MMO Week in Review: Elder Scrolls Online paves the way for Gold Road

Elder Scrolls Online fully unveiled its Gold Road chapter this week, letting players peek into the region, the city of Skingrad, and a tantalizing new spell scribing and customization feature.

Meanwhile, the City of Heroes madness continues as the Homecoming servers keep breaking their concurrency caps, Lord of the Rings Online promised another expansion this year, and Final Fantasy XIV pushed out its 6.55 update, all while Palworld, a game that’s been buzzless over the last few years we’ve covered, set Steam records.

THIS WEEK’S TOP STORIES

Into the Super-Verse: What City of Heroes needs now is not more endgame content - One of the key discussion points about the City of Heroes revival revolves around what the perception of the game is going to be. We haven't really reckoned with that…

Final Fantasy XIV wraps up Manderville weapons and readies for Dawntrail with patch 6.55 today - It's time to get started on your final push to Final Fantasy XIV's next expansion with today's release of patch 6.55, starting with the final installment of the MSQ story…

Elder Scrolls Online’s Gold Road chapter takes players back to Oblivion’s best city on June 3 - With the conclusion of Elder Scrolls Online's stream this afternoon, we can finally talk about the new chapter, dubbed Gold Road. TES fans who played TESIV: Oblivion will remember the…

City of Heroes Homecoming opens testing of new Arsenal powersets, epic power pool revamp, TF diversity, and more - It's finally here, and by here we mean on the Brainstorm beta server: City of Heroes Homecoming's first big patch since April 2023 (and obviously its first since announcing it…

LOTRO Legendarium: Digging into LOTRO’s 2024 roadmap, from U39 to the Baharbêl expansion - Oh boy -- it's roadmap time for Lord of the Rings Online! As we've been seeing over the past few years, Standing Stone Games has become way better at pushing…

Vague Patch Notes: What City of Heroes Homecoming means for the wider MMORPG industry - As you have probably noticed from the fact that I have been writing about City of Heroes nonstop since the Homecoming server got its official license to operate, I have…

Palia will reduce its beta release cadence – but not its content quantity – in 2024 - Singularity 6 is apparently back from holidays and ready with some downer news for Palia. The studio's dev update essentially begins by admitting to players that it cannot keep up…

GDC’s 2024 industry survey: Game devs weigh in on AI, layoffs, unionization, RTO, and more - Every year, GDC conducts an industry-wide survey of game developers and compiles the results in its State of the Game Industry, the 2024 edition of which arrived yesterday. Right up…

APB Reloaded is sunsetting its console versions – in fact, the Xbox server is already permanently offline - We've got some bad news for the APB community: Last night, Little Orbit announced that it's sunsetting APB Reloaded's console versions. "The decision to discontinue APB Reloaded on consoles was…

Leaderboard: What’s the most vulnerable Daybreak MMO in 2024? - Every year when it comes time to update this poll for January, I consider tossing it out. But the last few years of Daybreak have been more interesting than ever,…

Pokémon-like Palworld launches early access today, aims to be ‘the best game ever’ - Trust us: You haven't begun to catch 'em all. But the good news is that you can take a crack at a new Pokémon-like creature capture game with Palworld, which launched…

Diablo IV fleshes out the Seneschal companions coming in Season of the Construct - Last night's Blizzard stream on Diablo IV's already well-fleshed-out Season of the Construct dropped both eyecandy and details on the upcoming content. "Associate director of community Adam Fletcher, game design…

Massively Overthinking: The slowest and fastest combat in MMORPGs - During a recent podcast discussion about City of Heroes' official revival, the MOP writers were talking about its combat, which - let's be honest - harkens back to a long-ago…

Nightingale shares the first 20 minutes of gameplay in a video - The visuals of Nightingale haven't exactly been a secret, what with all of the picture and video previews that Inflexion Games has been kicking out over the past three years,…

Ashes of Creation officially makes good on its plan to stop selling Alpha Two backer packs - August of last year saw Ashes of Creation's Intrepid Studios announce its plans that it would stop selling pre-order packs of the gankbox MMORPG because it had hit the number…

Blizzard’s maintenance-moded Heroes of the Storm is getting another patch – with hero buffs - Back in autumn of last year, Blizzard created a minor stir by launching several small patches for its maintenance-moded MOBA Heroes of the Storm. Now the studio is at it…

Baldur’s Gate 3 boss pushes back against the industry’s renewed ambition over games subscription models - This week offered another example of executive foot-in-mouth disorder when Ubisoft director of subscriptions Philippe Tremblay suggested in an interview that games subscription business models are the future - and…

Final Fantasy XIV jumps the gun on Xbox open beta announcement - One of the biggest developments for Final Fantasy XIV in 2024 that isn't named "Dawntrail" has to be the MMO's debut on Microsoft's game console. Apparently someone over in Bill…

Guild Wars 2 studio says no accounts involved in new social engineering claim were compromised by CS - The Guild Wars 2 Reddit community has been up in arms this week over a gigantic thread started by former ArenaNet partner and content creator Paul "Olrun" Bentz. Olrun essentially…

City of Heroes Homecoming teases I27p7’s new powersets (plural) and story arcs - City of Heroes' Homecoming team, having been under official license by NCsoft for the last two weeks, issued an address to players on its forums this afternoon, diving into its…

Tower of Fantasy brings a new area, a climactic new story, and more boss fights January 30 - Over the past few updates, players of Tower of Fantasy have been wastin' away in Marshville as they've handled several water and darkness-based catastrophes for the area. It looks as…

Perfect Ten: The weirdest weapons from MMOs of yore - Swords. Staffs. Maces. Spears. Wands. Bows. Crossbows. Double-crossbows. Hammers. Wolverine claws. Daggers. Axes. Deadly? Yes. Fashionable? Not so much. A two-handed sword is so 1299. Now, a deep dish Chicago-style…

Epic and Apple appeals are rejected by the Supreme Court, making the original 2021 ruling final - The past few years' worth of gaming news have been something of a whirlwind to say the least, so let us take a moment to recount events. In 2020, Epic…

Diablo IV’s Season of the Construct arrives January 23 with Vaults and QOL perks - Blizzard has dropped the curtain enshrouding Diablo IV's next season today: It's called Season of the Construct, and it adds not only new lore-drenched content but a new dungeon type…

City of Heroes Homecoming saw 4431 peak concurrent players this past weekend - As more and more players learn that NCsoft has granted a formal license to player-led Homecoming to run City of Heroes servers, the playerbase - and its peak concurrency -…

Lord of the Rings Online’s 2024 roadmap includes an expansion, new hobby, and kinship ‘refresh’ - It's Lord of the Rings Online's turn at the roadmap podium as this 17-year-old MMORPG announced its 2024 plans today. While perhaps not as content-packed as 2023's, this roadmap points…

Choose My Adventure: Returning to Genshin Impact in 2024 - I'm irritated to admit that this week's edition of Choose My Adventure was more like a misadventure thanks to technical issues, to my surprise, as I was pretty sure that…

The Quinfall studio Vawraek defends its use of AI and ‘ready-made assets’ - Some days we live for drama and popcorn, and today we're all out of freshly-popped kernels. So we'll turn our attention to The Quinfall, an MMO project that seems hellbent…

World of Warcraft’s Seeds of Renewal update is set to go live tonight - The epilogue for World of Warcraft: Dragonflight is here... in many ways. Sure, today's Seeds of Renewal update literally includes an epilogue for the expansion's story, but it also contains…

New World’s cross-world expedition group finder heads to the PTR for testing today - All right folks, if you wanted the cross-world group finder in New World, it's finally your day... to test it, that is. Amazon announced last night that cross-world expeditions are…

Tibia-inspired MMO Ravendawn launches today – without the NFTs of its sister game - Those looking for a new MMO launch to start the year or a spiritual successor to one of the genre's oldest titles may want to pay attention to Ravendawn. This…

Throne & Liberty KR details rank resets and economy updates happening in its January 17 server merging - Players of the Korean version of Throne & Liberty already knew that a server merge was coming this week, but now the game's official site has offered additional details related…

RuneScape and Old School RuneScape will close their official forums on March 28 - Whether anyone likes it or not, it looks as if the official MMORPG forums are going the way of the dinosaurs, as even Jagex's long-running games RuneScape and Old School…

Dungeons and Dragons Online confirms ‘at least two new’ class archetypes for 2024 - Dungeons and Dragons Online is coming at 2024 hard and hungry with the recent news of a year-long celebration for D&D's 50th anniversary, a 47-quest pack free giveaway, monthly additions,…

Vitae Aeternum: The ups and downs of New World’s revamped story - In the early days, I made the argument that New World's narrative, while minimal, deserved more credit than it was getting. Since then, however, Amazon Games has poured an immense…

DC Universe Online marks its 13th anniversary with a returning event and free goodies for all - DC Universe Online is 13 years old this month, which naturally means that the players are the ones getting the presents, along with a returning event and a giveaway for…

Wisdom of Nym: Dreaming about Final Fantasy XIV patch 6.55 during the day-long downtime - Somehow, the final Endwalker content patch has arrived. All right, maybe you could argue that's just the tiniest bit premature; technically we've still got that crossover event coming, that's a…

THIS WEEK’S CASTS & STREAMS

Massively OP Podcast Episode 453: Massively minds of the roundtable

The Stream Team: Dragon skulls and an Oath of Vengeance in Dungeons and Dragons Online

The Stream Team: The second half of SWTOR’s Chains in the Dark

The Stream Team: Going for more of that bread in Headbangers Rhythm Royale

The Stream Team: Slaughtering Centaurs for a baby Skyscale in Guild Wars 2

The Stream Team: Starting Elder Scrolls Online’s Necrom with Eye of Fate

The Stream Team: Into the iron age in ICARUS

The Stream Team: Monster murder and meeting AQ3D’s special guest FG3000

The Stream Team: Fighting Asura and other tasks in Final Fantasy XIV

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.