MMO Week in Review: Skull & Bones departs drydock

February 11, 2024 8:00 PM

Skull & Bones finally drifted into its soft launch open beta after eleventy billion delays and do-overs, and… it’s actually not terrible? And it’s actually somewhat MMO-ish? Huh. Well then.

Meanwhile, Scars of Honor is angling for $200K on Kickstarter, Xbox thinks people will pay two subs to play Final Fantasy XIV on Xbox, and Microsoft is once again tangling with regulators thanks to its mass layoffs. Happy Lunar New Year, folks, and happy 9th birthday to MassivelyOP!

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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

Microsoft will require Final Fantasy XIV players to subscribe to Xbox Game Pass in order to play the game - It's tucked away in the announcement that Final Fantasy XIV's beta on the Xbox Series X|S starts on February 21st, but the announcement does confirm that players will be required…

Skull & Bones’ soft launch is underway for preorder players ahead of next week’s formal release - Ubisoft's long, long delayed pirate "co-op pirate open world action RPG" MMO Skull & Bones has finally set sail with a soft launch into a no-wipe open beta as of…

Scars of Honor is a throwback to the ‘golden age’ of MMOs with a $200K Kickstarter - Another day, another MMO that seeks to "bring back the golden age of the genre." But will the emerging Scars of Honor capture the zeitgeist of a community hungry for…

Lunar New Year events around the MMORPG world, 2024 edition - Would you believe that this is only our third year with enough MMORPG Lunar New Year events that a roundup is necessary? A decade ago, these events were rare, and…

Microsoft insists Activision-Blizzard was planning on mass layoffs before the merger - As we've been covering, earlier this week the FTC filed a complaint to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, alleging that Microsoft misrepresented itself during hearings before the acquisition of…

LOTRO Legendarium: How to walk away from LOTRO (for a while) - Even when you love an MMORPG a whole lot, it's rarely feasible to play it as steadily and at the same intensity over the long duration of its lifespan. Life…

Q4 2023: Nexon, Krafton, and Roblox all posted soaring revenues in 2023 - Welcome back to another MMO business roundup - this one all about financials for some of the companies we keep an eye on 'round here. ROBLOX Roblox's fortunes have been…

RuneScape’s Jagex confirms it’s being sold for the fourth time in eight years as it talks up ‘forever games’ - Rumors from earlier this week that suggested RuneScape company Jagex was once again for sale have now been proven correct, thanks to a formal press release from the parties involved.…

Working As Intended: A guide to City of Heroes Homecoming’s best player-crafted portal bases - A few years ago, I was wandering around in City of Heroes when someone advertised a cool base in chat. All I had to do was head over to a…

WoW Classic’s Season of Discovery moves into its second phase with Gnomeregan raid - It's a little strange to think that WoW Classic's Season of Discovery server is only just now moving into its second phase, but here we are. The experimental ruleset servers…

Former Overwatch 2 lead vfx artist calls out Blizzard for deceptive promotion and pay behavior - Workers and former workers at the various substudios at Activision-Blizzard have been calling it out as an unpleasant workplace for a while now since the whole scandal with the company…

Massively Overthinking: When the original MMO is better than the sequel - A few weeks ago, two lovely gamers I follow on Bluesky were discussing how let down they felt by Diablo IV, less because Diablo IV is particularly bad and more…

Vague Patch Notes: MMORPGs and the PC gaming market - I find myself thinking a lot about the MMORPG industry lately and the ways in which the gaming industry as a whole has changed over the course of the past…

World of Warcraft elaborates on The War Within’s hero talents system - The War Within expansion for World of Warcraft is bringing, among other things, the hero talents system, an "evergreen form of character progression for each class specialization that introduces new…

Lost Ark celebrates its second birthday by reminding you how many times it’s killed your characters - Lost Ark fans are already swept up in the game's second anniversary festivities thanks to the patch yesterday, but technically, the formal western birthday isn't until the 11th, but apparently…

Into the Super-Verse: What’s wrong with City of Heroes’ Incarnate system? - It hasn't been all that long since I said that what City of Heroes needs to focus on right now is not endgame content, and I stand by that. In…

Fight or Kite: Ravendawn has a great class system, but gameplay needs polish - As an avid gamer of the '80s and '90s, I’ve got a real soft spot for all things retro-inspired. A lot of my favorites lean into the action adventure-style games,…

Disney invests $1.5B into Epic Games with plans to create a ‘huge Disney universe’ in Fortnite - Seeing Disney's various IPs in Fortnite isn't exactly news by this point, but it appears as if there will be a whole lot more of the House of Mouse's characters…

Dune Awakening’s latest video snippet is all about playing both solo and with friends - Who here would like another vertically oriented video snippet out of Dune: Awakening? If you raised your hand, then you're probably reading this on mobile (in which case, hello) or…

Working As Intended: City of Heroes macros and popmenus for noobs - In my first braindump on City of Heroes for this column, I tried to ease superhero fans into the world of modding the 20-year-old newly relicensed MMO, which is actually…

Perfect Ten: The MMO franchises that can’t count past two - Back in the day, there was a running joke about how Capcom had shown with Street Fighter that the company could not count higher than two. We had a few…

Not So Massively: Stormgate isn’t delivering a revolution (yet) - Stormgate's marketing is laser-focused on studio Frost Giant's plan to deliver an "RTS revolution." With StarCraft II still popular but slowly waning as it languishes in maintenance mode, the genre…

New World’s 4.0.4 update lands today with cross-world expeditions - Happy launch day to New World's 4.0.4 patch - let's not take that number as any kind of sign - as the cross-world expeditions will finally go live as of…

Jeff Strain’s indie studio Crop Circle Games lays staff, reportedly without severance - Back in 2022 we saw former ArenaNet and Undead Labs co-founder Jeff Strain open his own indie studio called Crop Circle Games with the help of a $25M investment round.…

Tencent buys up majority stake of Swords of Legends developer and gains access to the IP - Tencent has walked over to another games studio and smacked it with its wallet, only this time it's a bit of a surprise purchase to us here in the west.…

Pantheon Rise of the Fallen shifts to a six-week seasonal dev cadence with boosted backer accessibility - Kickstarted MMORPG Pantheon has a big announcement this afternoon: It's swapping over to a seasonal dev schedule. Visionary Realms presents the plan as a way to lower the cost of…

Nightingale, counting nearly 50K testers, is launching early access two days earlier than originally planned - Hope you didn't take the original launch date off because Nightingale's early access release has been pushed up two days. "Inflexion Games announced the launch date of [its] PVE survival-crafting…

Wisdom of Nym: The franchise references in the world of Final Fantasy XIV - There's a fan theory circulating that Final Fantasy XIV is the nexus of the franchise multiverse. Essentially, the idea is that Hydaelyn and Zodiark are close enough to the usual…

Palworld vows to keep servers online ‘without regard to cost’ (despite monthly cost of nearly half a million dollars) - Getting professional server hosting for an online multiplayer title ain't cheap, and that holds true for Palworld developer Pocketpair, which is paying out the nozzle to keep the survival sandbox…

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.