Week in Review

At the end of every week, we round up the best and most popular news stories, exclusive features, and insightful columns published on Massively and then present them all in one convenient place. If you missed a big MMO or WoW Insider story last week, you've come to the right post.

This week, Trion Worlds' announcement that RIFT will transition to a free-to-play MMO in less than a month was tempered by news that the studio was forced to lay off a large portion of its staff, though the RIFT team itself was unaffected. Meanwhile, CCP's console shooter DUST 514 officially launched; Massively's Jef Reahard delivered tepid impressions of the game.

Read on for a look at the rest of this week's top MMO stories.

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At the end of every week, we round up the best and most popular news stories, exclusive features, and insightful columns published on Massively and then present them all in one convenient place. If you missed a big MMO or WoW Insider story last week, you've come to the right post.

Every three months, we gawk at the revealed financial health of various gaming companies, collectively cheering and jeering and sometimes both. This week, we fixated on NCsoft's mixed fortunes, Star Wars: The Old Republic's vindicating free-to-play success, and World of Warcraft's 1.3 million subscriber losses.

Blizzard was further vexed this week by a duping bug that saw the Diablo III auction house taken offline for several days before its restoration sans rollback.

Read on for a roundup of the rest of this week's top MMO stories.

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At the end of every week, we round up the best and most popular news stories, exclusive features, and insightful columns published on Massively and then present them all in one convenient place. If you missed a big MMO or WoW Insider story last week, you've come to the right post.

Dungeons and Dragons-flavored action-MMO Neverwinter soft-launched into open beta this week, free-to-play for all comers except for the inconvenient parts where you're probably going to pay. Massively was prepared, if lacking in pants, with a two-part hands-on launch diary and a formal (if irreverent) first impressions piece.

Read on for a look at this week's other top MMO stories.

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At the end of every week, we round up the best and most popular news stories, exclusive features, and insightful columns published on Massively and then present them all in one convenient place. If you missed a big MMO or WoW Insider story last week, you've come to the right post.

Every spring for the last 10 years, EVE Online fans from around the globe have journeyed to their MMO Mecca in Reykjavik, Iceland, for EVE Fanfest. This year, Massively's Brendan Drain attended the event to report not just on EVE but on CCP's other inbound titles, console shooter DUST 514 and vampire sandbox World of Darkness. From Brendan, we heard about EVE's virtual reality demo and revamp plans, DUST's launch date, EVE's anniversary collector's edition and TV series, and of course, World of Darkness' early development.

Read on for a peek at the rest of this week's top MMO stories.

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At the end of every week, we round up the best and most popular news stories, exclusive features, and insightful columns published on Massively and then present them all in one convenient place. If you missed a big MMO or WoW Insider story last week, you've come to the right post.

This week, Massively was focused on two MMO expansion releases whose status was once in question. First, Darkfall's Unholy Wars revamp finally launched, after repeated delays that turned the game into a punchline for many months during its extended beta. We sent in Darkfall veteran Jef Reahard to investigate; he was impressed by its immersive world, PvE, and crafting but not so impressed with its animations, UI, and economy.

Second, Star Wars: The Old Republic's Rise of the Hutt Cartel expansion officially launched. We posted a general impressions piece to complement our critique of the update's daily quests, while BioWare contented itself with explaining reworks of all eight of the game's classes.

Read on for a look at the rest of this week's top MMO stories.

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At the end of every week, we round up the best and most popular news stories, exclusive features, and insightful columns published on Massively and then present them all in one convenient place. If you missed a big MMO or WoW Insider story last week, you've come to the right post.

This week, wuxia-themed Age of Wushu launched officially, turning loose a hardcore, Chinese-flavored, martial arts sandbox in the MMORPG space. Persistent-world junkies are hoping the game marks the first of the big-budget sandboxes aiming to revamp the genre in the next few years. What sandboxes are those? I'm glad you asked. Massively's Jef recently prepped a guide to the bigguns, including ArcheAge, EverQuest Next, and Star Citizen.

Read on for a peek at the rest of our top MMO stories.

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At the end of every week, we round up the best and most popular news stories, exclusive features, and insightful columns published on Massively and then present them all in one convenient place. If you missed a big MMO or WoW Insider story last week, you've come to the right post.

Trion's trans-media-synergy MMOTPS Defiance launched Tuesday -- just ahead of its TV show debut next week -- to the usual smattering of launch-day bugs and issues. But on the whole, Massively's Jef found the game moderately appealing and potentially worth the dough for some light but brief MMO-shooter fun, as chronicled in his four-part launch impressions piece.

Read on for a look at the rest of Massively's top MMO stories from the past week.

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At the end of every week, we round up the best and most popular news stories, exclusive features, and insightful columns published on Massively and then present them all in one convenient place. If you missed a big MMO or WoW Insider story last week, you've come to the right post.

This week, we're building on our PAX East 2013 roundup from last Sunday to present even more of our PAX coverage combined with what we've released so far from our GDC 2013 recon. Dragon's Prophet demo? Check. How F2P saved SWTOR? Yeppers. Infinite Crisis hands-on? Roger that. Star Citizen's crafting system reveal? Yup, nabbed that too. All that and the rest of Massively's top MMO stories from the past week await beyond the break.

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At the end of every week, we round up the best and most popular news stories, exclusive features, and insightful columns published on Massively and then present them all in one convenient place. If you missed a big MMO or WoW Insider story last week, you've come to the right post.

This week, Massively's Eliot Lefebvre, Karen Bryan, and Matt Daniel descended on PAX East 2013 in Boston (shown above) prepared to chew bubblegum and play video games, and they were all out of bubblegum. They've been regaling you with tales of their exploits in WildStar, Elder Scrolls Online, and Hearthstone all weekend, and now we've rounded up the rest of their coverage (so far!) and our non-PAX MMO coverage from the last seven days just beyond the break... just in time for GDC to begin.

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At the end of every week, we round up the best and most popular news stories, exclusive features, and insightful columns published on Massively and then present them all in one convenient place. If you missed a big MMO or WoW Insider story last week, you've come to the right post.

MMO gamers are used to studios applying the words "massively multiplayer online" to games that are barely online, only optionally multiplayer, and certainly not "massive" in any way, but this week, Maxis' Lucy Bradshaw took our acronym to new lows by suggesting that EA's beleaguered SimCity is effectively an MMO. Perhaps Bradshaw meant to frame her game's release fiasco as just another clownshoes MMO launch, but I think the MMO industry is perfectly capable of watering down its own terminology, thanks.

Read on for a roundup of the rest of our top MMO stories from the past week.

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At the end of every week, we round up the best and most popular news stories, exclusive features, and insightful columns published on Massively and then present them all in one convenient place. If you missed a big MMO or WoW Insider story last week, you've come to the right post.

Its flagship franchise might be turning 14 this month, but SOE is working hard to ensure its business model isn't as ancient as its first MMO. The company revealed this week that it plans to overhaul the F2P models of both EverQuest and EverQuest II (yes, again). Specifically, SOE is eliminating some of the more draconian restrictions on quests, bag slots, shared bank space, and most importantly, race and class selection, which is welcomed more by newcomers than by highbies, who will still be saddled with gear and spell tier constraints.

Read on for a roundup of the rest of this week's top MMO stories.

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At the end of every week, we round up the best and most popular news stories, exclusive features, and insightful columns published on Massively and then present them all in one convenient place. If you missed a big MMO or WoW Insider story last week, you've come to the right post.

This week, CCP Games announced that cutthroat space sandbox EVE Online reached the 500,000 concurrent active subscription mark thanks to its relaunch in China, last December's Retribution update, and anticipation for shooter spin-off DUST 514. CCP teased vampire fans about World of Darkness' presence at upcoming EVE Fanfest. No sparkle jokes were made.

Read on for a run-down of the rest of this week's top MMO stories.

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At the end of every week, we round up the best and most popular news stories, exclusive features, and insightful columns published on Massively and then present them all in one convenient place. If you missed a big MMO or WoW Insider story last week, you've come to the right post.

This week, Massively's Final Fantasy XIV expert Eliot Lefebvre reported back on his experience at a recent Square-Enix press event. The game suffered a rocky launch in 2010 and is offline entirely right now while the developers revamp the game from the ground up. Eliot explored the updated crafting system, retooled zones, and character creation and combat, then he interviewed Yoshi-P in detail. He even snagged an exclusive look at Final Fantasy XI's upcoming expansion.

Want to investigate the refurbished FFXIV for yourself? The beta starts Monday.

Read on for a peek at the rest of this week's top MMO stories.

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At the end of every week, we round up the best and most popular news stories, exclusive features, and insightful columns published on Massively and then present them all in one convenient place. If you missed a big MMO or WoW Insider story last week, you've come to the right post.

Neverwinter's buzz crescendoed this week as reviews and opinion from the first beta weekend continued to pour in. Cryptic posted videos of the Guardian Fighter and the Mount Hotenow zone, while Massively's explorers delivered a formal impressions piece, a new video series, and a brand-new game column titled -- what else? -- Neverwinter Days.

Read on for a glimpse of the rest of this week's top MMO stories.

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At the end of every week, we round up the best and most popular news stories, exclusive features, and insightful columns published on Massively and then present them all in one convenient place. If you missed a big MMO or WoW Insider story last week, you've come to the right post.

Cryptic launched the first of Neverwinter's beta periods this weekend, ushering in the press plus anyone who ponied up $200 $60 for the highest-end founder's pack. The studio also unveiled the Devoted Cleric class and cinematic trailer. Massively was on hand to tour the upcoming Dungeons and Dragons dungeon-crawler; we delivered a hands-on with character creation, detailed videos of the classes and races available in the current testing phase, and a preview of the Cloak Tower dungeon. If your mind's still not made up, there's also our three-hour livestream of the festivities.

Read on for a look at the rest of this week's top MMO stories.

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