It was a weird and twisty week in the MMO genre: We talked about Magic Legends’ earth elemental butts and not-very-MMO-like state, discussed how WoW sucks at its Lovecraftian lore, debated devs using lore to justify bad decisions, embraced nostalgia with the MTV MMO, saw Crowfall raise a truckton more cash, and mused on the best MMOs of the decade. Plus, we rounded up all our 2019 awards and meta pieces for your entertainment!
Read on to catch up with the very best of this week’s MMO news and opinions today as every Sunday in Massively Overpowered’s Week in Review!THIS WEEK’S TOP STORIES
MassivelyOP’s complete 2019 awards debrief and annual recap - As we did in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018, today I'm going to recap our annual awards and other meta articles from the end of 2019. We gave out 19 formal…
Massively Overthinking: The best MMOs of the decade - A few years back, we did a cheeky Massively Overthinking about our five favorite MMORPGs of all time. It was quite a potent list from a large segment of our…
Cryptic’s Magic: Legends is an isometric RPG and not an MMORPG because of earth elemental butt - Yesterday, we got our first look at the gameplay in Cryptic's upcoming Magic: Legends MMO, and, well, it didn't go over that well. In spite of some of the cooler…
Vague Patch Notes: No, MMO lore does not excuse design decisions - There are a lot of problems with how people tend to use lore when it comes to MMOs. I've talked about one side of this before, even. But there's another…
Perfect Ten: Upcoming MMOs to watch in 2020 - There is a great feeling of flipping a calendar over to a fresh year, isn't there? All that promise and potential spread out in front of you, the mystery of…
The Game Archaeologist: That time when MTV made a virtual world - For the music trendy in the '80s and '90s, MTV was a huge source of fascination and audio discovery. It was the edgy channel that you turned on to watch…
WoW Factor: What Warcraft’s Old Gods were and how we lost it - At one point, I loved the Old Gods of World of Warcraft. At this point, they disappoint me. And since we're not that far away from the game's next raid that…
The first gameplay footage of Magic: Legends is available now for your viewing pleasure - So after the surprise reveal of Magic: Legends, we've all been awaiting the first glance at what the game's actual gameplay will be like... and we've finally gotten it in…
Leaderboard: What would you want to see out of a new Star Wars MMO? - Rumors have been swirling this week about expansions to the Star Wars universe that could be a big deal for gaming. According to multiple websites claiming insider knowledge, "Project Luminous"…
Tamriel Infinium: My favorite things in The Elder Scrolls Online - If you’ve been following the Tamriel Infinium column at least since my own arrival at Massively OP, you may have noticed my propensity for lists. Perhaps it’s an easy way…
Crowfall preps beta, raises another $12M from investors to bring total funding to $35M - Crowfall's founder update hit the ArtCraft site this afternoon, and it's a doozy. The studio's J Todd Coleman says development progress is "fantastic," and he should be excited, since the…
China is cracking down on online games and streaming even more with ‘Healthy China 2030’ - Even setting aside the Blitzchung fiasco that sent China's video game industry into the spotlight at the tail end of 2019, the western games press has been covering the China…
The Internet Historian takes a look at the fall and rise of No Man’s Sky (and reads a racy Sean Murray fanfic) - Just how far has No Man's Sky come since its disastrous launch? It's one thing for someone to do all of the research on the topic, but it's another to…
The Daily Grind: What MMOs are you no longer anticipating in 2020? - Every year, we dish out our "most anticipated" award, and you know what? It's almost never the same game twice, and sadly it's not always because the game actually releases.…
The push for games industry unionization expands with new initiative from major US union CWA - Unionization pushes have become a big discussion across the games industry for the last several years. The tipping point might just have been the Screen Actors Guild strike in 2016…
Rend studio Frostkeep has apparently suffered a round of layoffs - It looks as if Frostkeep Studios is suffering some downsizing this week. Evan "Scapes" Berman, a producer for the MMO studio and a figure well-known to veteran MMORPG players, tweeted…
NCSoft has a new logo that’s apparently full of all sorts of symbolism - "Okay. New year, new me. I'm going to show the world that I'm more than just two letters that look like they're holding hands. I'm going to show how deep…
More older adults play games than ever before, according to AARP study of people over 50 - Earlier this week, we wrote about Skyrim's "gaming grandma" and other older gamers who've staked out claims in the online gaming space on platforms like Twitch and YouTube, but if…
Choose My Adventure: Black Desert Mobile is absolutely crammed with stuff - This first-ever edition of Choose My Portable Adventure was more hotly contested than I was expecting. By the narrowest of margins – six votes, to be exact -- Black Desert…
Flameseeker Chronicles: Things to do when Guild Wars 2 feels stale - It happens to every player in every MMO: Sooner or later, even our favorite games start to feel stale. It may be that you’re stuck in a rut, or just…
Escape from Tarkov confirms no playable female characters because of ‘game lore’ and workload - Sorry, ladies, but it's just too ding-dong-dang difficult to put y'all in Escape from Tarkov. That's the cited reason why the game's developer, Battlestate Games, has affirmed that there will be…
Albion Online’s Queen update is crowned January 20 with Outlands rework, hideouts, and new faction - Albion Online's next big thing, Queen, is launching on January 20th, and fans of the PvP sandbox will want to prep for this one, as Sandbox Interactive is calling it…
Massively Uplifting: Gaming studios and communities support kids, trees, cats, STEM, and gaming grandparents - While there are understandably many reasons folks may not want to look back on 2019 fondly, the year wasn't all bad. Massively Uplifting has found and focused on a plethora…
Wisdom of Nym: The lore deep cuts we know of in Final Fantasy XIV’s next patch - There's lots of lore to unpack in Final Fantasy XIV. Seriously, I could write a lot about it because the game sets up lots of hints for the future and its…
Fallout 76 previews Wastelanders’ City of the Future, preps weekend double XP - OK, Fallout 76, it's a new year, a new decade, and hopefully a new you, with your many 2019 trainwrecks behind us, Fallout First a dated punchline, and now Wastelanders…
Not So Massively: Lessons Torchlight Frontiers can take from its predecessors - Torchlight Frontiers is a game I've gradually been developing some genuine hype for - as has our team here at MOP, in light of the fact that the game's taken…
THIS WEEK’S CASTS & STREAMS
Massively OP Podcast Episode 254: New year mysteries
The Stream Team: Warframe’s Chains of Harrow
The Stream Team: See the Sunken Sewer in Dungeons and Dragons Online
The Stream Team: The Cerulean Hills are alive with the sound of battle in DDO
The Stream Team: ‘Come to Corellia,’ SWTOR’s Darth Malgus said, ‘it’ll be fun’
The Stream Team: Storytime in AdventureQuest 3D
The Stream Team: Resisting Trove’s Renewus is futile
The Stream Team: Getting gifts for DC Universe Online’s 9th birthday!
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.
