In the Venn diagram comparing WoW Classic and Lord of the Rings Online, there’s a large overlapping section that simply says “chill gameplay.” And that’s probably why I appreciate both titles: because they feed that need I have to slow down, drink in the game world, and focus on a long leveling journey with no […]

Robert Frost’s poem The Road Not Taken was published in August of 1915, and it has endured an immense popularity since then. Many people can quote the last couplet of the poem (“I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference”), and for years the title alone conjures images of […]

We’ve all been there. You’re dragging yourself through another so-so gaming year, playing the same old titles, all while telling yourself that it’s about to get a lot more interesting, because a game you’ve been eyeing should come out before too long. And almost as if you jinxed a cosmic trickster, the next day you […]

As I type this, we’re at the top of January and waiting for two events that should be happening in the WoW Classic space this month. The first is the Burning Crusade Anniversary prepatch on January 13th, which will reshape the systems of those servers and open up some more character options. But the second […]

Welcome back to MassivelyOP’s annual awards for one more special honoree. Readers will remember that a few years ago, we decided to institute a lifetime achievement award specifically to honor an MMORPG that has made a significant contribution to the genre over the course of its lifetime and the genre’s history but may not be […]

Welcome back to MassivelyOP’s annual MMORPG awards for 2025! Today’s award is for the MMORPG of the Year, which was awarded to Throne & Liberty last year. Longtime readers will recall that way back in 2014, our staff was so disillusioned with the new MMOs launching that we withheld this award and picked “nothing” as our […]

Every time people discuss new things they would love to see in long-running MMORPGs, I see at least a few people speculating about things that aren’t just not happening but would fundamentally break the game. And it always makes a little twitch start up right behind my eye. It’s not that I don’t understand the […]

Welcome back to MassivelyOP’s annual MMORPG awards for 2025! Today’s award is for the Most Anticipated MMO, which was awarded to Star’s Reach last year. This award can be frustrating since many of the games and expansions we’re picking from here haven’t changed much as we’re still waiting on them. We’ll see how it goes in […]

Ahhh… can you smell that new house scent? It’s an aroma laced with fragrances of potential, creativity, and belonging. That’s right, player housing is now a reality in World of Warcraft, and although this is only early access and the initial iteration of the system, there’s a ton of room for players to claim and […]

Welcome to the end of the year, everyone! Somehow we all got here, seriously, and that means it’s time for our annual roundup of stories and events over the last year. I’m sure that some of these will have people saying that they were not surprised by anything that happened over the course of 2025, in […]

Classic Guild Wars fans divide neatly into two groups. No, not Kurzick vs. Luxon. No, not heroes or no heroes. No, not runners and runnees. It’s simple: Are you a Spamadan person floating in a sea of trade deals, or are you a kid hanging out in Great Temple of Balthazar international, complaining about your […]

In perhaps one of the quietest expansion releases to date, Lord of the Rings Online welcomed Kingdoms of Harad today. This marks the third and final installment of the Song of Waves and Wind cycle that began back in Corsairs of Umbar. “The Kingdoms of Harad stand at a crossroads, their rivalries sharpening as a […]

On yesterday’s MOP Podcast, Justin was rattling off the immense list of MMORPGs with big launches this week, and among them was EverQuest, whose Shattering of Ro expansion formally launched last night. This is Classic EverQuest, mind you, and it has a long list of its own: Shattering of Ro is the game’s 32nd expansion, […]

If you anticipated that the debut of player housing in World of Warcraft would be a hot mess, then prepare to be validated because it totally was. Last night’s launch of Patch 11.2.7 prompted a predictable stampede of players who couldn’t teleport into the housing district or change neighborhoods for lengthy periods of time. Bugs […]

Where were you when you first heard about the original Guild Wars? For me, it was late 2004 when the online gaming world was entranced with World of Warcraft. I was reading through a games magazine that posted a whole spread on this new project that some outfit called ArenaNet was making. What caught my […]

Well, I kind of expected this would happen. No matter how much or how little I might think of an MMORPG or MMO, I never like to really see less of them, but my return trip back into New World for this round of Choose My Adventure just reaffirmed that Amazon is throwing the baby […]

Warning! Warning! There’s a house in your future! Wait, that sounds perhaps less warning-related than it should with World of Warcraft’s The Warning update landing tonight. But that is a big focus for this patch, right down to articles highlighting how achievements and every era of crafting can feed into finding decorations for your house. “Players who […]

You may not believe this, but I didn’t really want to write this column about Final Fantasy XIV because it is entirely based on a game of telephone that is going to disappoint someone down the line. Let’s take a moment to recap. Back a couple of weeks ago, Naoki Yoshida (producer and director of FFXIV) gave […]

December 2nd is coming awfully fast — just two weeks now! — and the excitement for World of Warcraft player housing is hitting a fever pitch, especially with many testers exploring the system in beta. It’s great to see the creativity of this community spring up around the system, and I look forward to even […]

So this week’s moment of “unexpected but very, very good” news is the announcement that Guild Wars is getting a new “Reforged” update that does things like bump up some graphical quality and add some general experience improvements, for players on multiple devices. This is a really cool and good thing, and while I could speculate […]