Destiny 2’s Bungie volunteered to be the industry villain of the week as it slashed multiple games and teams with cancelations and layoffs as part of cost-cutting measures to rescue the Sony-owned studio from Bungie executives’ management blunders.
Meanwhile, we took a look at Fellowship, pondered what theoretical World of Warcraft housing could look like, debated the merits of Discord for MMORPG communities, argued over Stars Reach, and dipped a toe into Stormgate.
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
Destiny 2 studio Bungie lays off another 220 workers, ending work on multiple games - Bungie is conducting yet another round of massive layoffs today. The Destiny 2 studio announced the elimination of 220 jobs, around 17% of the company's current workforce. Readers will recall…
Wisdom of Nym: The actual storytelling issues with Final Fantasy XIV Dawntrail - I'm not exactly surprised that basically any controversy vis-a-vis Final Fantasy XIV's most recent expansion is pretty much completely focused on the story (with maybe 5% reserved for "Viper is…
Hands-on with Arc Games’ Fellowship, a new game trying to distill the MMORPG dungeon experience - For many folks, one of the more entertaining aspects of playing an MMORPG is running through its dungeons (though of course that varies from game to game and PUG to…
Design Mockument: How to make housing work in World of Warcraft - Editor's note: This column was originally published in August 2024, a full three months before we knew WoW is actually getting housing with the Midnight expansion. Enjoy! Since the launch…
Massively Overthinking: Has Discord helped or hurt MMOs? - MOP reader Josiah recently pitched us a rather relevant question about the impact of social media on MMORPGs and their communities - specifically, the idea that "Discord has ruined the…
LOTRO Legendarium: My six-month leveling plan for Lord of the Rings Online’s fresh legendary server - If all goes well, the new legendary servers -- the first in three years -- will roll out this week for Lord of the Rings Online. I've been eagerly waiting…
Not So Massively: Stormgate was not ready for early access - As the first of StarCraft II's spiritual successors to make it to a public launch, Stormgate will be releasing free to play for all as an early access title on…
Project Gorgon buffs Necromancers, preps mount cosmetics, and fixes AOE issues - Indie MMORPG Project Gorgon dropped a fresh content-and-QOL patch this week in what devs characterized as a "nice well-rounded update" with a little bit of everything. For starters, Elder Game…
World of Warcraft offers a free weekend as the Radiant Echoes event gets revised and pre-patch bugs continue - The good news for World of Warcraft fans - or perhaps we should say lapsed fans - is that if you're curious about how the run-up to The War Within…
Diablo IV shares patch notes and discusses gameplay adjustments arriving with Season 5 - Diablo IV is practically gushing with information ahead of its upcoming Season 5 launch on August 6th, with Blizzard offering up a developer livestream and the complete patch notes for…
Tarisland adds damage and defense bonuses for bringing rookies to endgame content - Tarisland has been surprisingly quiet since its launch here in the west last month, with Tencent having focused on launch promotion and influencer showdowns. But now, the team has regrouped…
Vague Patch Notes: The player-provided guidance problem in MMORPGs - Final Fantasy XIV has a player-based mentor program and an automatic guidance network for new players. The idea is that certain players can volunteer to be listed as mentors, indicating…
Ashes of Creation previews its Bard class, announces Alpha Two’s release in October - It's time to get violently musical in Ashes of Creation, or at least it will be when Alpha Two goes live because the Bard archetype is going to be a…
Raph Koster on designing and defining Stars Reach: ‘The Tragedy of the Commons is a lie’ - Playable Worlds' Raph Koster is back with a new dev blog on Stars Reach, and it's not about game design pillars this time; it's focused on trying to explain just…
Elite Dangerous confirms Type-8 ship launch and major overhauls to engineering for August 7 - Frontier Developments' monthly livestream once again provided some big news for Elite: Dangerous players, particularly those who have been in the game for a long time, as the devs officially…
LOTRO opens new legendary servers today, Before the Shadow is now free for VIPs - Lord of the Rings Online welcomed VIP players to a pair of brand-new progression servers today, one of which finally gives European players a local home: "Angmar and Mordor are…
Old-school web browser MMORPG Tanoth has been resurrected in a playable beta format - Here's a blast from the past that is sure to catch genre fans by surprise. Does anyone here remember Tanoth? It was a web browser MMORPG that first launched in…
Guild Wars 2 runs down the essentials of Homestead gameplay in the Janthir Wilds - Your house (in Guild Wars 2) can be a very very very fine house (fine house), with stray cats in the yard. Unlocking them isn't hard, and all your characters…
Guild Wars 2 kicks off Festival of the Four Winds, preps PvP warclaw overhaul ahead of Janthir Wilds - When Guild Wars 2's Janthir Wilds launches at the end of August, the warclaw mount will undergo a major transformation as the journeykin, an enhanced mount with a new expansion-themed…
Perfect Ten: MMOs with outstanding tutorial sections - Tutorials! They're important. I even wrote an entire column about them recently, talking about how important they are in getting people into a new game. But that does not mean…
Palia’s latest update rewards gamers for building – and touring! – player houses - As teased, Singularity 6 - now owned by Daybreak, which continues to boggle the mind - released Palia's Summer Serenade patch last night, with much more detailed patch notes than…
Lord of the Rings Online’s Update 41 adds birding hobby and hard tack crafting event today - Look to the skies and you may see Lord of the Rings Online's new hobby taking flight! That's right, today's Update 41 adds the game's second-ever hobby, birding, along with…
World of Warcraft starts up The War Within’s pre-expansion event and finally turns on Warband banks - A week after the patch that was meant to turn on most of the features for World of Warcraft's next expansion, one of the big elements of The War Within is…
Lost Ark’s August-through-November 2024 roadmap heralds new continent, T4, and bound gold - Lost Ark's third roadmap of the year has arrived as of this afternoon, heralding core new content and features coming to the game from August through November. So not quite…
Choose My Adventure: Blowing up rocks for fun and profit in Elite Dangerous - When I first started my run in Elite: Dangerous for this week's Choose My Adventure, I was just barely over the amount of credits I would need to spend in…
Vitae Aeternum: Let’s design some New World artifacts - The New World community is currently waiting not so patiently for the big Aeternum update in October. While we're killing time, I thought it would be fun to theorycraft some…
For Science: EVE Online ramps up cancer-fighting Project Discovery with new minigames and rewards - You know, one of my all-time favorite types of stories to write are about EVE Online's Project Discovery. It's science, MMOs, and warm fuzzies all at once. And today, CCP…
MMO sandbox Fractured Online wants your whole guild to come give it a free trial run - Fractured Online officially launched last week with a $15 price (cut down to $12 on sale) - and while the release and patch helped restore recent reviews to "mostly positive,"…
RuneScape microtransaction survey ponders the potential full removal of lockboxes - RuneScape's Treasure Hunter activity, aka the lockbox portion of its wider monetization scheme, is facing the potential for removal from the game, at least if the questions in a player…
PSA: APB Reloaded is shutting down console-to-PC character transfers on Friday - You might not recall this, but at the start of the year, Little Orbit made the shocking announcement that it would be shuttering the PlayStation and Xbox versions of APB…
VR MMO Zenith strives for ‘a more sustainable vision’ as it shuts down three servers - The days certainly appear to be numbered for Zenith now that its studio confirmed that it's moving the virtual reality MMO into maintenance mode. But the question now is, how…
Dual Universe unveils a standalone version that lets players host their own fully customized private servers - If you're the sort of person who was intrigued at the prospect of playing Dual Universe but were not thrilled by the thought of dealing with FFA PvP or all…
Rumor: Blizzard’s new WoW Classic survey once more raises hopes for a Classic Plus launch - If you're anywhere even adjacent to the WoW Classic playerbase, then you've probably seen rumblings about a "Classic Plus survey" making the rounds in your personal feeds - and in…
Ultima Online’s New Legacy and crackdown on third-party clients have vets rioting - Ultima Online is a very old and fairly small MMORPG nowadays, but even so you probably knew that it has a thriving emulator community, which is generally left alone by…
Microsoft creates a small team to pump out AA titles of Blizzard franchises - Thought that Microsoft was going to drop $72 billion on Activision Blizzard and then allow the studio to continue operation with no interference whatsoever? So this is our "we're not…
Insiders say Bungie’s latest layoffs were an inevitable result of over-promising execs - It was already assumed that layoffs of 220 workers that hit Destiny 2 developer Bungie were a result of executive mismanagement, but now there are insider reports from Game File…
THIS WEEK’S CASTS & STREAMS
Massively OP Podcast Episode 478: Ultima Online finds its stones
The Stream Team: Peeking in on the early access multiplayer life RPG Spellfarers
The Stream Team: The last DDO Feywild quest, The Legend of the Lost Locket
The Stream Team: Entering Enshrouded
The Stream Team: Hopping in to a friend’s Palworld universe
The Stream Team: A Guild Wars 2 rescue Ranger
The Stream Team: Not-Necrom adventures in Elder Scrolls Online
The Stream Team: There’s gnome problem in AdventureQuest 3D
The Stream Team: The valley of resources in Planet Crafter
The Stream Team: A day of dailies in Final Fantasy XIV
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.
