MMO Week Recap: Return to Cantha

The first episode of Guild Wars 2’s The post-Dragons non-living story season kicked off this week, sending players back to Cantha with the crew to solve a mystery in Gyala Delve.

In the meantime, destiny 2 Lightfall expansion released, we took a look at the upcoming MMO sandbox pax dei, Bless Global failed on his steam crypto bat, and we examined the impact of Section 230 on MMORPGs.

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

Flameseeker Chronicles: What Lies Beneath from Guild Wars 2, the next story in End of Dragons, has been released – Congratulations on the Guild Wars 2 End of Dragons expansion! Can you believe it’s been a whole year? In a way, I feel like I’m still learning what the end…

Meet Pax Dei, a well-funded open-world social sandbox built on “true MMO scale”. – In 2021, we got wind of a new Microsoft-backed MMO called Pax Dei from studio Mainframe Industries, which was busy raising huge moneybags from investors like…

WoW Factor: World of Warcraft is rolling down the mountain – In November 1994, Marvel Comics released a new comic book spin-off of the main series X-Men. Written by Scott Lobdell, Generation X was in many ways a return to a…

Lawful Neutral: What MMO gamers need to know about Section 230 – You may have something in the news last week about something called Section 230 and a lot of panic about the “end of the internet” as a result of…

After another weak quarter, Square-Enix will replace Yosuke Matsuda as president – Yosuke Matsuda is finally leaving Square-Enix: The company’s board of directors announced earlier today that Matsuda will step down as president and through…

Vague Patch Notes: Why I’m expecting Blue Protocol – My anticipation for Blue Protocol is something I can’t adequately explain because at the end of the day it’s based more on a feeling than actual proof.…

LOTRO Legendarium: Six unpopular opinions about Lord of the Rings Online – Just because you’re a fan of a particular franchise or game doesn’t mean you always agree with the larger groupthink. It’s always a fun exercise to indulge in…

Bless Global is already delisted from Steam after trying to push crypto thugs – Did we expect anything else? Not really. Just days after Bless Global relaunched the franchise for the umpteenth time on Steam, the MMO was dropped from Valve’s platform. Maybe that…

Hitman series developer IO Interactive is teasing its work on an upcoming online fantasy RPG – Gamers may know the IO Interactive studio as the ones behind several games in the Hitman franchise, but it looks like the studio is now on the way to…

Mortal Online 2 brings Thunder, Fire, Ice and Rock with its new Elementalist School of Magic – It’s hard to deny the element-weaving spellcaster’s classic appeal in a fantasy setting, and this evergreen trope is now available in Mortal Online 2 thanks to the…

FTC grants Microsoft’s request for Sony documents as leaks say EU will approve ABK merger – Remember the time Sony accused Microsoft of “harassment” for requesting internal documents from Sony that would help Microsoft defend its Activision-Blizzard merger before the Federal Trade Commission this summer?…

Square-Enix’s Babylon’s Fall ended with the faintest whimper – How do you imagine your favorite online service game going dark? Hopefully it’s bittersweet parties in the loyal community and massive end-of-game events that serve to make an exclamation mark…

Embers Adrift’s latest developer video features its biggest patch yet – The Embers Adrift dev team is on a winning streak with their biggest patch yet, even as they ramp up for the upcoming March update. In a new…

Massive Rethinking: How Should MMOs Deal With In-Game Crime? – About a week ago I fell down a rabbit hole while writing an ArcheAge post. Kakao gave out joke titles for absurd achievements like accumulating the…

After Gamigo, X-LEGEND has big expansion plans for Aura Kingdom and Grand Fantasia – Back in December, Gamigo announced that it was closing several MMOs on its roster and handing some of them back to their original developers. Among those games was Aura Kingdom…

World of Warcraft previews new adventures in the Forbidden Reach in patch 10.0.7 – Raszageth has disappeared from World of Warcraft. She’s not here anymore. But her legacy lives on…especially her legacy of being the reason you couldn’t just go back…

Elder Scrolls Online announces plans for an in-person fan event in April – Seems like a lot of MMORPGs are getting fan events and we don’t necessarily hate it (although COVID is still a big deal and so players should still…

Mad World is on track to launch “before June”, don’t worry about Diablo IV – Mad World has been cooking for a long time; It was originally scheduled for release in 2018, then 2020, and then 2022. “We’re 99.9% confident we’ll finish the game within…

Chronicles of Elyria boss justifies rebuilding site, communications and reopening Discord – Last month, Soulbound Studios’ Jeromy Walsh wrote another in-depth talk talking about merging design docs for Kingdoms of Elyria and its former (i.e. originally Kickstarted) game Chronicles of Elyria,…

EA is laying off hundreds of Apex Legends QA testers – Over 200 Apex Legends quality assurance testers were abruptly fired from Electronic Arts this week, reports Kotaku. The pink slips were distributed to the entire Baton Rouge exam…

Bless Global is back again, this time on mobile and Steam as a waddling blockchain horror – I’m sorry to report this morning that Bless is back and at it again. Oh, that sounds cruel if you don’t know the story, so let me recap: Bless Online…

The Blue Protocol benchmark tool and character creator have been released – Do you want to know if your computer can handle the Blue Protocol? Would you like to try creating a character in the game’s creation engine? Do you read Japanese? …

Avalon is the latest blockchain metaverse project from old-school MMO developers – I know, I know, another one of those metaverse blockchain web3 startups, but this one is one that MMORPG fans will at least want to take note of, for who exactly…

Perfect Ten: 10 little Guild Wars 2 details that make it special – I find that there is that special window of time that happens when you come back to an old favorite MMO that you shouldn’t miss. It’s only about the first week or…

Final Fantasy XIV opens another ticket lottery for the London Fan Festival in October – European fans, did you feel left out of the Final Fantasy XIV Fan Festival Vegas hype? Not anymore: Square-Enix kicked off the Fan Festival in London this morning and…

Korean Elyon fans have already created a rogue server of the shut down MMORPG – Fans of Elyon in both Korea and the West were basically kicked out of the MMORPG by Kakao Games, with a December sunset in our part of the world…

Massively on the Go: Pokemon GO’s Hoenn Tours had the lowest value of any tour to date – While I thought Pokemon Go’s Las Vegas Hoenn Tour was bad, the Global Tour was somehow worse. Well, to be clear, there is a difference between “services rendered” and “fun”.…

Destiny 2’s Lightfall and Season of Defiance are officially live – It’s finally here: Destiny 2’s Lightfall expansion is officially live as of this afternoon, on every damn platform the game works on, along with the Season of Defiance.[AL:D2] “Lightfall is…

Funcom’s Dune Awakening teases exploration, survival, and “bespoke” crafting – Back in 2019, Funcom signed a deal to develop a DUNE survival game, but how MMO-like the game would be remained an open question. In 2020, Funcom will…

Choose My Adventure: New tutorials and old habits bring Destiny 2’s hooks to life – I’ll admit it to myself: Despite my misgivings about what to expect in the endgame, I can feel myself getting all involved in Destiny 2…

The Front is a new survival shooter coming in 2023 with 10 “different survival indices” to track – Attention folks, we have a new MMO acronym coming up: Survival Open World Crafting, also known as SOC. Will it stick? Well, Samar Studio’s new “SOC” dubbed The Front hopes so, but it…

Not so massive: impressions from the new PvE mode of Century Age of Ashes – In 2021 I watched an early version of the dragon riding arena shooter Century: Age of Ashes. I found its core gameplay to be promising, but the game…

Wisdom of Nym: Where does the Final Fantasy XIV story go after 6.3? – As we all know Final Fantasy XIV at this point is the story of Zero and as we all desperately want her to live happily ever after with at least 30 cats.…

Former Wildstar developers are calling Wayfinder “the second coming” of the defunct MMORPG – Are you looking forward to Wayfinder? Good for you, because liking things is more fun than hating them. Do you know who else is excited? Some of the former…

Ashes of Creation provides a deeper dive into the updated UI elements and the steps taken to create them – Last month Ashes of Creation offered a look at some UI elements, but the last preview video was mostly about tank classes. This time the latest development video…

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.

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