MMO Week in Review: Elder Scrolls Online’s Elsweyr chapter heralds five months of cat memes

I wouldn’t go calling Elder Scrolls Online’s Khajiit catgirls and catboys to their faces, but we’re sure to be tempted this summer when as announced this week the Elsweyr chapter/expansion launches and we get our first chance to dig into the full depths of the province. Bring your hype!

THIS WEEK’S TOP STORIES

Elder Scrolls Online will launch Elsweyr and Necromancer in June, Wrathstone DLC in February - ZeniMax has just revealed that Elsweyr, homeland of the Khajiit, is indeed Elder Scrolls Online's next chapter. The devs kicked off their stream with a teaser and the cinematic (the…

Tamriel Infinium: Examining the features (and hype!) of Elder Scrolls Online’s Season of the Dragon - I have mixed feelings about dragons coming to Elder Scrolls Online. Originally, we knew that we would not see them because they were hibernating or had fled Tamriel in this…

EverQuesting: Can Daybreak make it through 2019? - Those who've been long-time followers of Massively OP's long-running EverQuesting column might have noticed a distinct lack of new year hopes and predictions articles for the EverQuest franchise along with…

WoW Factor: No, Activision is not the reason you’re unhappy with World of Warcraft - There's a narrative that's been making the rounds for a little while now among the World of Warcraft community, buoyed a lot by the fact that we've seen lots of evidence…

Interview: Astellia’s western team on pay-to-win, themeparks, and dodging early access and battle royale - Yesterday we covered the news that South Korean born MMORPG Astellia is heading westward in 2019, with its holy trinity classes, solid PvE and PvP, and hard lean away from…

Electronic Arts cancels its untitled open-world Star Wars game - Remember that open-world Star Wars game that Electronic Arts' Vancouver studio was working on after the company closed down the previous studio that had been working on an open-world Star…

Blizzard lays out World of Warcraft’s esports 2019 plans, will crowdfund part of prize pools - Although Blizzard may have cut back on esports support for Heroes of the Storm, World of Warcraft's esports scene is back and bigger than ever in 2019, and the studio…

Torchlight Frontiers previews gear progression, redesigned alpha UI, and pets - It's been about a month since Torchlight Frontiers concluded its second alpha test, and the devs have been hard at work making changes based on players' feedback. Project Lead Tyler…

The Game Archaeologist: Fury - Back in 1997, Australian game developer Auran arrived onto the scene with the real-time strategy title Dark Reign. While it wasn't exactly Command & Conquer or Warcraft, the game sold over…

The multiplayer Skyrim Together mod is about to hit closed beta - If you've been around the Elder Scrolls modding community long enough, you know that fan efforts to bring multiplayer elements to the franchise's single-player games are a never-ending thing, perhaps…

Fortnite is apparently fertile ground for doing crimes, like money laundering - Hey, you know what is fun? Money laundering! Wait, did we say "fun"? We meant "highly illegal and full of dire consequences." It's probably not something most of us have…

Nexon founder’s controlling shares in the company are now officially up for sale - Remember how Nexon's founder and 98.64% share holder Kim Jung-ju made it clear early this month that he was looking into selling his controlling stakes in the company? It appears…

Elder Scrolls Online is not launching a swag-stuffed physical collector’s edition of Elsweyr - One of the announcements oddly missing from the Elder Scrolls Online's Elsweyr hoopla earlier this week was one about physical swag for the collector's edition. Turns out that wasn't an…

Bethsoft is banning more Fallout 76 exploiters and teasing its free-for-all PvP mode - Even before Fallout 76 launched last year, the game was becoming well known for bugs of the exploitable sort. The most recent to make headlines was the glitch that allowed…

Breach hits early access with a blend of action combat and MMO dungeon crawling - Snowbound or bored this weekend and looking for something new to do? Breach arrived on Steam early access yesterday, bringing with it an interesting blend of MMO design, co-op dungeon…

Bungie reiterates its commitment to Destiny 2 long-term as it previews short-term goals - Since last week's revelation that Activision and Bungie were parting ways and sending Destiny home to live with its real dad - oh yeah, and investors began investigating potential securities…

Massively Overthinking: What would you want out of a World of Warcraft 2? - Let's pretend for a moment that the reason Blizzard appears to be dropping the ball with World of Warcraft right now is that it's working on World of Warcraft 2…

Check out another 10 minutes of gameplay footage from Anthem - Everything has hidden depths. Anthem definitely does. Literally, it's got a mission named Hidden Depths, and today's latest burst of gameplay footage from IGN covers 10 minutes of running through Hidden…

Atlas just rolled back the North American servers five hours after an admin account was ‘compromised’ - In case you needed your daily reminder not to buy early access games that are still neck-deep in testing and problem children, here's your dose for the day: Studio Wildcard's…

Vague Patch Notes: Representation in games matters when you don’t see why it matters - This is a story about a boy named Michael. Follow along with me for a little bit, if you'd be so kind. Michael was born in 1983, and he didn't…

Gamigo is expanding ArcheAge’s team, reducing lockboxes, and evaluating the Gazillion assets - MMOBomb has an interview up with Gamigo's top brass today that has some interesting nuggets for MMO players wondering about the current state of the company and all the MMORPGs…

Artifact continues to lose players at an aggressive rate - We're just about two months into the life cycle of Valve's aggressively non-free-to-play card game Artifact, and the game continues to lose players with a focus and intensity usually reserved for gaining…

ArcheAge rolls out update 5.1 as players call ‘bait-and-switch’ over normalized mounts - [AL:Arche]As promised, Gamigo pushed out update 5.1 for ArcheAge yesterday, complete with its hero system revamp, tweaks for pirates, the Abyssal Library do-over, and the separated Golden Plains Battle arena.…

Elder Scrolls Online’s racial abilities are getting revamped in update 21 - One of the things that the folks at Zenimax are focusing on in The Elder Scrolls Online's upcoming update 21 is balancing the passive abilities of the game's myriad races,…

Legends of Aria’s Steam early access launch is now slated for spring - The testing through early access continues for Legends of Aria, and that includes figuring out the schedule for the game's patches and ultimate release. The latest news from the team is…

Perfect Ten: The MMOs with the most uncertain futures in 2019 - Working in this field has given me something of a sense of how a lot of the industry is going to play out. Take the ongoing early access saga of Atlas,…

Black Desert’s battle royale mode, Shadow Arena, hits early access for current players today - [AL:BDO]Black Desert is formally hopping on the battle royale bandwagon this week with the "early access" release of Shadow Arena today. How does a fully launched MMORPG run an "early…

Steam is rolling out better store discoverability, mobile chat, and library improvements in 2019 - Valve is surely feeling a bit frazzled over Epic and Discord's power plays in the last few months, but you wouldn't know it from its annual Steam recap this week.…

The Survivalist: Seven survival game features I want to see in 2019 - A new year is all about new hopes, new goals, and -- hopefully -- new features and content. I am talking about games, of course! (Although I might go for…

Choose My Adventure: The lonesome job of star charting in Elite Dangerous - Today's edition of Choose My Adventure features results that were both a landslide and extremely close. On the one hand, most people suggested that I trade in my current ship…

Dark and Light is closing down 70% of its early access servers - Snail Games' early access MMO Dark and Light has suffered a few growing pains during its development. The company originally announced it was resurrecting the 2004 MMO back in 2016;…

Wisdom of Nym: Final Fantasy XIV’s patch 4.5 in review - Ah, that's the good stuff. I'm not going to lie, I was honestly a bit concerned about this patch for Final Fantasy XIV. Not just because of my frankly absurd level of…

Fallout 76 players are finding ways to glitch into a secret developer room with unreleased items - We would like to preface today's story of Fallout 76 having all the integrity of tissue paper in a hurricane by saying that you should probably not try to access this…

THIS WEEK’S CASTS & STREAMS

Massively OP Podcast Episode 204: SpatialOS spasms

Battle Bards Episode 136: Overlooked MMO soundtracks

The Stream Team: Spicy times with the Dauntless Scorchstone Hellion

The Stream Team: Happy third anniversary Blade & Soul

The Stream Team: Going to the green cave in ARK’s Extinction

The Stream Team: A song in ice and fire in Conan Exiles

The Stream Team: Having More Than a Feeling in Guardians of the Galaxy: The Telltale Series

The Stream Team: Burning through City of the Sun God’s missions in Secret World Legends

The Stream Team: Talking about Elsweyr in Elder Scrolls Online

The Stream Team: Grinding ice in AdventureQuest 3D

The Stream Team: Trying out the Final Fantasy XIV Blue Mage

The Stream Team: Been there, betrayed that in Path of Exile

AND FROM OUR FRIENDS AT BLIZZARD WATCH

• We’re not prepared for Burning Crusade to celebrate its 12th birthday
• These classes will be must-haves for WoW’s Battle for Dazar’alor
• Improvements to WoW’s transmog would make cosmetic-swapping easier

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.