This week in MMOs, Blizzard laid out a rough outline for World of Warcraft’s proposed housing system, and while the blueprint so far doesn’t actually include any screenshots of what it looks like, the studio did explain that the system will be neighborhood-based with at least some level of customization, alt-friendliness, and minimal monetization.
Meanwhile, Final Fantasy XIV took the wraps off Seekers of Eternity, Stars Reach did a final AMA before its Kickstarter, we got a new video out of Dune Awakening, SMITE 2 studio Hi-Rez is a mess right now, Star Citizen raised eyebrows with its new cadence, and Warframe’s TennoCon sold out before you could say the words “awww man.” Finally, as we are technically a Philadelphia-based outlet, on this day we are legally obligated to shout, “The eagles are coming!”
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… and get ready for some MassivelyOP Independence Day fun tomorrow as we turn 10 years old!THIS WEEK’S TOP STORIES
Blizzard lays out the design pillars for World of Warcraft’s accessible neighborhood housing - The news that World of Warcraft is getting housing with its next expansion, Midnight, shocked the whole MMORPG genre - and us too, as we even called it the biggest…
Casually Classic: Why vanilla Classic’s quest system was an industry revolution - In every retrospective covering World of Warcraft's explosive success out of the gate, there's a lot of effort spent trying to put a finger on what, exactly, made this game…
Vague Patch Notes: How long do online games truly get to live? - I'm going to start this article by asking a question I don't actually want an answer to: How long has Minecraft been popular? Objectively there are obviously dates and times…
Warframe’s TennoCon 2025 tickets sold out almost immediately, leading fans to assume bot shenanigans - If you're a Warframe fan who was hoping to attend Digital Extremes' in-person TennoCon event this year, it would appear that you missed out, as tickets for the event completely…
Final Fantasy XIV 7.2 promises new gathering quests, new Arcadion matches, and new phantom jobs - Before anyone in our readership gets worried that Final Fantasy XIV is giving ghosts long-term occupations, rest assured that "phantom jobs" are not jobs for phantoms but rather the new ability…
‘We are designing it to last for decades’: Stars Reach is hoping for ‘a few hundred thousand players’ - Are you feeling the hype yet from the approach of the Stars Reach Kickstarter? Because Playable Worlds is kinda going all out with blogs and videos and now an AMA…
LOTRO Legendarium: Baubles are the stealth feature LOTRO needed - Cast your memory back to last fall when Lord of the Rings Online's current expansion, Legacy of Morgoth, was announced. While there was excitement over further adventures in the game,…
World of Warcraft’s charity fox raises over $2 million for Duchenne muscular dystrophy research - Last December, we reported on how Blizzard started selling a special fox-and-backpack bundle in World of Warcraft to raise funds to help cure Duchenne muscular dystrophy. By the end of…
Massively on the Go: Pokemon Go’s Legendary Flight lands with a thud - Niantic's problem isn't that players are over or have forgiven Pokemon Go's Dynamax/Gigantimax raids - it's that the company keeps pushing them in the face of disappointment, anxiety, and heavy…
Pantheon’s Visionary Realms is investigating after players accuse a dev of enriching his guild - We've updated the end of this story with Visionary Realm's investigatory conclusion; in short, it does not believe the dev was guilty but has chosen to "counsel" the GM about…
Following layoffs and an exec purge, Star Citizen is slowing down its content and comms cadence - Star Citizen is continuing to beat the drum of its focus on playability and stability in its promised Star Citizen Live broadcast, which brought on CTO Benoit Beausejour to discuss…
New World gears up for its Coral Divide Outpost Rush map testing this weekend - New World has a big event weekend queued up: It's letting players preview the Coral Divide map en route to the game's Outpost Rush PvP mode. This map is "smaller…
Massively Overthinking: MMOs that suck in interesting ways - This week's Massively Overthinking is entirely inspired by a fantastic argument made by YouTuber on Bluesky. Iron Pineapple declared that "a good game can turn into a great game if…
SMITE studio Hi-Rez is going through its second round of layoffs in four months - Bad news for fans of Hi-Rez's remaining multiplayer games: The company is apparently undergoing another round of layoffs. We say "another" because Hi-Rez just did a round of cuts four months…
Steam will finally start warning players when early access games have seemingly been abandoned - It sucks pretty bad to buy an early access game on Steam only to find, belatedly, that the game has been abandoned by the developers and will not be maintained…
WoW Classic Cataclysm heads into its final hour… of Twilight - The original WoW Classic servers -- how weird it is to type that -- now are cruising down the final stretch of Cataclysm Classic's run. Blizzard announced that it is…
Raph Koster offers a high-level overview of what Stars Reach is and what you’ll do in it - "Today I’m going to give you a tour of Stars Reach, the game. Like, the whole thing." So begins Raph Koster's latest dev blog for Playable Worlds' in-development sandbox MMORPG,…
Warframe of Mind: Unpacking the reveals of the latest Warframe developer stream - After years and years of watching a pretty standard set of development streams, I found that watching Warframe's last week was a bit of a new experience. You know how…
Dune Awakening’s latest trailer showcase the vibes, visuals, and development of Arrakis - Dune: Awakening is once more looking to keep followers of the survival sandbox interested and intrigued through the medium of video, as Funcom's latest showcases look at the design of…
Palia’s new loyalty club has arrived with a de facto discount for cash shop currency - Just two weeks ago, Palia studio Singularity 6 announced what it's calling Zeki's Loyalty Club. As teased, the club sounded like a cross between an MMO-standard subscription stipend and a…
Pantheon Rise of the Fallen is finally launching its Unity 6 upgrade patch today - (We've updated at the end; the patch is now expected this afternoon! Updated the headline accordingly. Original article follows.) If you've been following the Twitter account of Pantheon: Rise of…
Lost Ark celebrates three years of service in the west with a ton of free gifts - Pop on your party hats, Arkesians, because it's time to celebrate Lost Ark's third birthday. OK, its third birthday since arriving to the west. And it's a little early, but…
EA is plotting Apex Legends 2.0 while scapegoating Dragon Age 4’s lack of live-service features - Last week's news that BioWare had shed a significant portion of its remaining team following Dragon Age: The Veilguard failing to meet EA's ambitious promises to investors (which is not…
World of Warcraft’s state of the game vows an improved new player experience and social initiatives - World of Warcraft is surprisingly chatty this Wednesday, with an article on Patch 11.1's cartels earlier today and a housing preview (!) in a little bit. But sandwiched in the…
Perfect Ten: 10 MMOs (and MMO-adjacent games) you can play on Nintendo Switch in 2025 - In our family, there's an ongoing joke that I was the one who got the Nintendo Switch as a birthday present a few years back, yet it's my children who…
Players start a #SaveMultiVersus campaign, but is it too little, too late? - It's a testament to the love for MultiVersus that the community has come out in droves in an effort to save the game from its upcoming shutdown. The hashtag #SaveMultiVersus…
Elder Scrolls Online explains Cyrodiil Champions, its multi-stage PvP revamp test - As ZeniMax Online Studios continue testing Elder Scrolls Online's update 45 on the PTS, it's been teasing much more for testers - and that includes the Cyrodiil Champions revamp, essentially…
Fight or Kite: Dark and Darker Mobile brings the multiplayer extraction RPG gameloop to your pocket - I guess I left the room when developers all agreed that extraction shooters, RPGs, and their ilk were going to be the next focus of PvP gaming. It just feels…
Classic MMO-inspired web series The Guild is getting the musical treatment with a live reading February 23 - Gamers of a certain vintage are probably going to be familiar with a classic comedy web series known as The Guild, but even then it's been a pretty long while…
UK rebuffs game preservationists’ petition to make retroactively breaking old games unlawful - One of the big industry-wide narratives that emerged from the wreckage of 2024 was player-initiated efforts to center game preservation - indeed, even to make the broader public and political…
Choose My Adventure: Murder mysteries and paywalls in RuneScape - This week... was a weird one. A weird and rough one. And it's going to get a tiny bit personal - some might say full of excuses - but I…
Destiny 2 Heresy episode act one releases today with new activity, weapons, and balance tweaks - It's time for a new episode and three more acts' worth of stuff in Destiny 2. The Heresy update arrives to the looter shooter this afternoon, bringing with it the…
Ultima Online’s producer steps down after 26 years working on the MMORPG - It's the end of an era in Ultima Online: Bonnie "Mesanna" Armstrong has announced what sure sounds like a retirement from her role as top producer on the 27-year-old MMORPG.…
Star Citizen’s alpha 4.0.1 is such a mess that CIG has cancelled the Red Festival free-fly event - Last December, CIG head Chris Roberts stated an intention for alpha builds of Star Citizen would focus on "decoupling feature development from content creation and general fixes" in order to…
VR MMORPG OrbusVR announces a sunset date of April 6 after eight years - The VR MMORPG space is not exactly one of robust health, but for a while it seemed as if one very plucky little game for the platform that was chugging…
SMITE 1 will sunset on the Nintendo Switch May 1 over apparent quality issues - If you were a fan of the original SMITE on the Nintendo Switch, we have some unfortunate news for you. Hi-Rez's Titan Forge has announced that it is sunsetting the…
Chronicles of Elyria’s dev blogs disappear, and there’s no timeline for when they’ll return - This past December we reported on the continued drawing inward of communication and updates from the kickstarted MMORPG Chronicles of Elyria, as Soulbound Studio's Jeromy Walsh promised pre-alpha development was…
Here’s (almost) everything you need to know about transferring to Lord of the Rings Online’s upcoming 64-bit servers - Are you hungry for 64 bits of mega power? Then you're probably itching to hop in to the upcoming 64-bit servers in Lord of the Rings Online but have been…
‘We’re not giving up on SMITE 2’ says executive producer after Hi-Rez layoffs - The most recent round of layoffs at Hi-Rez Studios destabilized not only the current team but also fan faith in its product line. Of gravest concern is the still-in-beta SMITE…
THIS WEEK’S CASTS & STREAMS
Massively OP Podcast Episode 504: The legacy MMO devs leave behind
The Stream Team: Taking on the challenge of survival RPG IfSunSets
The Stream Team: What’s in your warehouse, DDO?
The Stream Team: Backseat Streaming watches a galactic war from the ZeroSpace beta
The Stream Team: Shooting galleries and minigolf in Tower Unite
The Stream Team: Slithering into Guild Wars 2’s Year of the Snake celebrations
The Stream Team: Bounty buddies in Warframe 1999
The Stream Team: Ghostly trials and treasures in AdventureQuest 3D
The Stream Team: An Astroneer launch anniversary in Glitchwalkers
The Stream Team: Hunting with a full complement of friends in Monster Hunter Wilds’ open beta
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.
