MMO week in review: New Year’s worries for WoW, ESO and Lost Ark

The first week of the year may be quiet for MMOs, but it’s not us: this week we’ve bottled the hype for Final Fantasy XIV upcoming patch, went back to classic Guild Warsand aired our concerns for World of Warcraft, Elder Scrolls Onlineand Lost Ark.

In the meantime, we’ve conducted the first of two 2023 kickoff roundtables (including our status report!) as well as our debriefing for all of our 2022 annual awards!

Read on for this week’s very best MMO news and opinion today, as every Sunday since 2010!, in Massively Overpowered’s Weekly Recap!

THE TOP STORIES OF THIS WEEK

WoW Factor: Why is Dragonflight crafting not well received? – World of Warcraft has long suffered in the crafting department. Basically, every single expansion for the game promised crafting overhauls and restorations at one point…

Tamriel Infinium: Elder Scrolls Online faces an uphill battle in 2023 – Let me tell you, it’s a strange time to return to Elder Scrolls Online. After a strong stint last spring, I took a break to…

EVE Online says lowsec assassination and ship production has increased since the uprising – In its first Producer Letter of 2023, CCP Games again addresses the active players of EVE Online, but if you’re hoping for an actual number, you won’t…

New World describes another round of server mergers taking place on January 10th – At this point, it’s not really surprising if New World is moving the number of servers up and down – scalable server services are part of Amazon’s overall business, after all.…

Cyberpunk 2077 class action lawsuit settled for $1.85 million – Remember when Cyberpunk 2077 was on the verge of becoming the next big thing in CRPGs? And then all it seemed to do was hand Keanu Reeves a paycheck and tick royally…

MassivelyOP’s Weirdest MMO Stories of 2022: LOTRO’s New Mascot – Today we conclude our traditional countdown of the Craziest MMORPG stories from MassivelyOP of the year! Coming up at #1 on our list… LOTRO’S PET ROCK With the release of Before…

MassivelyOP’s full debrief and year in review for the 2022 awards – As we did in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021, today we will be recaping our annual awards and other meta articles from late 2022. We gave…

Final Fantasy XIV releases its preliminary patch notes for Gods Revel, Lands Tremble – The date for Final Fantasy XIV’s first major patch of the year is almost here, and that means it’s time for the traditional Patch 6.3 Pre-Patch Notes! And,…

Microsoft dismisses constitutional complaints in renewed response to FTC antitrust lawsuit – Microsoft caused a lot of eye-rolling and head-shaking when it filed its response to the Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust lawsuit, alleging, among other things, that both the processes of…

The first monthly pre-alpha test of Pantheon Rise of the Fallen will run for 24 hours on January 28th – Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen has promised that it will run pre-alpha tests every month starting in 2023, and it’s delivering on that promise at least in the…

Massively Overthinking: Hopes and Fears for MMOs in 2023 – As 2022 drew to a close, we spent our Massively Overthinking Roundtables discussing our predictions for 2023 as well as our goals. Now we’re going to talk about our hopes…

Early Access life simulation RPG My Time at Sandrock is testing its multiplayer mode on January 12th – If you love those cozy life simulation RPGs like Animal Crossing and Rune Factory, you might know My Time at Sandrock, an in-development Early Access sequel to Pathea Games’…

Global Chat: Would Secret World have done better if it was set in the 1920s? – Thanks to a recent article by MMO Folklorist, I learned something about The Secret World that I had never known: Apparently the game was going to be discontinued in early development…

Final Fantasy XIV updates its Gods Revel, Lands Tremble preview page with more content – With the next major Final Fantasy XIV patch just around the corner, the game’s update dedicated page has been expanded to cover things included in the 6.35 interim patch…

Vague Patch Notes: Introducing limited-time content modes in MMOs – Today’s column was inspired by a discussion in Work Chat about limited time game modes – specifically the idea of ​​something like that in World of Warcraft. Nothing like ultimately…

Mad World is filling in the lead up to launch in 2023 with lots of videos and armor previews – What’s happening at Mad World developer Jandisoft? It’s hard to tell as things coming out of the studio seem to be nothing more than armor previews, a…

Ranking: What was the best *new* MMO of 2022? – The downside of qualifying both old and new games for MMO of the Year is that it can be quite difficult for brand new MMOs to compete with the…

The Lord of the Rings Online Shadowfax server is advancing into the Vales of Anduin – One of Lord of the Rings Online’s smallest servers took another step this week to round out the game map. On Wednesday, Standing Stone Games quietly advanced the legendary Shadowfax…

For Science: New research is attempting to link game decisions, soft skills, and career paths – I suspect most long-time MMORPG players can point to a useful skill, contact, or experience in gaming that helped them at some point in their career or life, or maybe…

MassivelyOP’s Weirdest MMO Stories of 2022: EverQuest II’s Prison Server – Today we start our traditional countdown of the Craziest MMORPG stories from MassivelyOP of the year! Coming up at number 3 on our list… EQ2 has everyone permanently banned on their “prison server”…

Black Desert PC launches the first season of Arena of Solare, tweaks animations and asks to see your dog – “May I see a picture of your dog?” That’s one of the questions the PC version of Black Desert is asking during one of their events this week, as…

GeForce CES Showcase features additional gameplay footage from Throne and Liberty, The Day Before, and Party Animals – We’re not usually the one to single out Nvidia by touting its GPU hardware and software capabilities, but in the case of a GeForce Beyond presentation at CES, we’ll make an exception…

End-of-Year Eleven: The Top MMOs to Watch in 2023 – You know how some people like to push that narrative that “MMOs are dying?” If that’s really true, then my job is to summarize all the up-and-coming titles…

Leaderboard: What was the most overrated MMO of 2022? – A funny and incredibly predictable thing happens every year in the comments of our most underrated prize: someone, usually multiple people, informs us that what we’re thinking is actually…

Embers Adrift adds Exile Freehold Outdoor Dungeon – If one of your New Year’s resolutions was to jump headlong into a badass indie MMORPG and challenge yourself to survive in a world that wants you dead, then Embers is…

Microsoft’s ZeniMax QA has just formed the largest gaming industry union in the country – Just before the holidays, workers at Microsoft’s ZeniMax Media — including Elder Scrolls Online’s ZeniMax Online Studios and Bethesda itself — announced their intention to unionize as a group…

The Game Archaeologist: PlaneShift, the flagship open source MMO – A dark view will appear while the character creation screen is being hidden. The new adventurer looks around and contemplates sinister forms and sinister movements – the subterranean realm of Yliakum.…

Choose My Adventure: Guild Wars is giving the system a shock after months into the sequel – We start the new year of Choose My Adventure by jumping to an older game, the original Guild Wars. I’m honestly not too surprised by the results here, especially…

Final Fantasy XIV’s Naoki Yoshida teases the game’s future in 2023 – It’s a new year again and this year fans of Final Fantasy XIV have fan festivals and the awaited announcement of the game’s next expansion. Damn, the first big…

Ranking: What’s the most vulnerable daybreak MMO in 2023? – Picture this: It’s 2015. Sony just sold SOE and it reformed to Daybreak and started deleting games, hard – about 20 to date, not to mention all the…

Square-Enix’s Yosuke Matsuda is still all-in on blockchain and NFTs after 2022 – You might think that after watching the steady erosion and collapse of blockchain and NFTs in general and in gaming after 2022, the obvious conclusion would be…

Wisdom of Nym: Ways for Final Fantasy XIV to make better use of old zones – So Final Fantasy XIV has some zones, huh. Well, this in and of itself is neither a problem nor a problem. There are many places to explore and…

Not So Massive: Why I Don’t Play Lost Ark – At release I played Lost Ark quite intensely for a while, eventually racking up over 100 hours in game and generally enjoying myself as much as I did. If I…

Bellatores is silent for half a year after receiving a $33.3 million investment – Normally, a budding MMORPG enjoying a profit of $33.3 million would be nothing but good news. But in the case of Nyous Bellatores, it’s more worrying. As we have previously reported,…

Star Citizen announces 2022 as a year of growth, discusses 3.18 features and updates plans for 2023 – In late 2022, CIG’s Chris Roberts released another letter from the Chairman, looking back on the past year of Star Citizen and looking ahead to the current year and many…

THIS WEEK’S CASTS & STREAMS

Catch up on the latest news in the MMO genre and the best content from Massively OP in our MMO Week in Review each week! Want more content summaries? Check out Friday’s Betawatch for MMO testing highlights, Saturday’s Make My MMO for MMO crowdfunding updates, and Sunday’s The MOP Up swiping up all the news we haven’t covered anywhere else.

advertising