MMO Week in Review: The foggy future of SWTOR

While Star Wars The Old Republic’s move to Broadsword is a sure thing now, the future of the game still has players worried – but BioWare was vocal this week about the studio switchover, downplaying “doom and gloom” and vowing that the game is “absolutely not” going into maintenance mode.

Meanwhile, we speculated on World of Warcraft and LOTRO, Microsoft and the FTC faced off over the ABK merger, WoW set a date for Fractures in Time, and Guild Wars 2’s next expansion name leaked.

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

SWTOR is ‘absolutely not’ going into maintenance mode, BioWare says – So is Star Wars The Old Republic still moving to a new studio? Yes – but the open secret that the studio is EA’s subsidiary and home for aging MMOs,…

LOTRO Legendarium: What I want to see with LOTRO’s Umbar expansion – This past week, I wrapped up my adventures through King’s Gondor in Lord of the Rings Online and found my appetite whetted for this fall’s expansion. Update 36 is both…

WoW Factor: Speculating on compelling future World of Warcraft class specs – With the release of patch 10.1.5, World of Warcraft’s Evokers will become the second class to get a new spec added after its introduction – and the first one where…

Vague Patch Notes: Examining the MMO tiers, from the Big Five to maintenance mode – I’ve mentioned many a time that one of the ideas behind the Vague Patch Notes column here on MOP is to have a place where we can reference back when…

Mabinogi is switching to Unreal Engine 5: ‘It is a necessary improvement’ – Hey, do we have any Mabinogi veterans in the house? Considering that this sandbox MMO has been around for 15 years in the West, we say the chances that several…

FTC uses Zenimax’s current exclusivity as a primary argument against Microsoft’s ActiBlizz buyout in court – The long-brewing legal battle between the US Federal Trade Commission and Microsoft has begun in earnest, as this week saw the FTC and Microsoft meet in court to determine if…

ESA claims it is ‘currently having conversations’ about E3 in 2024 and 2025 – With E3 officially dead for this year, many are likely assuming that the Entertainment Software Association’s marquee show is completely dead. This presumption was further helped by a post on…

Rumor: Guild Wars 2’s next expansion name appears to have leaked thanks to Steam and the USPTO – Awww, we were hoping the days of Guild Wars 2 leaks were finally past us, but this latest leak – purportedly of the next GW2 expansion – appears to be…

Massively Overthinking: Which MMOs are memorable but not actually fun? – Earlier this week, we ran a Daily Grind on MMOs that are fun but not especially memorable, throwing it back to a quote from MOP’s Andy. A reader on Mastodon,…

ArcheAge introduces the Daru gathering transformation and 10v10 flag war in newest update – If you were intensely curious about ArcheAge’s upcoming ability to let players transform into a wholly distinct race for increased pastoral pursuits, your curiosity can now be sated, as this…

After half a year offline, Fractured’s early access is finally relaunching today – Putting its year-long stint under the Gamigo banner (and the associated corporate drama) fully behind it, Dynamight Studios has finally gotten its homebrew, Kickstarted MMORPG sandbox Fractured back online. Well,…

Guild Wars 2’s next fractal launches alongside the class-balance patch on June 27 – So players knew – as long ago as the May roadmap – that Guild Wars 2 was destined for a major class-balancing update come June 27th. That’s still happening. They…

Activision-Blizzard shareholders vote down anti-union busting proposal – We hope you weren’t holding your breath on Activision-Blizzard shareholders doing the right thing, but if you were, you can exhale now: Proposal 6, which suggested that the company should…

MMO dev Richard Garriott’s Explorers Club joins search for missing submersible at the site of the Titanic – As part of our 2021 recap, we counted among our “weirdest stories” articles representing the weirdest things MMO developer Richard Garriott did that weren’t, you know, the video game you…

The Realm Online is shuttering its rebooted version at the end of June – Five years ago, a group of enterprising fans banded together to assemble and run an improved version of the classic MMORPG The Realm Online by working with the IP holders,…

Gamigo’s RIFT was down for two days and understandably freaked everyone out – A standard server restart this past Tuesday turned into a morass of confusion and consternation as RIFT went offline in North America and stayed that way from Tuesday through Thursday…

Discord announces additional monetization via new subscription gating tools for server creators – For regular users of the chat program Discord, monetization of the platform began a potentially worrying trend when the company announced the server subscriptions feature in December, which would let…

Fallout 76’s Once in a Blue Moon arrives with new events, cryptids, and season – Strange things are afoot in Fallout 76 with the arrival of this week’s Once in a Blue Moon update. It may not be the beefiest patch that the post-apocalyptic has…

Tower of Fantasy launches on PlayStation August 8 (without crossplay) – Gamers already likely knew Tower of Fantasy was destined for PlayStation, largely because Hotta Studio has already loudly complained about Perfect World’s stewardship of that version of the game. But…

MMO Burnout: Lessons MMOs can learn from The Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom – Like most MMO players, I am, first and foremost, a PC gamer. However, like many gamers born in the ’80s and ’90s, I also have a deep love for Nintendo…

Palia announces free-to-play arrival to Nintendo Switch this holiday season, reaffirms work on PC version – The latest Nintendo Direct has just wrapped up, and there was a pretty surprising announcement to come out of Singularity 6’s developing cozy MMO Palia: The game will be launching…

Perfect Ten: What good MMO logos say about their games – Back when I was taking a smattering of business classes in college, one of my favorite electives dealt with marketing. It wasn’t that I wanted to be a marketer, mind…

Gaijin’s ‘aquatic adventure MMO’ Age of Water enters paid closed beta stage two early access – Way back in 2020, Gaijin announced a new MMO called Age of Water. It was under development by Three Wales Studio, and it was pegged as an “aquatic adventure MMO”…

Blue Protocol JP celebrates 200K concurrency and 600K total players with in-game freebies – Despite the multiple problems that have beleaguered the MMORPG, Bandai Namco has noted the large number of Blue Protocol players who arrived to the game over its launch week, with…

World of Warcraft patch 10.1.5, Fractures in Time, releases on July 11 – It’s an interesting experience for World of Warcraft fans to keep seeing “This Week in WoW” updates that are more about things happening in several weeks. This is true this…

Remember that EVE Online Excel integration? It’s actually fully live today – Last year at EVE Fanfest, CCP Games teased a partnership with Microsoft Excel that would literally integrate EVE Online with the spreadsheet tool. In February of this year, the company…

Harry Potter Magic Awakened, NetEase’s new MMOCCG, is launching June 27 – Warner Bros. and NetEase have been teasing a launch for Harry Potter: Magic Awakened for a few weeks now, but now it’s official: The global launch for the card-centric mobile…

Choose My Adventure: Finding frustrations in Age of Conan – If that headline wasn’t a big enough clue, then let me just go ahead and reaffirm: This week, life in Age of Conan was not easy. The whole thing started…

Tarisland shares a deeper look into the mechanics of its Mage class – While Tarisland provided a video preview of its Mage class last week, that was arguably more bluster and showcase instead of anything terribly informative. Luckily, Tencent has decided to fill…

Tencent’s Undawn, an open-world survival RPG starring Will Smith, launches globally – If you want to get your new open world survival RPG noticed against the ever-expanding field of competitors, you need to have some sort of hook. Maybe it’s a unique…

The Daily Grind: What are the most common studio fibs we tolerate in the MMO genre? – Buried in the comments of a WoW Factor column a while back, MOP reader Nathan expressed skepticism over claims about being able to full gear up on basic heroic dungeons:…

Microsoft admits Redfall is ‘a miss’ but reaffirms its support of the shooter’s development studio – It’s a well-documented fact that Arkane Austin’s multiplayer FPS Redfall has had a messy launch, with players and critics panning the game, Phil Spencer issuing an apology over the matter,…

Wisdom of Nym: Turning a critical eye toward Final Fantasy XIV’s Bozja – There’s honestly not much for me to say about Eureka in Final Fantasy XIV. I can respect what it was trying to do, and there are many parts of it…

SWGEmu’s Finalizer rogue server is apparently struggling to make its monthly budget – One of the topics that doesn’t get talked about all that much in the MMORPG rogue server space is how old-school emulators get paid for. You’ll often have to go…

Vitae Aeternum: Touring New World’s housing system – Whenever I’ve talked about player housing in New World, my coworkers have requested tours of my in-game homes. Being a lazy worker looking to fill my column quota a generous…

Blue Protocol reportedly unleashes a banwave against players accessing the MMO outside of Japan – Earlier in the month, we pointed out how eager western fans of Blue Protocol were ready to arrive to the Japanese version of the game with a fan-built translation tool,…

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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