Massively Overpowered

All right! Who's ready to hand over what will likely be more than $350 for virtual reality equipment? Oculus announced today that pre-orders for the Oculus Rift will open at 11 a.m. EST on January 6th. "We’ll be sharing everything you need to know to order your Rift on Wednesday when pre-orders go live," says the company; it's also planning...

There was a thread on the official Final Fantasy XIV forums back about... I want to say a million years ago? Maybe two million? The point is that it was back closer to launch, which is far enough to functionally be ancient. It was a thread all about how the original poster didn't like to DPS during instances and...

Guild Wars 2 isn't the only game to have recently been smacked with a spate of raiding guild drama: The normally unassuming MMO themepark RIFT was embroiled in spectacle over the holiday. Major RIFT raiding guild Apotheosys concocted a 13-minute goodbye video and 3400-word blog post slamming developer Trion Worlds, comparing it to the "Nazi regime," and declaring RIFT "dead."...

On Friday, I took a look at the classes, combat, and tricky mechanics of upcoming sandboxy Korean-import Black Desert's first western closed beta test. Today, I'll pick up where I left off by addressing the game's crafting, gathering, and economic systems. Now then, as I noted in that earlier article, most of the things you do in the game will...

Sci-fi sandbox Divergence Online is on the way to Steam's early access program -- at least, it will be when someone at Valve wakes up from the traditional New Year's stupor and flips the approval switch. "We're realizing that although the game was already approved for sale on Steam, that there is still a final 'final' approval process that it...

Gear up, mercenaries: Escape from Tarkov has started taking preorders for four different game packages, even though the title hasn't gone into testing yet. The preorder packages range in cost from $45 to $140 and include bonus equipment, access to the game's various testing stages (alpha and beta), and an early unlock of the game prior to launch. Escape from Tarkov also...

The new year is here, and it brings with it the promise of more content and options in Shroud of the Avatar. Not in the abstract sense wherein you know there will probably be content, but in the sense that the most recent dispatch from the developers extensively outlines several parts of what players can expect from Release 26....

Be they sandbox or themeparks, plenty of MMORPGs have hopped on the two-faction PvP bandwagon. A player rolls up on the red side or blue side at character creation, and that's the side he'll be fighting on for the rest of his character's career -- barring paid faction swaps, of course. Inevitably, faction imbalances appear: sometimes the result of one side being aesthetically cooler...

Were you too busy gaming this week to pay attention to MMO news? Get caught up every Sunday evening with Massively Overpowered’s Week in Review! This week, Massively OP's own Matt Daniel dived into Black Desert's beta and delivered the first part of his impressions of the upcoming sandbox import. He's now covered classes, combat, and mechanics; stay tuned for the second half...

Crime never sleeps and superhero MMOs never take a holiday from patching. Valiance Online has been hard at work whipping up a couple of new updates over the past week. The first patch, on Christmas day, completely wiped the server and started testing new client-to-server architecture. A second smaller patch on December 29th provided more optimization and updated textures to make it...