Wed Jul 29 18:00:00 EDT 2020
Back in June, we covered the news that Echo of Soul was being revitalized by a coterie of game development companies – welcome news, since the game has a long list of sunsets and classic servers and closures in its relatively short history. Anyhow, Blue Potion Games announced this week that it’s begun pre-registration for […]
With Fortnite effectively putting the kibosh on major new updates, there leaves the one final piece of content which will become the only form of regular content: Ventures, a seasonal feature that takes place in a location known as the Blasted Badlands. This area promises to be full of missions to undertake and modifiers to […]
A new challenge league has been running in Path of Exile for about four weeks now, and that means it’s time to share statistics. Who doesn’t like statistics? Statistics are fun. Have a whole bunch of statistics about challenges and seeds dropped! There have been a lot of seeds dropped, with over 3 billion tier […]
Massively OP’s MJ is back to the land of internet for a short spell, and you know the first things she wants to do is? Battle with a bow, baby! She’s more than ready for AQ3D’s new Ranger class, and she’s heading to meet Robina in Greenguard so she can prove herself worthy of wielding […]
I can’t think of a whole lot of rogue servers or player-run emulators that make the leap to Twitch drops, but Return of Reckoning, the player-run Warhammer Online megalith, is doing just that, with an account system that will now allow players to link their game accounts to their Twitch accounts and then watch affiliated […]
The next Final Fantasy XIV patch arrives on August 11th, and you’re going to need to do some stuff ahead of time if you want to continue with the MSQ when it arrives. Fortunately, if you’ve been playing for a while, odds are nearly absolute that you’ve already done it, but the team behind the […]
Nearly eight months’ worth of PC updates for PlanetSide 2 will finally arrive to PlayStation 4 players today with the Escalation update in what is being touted as the multiplayer shooter’s biggest content release yet. Bastion Fleet Carriers, the Colossus Heavy Tank, the War Assets feature, the Sanctuary social hub; it’s all part of this […]
It’s all over in Sea of Thieves, because you now have to fight skeletons covered in fire. Yes, the Ashen Lords arrive on the high seas, and that means aside from having to fight off skeleton pirates they’re also setting your wooden boat on fire and generally being… you know, on fire. Fire is hot […]
MMO gamers were bummed back in May when Gamigo sunsetted Dragon’s Prophet over in the Europe, especially since it was the last remaining western version after Daybreak’s 2015 sunset of US version of the game. So it was cause for cheer when the game recently popped back up on Steam, especially since we’d long wondered […]
We all love multiplayer, persistent world online games, don’t we? Players stay for the familiarity, nostalgia, and potential for years of enjoyment. Studios love the playerbase stickiness, ability to build on an existing environment, and potential for years of a consistent, predictable revenue stream. But there’s at least one issue that long-term multiplayer games face […]
In World of Warcraft: Shadowlands, players are wandering in the realm of the dead and dealing with afterlife issues. A perfect time to find members of the opposite faction and kill them, right? No? Well, in that case, why not just kill anyone else? Yes, it appears that the world quests related to PvP are […]
Here’s a not-actually-very-secret bit of honesty about the industry that I have been working in for about a decade now: I am not actually right all of the time. I say it’s not actually secret because, well, I talk about this a lot. I make my guesses and understandings clear, I play my cards on […]
Cursed by Netflix transmedia synergy, that is! Yes, as promised, the Netflix fantasy series Cursed has a big crossover with the Black Desert franchise rolling out this week. When it was announced earlier in July, we didn’t quite know what it would entail for MMO gamers, but now we do: Pearl Abyss and Kakao have […]
Warframe’s newest mission is its most lucrative — and dangerous. This week, the space ninja title dropped The Steel Path hardmode update, giving highly experienced players a run for the money. “The Steel Path flips the Origin System on its head, increasing the difficulty of every node on the Star Chart,” Digital Extremes said. “Put […]
The other day when I heard that Valiance Online was going to hold a one-week open beta event in August, I rushed to my calendar and put that as a “high priority” alert for those dates. Yeah, I’m shameless — but I’m also excited to dive into this City of Heroes’ spiritual successor for the […]
Earlier in the week we reported on a Reddit post that wondered aloud what was happening with Squadron 42’s development. CIG has now officially responded on the forums with some explanations on what’s taking so long to keep backers informed on the project. The post first points towards several SQ42-related video pieces as well as […]
Been playing Lord of the Rings Online lately? That’s a little gallows humor for you, right there; logging into LOTRO has been a well-documented nightmare at the best of times for far too long now. No one is happy about this fact, and it seemed like an almost foregone conclusion that Standing Stone Games should […]
No matter what you think about Pokemon Go and mobile MMOARGs in general, you gotta give Niantic some credit for managing to pivot a “go outside” game hard in the middle of a pandemic with actual lockdowns keeping people inside. Niantic’s quick shift to incentivize more sedentary and solo behavior, as our own Massively on […]
If you’re looking for a fight in Shroud of the Avatar, then you’ll soon be able to take a number thanks to an in-development PvP queue system that’s due to release at some time this year. The system will let players see a list of others looking for PvP, with several brackets planned to show […]
Remember when DC Comics completely destroyed its multiverse only to bring it back a couple of years later, tops? We sometimes do. But it means that you can have content like DC Universe Online’s new Wonderverse episode, which launches on July 30th for PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4. Switch players will have to wait […]
Summer has come to an end… well, over in Astellia Online. The game’s newest patch removes the summer event, so you’ll need to focus more on standard game activities like farming in Avalon. Of course, the game has also adjusted the rewards in Avalon, with enhanced stats for weapons and armor gained there, improved stats […]
Justin and Bree discuss SWTOR and Wurm Online launching on Steam, FFXIV's 5.3 patch, Phantasy Star Online 2's New Genesis, the Fable MMO rumor, Valiance Online, and Elder Scrolls Online on Stadia, with adventures in LOTRO, SWG Legends, and WoW, plus a mailbag topic on FFXIV's unskippable dungeons.
On August 11th, Final Fantasy XIV players will face the end of the Shadowbringers MSQ arc that will decide the fate of a world. But on August 12th, an even greater threat will emerge. Sharks. Sharks that can only be faced with the power of dancing and skimpy beachwear. Yes, this year’s Moonfire Faire starts […]
Archaeology and saving the world go hand-in-hand — just ask Doctor Jones. RuneScape players have a chance to experience this themselves right now with the release of the game’s latest quest update, Desperate Measures. The mission picks up from a previous story update and involves (among other elements) the game’s Archaeology skill. “When we last […]
It was no real surprise earlier this month when Amazon said it was delaying New World yet again, this time until 2021 – frankly, the consensus was that the game needed more time to bake. But what are you meant to do in the meantime? Well, how about stress testing? That’s what Amazon has in […]
To celebrate the arrival of Avernus for Neverwinter on console today – yes it’s happening, folks! – PWE has granted Massively OP a stack of keys for the Gift of the Noble Guard, all on PS4. The Gift of the Noble Guard includes the Cape of the Noble Guard, the Stone of Health, an Adventurer’s […]
Two weeks ago, Lord of the Rings Online players were treated to “cascading” issues across the game servers that led to multiple days of downtime, lag, and the disabling of the chat system. Frustration from players, including those on our own staff, was palpable, more for Standing Stone Games’ communication lapses than for the actual […]
Remember the Phantasy Star Online 2 launch fiasco with the Windows store? Of course you do. It was terrible. And it led to a lot of people saying, with varying degrees of exasperation, that the game should just be on Steam because of course it should be. Well guess what? Now the game has a […]
Just two short months ago, Guild Wars 2 introduced us to the Drizzlewood Coast, flashpoint of the civil war between the Charr United Legions and Bangar Ruinbringer’s Dominion forces. Over the course of the story, the added support from the Seraph and the commander, the United Legions were able to turn their near defeat into […]
Just two weeks ago, we covered the simultaneously amusing and sad story about Red Dead Online players dressing up as clowns to protest a huge content drought in the game. I mean, clowns? They’re funny. But content droughts? Not funny. Especially when the content lapse goes on for months and months and months. In any […]
Week after week in this round of Choose My Adventure, I’ve been finding little things to love about Dungeons and Dragons Online and this final week put a capstone on my enjoyment. A cherry on my sundae. A flambe flourish on my Baked Alaska. I might be hungry as I type this. And while I […]
Wouldn’t it be easier to just sign up for beta testing and playtesting events via Steam instead of other means? Yes, it would. And wouldn’t it be nicer to have the ability to flag people for tests directly through the client rather than having people redeem beta keys manually? The answer to that is also […]
So Black Desert has some good news and bad news this past week. And the bad news leads in to the good news, so let’s do that first: Pearl Abyss and Kakao are shutting down the summer season servers early on PC. August 26th is the new end date. Frustrating, yes, but the goal here […]
It may be strange to consider, but the 2020 opening of Ahn’Qiraj in WoW Classic may actually be a bigger deal than it was back in vanilla. It’s certainly building up to be the event spotlight of the year for Classic players — and now it has begun. As of today, the server-wide war effort […]
If it seems like we’ve been talking about improved performance in The Elder Scrolls Online for a really long time, you’re not nuts because it was exactly a year ago at QuakeCon that ZeniMax dropped its first timeline of the planned improvements. But performance in Cyrodiil in particular has been a concern for the game […]
Let’s talk about money! Pretend money in video games, that is. I’ve been thinking about this a bit lately since realizing that I use money as a top marker of accomplishment in MMORPGs: I find I measure my personal success in a game based more on how much money I can make rather than using […]
When you think about it, combining board games with MMORPGs isn’t the worst idea in the world. Graphical MUDs and games like Stash have brought this kind of experience to players for years now, but it may be that World Seed represents the next level of board game MMOs. “World Seed is heavily inspired by […]
If you like your dungeon crawler hack n’ slash games more pixelated and challenging, then you might be familiar with Hammerwatch, a game that was released in 2013 to some overall high acclaim judging on critical and Steam user reviews. A sequel was released on PC in 2018 called Heroes of Hammerwatch, making it more […]
Ah, the 64-bit client! 64-bit clients for games are pretty well the norm by now, but some games have held back. One such example was TERA’s EU version, but no longer; the game will be migrating to a new 64-bit client at the beginning of August, allowing for greater RAM access, more asynchronous loading, DirectX […]
Farewell, Champions of Titan, we scarcely knew you. The game is shutting down on August 31st, which means the game’s Steam page will be removed and it will be gone… again. Wait, again? Yes, we’ve done this dance once before with Champions of Titan when it was called Wild Buster; we documented that whole sad […]
Ahead of the 10th anniversary of the first introduction of Path of Exile to the public, Grinding Gear Games has posted a “then and now” blog that – well, you guys really need to see some of these screenshots, some of which are apparently from the earliest builds of the game from 2007. Even once […]
You’d think in a video game where resources can just be populated at the developers’ will that a fuel shortage wouldn’t be possible, but that’s precisely what’s happening in Elite: Dangerous right now as an adjustment made in an earlier patch to fix one problem has instead spawned new problems. Before this patch, there was […]
As much as the companies using them to make bank might want them to, the discussions around lockboxes are not going away. And a new study from the EU Internal Market and Consumer Protection committee brings up a point that those companies would really rather not hear. Rather than discussing lockboxes under the header of […]
Beta testing for Elyon, aka The Game Formerly Known as Ascent: Infinite Realm, has been ongoing in Korea for a little while now while the game’s western website has been kind of thin on details. So (and as usual) it falls to fans to aggregate information and present it to waiting players, which is just […]
You know, I am always conflicted about these types of stories: They are tragedies, and nobody wants to have to tell a community that a fellow MMO gamer has passed. But they’re also heartwarming when the community comes together to celebrate that gamer’s life. I’m talking today about PlanetSide 2 player Ezrason, who was memorialized […]
A post on the Star Citizen subreddit has been growing in traction in recent days, putting into perspective an abject lack of substantial progress reports on Squadron 42’s development. The post points to a promise written in March 2020’s Roadmap Roundup to share more SQ42 content in its AMAs, Calling All Devs, and in sprint […]
Tribal MMO sandbox Xyson is getting frisky and furry this summer season thanks to a new patch that added in pets for players to enjoy. “This latest patch is one in a series of patches focused around creatures, combat and improvements to the game based on the suggestions of players,” the devs said. “Players can […]
With the launch of SWTOR on Steam this week (and totally, completely, not a beautiful coincidence), I finally reclaimed my account and rejoined the battle for the galaxy! A quick glance through my old emails seems to show the last time I played was around March of 2012, so you could say I’ve got a […]
EVE Echoes has been eyeballing August as its launch month for some time now but never really bothered to nail down a calendar date until this past Saturday, where the devs confirmed a launch date of Thursday, August 13th. The announcement still points to the game’s ongoing pre-registration which will unlock a number of free […]
It’s not exactly a secret to people who follow my presence on various feeds that I’m not doing great right now emotionally, but the prospect of Final Fantasy XIV’s patch 5.3 certainly does at least help take the edge off. And at the time you are reading this, the patch is going to be here […]
