ArenaNet surprised fans this week with the announcement that it’s essentially retiring the concept of Guild Wars 2’s living world seasons going forward, switching instead to quarterly updates with smaller but more frequent expansions – and if you saw the NCsoft’s financials over the last year, you’ll immediately understand why the studios want to start churning out more expansion packs.
Meanwhile, Blizzard’s Mike Ybarra reminded everyone that Blizzard is just as good at shooting Blizzard in the foot as Activision is, the lottery for Final Fantasy XIV’s Fan Festival tickets began, Diablo IV got a pair of March beta dates, and The Elder Scrolls Online previewed its upcoming Arcanist class.
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
Guild Wars 2 appears to be dropping living world structure in favor of larger, more consistent updates - As promised, Guild Wars 2 studio ArenaNet has issued its developer blog on long-term plans, and it's not just prattle: The studio is planning a major revision to content delivery…
Blizzard’s Mike Ybarra stuns devs with demoralizing bonus-slashing and return-to-work meeting - Earlier this week, we noted that Activision-Blizzard was preparing to end more of its COVID-induced work-from-home policies and that some of its studios that had previously opted out were now…
Final Fantasy XIV opens Fan Festival 2023 tickets registrations through a lottery system - Square-Enix is flippin' on the hype machine for this year's Fan Festival in Las Vegas, which'll mark not just the first event for the Final Fantasy franchise in two years…
LOTRO Legendarium: Why flying would have ruined LOTRO’s Middle-earth - Despite the title up there, this column isn't really about flying. I'm just getting that out of the way right here. I actually have no problem with flying in most…
Blizzard preps two Diablo IV betas for March – including an open beta - Well, we can't exactly call it a surprise since Blizzard had already telegraphed its intentions about Diablo IV at IGN's Fan Fest this weekend, but in any case, it's official…
The Elder Scrolls Online previews Necrom’s Arcanist class in action in latest video - We're still plucking out the juicy bits from IGN's Fanfest trailerpalooza from last weekend (juicy to us and our readers, anyway), which brings us to the portion of the presentation…
Design Mockument: In which we do not design World of Warcraft 2 - Over the course of my professional writing career on this site and that site we used to run before AOL screwed us all over, I think I have designed World…
Embracer’s revenues soar as LOTR gets new games and Neverwinter, Star Trek Online bolster back catalogue - Embracer Group posted its fiscal year Q3 2022 earnings today, representing the fourth quarter of the year (October, November, and December). The megacorp saw revenues increase 128%, largely on the…
Diablo III’s next season launches Friday with skill tree-granting altars - The end of January saw public testing of Diablo III's Season 28 get underway, but if you missed that testing window then you can just wait for the season's release,…
Gamigo mandates that RIFT and Trove accounts be linked to Steam - If you're one of the faithful players who continue to adventure in RIFT and Trove under Gamigo's operational oversight, then you'll need to take action to connect your Glyph and…
Final Fantasy XIV’s Far Northern Attire is accused of appropriating Sámi cultural property by the Saami Council - Back in December, you may recall that Final Fantasy XIV added a new cosmetic outfit, the Far Northern Attire. The outfit in question lacks any kind of cultural attribution to…
Leaderboard: Do you prefer first-person or third-person perspective while gaming? - Quantic Foundry, the team behind the Gamer Motivation Model and the modern gamer profiling test, put out a dev blog at the end of January homing in on first- vs.…
Ubisoft says it’s sitting on a ‘very strong improved version’ of Skull and Bones - A month after Ubisoft delayed its pirate sim Skull and Bones for an astounding sixth time, the company hinted that the time's been well-spent to create a vastly better product…
Dune Awakening’s highlight videos indicate how you’ll be able to survive on Arrakis - Uh oh: We've got wormsign, y'all! And in the universe of Dune Awakening, that means you either need to take shelter in a sturdy structure of your own making or…
Genshin Impact fires voice actor over allegations of grooming, harassment, and abuse - One of the English voice actors for Genshin Impact has lost his job as a result of some serious allegations leveraged against him. Elliot Gindi, who voiced the character Tighnari,…
Crossplatform multiplayer monster-hunting game Wild Hearts is live today - Electronic Arts officially leaps into the beast-hunting genre today with the release of KOEI TECMO's and Omega Force's Wild Hearts, live now on Steam, EGS, PS5, Xbox X|S, and of…
Lord of the Rings Online is adding the infamous wayward rock as housing deco - One of the weirdest MMORPG stories of 2022 was the saga of Lord of the Rings Online's pet rock, a giant boulder a developer had unintentionally plopped in the middle…
Why I Play: Black Matter’s shooter Hell Let Loose scratches my RTS itch - I’ve been playing multiplayer shooters since I discovered DOOM 2’s dialup modem DOS commands, and it’s a genre I find myself returning to every so often. Despite the sometimes toxic…
Vague Patch Notes: The three kinds of sunset in the MMO space - Not all sunsets are the same, no matter how much you may like a given game. This is one of the things that tends to be hard to understand. Maintenance…
Pearl Abyss Q4 2022: Revenues decline as Black Desert and EVE hold steady and Crimson Desert malingers - Pearl Abyss posted its Q4 2022 financials this week, and unlike some of its regional counterparts whose chief interest is China or South Korea, PA demonstrates again that its heart…
Chronicles of Elyria apologizes for ‘toxic’ Discord, aims to test Kingdoms of Elyria again soon - In Chronicles of Elyria's second public missive for 2023, Soulbound Studios' Jeromy Walsh took his unjustifiably patient fans through the process of bringing both Kingdoms of Elyria and Chronicles of…
Citrine’s Last Wish is now live for Warframe on all platforms - What, precisely, is Citrine's last wish? Was it to finally ride Space Mountain all by herself? Was it a notarized letter specifying that crystal stuff is pretty cool? Was it…
New World plots an event to take down evil Roman bosses starting February 21 - New World may not have run a Valentine's Day-themed event, but if that means we get an in-lore event later this month instead, we're not even mad, and that's exactly…
Tamriel Infinium: How Elder Scrolls Online’s quests go above and beyond the MMO norm - There are some MMOs you play because of and some you play in spite of, if you catch my drift. These titles have great qualities and features that make them…
Perfect Ten: Ranking 10 MMORPG map designs from worst to best - When I was a kid, I loved poring over maps in our family's atlas when we went on road trips. Getting a kind of bird's eye view of the world…
NCsoft Q4 2022: Guild Wars 2 had a great 2022, Throne & Liberty is still launching by summer - There's good news and bad news in the Q4 2022 and FY 2022 financial report, and the bad news might help explain why NCsoft decided to take an axe to…
PSA: Overwatch 2’s battlepass is confusing – make sure you understand what you’re buying - So here's an interesting tale of how a subtle change in an interface element can be deceptive, intentionally or otherwise. If you play Overwatch 2, you know that there are…
Guild Wars 2’s patch adds WvW incentives, cosmetics randomizer, and class balancing - As promised, Guild Wars 2's class balancing update has arrived, and depending on which elite spec play you will love, hate, or love and hate the update. However you feel…
Choose My Adventure: Slowly cracking the code of how Warframe works - For the longest time last week, the Choose My Adventure voting was extremely close - it was at a three-way tie at one point - and by the end of…
Corepunk posts an hour of gameplay footage that focuses on gathering and crafting professions - This past December, we heard fresh word out of Corepunk that was generally a combination of good news and bad news: The game's beta was pushed back, but the devs…
Activision-Blizzard is stuck with Bobby Kotick if the FTC blocks Microsoft’s takeover - We noted last week that a lot of gamers who traditionally distrust the increasingly oligopolistic gaming market situation were still hoping to see Microsoft subsume Activision-Blizzard as it would be…
No, Lord of the Rings Online’s newest class won’t be the Corsair - Players are having a field day speculating about the new class coming to Lord of the Rings Online with this fall's expansion. And while some players spotted the name "Corsair"…
Not So Massively: Voidtrain’s Next Fest demo leaves a terrible first impression - It's hard to find a survival game with an original premise these days. Dinosaurs? Done. Alien worlds? Done. Zombies? Done to (un)death. But how about a survival game where you…
Tamriel Infinium: 18 activities to do at max level in Elder Scrolls Online - As they say, absence makes the heart grow fonder, and so it's been with the past six months between me and Elder Scrolls Online. Sometimes you take a break from…
Wisdom of Nym: Where else could we get a Final Fantasy XIV raid series from the franchise? - Let me start this particular column with an observation that should really accompany any and all discussion of future raid series for Final Fantasy XIV: We are, at this point,…
Survival MMO The Day Before struggles to secure trademark as YouTube bans its videos - Boy, we hope that you're not holding your breath for The Day Before because what was once Steam's most-anticipated title is a hot mess of development delays, copyright bans, and somewhat…
Valentine’s Day around the MMORPG genre, 2023 edition - I'm sorry to be the one to remind you of this, but today is Valentine's Day. In fact, if I am the first person to point this out to you…
THIS WEEK’S CASTS & STREAMS
Massively OP Podcast Episode 409: All aboard the Tyria train
The Stream Team: The Imp side of SWTOR’s Corellia
The Stream Team: Heroes hearts, Druids, and Samurai in AQ3D
The Stream Team: Reacclimating to Star Citizen after months of hardware hiatus
The Stream Team: Seizing the Dawn in Dungeons & Dragons Online
The Stream Team: Fun with the Fall Guys
The Stream Team: Running and gunning through the corridors of Warhammer 40K Darktide
The Stream Team: Investigating Guild Wars 2’s Sky Pirates
The Stream Team: Securing a second Elder Scrolls Online companion
The Stream Team: Heading into the new hunting grounds of Wild Hearts
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.
