MMO Week Recap: Throne & Liberty, New World Seasons and plenty of MMO Birthdays

Amazon made two big announcements this week that stole the MMO show: First, it’s releasing NCsofts Throne & Freedom in the west, and second, it converts New world into a seasonal MMO with the Fellowship and Fire update releasing in late March.

Meanwhile, players are celebrating plenty of anniversaries for CRACK, Dungeons and Dragons Online, black desertAnd Old school RuneScape.

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

Amazon Games will publish NCsoft’s Throne & Liberty in the Americas, Europe and Japan – The rumors were true: Amazon Games is releasing NCsoft’s Throne and Liberty in the West. The companies announced the partnership earlier today. “Amazon Games and NCSOFT today announced a…

Vitae Aeternum: New World Season 1 preview and updated roadmap for 2023 – Last week, Amazon Games invited members of the press to a presentation where it revealed its plans for a new seasonal content model for New World. The first season starts…

WoW Factor: Does World of Warcraft need more classes? – How many classes are there in World of Warcraft? There are wrong answers, but there is more than one right answer. If your answer was “13”, you are right. There…

Gamigo is giving new and returning RIFT players 15 free days of Subtime – Has Gamigo given up on RIFT? Given the lack of updates and massive layoffs and a tiny population, you might think so, and we were certainly suspicious of the company’s intentions. But maybe…

Perfect Ten: 10 things I really dislike about Final Fantasy XIV – Sometimes, when I’ve got a series of columns planned, I start by saying, “Hey, here’s a series of columns I’m planning.” And sometimes I just leave it unsaid…

Embers Adrift cuts box price, subscription price and plans content for 2023 – Over the past few months, Embers Adrift has been running sales for its brand of PvE MMORPG games, including free weekends and a limited-time discount on its subscription…

The Game Archaeologist: The tale of Infinite Crisis, Turbine’s extremely short-lived DC Comics MOBA – Smart people will remember that back in 2012, EA Mythic attempted to reverse its dwindling MMO fortunes by repackaging Warhammer Online into a MOBA called Wrath of Heroes. This great…

The Daily Grind: What kind of fashion do your MMO characters wear? – As the truth-in-comedy joke says, the real endgame for MMORPGs is fashion wars. Which player creates the best cosmetic outfit from collected parts and strategically applied dyes is the real…

Jukebox Heroes: Six great EverQuest II expansion tunes – When was the last time you took a step back and realized how big and extensive some of your MMORPGs have become over the decades of their existence? It definitely gives me…

Artifact Krewe, an exploration game for Guild Wars 2 fans, is now available – Is exploring maps, jumping around, uncovering treasures, and just seeing what the world has to offer is your favorite part of Guild Wars 2? We can understand exactly…

X-LEGEND confirms its plans for a global relaunch of Eden Eternal – Earlier this week, Redditors spotted some signs that Eden Eternal was on track for a return following its closure by Gamigo. We can now confirm that X-LEGEND…

Massively Overthinking: The MMO Characters We Want to Love But Don’t Love – A few weeks ago, MOP reader Neurotic pinged the MOP Podcast with a question about characters we want to love but just don’t love. He had it despite…

Wayfinder begins closed beta next week and schedules no-wipe early access for May – The MMO-inspired but smaller co-op PvE hack-and-slasher Wayfinder crept into our hearts last year with its familiar visuals and splashy combat, and now it meanders into a…

Baldur’s Gate 3 announces August launch date with multiplayer – After years in Early Access, Baldur’s Gate 3 finally has a Baldur’s Date… for release. That said, this multiplayer co-op CRPG is available on PC, Mac,…

Coreborn Nations of the Ultracore is offering its open-world co-op survival sandbox for alpha testing on March 2nd – Another survival sandbox making its way onto our radar (and likely part of our list of beta titles). This time we turn our attention to Coreborn: Nations of the…

Games startup Elodie Games announces Project Skies, a “social cooperative action RPG game” – At this point we’re all seeing a press release from a new startup studio with tons of investment money that has developers from the likes of Blizzard, Riot and BioWare and…

Massively on the Go: Preparing for Pokemon Go’s Global Hoenn Tour – Pokemon GO’s Hoenn Tour is fast approaching, and as is usual with POGO regional tours, we’ve got a nice little checklist for you global players out there. While Niantic, as usual, still…

Vague patch notes: MMO events are not for the high-level player base – Let me start with a statement: I really like limited time events in MMORPGs. I don’t like them as a means of conveying important story beats (if you look at…

Lord of the Rings Online increases its Virtue and Legendary item cap, talks about ‘new work in Gondor’ – In case you missed it – possibly because it didn’t originally air on all channels – Lord of the Rings Online recently increased both the Virtue cap and the Legendary item cap.…

Pantheon will be testing crafting and gathering updates in this weekend’s pre-alpha – It may not be exciting, but Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen seems to have made great strides in infrastructure, most of which is invisible to players. This is the snack from the…

The western version of RF Online has been discontinued due to an apparent contract issue – News coming out of sci-fi MMO RF Online was mostly a trickle of headlines – the latest report concerned Korean developer CCR, who announced their intention to launch the…

Dungeons and Dragons Online Update 58 is giving away a free dungeon and anniversary cosmetic – As Dungeons and Dragons Online celebrates its 17th anniversary, Standing Stone Games is spreading the celebrations far and wide with this week’s Update 58: Unlikely Heroes. [AL:DDO]Starting point for…

RIFT launches Ascended Carnival to celebrate its 12th birthday – Go ahead and pinch yourself to check it out, but you’re not dreaming: Gamigo has now done two good things for RIFT in a single week after years of neglect…

Singapore Arrests Teen For Gambling On Roblox Terror Worlds – You know how they say, “All publicity is good publicity?” Maybe that’s not entirely true in the case of Roblox and…well, everything that’s going on with this thing…

Massively on the Go: Pokemon Go’s Vegas Hoenn Tour absolutely sucked – Before the last Pokemon GO Hoenn personal tour in Las Vegas, a few people in my community were joking about what could go wrong. Apparently there were lag and login issues on the…

Elder Scrolls Online is highlighting some of the quality of life and accessibility features coming with Update 37 – As usual, the next Elder Scrolls Online update isn’t just about the Necrom expansion and all its gubbins; it’s also about Update 37, also known as the part of the…

Old School RuneScape celebrates 10 years with a cake-centric quest full of new cosmetic rewards – When it’s someone’s birthday, it’s customary to bake a birthday cake, and Old School RuneScape is certainly no different, as cake is the main focus of MMORPGs…

Microsoft Strikes Deal to Bring Activision Games to NVIDIA GeForce Now – Nintendo wasn’t the only video game company to strike big deals with Microsoft yesterday: Microsoft is also collaborating with NVIDIA to bring Activision titles, including Call of Duty, to…

No Man’s Sky adds a new spaceship, enhanced VR capabilities, and a new Expedition with the Fractal update – No Man’s Sky has done it again: Early in the morning, the sci-fi survival sandbox has released another massive patch known as the Fractal Update, bringing more features and improvements to…

Black Desert is celebrating seven years on PC and four years on console with freebies and bonuses – It’s birthday season for Black Desert as Pearl Abyss celebrates its “milestone anniversaries” for the PC and console versions of the game next month. Here are the…

Diablo IV previews the world of Sanctuary in a new video – The Diablo IV team undoubtedly feels the pressure to keep long-time series fans happy, to carry Blizzard’s fortunes on their backs, to try to get people to…

Fight or Kite: The Witcher card game GWENT ticks many of the right boxes – but too many of the wrong ones – Continuing my journey into digital card bliss, I decided to try a game that I had mentally discarded as one of the top contenders in the genre: GWENT.…

Choose My Adventure: The return to Destiny 2 has been both bumpy and compelling – As we break this random whim of mine to compete in shooter MMOs for this month’s “Choose My Adventure,” we’re clearing our playlist with Destiny 2, a…

Throne & Liberty begins its final testing phase in South Korea today – After 12 years of development, the NCsoft game now known as Throne and Liberty is finally nearing completion. NCsoft reiterated on Twitter last night that its latest small test…

Microsoft and Nintendo decide to release Call of Duty on Nintendo consoles for the next decade – Well, here’s another push from Microsoft in its effort to buy Activision-Blizzard: As international regulators debate the merger, Microsoft signed a deal with Nintendo promising to call…

Wisdom of Nym: The invisible character of Final Fantasy XIV is (not) the warrior of light – In the Final Fantasy XIV lore, the overall lineup of the Convocation has changed a bit as we learned more. At first there were only a dozen members. Then we realized that…

EG7 Q4 2022: Sales soar thanks to mobile as LOTRO sees “mainstream resurgence”. – Enad Global 7’s Q4 2022 Investor Report was released over the weekend and includes an annual review for Swedish games giant EG7 and its subsidiary Daybreak Game Studio, which…

The Secret World Classic account page is down, but the original version is still running – [This issue has been resolved as of February 21st, thankfully!] There are some mildly to moderately worrying developments regarding The Secret World – the original version, that is, not the Legends reboot.…

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