I would like to say this past week wasn’t another bad one for the genre, but I’m just not that big a liar. Most importantly, the MMORPG community lost Project Gorgon developer Sandra Powers, a veteran MMO dev who’d been open about her struggle with cancer. I’m still reeling from this myself.
Then we found out that most of Phoenix Labs (Dauntless/Fae Farm) had been laid off, MultiVersus is sunsetting, the Path of Exile franchise is a mess, Throne & Liberty announced its merge list, and Camelot Unchained is dawdling. Granted, some of those aren’t true MMOs, but they definitely overlap a bit.
Here’s some bright news: No Man’s Sky’s Worlds II is here, EVE Online is planning two expansions for 2025, and The Division 2 finally got its shit together. Hopefully.
Read on to catch up with the very best of this week’s MMO news and opinions today as every Sunday (
since 2010!) in Massively Overpowered’s
Week in Review!
THIS WEEK’S TOP STORIES
Obituary: Project Gorgon developer Sandra Powers has passed away - I'm horribly sorry to be the bearer of this dreadful news this morning: Sandra Powers, one of the two key devs behind Project Gorgon studio Elder Game, has passed away.…
Following painful layoffs, Camelot Unchained is apparently still planning to resurface in Q1 2025 - Earlier this month, we expressed serious concern over the fate of Camelot Unchained when it became clear that studio Unchained Entertainment had laid off 24 of its 55 developers owing…
LOTRO Legendarium: How well does Lord of the Rings Online fulfill class fantasy? - It was several World of Warcraft expansions ago -- Legion, most likely -- that the development team at Blizzard really got worked up over this idea of "class fantasy." While…
A ‘majority’ of Dauntless and Fae Farm devs at Phoenix Labs have apparently been laid off - We've got bad news for fans of Dauntless and Fae Farm tonight: Studio Phoenix Labs posted to Linkedin that its owners have "made the tough decision to part ways with the…
Path of Exile 1’s next league is delayed indefinitely as GGG prioritizes fixing Path of Exile 2 - This was likely a foregone conclusion for most fans of Path of Exile, but game director Jonathan Rogers has confirmed it in a video address: The next major league update…
MultiVersus will close again in May, and this time it’s not coming back - MultiVersus is shutting down again, and unlike the last time, this one's going to stick. "Season 5 will serve as the final seasonal content update for MultiVersus," Player First Games…
No Man’s Sky’s Worlds Part II is live with a continuation of the ‘world refresh’ started last year - If you've been watching Sean Murray's social media for the last few days, you probably guessed that something about gas giants was inbound for the never-ending multiplayer sandbox No Man's…
Vitae Aeternum: New World season 7 doubles down on punishing solo and casual players - When New World relaunched as Aeternum, I harshly criticized the changes made to endgame for making life much worse for casual and solo players, a strange choice for a relaunch…
Throne & Liberty will merge 107 servers down to 25 in February – here’s the whole list - Amazon has been heralding server merges for Throne and Liberty for weeks now, and we have everything from a rationale (cleaning up the excess severs needed at launch) to a…
Warframe of Mind: So why didn’t Warframe’s open world areas work? - So I've talked a lot about ideas in this column over the past few weeks, but now I think it's time to start diving into an experiment that Warframe went…
World of Warcraft has likely made millions from its $90 pay-to-win dino mount - Last October, World of Warcraft elected to celebrate its 20th anniversary by selling a $90 mount with mail and auction house features baked in. And even though complaints about the…
Elder Scrolls Legends has officially sunsetted after years of lingering in maintenance mode - Back in November, we covered the sad news that multiplayer CCG Elder Scrolls Legends was truly doomed. After siloing the game off under a new reboot studio, abandoning promised content…
Richard Garriott is still toying with Ultima Online spinoff ideas – like maybe a TTRPG - MMORPG gamers might recall that last summer, Ultima Online creator Richard Garriott grabbed headlines a bit by accident when he casually told a player on Twitter that he's been trying…
Sunsetted MOBA Heroes of Newerth is coming back for a revamp and re-release - Back in 2022 we reported on the unfortunate sunset of Heroes of Newerth, a free-to-play MOBA that had been running for 12 years (although it received its final patch back…
Massively Overthinking: The MMOs where suddenly you’re a different character now - I was recently thumbing through my Lord of the Rings Online screenshots when I stumbled into one I'd taken of a player's extremely smart observation on session play and mounted…
The Division 2 now says The Battle for Brooklyn DLC will launch in 2025 - Earlier this week, following news that Ubisoft's was laying off another 185 people affecting four studios in Europe, the The Division 2 team - which was apparently affected by those…
Star Citizen releases the Fight for Pyro event in alpha 4.0 preview, teases new alpha 4.0.1 ship - Star Citizen alpha 4.0 - that is, the "preview" version as opposed to the forked-off alpha 3.24.3 - is getting itself a new event, just in case there wasn't a…
The Quinfall opens new servers while attributing ongoing issues to DDOS attacks - If Vawraek Technologies is to be believed, the myriad connection issues that have plagued The Quinfall's early access launch aren't entirely the fault of the studio and instead are the…
Vague Patch Notes: Bad MMOs happen – but not because nobody cares - When I first started working at Massively-that-was, I got a bit of a wake-up call pretty early on when I made a joke about EverQuest II. It wasn't a good…
Blade & Soul NEO is launching February 25 following a week-long character creation event - Just two weeks ago, NCsoft America announced that not only is Blade & Soul NEO launching in the west but the game is opening up preregistration packages. The one thing…
Elite Dangerous dates the release of its colonization feature for February 26 - Consider us surprised and perhaps a little bit confused - mostly because of the lack of details - but Elite: Dangerous devs have just announced that the major colonization gameplay…
MMO Hype Train: The odd allure of Eternal Tombs’ live game masters - For a lot of MMORPG players, there are certain keywords that prove to be deal-breakers if we hear them in conjunction to an upcoming project. Let's see if I can…
Vaultbreakers – fka Project F4E – is an upcoming co-op extraction OARPG that isn’t a shooter - Anybody out there remember BetaDwarf's upcoming MMO Project F4E? You'd be forgiven if you didn't. It was first announced in 2021 as Project Haven, a co-op PvE MOBA focused on…
World of Warcraft shows off the new customizable cars coming with the Undermine(d) update - No matter how hard you might try in World of Warcraft, you cannot replace your horse's hooves. There are no tools to lower the suspension on your wolf. And good…
Marvel Snap has a new US publisher: Marvel Heroes boss David Brevik’s Skystone Games - Marvel Snap players have been through a lot over the last few weeks: The game was taken out in the crossfire of the US government's TikTok ban, then down for…
Star Anvil opens $50K Kickstarter for its third Secret World tabletop RPG - No, Funcom hasn't made any big moves on The Secret World MMORPG franchise lately and didn't even rouse itself to celebrate the game's 12th birthday last year - but fans…
Perfect Ten: 10 MMORPGs that came back from the dead - The fact that I loved Charlotte's Web as a child probably had some influence on my developing brain, but it does mean that I am forever thinking of a beautiful…
Co-op looter-shooter Wayfinder has finally launched on Xbox – and introduced a hardcore mode - When Wayfinder launched on PC and PS5 last October, it did so with a big caveat: that the Xbox version had been indefinitely delayed. But that delay has finally come…
Microsoft dispels World of Warcraft Game Pass rumors sparked by its own marketing email snafu - When Microsoft spent billions to buy out Activision-Blizzard (and then carved that cost out of the hide of its workforce), many gamers were salivating at the idea that World of…
PlanetSide 2 says its development team ‘remains unchanged’ following Toadman’s shuttering - MMO fans have been worried about the fate of PlanetSide 2 over the last few weeks following the revelation that EG7 would be shuttering one of its subsidiaries, Toadman Interactive,…
DC Universe Online’s narrative-focused Day of Reckoning update is live - [AL:DCUO]DC Universe Online has talked up the more narrative and dark bent of this update, and now it's time for players to experience it all for themselves, as last night…
World of Warcraft kicks off Lunar New Year, Season of Discovery phase 7, and Mythic+ revision - World of Warcraft is having a busy week in multiple versions of the game, but let's start with the holiday: the Lunar Festival is finally live through February 11th. "Khaz Algar…
EVE Online’s 2025 roadmap promises a pair of expansions in Q2 and Q4 - CCP Games has delivered a solid roadmap for EVE Online today - the punchy short version and the hour-long stream version. So let's get straight to the big news: The…
Guild Wars 2’s lunar new year festival is live with snake tail pants - As promised, Guild Wars 2's Lunar New Year event is officially live this afternoon. "Shed the old year and slither into the next - our annual Lunar New Year celebration…
Throne & Liberty’s Wilds of Talandre expansion launches March 6 – here’s what’s in it - When Amazon started namedropping the Talandre expansion for Throne and Liberty earlier this month, it threw us for a loop for a sec until we remembered that this expansion arrived…
Neverwinter Nights persistent world Arelith hits a new player concurrency record after 22 years - Three hundred eighty. That sounds like a pretty meager number when it comes to most MMO and multiplayer game concurrency records, but for the people running the persistent world Arelith…
Progress Bar: Hyper Light Breaker needs more time to bake in early access - That headline is probably going to elicit furious typing from those who equate self-worth with the ability to surmount challenging video games, but I'm hoping to explain that the current…
Survivalbox Enshrouded sets launch target of spring 2026 as Pact of the Flame goes live - It's a hardwritten rule in the great codex of survival games that they must launch in January, which means quite a few of them also have birthdays in January -…
Ubisoft is laying off another 185 game devs in Europe - The bad news for Ubisoft just keeps rolling this week as the company has admitted it's laying off another 185 people and closing down its entire 50-person studio in Leamington,…
Wisdom of Nym: Final Fantasy XIV’s pointless sidequests and FATEs - Way back in the time of Stormblood, we were told that Final Fantasy XIV was getting rid of combat-based levequests because they were basically redundant and not fun. They were,…
Warframe previews the Techrot Encore, the eighth Nightwave round, and TennoCon 2025 - If you only take away one thing from this post about Warframe, let it be this: A whole heck of a lot of stuff is going down in the game…
Ashes of Creation takes players on a treasure hunt in January development stream - Hunting for treasure isn't the exclusive domain of marauding pirates, whip-cracking archaeologists, or tomb raiders; it's now part of Ashes of Creation alpha two and a focus of the January…
THIS WEEK’S CASTS & STREAMS

Every week, get caught up on the MMO genre’s latest news and Massively OP’s best content in our
MMO Week in Review! Want more roundups of content? Try Friday’s
Betawatch for MMO testing highlights, Saturday’s
Make My MMO for MMO crowdfunding updates, and Sunday’s
The MOP Up, which mops up all the bits of news we didn’t cover anywhere else.