MMO Week in Review: Guild Wars 2 navigates its own straits of devastation
Sheik Yerbouti
If you thought ArenaNet and Guild Wars 2 were immune to NCsoft’s recent corporate tinkering, you were in for a rude awakening this week, and I don’t mean the kind where you spend two grueling weeks in the Crystal Desert with Orion and Alesia. NCsoft and ArenaNet announced this week that they were planning large layoffs for the Guild Wars 2 studio, reportedly canceling two secret projects along the way, though both have suggested the core MMO will continue operating as planned. This after a year when Guild Wars 2 pulled in over $70M US and immediately following the reveal of a sweet new mount type and new love for Classic Guild Wars.
THIS WEEK’S TOP STORIES
- Now confirmed: Guild Wars 2 studio ArenaNet is suffering heavy layoffs, but the game will continue - Update: The layoffs have now been confirmed, and ArenaNet has now issued a statement. We're continuing to update this article at the end. Kotaku is reporting that ArenaNet, the studio…
- Anthem is finally officially launched, to the tune of lukewarm reviews (plus the launch roadmap) - Anthem has finally, finally wound its way through all its early tests and early accesses and headstarts and other folderol to make it to the finish line, which is also…
- LOTRO Legendarium: Examining 2019’s amazing producer’s letter - I swear, the news never fails to make a monkey out of me. Just the other day I was grousing about how it was the end of February here and…
- Hey packrats, clean out your Elder Scrolls Online hoards… for the good of the database - Wrathstone and update 21 are launching in Elder Scrolls Online next week, at least for PC, so you're going to want to be prepared. It turns out you can do…
- SuperData: Digital gaming revenue is down across the board as Fortnite has ‘increasingly lumpy revenue profile’ - Hey so can we just get a do-over on January and maybe February? No? Sigh. SuperData's released its January 2019 report, and surprising no one, digital games revenue is once…
- Bethsoft says it’s ‘fully dedicated’ to Fallout 76 as it rolls out huge roadmap for 2019 - Heck yeah let's keep the Friday good news train rolling. Fallout 76 just turned 100... days! And Bethsoft has plans, people. It's just posted up its roadmap for 2019. This…
- Lord of the Rings Online producer’s letter confirms seventh expansion - The 2019 producer's letter is here for Lord of the Rings Online, and Hobbits and Big Folk alike have plenty to celebrate as they look to the future of this…
- WoW Factor: Why people are mad at Battle for Azeroth, part one: Combat - One of the complicated challenges of writing about World of Warcraft is sorting out the stuff that's happening now from the stuff that's been happening the whole time. To use an…
- Blizzard wants to know why you’re not playing Hearthstone anymore - It seems that Blizzard's free(ish)-to-play digital TCG Hearthstone has hit a bit of a rough patch recently. According to PC Gamer, Blizzard COO Coddy Johnson said in the company's now-infamous…
- The Daily Grind: So how worried are you about Guild Wars 2? - Last night's devastating news that NCsoft was forcing Guild Wars 2 developer ArenaNet to make major layoffs definitely shook me, even more than the Blizzard layoffs, which at least seemed…
- Massively Overthinking: Contending with the MMO genre’s ‘wowfugee’ crisis - Last week on the MOP Podcast, we read a letter from a listener named Megan who pointed us to a blog post on the The Eorzean Frontier called What do you mean…
- Hyperspace Beacon: The Star Wars MMOs and communities beyond SWTOR - Time flies: I am now coming up on nine years of covering Star Wars: The Old Republic professionally. Of course, I was a Star Wars and Star Wars Galaxies fan…
- Leaderboard: How worried are you for PlanetSide Arena and Daybreak right now? - Daybreak's Friday-night revelation that it is delaying PlanetSide Arena to summer made me worried. Actually, the revelation that the company would be refunding everyone who'd preordered made me the most…
- Mobile MMO AxE: Alliance vs Empire launches today - There's a new trend in reveal-to-launch-time ratio, and we can't say that's a bad thin: Having less wait between learning of a game and getting to play it is a…
- Vague Patch Notes: Online games are a marathon, but they still need to start running - One of those phrases we like to use a fair amount here is the fact that running an MMO is a marathon, not a sprint. You don't need to look…
- Epic Games yanks Fortnite ads from YouTube over super gross child exploitation expose - Welp, if there's anything that might finally convince Google to overhaul its horrible, awful, no-good YouTube video algorithms that somehow start you with puppy vids and get you to creepy…
- Darkfall Rise of Agon has officially soft-launched its hybrid free-to-play ‘freemium’ model - Remember back when free-to-play was still a pretty rare thing, and we used to run polls on which MMOs would go free-to-play next? And then pretty much every major game…
- Perfect Ten: The bloodiest MMOs of all time - I am not nor ever have been that much of a fan of gore and blood in video games. Oh, I thought Doom was delightfully scandalous back in the day…
- Kotaku exposes the creeps of game streaming, plus the update on Elvine you didn’t want - At the beginning of the month, we were all horrified to cover the news that a Twitch streamer and (now former) Hi-Rez employee, Thomas "Elvine/Elvinelol" Cheung had been arrested and…
- Seek memories in Path of Exile’s newly announced Synthesis league beginning March 8 - Betrayal. Incursion. Prophecy. Breach. Talisman. Nemesis. Ambush. Instead of words of the day, Path of Exile has words of the league. And with so many more words in the English…
- Guild Wars 2 is releasing a new cat mount – but only through world vs. world PvP - Guild Wars 2 WvWvW players, today is finally your day to crow. Or growl. It's more like a growl, yeah. That's because the game's getting a new cat mount -…
- Choose My Adventure: Dungeon diving in The Elder Scrolls Online - Pretty much everything I've done in The Elder Scrolls Online has been a delight, so I was going in to my chosen task for Choose My Adventure with a pretty…
- Project Gorgon dev on hiring and content cadence: ‘I can confidently say we are not gonna fail’ - Are you grumpy about how long some indie games take to develop? Yeah, join the club - the indie devs are too. That's the takeaway from a long forum post…
- Check out Anthem’s day-one patch notes as BioWare puts an end to gear farm cheesing - It just wouldn't be an MMO or pseudo-MMO launch without a day-one patch, now would it? Thanks to a leaker on Reddit, we've got patch notes for update rolling out…
- Neverwinter descends into the depths of Undermountain this spring in its ‘largest expansion ever’ - Although the arrival of spring may bring bright sun and beautiful blossoms, the adventurers of Neverwinter will likely find themselves far from the light of day as they delve deep…
- The Survivalist: Astroneer adds whimsy to the enjoyable terrors of space survival - Ever feel like you can't keep up with all the survival sandboxes coming out? With so many, it can be hard to keep them straight much less find time to…
- Wisdom of Nym: The system changes I’d like to see in Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers - We don't yet know everything we're going to learn at the Tokyo fan festival about Shadowbringers, but we can be reasonably confident that it will involve a minimum of stuff…
- The Daily Grind: Are you concerned about the future of World of Warcraft? - Given the week that Activision-Blizzard just had - capping off a record financial year by haphazardly firing 800 employees, literally provoking union groups to step up their organization and call…
- EVE Evolved: EVE Online has a gambling problem - The gambling debate has kicked off again in EVE Online, this time in response to the annual Guardian's Gala event that's currently running throughout the game. Last year's event just…
