Justin Olivetti    Genshin Impact’s first big content update of 2026 is here along with the annual Lantern Rite festival. The holiday improved over last year, with a new Lantern Rite story [that] reveals more about Zibai, alongside festive events offering 1,600 Primogems, 10 Intertwined Fates, a brand-new outfit for...

Justin Olivetti    As if people stuck swimming through the air wasn’t enough of an ignominious start for medieval MMORPG Past Fate, studio Icy North Games announced that it will be resetting levels yesterday for all characters because of a fundamental redesign. Does the it’s only beta defense work in this case?...

Eliot Lefebvre    To the absolute surprise of no one who has paid any attention, housing in World of Warcraft has proven incredibly popular with players, which means that the developers are still trying to figure out which features to implement next and how to make the feature the best it can be. And that is an...

Eliot Lefebvre    Sometimes it’s nice to just queue up an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000, log on to Final Fantasy XIV, and craft while I watch. Crafting a whole pile of high-end food doesn’t exactly tax the old noodle, so it’s ideal and cozy to just watch a show I enjoy, tap at my crafting macros, and [&]

Larry Everett    The Stream Team returns to Moria in Return to Moria. Last week, the team fell down a hole, and for the next several weeks, they will do their best to dig themselves out. If for some reason they can’t, there will be a good amount of mining ore and singing songs, at least. The singing [&]

Chris Neal    What better way to encourage people to band together than to face bandits’ greed, deadly plague, mud and madness ? If that sounds like your idea of a good co-op time and not a team-building exercise straight from the deepest pits of hell, then you’ll want to keep your eyes on Nested Lands, a new...

Chris Neal    It’s time yet again for another hyper-granular knob turning patch for Path of Exile 2, as this week is bringing a fresh round of adjustments for the early access multiplayer ARPG that will likely matter deeply to those entrenched in the game right now. Among the changes coming are a variety of...

Eliot Lefebvre    So if you’ve somehow forgotten, Vindictus has been around for quite a while at this point. It might seem like it’s a new kid on the block, but it’s more than a decade old That means players have a lot of catching up to do, but that’s what the latest update’s additions are all about: [&]

Chris Neal    We hope you like your Marvel Rivals roster additions loud, full of quips, and fourth wall-breaking. That’s because the infamous merc with a mouth, Deadpool, is on his way to the hero shooter as the headlining act for Season 6: Night at the Museum, which starts adding new goodies on Friday, January...

Eliot Lefebvre    If you have a lot of trouble figuring out how to create your character in an MMORPG, maybe what you really need is to free yourself from constraints and several leaps of logic later just make yourself into a floating cursor. No, really. Cursor Party is an open-source MMO project by a developer...

Chris Neal    As we noted in a recent MOP Up, this week has introduced a new addition to the wider MU Online set of MMOARPGs. And yes, this one is another mobile edition on top. Say hello to MU: Dark Awakening, brought to us by WEBZEN, Tianma, and Fingerfun. No snickering. Carrying forward the nostalgia and...

Chris Neal    Wargaming is kicking off the month with all kinds of stuff for both World of Tanks and World of Warships, as the studio has rolled out a pair of patches full of new vehicles, new features, and another round of crossovers that are just so off-the-wall that you just have to kind of shrug. We’ll [&]

Justin Olivetti    At the strange convergence of science and the legal system is a question that now demands to be answered. Can online multiplayer games actually rewire the brains of still-developing children? And if so, can we use this technology to eliminate the dreaded 6-7? Gamespot reports that a lawsuit has...

Bree Royce    Earlier this week, we covered the impending return of Darkfall Rise of Agon under a brand-new indie studio we’d known it was cooking for the last few years, but this past weekend, the devs at Toxic Rain Studios ran a multi-day test that the studio deemed a success, both in terms of technical...

Bree Royce    Eterspire, it turns out, isn’t just going to sit on its laurels having earned our Indie MMORPG GOTY: Today’s it’s rolling out its first big update of the year, complete with new endgame dungeon content. Yes, even some casual MMOs have endgame content. The dungeon is called the Cartesian Dungeon,...

Eliot Lefebvre    You know, I’m going to be honest. I think maybe we’re done with doing this list? Like, maybe this year every MMO has a pretty clear path forward for the next year, so we don’t need to spend an entire column talking about uncertain futures and bwahhhhh I can’t keep this up, I’m joshin’ with ya. [&]

Eliot Lefebvre    So you’ve got a bonus damage effect, your target has a damage reduction effect, and you’ve got an ability that does a lovely multi-hit strike in Throne and Liberty. How do these two things interact? Well, according to the newest installment of Tico Talks (in which Tico does, in fact, talk) the game...

Chris Neal    Last year was a fairly active one for Eternal Tombs, the hardcore-leaning MMORPG that touts using live GMs to engage events in-game, as it showcased its progress over the past several months. Followers of the project are being informed that we’ve still got a year to go before the game officially...

Bree Royce    Lost Ark’s first patch of the year rolled out to the Amazon servers as of this morning, and it is extreeeeeeeeme. No, really, it’s called Thaemine Extreme, and it delivers as its titular experience a new event raid. The most powerful Demon Legion Commander has returned for an extreme version of the...

Justin Olivetti    Here’s a very pleasant surprise for World of Warcraft’s playerbase and housing fans in particular: The January 20th prepatch is going to have a lot more content in it than players first assumed from Blizzard’s original teasers. In addition to inserting the chance to create Void Elf Demon Hunters,...

Bree Royce    We’ve finally got a hard date for Echoes of Elysium, again: It’s now launching into early access on January 27th. Readers will hopefully recall that the game was actually quiet most of last year, apart from launching a standalone airship tool, and re-emerged in November to announce a December 4...

Justin Olivetti    All right, WoW Classic fans, it’s time once and for all to show Illidan that we can be kinda- sorta prepared for yet another entry into Outland. After an extraordinarily long 24-hour downtime (which allowed Blizzard to untangle game versions), the legacy MMO’s anniversary servers rolled out the...

Justin Olivetti    One of our most sacred of duties here at Massively OP is to make sure that y’all are aware of any free promotion that MMO studios are running. Sure, it’s a blatant bribe to get you to log into their games, but free is free and who are you to turn your nose up [&]

MJ Guthrie    Although Massively OP’s MJ was distracted by a very important rescue operation last week, she is back on track of Guild Wars 2’s Visions of Eternity main story. That means she is heading deeper into the forest in search of some Ruins of the Old World. What secrets can she uncover as she explores...

Justin Olivetti    Sometimes you get a sequel that you didn’t ask for but you aren’t totally upset when it arrives. Such may be the case for Fallen Sword II, a newly announced multiplayer title that’s billing itself as a spiritual successor to studio Haunted Cow Games’ original browser MMORPG that came out in 2006....

Eliot Lefebvre    Have you ever expected to see an hour-long video about an upcoming patch for Torchlight Infinite? Because that’s exactly what the team behind the game has put together for its upcoming Vorax update arriving on January 15th. There’s a lot of stuff in the patch, too, starting with the eponymous Vorax...

Justin Olivetti    There may be no admittance to Bilbo’s burrow except on party business, but the good news is that Lord of the Rings Online players are all invited to join in the festivities to come this year. Standing Stone Games posted the full 2026 event schedule for the Middle-earth MMORPG, including dates for...

Justin Olivetti    Justin and Bree discuss the MOP award winners, Elder Scrolls Online’s roadmap, Project Gorgon, WoW Classic Classic’s Burning Crusade, Past Fate, and Loftia, with adventures in LOTRO, Guild Wars, Guild Wars 2, Palia, Loftia, BitCraft, Eterspire, and SWG Legends.

Eliot Lefebvre    It’s time to celebrate 15 years of operation for DC Universe Online this year, and like any long-running comic book, the game is celebrating by making players more powerful. No, really; the letter from producer Andre Emerson notes that one of the first major additions will be the addition of Power...

Chris Neal    Out of all of the villains to be faced in MMORPGs, there are few more vile than item enhancement systems that feature failure mechanics, where improving the best-in-slot piece of gear can often incur devastating punishment for simply having what amounts to a bad dice roll. It’s a pain that regular...

Chris Neal    As our regular readers know, yesterday saw the end of operation for the sci-fi looter shooter Anthem, and its impact was marked among fans and one of the game’s former execs as the servers saw their last shutdown. Fans of the game shared their thoughts across social media, most of them offering...

Chris Neal    Last month we covered the newly announced MMORPG Epitome, a self-described next-gen MMO that hangs its hat on LLM-powered quest generation and NPC interaction, as well as other sky-high promises like server tech that can accommodate over 33,000 players in a single instance, a massive open world...

Bree Royce    Palia’s first big update of the year is officially live this afternoon: Winter’s Wonder has opened its doors for the cozy mini-MMO alongside the reveal of its final patch notes. A softer, snowier season settles over Kilima Valley today with the release of Palia’s Winter’s Wonder: Snowbound...

Chris Neal    Evidently, Ubisoft made sure that voluntary firings will become involuntary ones because not enough worker heads were sent rolling for the studios behind The Division. Following the company’s offer for voluntary redundancies of staff at Massive Entertainment last year, Ubisoft has proposed that a...

Chris Neal    It seems to me that the Dungeons & Dragons Online voting public has a predilection towards spellcasters that are almost entirely focused on melee combat. Not that I’m complaining, mind you; I’m of the mind that there aren’t enough spellsword or blade mage classes in MMORPGs nowadays. But it was...

Tyler F.M. Edwards    We’re continuing our New World nostalgia tour here in Vitae Aeternum this week, and the third (and final?) zone I want to talk about is arguably where the game peaked, at least in terms of its story-telling and its zone design. Today, we venture into the harsh sun of Brimstone Sands. Brimstone was...

Bree Royce    As of 10 a.m. EST this morning, Hytale is officially back in business and playable for everyone who ponied up the early access fee, following a cancellation and comeback story that was a highlight of 2026. How many people are in there? We don’t know because the game’s early access isn’t on Steam...

Bree Royce    Elder Scrolls Online fans haven’t even had a full week to digest all the changes coming their way in 2026, but some of them are already locked and loaded on the game’s public test center with the arrival of the partial season zero. The Public Test Server (PTS) has been updated to include many...

Chris Neal    The first major update for this year is coming for The First Descendant later this week, as the shooty with the booty brings an all-new feature for dungeons, some deeper level character tweaks to a pair of descendants, and a host of other updates and events tomorrow on Wednesday, January 14th. The...

Justin Olivetti    Hey Diablo IV players, do you have the right stuff? Are you all that and a bag of chips? Is your parser writing checks that your skill level can’t cash? Then bring your braggadocio over to Blizzard’s online ARPG where the Tower looms to see if you can climb its heights& or fall to your [&]

Bree Royce    Nexon is popping corks over Embark’s having reached a new ARC Raiders milestone: A whopping 12 million people have overlooked the game’s gen-AI apologism to log in and player their little extraction shooter hearts out. Today, Embark Studios can officially confirm that ARC Raiders has surpassed 12...

Bree Royce    This annual Daily Grind is a counterpart to our best trend award, which this year I tweaked to focus on the most important trend. But I still want to talk about the bad trends here To me, the worst trend is that we’re losing a lot of at-risk MMORPGs and in-development MMORPGs, which is going [&]

MJ Guthrie    So how about them gorapples? There was a bit of news this last week: Elder Scrolls Online is ditching chapters for seasons. That means at some point, Massively OP’s MJ will get access to the latest DLC content that she doesn’t yet have. (Though that will be quite a while in the future it appears.) ...

Chris Neal    For the past few months we’ve been keeping tabs on Sand, a developing PvPvE extraction shooter from Hologryph and TowerHaus that sees players fighting across an alien desert world, seeking loot and attempting to make off with the goods while riding massive mechanical walking bases known as...

Chris Neal    Scars of Honor is following up on its end-of-2025 development broadcast with another giant bucketful of hype, this time through a dev blog that once again talks up its procedural dungeons, assuming you subscribe to the idea that procedural generation is as impressive as it states. Dungeons are...

Justin Olivetti    Just when you thought it was safe to go where no one has gone before, the winner of MOP’s Most Horrifying MMO Reward of 2025 is back to take a bite out of unsuspecting players. That’s right, Moopsy is making the rounds in Star Trek Online for the final installment of the 2025 campaign event [&]

Chris Neal    It’s time yet again for Darkfall: Rise of Agon to come skittering out from the dark, honk loudly about what it’s managed to do, and maybe stay out in the sunshine for a while. Readers may recall that we last reported on this one in 2023 as it continued to talk up its Steam relaunch, [&]

Chris Neal    It’s time for checkup on the sandbox MMORPG Wurm Online, which has been keeping itself updated with some new content despite the small team at Code Club. Or in the case of content pacing, it’s because of the small team at Game Chest Group’s Code Club. The largest update for the game came this past ...

Chris Neal    We haven’t been able to confirm this information, so call it a rumor for now: It appears that some looky-loo fan of EVE Online has shared what appears to be CCP Games’ attempt to create an AI LLM chat bot for the spaceship sandbox to assist players with navigating the sandbox’s myriad facets. A...

Chris Neal    Last year saw an entirely new chapter begin for the struggling sandbox MMORPG Fractured Online, as its new developer Happy Cauldron Games announced that the title is being completely overhauled into something called Fractured Conquest, changing it from a multi-faceted sandbox into a persistent war...