MMO Week in Review: Dawntrail, Plunderstorm, and the Riot MMO

You gotta love weeks stuffed so full of MMORPG news that we can’t even decide what to focus on! This week, Final Fantasy XIV set Dawntrail for July 2nd, Riot admitted it’s taken the Riot MMO back to the drawing board, and World of Warcraft surprise-launched a battle royale side game.

Meanwhile, ArcheAge 2 was delayed again, Chrono Odyssey got a new publisher, Path of Exile 2 delayed its beta, Cryptic gave us new reasons to worry, and New World plans to launch its next season April 2nd.

Read on to catch up with the very best of this week’s MMO news and opinions today as every Sunday (since 2010!) in Massively Overpowered’s Week in Review!

THIS WEEK’S TOP STORIES

Final Fantasy XIV’s Dawntrail expansion is launching on July 2 following June 28 early access – Final Fantasy XIV has announced the launch date for the game’s next expansion, Dawntrail, after it was actually avoided during this year’s fan festival reveals. Dawntrail will release for early…

Riot has ‘decided to reset the direction’ of the Riot MMORPG as team goes ‘dark’ under new boss – It’s hard to take the Riot MMO too seriously when we’re still stuck using Runeterra pics and calling it the Riot MMO for want of a real name, but if…

World of Warcraft announces Plunderstorm, a pirate-themed battle royale mode – Blizzard has apparently had enough of merely teasing World of Warcraft’s pirate-esque update with icons and winks: It’s officially announced what it’s calling Plunderstorm. It’s pretty much a pirate-themed battle…

New World’s Season of the Guardian launches April 2, server merges begin next week – The delay is over – or it will be in April, anyway – as Amazon has finally announced a new date for New World’s Season of the Guardian. “Season of…

Everything we learned about the future of Star Trek Online, Neverwinter, & Champions Online from Cryptic’s stream – The knowledge that Cryptic’s MMOs have been shunted off to a tiny European corner of the Embracer empire is not news to the MMO industry. In fact, we’ve known since…

ArcheAge 2 has been delayed (again), now to some point in or after 2025 – Our eyes must have glazed over the Q4 2023 investor report from Kakao when it dropped a few weeks ago, but it contained some big – and unfortunate – MMORPG…

Vague Patch Notes: Why in the world do you want the Riot MMO to be a thing? – Let’s make something clear right up front: If you came into this column eager to head for the comments section to say, “Well, I don’t want a Riot MMO,” this…

Chrono Odyssey debuts a splashy new in-engine trailer and confirms Kakao Games as publisher – It’s been a long time since we’ve heard any major announcements out of Chrono Odyssey, the developing open world fantasy MMORPG from Npixel that was first announced in 2020 and…

Wandering Wraeclast: Path of Exile 2 showcases the Ranger, announces beta delay and June alpha – The wheels of Grinding Gear Games’ Path of Exile 2 info machine are moving, and we are here for it! Earlier this week, I met with devs to preview the…

WoW Factor: World of Warcraft’s Plunderstorm is neither greedy nor good – It would be an exaggeration of the highest order to say that no one was even a little interested when World of Warcraft unveiled its whole Plunderstorm spinoff. Not the…

Wandering Wraeclast: Create your own graveyard with Path of Exile’s new Necropolis league – You’ve heard all about Path of Exile 2’s news during Grinding Gear Games’ big development update livestream last night, so now it’s time to dig into Path of Exile’s new…

Massively Overthinking: What’s the most polarizing topic in your favorite MMORPG? – I was playing Lord of the Rings Online last weekend when my server naturally veered off into one of its favorite discussions: whether Moria sucks. (Honestly, any conversation is better…

NCsoft’s Throne & Liberty has been out in Korea for 100+ days, with still no news on the global launch – Yesterday’s Battle Crush announcement from NCsoft reminded me that we still don’t have any fresh news on the state of Throne and Liberty’s western push, which was at one point…

LOTRO Legendarium: My 11 favorite zones in LOTRO – This week I put my chin on my fists and thought super-hard about the following question: What column could I write that would be both fluffy and controversial? The answer…

Tencent’s multiplayer zombie survival RPG Undawn ‘flopped spectacularly,’ according to Reuters – Last June, Tencent introduced the world to Undawn, a mulitplayer survival RPG for PC and mobile that tasked players with trying to make it in a post-apocalyptic world full of…

RIFT holds a server load test as part of new data center migration, manually reruns the Mech Parade event – This week marks another bit of odd activity in RIFT, which appears to be associated with earlier server merging and server transfers: Gamigo is encouraging players to join in a…

The cast list for Wildcard’s surprise ARK Animated Series on Paramount+ is bananas – I don’t know who asked for this, but I’m also not upset about it as this might be the most amusing thing the ARK Survival Evolved/Ascended franchise has produced in…

EVE Vanguard’s latest playtest adds a mining laser, resource gathering, and suppression contracts – Playtesting for the EVE Vanguard module within EVE Online is continuing once more this weekend, and it’s bringing several new feature updates for those who join in on this next…

Elder Scrolls Online crosses $2B in customer spending, revives Jester’s Festival for April Fools’ day – When you look at the high risk of making and running MMORPG, a reasonable question arises: Why would any studio undertake such a project? Elder Scrolls Online has a good…

Gaijin’s ocean adventure MMO Age of Water sets sail for early access on April 18 – Gaijin’s seafaring MMO Age of Water has an official early access launch date: April 18th. We’ve had our eye on the game since its first reveal all the way back…

Fight or Kite: Is Epic’s MOBA Paragon just too easy to remake but impossible to succeed? – This past week we got some news regarding Predecessor, a new MOBA game on the way. At first blush, it looks like many other third-person over-the-shoulder MOBAs that have released…

Blizzard is massively revamping Diablo IV’s itemization systems – If you had two hours to spare last night, then hopefully you spent it on something more fun than watching video game streams, but if you’re a Diablo fan, then…

Perfect Ten: MMOs with live-action media tie-ins – Every so often I think to myself that a video game should get some kind of media adaptation before I come to my senses. Like, imagine a Final Fantasy VII…

Ubisoft debuts AI NPC prototypes at GDC, and it went about as well as you’d expect – Ubisoft looks to be once more chasing the latest buzzword-scented tech trend. After the studio tried and failed to make NFTs work, it’s now attempting to hop on the AI…

Tarisland’s new Twelve Monarchs raid is ‘now live,’ whatever that means – Tarisland’s marketing team clearly is operating in a parallel dimension where this fantasy MMORPG already released because it’s inviting fans to “jump in now” to a brand-new raid. I mean,…

Sony pauses production on its floundering PSVR2s while it tries to sell off stock – Digital storm clouds are forming on the horizon of Sony’s virtual reality headset: Bloomberg reports that the company put a hard pause on the production of its PSVR2 units because…

Lost Ark’s Breaker and fresh catch-up mechanics arrive in tomorrow’s Break Through to Thaemine – “Break Through to Thaemine” may not exactly roll off the tongue, but it’s rolling out to Lost Ark’s live servers tomorrow anyway. And headlining the patch – literally, in this…

Runes of Magic turns 15 years old today with a new trailer and endgame content – When I first started working on Old Massively, Runes of Magic was still a new MMORPG, and popular enough to merit its own weekly column, so it shouldn’t surprise anyone…

Choose My Adventure: Opening and exploring the astrolabe forest in Nightingale – I was not expecting the voting to be as close as it was for this game. There was a nearly three-way tie at polls’ close, with the winning vote for…

Former Overwatch 2 devs express concerns that future story missions won’t see the light of day – The PvE offerings out of Overwatch 2 haven’t been what one might call impressive: The shooter put out John Cena-endorsed story missions in August, released a May event with limited…

Shroud of the Avatar devs form new studio to make AI-generated roguelike battle royale Project Rise – If you thought that the waters surrounding some of Shroud of the Avatar’s bigwigs weren’t muddy before now, things are potentially about to get murkier: Players have dug up a…

Warframe debuts new previews for its Dante Unbound, Warframe 1999, and Jade Shadows updates – The devstream from Warframe at this year’s PAX East had a lot to show off to fans. That’s generally nothing new if you consider how info-loaded these presentations tend to…

Soulframe talks expanding testing access and shows off new gameplay footage at PAX East – Digital Extremes’ second game Soulframe is currently in what it’s calling “pre-pre-pre-pre-alpha,” which suggests that its pool of testers is pretty small. That notion appears to be changing moving forward,…

THIS WEEK’S CASTS & STREAMS

Every week, get caught up on the MMO genre’s latest news and Massively OP’s best content in our MMO Week in Review! Want more roundups of content? Try Friday’s Betawatch for MMO testing highlights, Saturday’s Make My MMO for MMO crowdfunding updates, and Sunday’s The MOP Up, which mops up all the bits of news we didn’t cover anywhere else.

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