Clik here to view.
Massively OP Podcast Episode 356: A long time from now in a galaxy far, far away
Justin and Bree discuss LOTRO, Star Citizen, Black Desert, Elyon, and Neverwinter, with adventures in LOTRO, Crowfall, and Elder Scrolls Online, plus voicemail topics on alienating MMO design choices...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Crowfall applies a general update patch as the newest Dregs campaign gets...
What’s the latest happening in Crowfall? A campaign of course, as well as a recent housekeeping update that mostly focuses on adjustments, fixes, and other tidying up. Of note are some changes to...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Massively Overthinking: Are you an MMO skeptic or true believer?
A while back, a reader (hi Ken!) posted an infographic into a Star Citizen thread I’d forgotten all about, but it wasn’t even the first time it’s made it to our comments. Apparently, it was originally...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Crowfall tasks players with confectionery crafting for Valkyntine’s Day
I have to admit that I didn’t imagine that Crowfall would have a Valentine’s day event queues up, what with its population struggles and holiday sale to an investor who is also a game developer and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Fight or Kite: Checking in with Crowfall after the acquisition
I’ve been playing all kinds of different games these days, many of them MMOs and many of them offline RPGs. I find myself kind of like an ethereal ghost: I’m wandering through all these games, but I...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Crowfall promises shorter and more intense Dregs campaigns and a long-term...
There are still things being done in Crowfall. We examined where the PvP MMO sits this past February after developer ArtCraft sold the game to Monumental, but things have been otherwise a little quiet...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Massively Overthinking: What do you expect from MMO Kickstarters?
I know, I know. People don’t trust Kickstarters anymore. Nor should they, especially now. I think our genre knows this now. For every Wagadu Chronicles, there are a dozen Chronicles of Elyrias. For...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Crowfall’s latest patch adds significant dev config for next week’s Wolfe...
Kickstarted MMORPG Crowfall has been through kind of a lot in its short life. Having launched last summer, the RvR game suffered from a low population and layoffs and then was bought out and taken over...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Crowfall has kicked off a 10-day custom Dregs campaign called Wolfe
Last week, Crowfall rolled out the prepwork for what it called “campaign configuration knobs” – essentially, tools that would allow the developers to adjust and tweak each campaign at the onset with...
View ArticleClik here to view.
EG7 intends to sell Innova subsidiary and relocate Toadman Interactive studio...
Enad Global 7, the Swedish company that readers will recall bought up all of Daybreak Games in 2020, is apparently looking to cut ties with Russia, citing a desire to have “no further exposure to...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Crowfall’s Gordon Walton joins Raph Koster’s Playable Worlds MMO and platform
Raph Koster’s Playable Worlds MMORPG has picked up two new executives today: Gordon Walton and Omar Abdelwahed. Walton will be immediately recognizable to modern MMO fans as he was one of the two...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Massively Overthinking: Solved problems in MMOs
One of the most annoying pet peeves this genre seems to spin up frequently is some companies’ tendency to treat solved problems as unsolved problems – or more colloquially, to keep on trying to...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Crowfall preps two new campaigns this month and hands out a sigil for its...
It’s been one year since Crowfall fully launched, and the news has been kind of lackluster for the RvR MMO. Major updates to the game have effectively dried up with the last blog post being shared in...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Working As Intended: MMOs that wish they were Star Wars Galaxies
“My friends and I would skin someone alive for an SWG 2,” an old Star Wars Galaxies player recently wrote on Reddit, and that sentiment is… gruesome, yes, but also widely shared by gamers who remember...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Perfect Ten: The MMO studios that keep whiffing on new projects
Everyone makes mistakes, and that’s all right. That’s not necessarily a big deal. Yes, this is true when it comes to MMO studios too. I cannot think of a single MMO studio that has not had at least one...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Monumental, the studio that bought Crowfall, just bought Boundless too
To make some sense of this press release and why it matters to MMO fans, we’re going to have to throw it back to not one but two different games. First, there’s Boundless (fka Oort Online), which is a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Massively Overthinking: Have you ever returned to an old MMO and fallen in love?
Earlier this month, MOP’s Eliot penned a WoW Factor that doesn’t quote but certainly does evoke the ol’ Heraclitus quote about how you cannot step into the same river twice. Even if you’ve somehow not...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Massively Overthinking: The MMO Kickstarters that let us down
MOP’s Chris penned a solid piece earlier this week about the fate that has apparently befallen Destiny’s Sword, and as I was editing it, I got madder and madder. This was an indie studio that promised...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Whatever happened to throne war MMO Crowfall?
It’s been some time since we peered in on the news coming out of Crowfall, the Kickstarted PvP “throne war” MMO originally from developer ArtCraft. Readers will remember that one of the larger stories...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Crowfall is going offline on November 22, supposedly for further development...
Since Crowfall was purchased in December of last year, the news coming out of the game has been minimal at best. So today’s announcement that the game will go offline as of November 22nd will likely...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Vague Patch Notes: Alas, poor Crowfall, you’re gone now
Dusty dusty, ashy ashy, Crowfall’s plane went crashy crashy. Yes, we are now talking about Crowfall very strictly in the past tense. You could argue that technically it’s just sleeping, but that would...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Massively OP Podcast Episode 396: Crowfalling
Justin and Bree discuss Crowfall, Blue Protocol, SWTOR, New World, Q3 2022 financials (for Blizzard, Pearl Abyss, Square Enix, NCsoft), and new patches (for DDO, Neverwinter, Blade and Soul, EVE...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Crowfall goes dark today with a slim hope of a future return
For an MMO that’s all about death and reincarnation, there’s either irony or hope in Crowfall going offline today supposedly for retooling. Whether or not the crowfunded PvP game returns, its...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Massively Overthinking: The best cooking in MMORPGs
You probably thought tonight’s Massively Overthinking would have a gratitude theme, what with the holiday and all. Nope, not this time, although it’s sort of Thanksgivingy. We’re going to talk about...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Monumental’s CEO once again says ‘nothing is off the table’ as the devs work...
Crowfall shut down last week, though it did so with a vague promise of some kind of return – a prospect that hasn’t instilled a great deal of confidence in backers and fans. Apparently, the development...
View ArticleClik here to view.
End-of-Year Eleven: The biggest MMO stories of 2022
I might be biased – by which I mean I am definitely biased – but 2022 was a year of big stories and big surprises. And that’s without getting into the way that my life got wildly upended, became very...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Massively Overthinking: Our MMO predictions for 2023
Nobody can see the future, but it sure is fun guessing, and that’s exactly what we’re going to do for (to?) the MMO genre in this end-of-the-year-themed Massively Overthinking. I’ve asked our writers...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Daily Grind: What was the most painful MMO sunset of 2022?
So I have good news and bad news about this Daily Grind. The bad news is that we had a lot of sunsets this year – more high profile MMOs than the last couple of years. The good news is that they were...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Daily Grind: Will you Kickstart any MMOs in 2023?
Listen, this Daily Grind has exactly one right answer, and that answer is “no.” I will also accept “hell no.” All right, I’m kidding… a little bit. MMO crowdfunding actually had a mixed year in 2022....
View ArticleClik here to view.
End-of-Year Eleven: The top MMOs to watch in 2023
You know how some people like to push this narrative that “MMOs are dying?” If that was actually true, then my job to round up all of the up-and-coming titles every year would be far simpler. I’d look...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Massively Overthinking: Hopes and fears for MMOs in 2023
As 2022 drew to a close, we spent our Massively Overthinking roundtables discussing our predictions for 2023 as well as our goals. Now, we’re going to talk about our hopes and fears for MMOs and the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Vague Patch Notes: Stop taking your released MMOs back to the drawing board
This is not a column about Kingshunt, but it is. It’s not a column about Crowfall or Deathverse: Let it Die or even Crucible. But it’s about all of those games and more besides. And it’s about a myth...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Soapbox: Hating on the competition is no way to promote an MMO
Recently, RIFT was back in the news, offering free subscription time to new and returning players. While I salute Gamigo’s generosity here, whenever the topic of RIFT comes up, I can’t help but think...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Massively Overthinking: The times MMO developers admitted they were… wrong
Earlier in March, Jagex did the unthinkable for an MMORPG company: It admitted it was wrong about something. If you’re used to the Blizzards of the world, you know that they seldom admit to making...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Massively Overthinking: How to alienate your MMORPG playerbase
I am not a Pokemon Go player, but I can’t help but stare at its many trainwrecks thanks to the detailed coverage of our Massively on the Go columnist Andrew. And the latest trainwreck is one that I’ve...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Vague Patch Notes: So why didn’t crowdfunded MMOs save the genre?
The past few weeks we’ve been following this freakin’ thing because… well, obvious reasons. But that has me thinking about crowdfunding in general, because we’ve gone in an interesting trajectory....
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Daily Grind: Have your opinions on MMO PvP changed over the years?
One of the first columns I penned for MOP after we went indie was a column about what I wanted from serious MMO PvP. I cut my MMO teeth on an open-PvP sandbox at the dawn of the genre, and I’ve joked...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Massively Overthinking: Massively Overwhelming content in MMORPGs
This past weekend, I picked up my first premium house in Lord of the Rings Online after much hemming and hawing. I didn’t expect much out of it; surely it’d just be like my boring ol’ basic hobbit hole...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Cinderstone Online has apparently sunsetted after just two months as devs...
Over the last couple of years, we’ve kept an eye on Cinderstone Online aka Fioresia Online, a cutesy indie MMO that actually made it to early access launch in September; we even gave the game a spin on...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Working As Intended: The hits and misses of our 2023 MMO predictions
We’ve been offering up an MMO predictions list for Massively Overthinking for years upon years now as our writers and readers prognosticate on the future (and also take some wild swings on the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Massively Overthinking: Our favorite MOP articles of 2023
Every year, we pick out a bunch of narrative arcs and stories that dominated the headlines and emotions of the MMORPG genre, and it gets an award. Actually a couple of awards, if you get creative about...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Make My MMO: The biggest MMO crowdfunding stories of 2023
Welcome to a special end-of-the-year edition of Make My MMO, the MassivelyOP column where we – well, I – keep tabs on all of the crowdfunded MMOs in our genre, as well as all the ones that attempted...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Crowfall owner Monumental hit with layoffs while eyeing blockchain
The question of Crowfall’s existence has been an unanswered one for quite some time ever since the game was purchased by Mythgard publisher Monumental in 2021, followed by the game going offline in...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Perfect Ten: MMOs that experienced a surprising comeback
It’s hard to pass up a really good comeback story. We love it when a beloved something or someone is counted down and out… and then returns in a surprising but welcome fashion. In today’s list, we’re...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Stormgate studio Frost Giant opens equity crowdfunding campaign to make...
Back in February, we covered the eyebrow-raising story that Frost Giant, the studio behind multiplayer RTS Stormgate, was planning to make a push for an equity crowdfunding campaign. Unlike the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Massively OP Podcast Episode 466: Elder Scrolls Offline
Justin and Bree discuss PlanetSide 2's new developer, Elder Scrolls Online's rollback situation, the revival of Life is Feudal, and the resurrection of Legends of Aria Classic, with adventures in...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Massively OP Podcast Episode 467: The end of an ArcheAge
Justin and Bree discuss ArcheAge's sunset, the cancellation of BlizzCon 2024, Escape from Tarkov's no good very bad day, Age of Water's early access launch, and the 20th anniversary of City of Heroes,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Unleashed’s MMORPG Haven is aimed at parents who grew up playing EverQuest...
Back in February, we covered an upcoming but low-key crossplatform MMORPG called Haven by an indie studio called Unleashed games, whose star-studded dev team includes (among many others) World of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Perfect Ten: 10 more MMOs you’ve already forgotten ever existed, from Elyon...
Last year, I assembled a list of 10 former MMOs that not only have ceased to exist but have ceased to be remembered (for the most part). With so many deceased projects littering the past, unfortunately...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Whatever happened to RvR MMO Crowfall? (2024 edition)
In the annals of MMORPG history, Kickstarted MMORPG Crowfall seems destined to be remembered for its impressive crowdfunding totals, imaginative character designs, strong developer pedigree, and a...
View Article