MMO Week in Review: Strong and pretty

We’re sorry, but Bree can’t come to the Week in Review right now; she’s too busy playing City of Heroes, whose Homecoming servers were finally licensed by NCsoft this week. Eliot also can’t come to the Week in Review, as he’s focused on the reveals from the Final Fantasy XIV Japan fan festival. All of this is to say, we’d sure be tickled if the rest of the year for the MMORPG genre looks like this first week did. Come through, 2024.

In the meantime, we’ve recapped all of our 2023 awards and holiday content for anyone who missed it, plus we launched our brand-new Well Fed column!

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

NCsoft has officially granted a City of Heroes server license to the Homecoming crew – City of Heroes fans are in for a treat today – or a shocking surprise they were convinced was never coming, depending on their level of cynicism. Readers will remember…

Final Fantasy XIV Tokyo Fan Festival: Pictomancer, lady Hrothgar, and release ambiguity – If you had been paying attention and looking forward to Final Fantasy XIV’s third and final fan festival ahead of Dawntrail, you probably had three major expectations going into the…

End-of-Year Eleven: All the upcoming MMOs to watch in 2024 and beyond – We’ve said it before, but this time we really mean it: The future of MMORPGs looks amazing. Contrary to years when we’ve seen only a handful of longshot projects in…

City of Heroes Homecoming talks funding, the City Council, and the impending content drop – Following yesterday’s surprise announcement that NCsoft has granted City of Heroes rogue server group Homecoming a license to operate the game – something it’s sought over the nearly four years…

Well Fed: An introduction to our MMO kitchen and MOP’s new Well Fed column – Hello fellow MMORPG lovers and food enjoyers alike! Welcome to Well Fed! If you listened to the end-of-year podcast from Bree and Justin, you know that this MMO food article…

Following Bobby Kotick’s exit, former ABK devs call out his toxic management and Overwatch 2 sabotage – Now that Bobby Kotick has floated away from Activision-Blizzard on a doubtlessly diamond-encrusted platinum parachute, some former developers at Blizzard are feeling confident enough to speak up about his management…

Into the Super-Verse: Reflecting on City of Heroes, back officially at long last – As a dedicated fan of superheroes, I have to be honest that yesterday’s news feels downright poetic. City of Heroes died in November of 2012. We lost a hero ages…

The Daily Grind: Now that NCsoft has licensed City of Heroes servers, will you go back to play? – When the City of Heroes rogue servers first went public back in 2019, a lot of MMO players were very vocal about not wanting to play on them. Even though…

Not So Massively: It’s okay that Redfall is just okay – I rarely let myself get too hyped for unreleased games, but I was keeping one eye on the vampire-hunting online FPS Redfall. When it launched to disastrous user reviews and…

MassivelyOP’s Weirdest MMO Stories of 2023: Weirdest Thing an MMO Company Sent Me This Year – We’re finishing out our traditional countdown of MassivelyOP’s weirdest MMORPG stories of the year! Coming in at #1 on our list is… Literally a Can of Spinach I know people…

The Game Archaeologist: The Sims Bustin’ Out, the online Sims game nobody remembers – Many gamers who complete that Venn diagram of being fans of both MMOs and The Sims no doubt will be familiar with the tragically unfulfilled potential of The Sims Online.…

Project Gorgon’s Sandra Powers on the MMORPG’s features, its fiscal future, and the broader genre – The story of 2023 for Project: Gorgon was a remarkable one to say the least, as it faced possible maintenance mode and serious illness for one of its top devs…

‘Open betas will be paid,’ The Quinfall declares amid fraud allegations – In the wake of a persistent hum of skepticism about The Quinfall, Turkish MMO studio Vawraek has posted more confusing information about its upcoming beta test. As first noted on…

Massively Overthinking: Hopes and fears for MMOs in 2024 – For our first Massively Overthinking of the year, we’re drawing a hard line between what we think will happen, what we mean to make happen, and what we hope will…

Hearthstone is sunsetting its Duels Mode in April, Blizzard has announced – Hearthstone fans are in for disappointment today as Blizzard has announced the impending demise of the game’s Duels Mode. “As we think about the future of Hearthstone and where the…

Working As Intended: The MMOs we lost in 2023 – If preserving MMORPGs is your jam, 2023 was not a great year. The one nice thing I can say about it is that we didn’t lose too many massive MMOs,…

Casually Classic: Analyzing WoW Classic’s 2024 roadmap – With another year debuting this week, Blizzard was more on the ball than some MMO studios by already publishing its roadmap for 2024. Two roadmaps, in fact — one for…

Vague Patch Notes: MMOs are still just games you rent – When I was a teenager, I accidentally stole a few games from a video rental place. You might wonder how you accidentally steal something, but it turns out that it’s…

VR MMO Zenith’s next patch is a literal do-or-die moment: ‘We’ve been operating at a loss’ – Kickstarted virtual reality MMO Zenith has a major update on the horizon. How big is it? It’s so big that it’s getting a “2.0” moniker and starting its journey with…

Chinese government fires media official over announced gaming rules proposal that battered the market – The last few weeks saw the Chinese games industry turn into a tinderbox thanks to an announced draft of new restrictions on gaming in the country, which saw regulators proposing…

Korea’s FTC fines Nexon $8.9M over MapleStory’s deceptive gear upgrade probabilities – Care for a little smile to start off this first week of 2024? Then feast your eyes on a hefty $8.9M (₩11.6M) fine levied against Nexon because the company kept…

Square-Enix’s new president mentions blockchain and generative AI in new year letter – The departure of Yosuke Matsuda from the presidency of Square-Enix in 2023 means that at the top of 2024, he has not written a greeting insisting that Square-Enix will be…

Throne & Liberty KR is already engaging server merges a month after its launch – It has barely been a month since Throne & Liberty released to Korean players, but already the game is beginning to merge its servers on Wednesday, January 17th, squishing the…

Progress Bar: Another go-round with cozy ‘MMO’ Palia, this time on the Switch – I’m not much of a console player in general. The controller has always felt limiting to me, especially when compared with the precision of a mouse and keyboard. That doesn’t…

ArcheAge’s 2024 roadmap includes new systems and the Fairy race – ArcheAge is cursed to live in interesting times, it seems. With game version merges in its recent past, the 11th anniversary in its present, and a brewing sequel in its…

Star Citizen studio CIG claims increases in revenue, salaries, headcount, and costs in 2022 financial year report – The 2022 fiscal year for Star Citizen and Squadron 42 developer Cloud Imperium Games can best be described as “all the numbers were bigger”: The company’s latest financial report shows…

World of Warcraft’s next patch, Seeds of Renewal, arrives on January 16 – It’s a new year, but just like last year, World of Warcraft does not care one whit what the words “this week” mean. Proof? Well, it’s right in the latest…

Choose My Adventure: Villagers & Heroes starts off feeling like a different game – I admit that it’s been a very long time since I had played Villagers & Heroes – since 2020, to be exact – but considering the whirlwind of life between…

Wisdom of Nym: What Final Fantasy XIV’s fan festival needs to accomplish – In just a few days, the last fan festival for Final Fantasy XIV’s upcoming Dawntrail expansion will kick off, and on paper it looks pretty simple in terms of objectives.…

EverQuest’s ‘Year of Darkpaw’ kicks off with an 11-floor anniversary tower and world bosses – All that talk of 2024 being the “Year of Darkpaw” over at Daybreak wasn’t just a lot of PR hot air. Kicking off the year where major anniversary milestones happen…

Job listings suggest Sony’s Horizon MMO aka Project Skyline is actually happening – It was a little over a year ago that we first reported that Sony and NCsoft possibly were teaming up to create an MMORPG set in Sony’s popular Horizon universe.…

Lord of the Rings Online readies Ill Omens event, Update 39, and 2024 roadmap – After the holiday break, Lord of the Rings Online’s team is revving up for another year in Middle-earth. In this past Friday’s studio livestream, SSG outlined what players should expect…

MassivelyOP’s complete 2023 awards recap and debrief – As we did in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022, today we’re going to recap our annual awards and other articles from the end of 2023. We gave…

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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