Bye. Hey, it's Justin with me. It's Bree. I'm stuffing my face with string cheese because that's my lunch today and you're listening to Massively OP. The OP podcast. Do you eat your string cheese like... from the top bottom or do you pull off? We don't buy spring cheese, but we buy fresh mozzarella balls. Does that count? Those are really good. What are you? Yeah. I don't know. No, those are great too. I like those.
really anything cheese is like my favorite food it's it's very bad for us but it's the best oh my first my first favorite is eggs so i'm having a great time right now It's 2025 and my favorite food is... Yeah, exactly. I'm starting to feel like the universe is attacking me personally and I really like it to stop. Just in case you guys wondered if Brie has main character syndrome. I like that.
Don't normally, but everything from Gamergate to now tells me that I am the target of this simulation and I don't like it. I don't want to be. What's the opposite of solipsism? Because that's what I'm aiming for here. Leave me alone. I'm going to write down in my little book, String Cheese Will Set Her Off. Okay, I'm going to put that up. Oh my gosh. No, you guys. This week has been disastrous. I am the only one standing right now. Everybody else is sick.
the house of uh the fall of the fall of the house of brie right one child barf right on my rug and my blanket in the middle of the night right in the middle of the night and then that's the best way to wake up i didn't realize she had done it so i stepped in it on my way out the door to come we're gonna have to raise this this podcast rating to an entirely new like
Not safe for work, not safe for ears. Yeah, it just kept getting worse. Like, literally. People already had to suffer, you had to suffer. Everyone is sick in so many ways. But I am still kicking. I am only covered with rashes right now. Because it's spring. I realize February doesn't seem like spring, but the trees say it's spring. So, you know, pollen is not my friend. I just want to go back to bed.
We're having our great melt. It's the first time in probably two months it's been over 30 degrees. There you go. Yeah, we had a 40 degree day yesterday and that was enough. Yeah. Oops. All right, well, as Bree continues to implode and the rest of us go on playing some games, we've got an awesome show lined up for you today. It was, I mean, I think we finally reached the point of...
The early year where we go from no news to all the news. A little too much. Yeah. Maybe a lot. We had such a hard time paring it down on today's podcast. We usually try to go for like four or five stories. And today we're like, no, we're just all the things. Usually I'm like throwing stuff in at the last minute. Like, Justin, can we do this? Justin, can we do this? And you're like, no, I want to get to the mailbag. This this week, he's got one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, eight.
story and i didn't even get to put anything else in no because he already filled the list so if i left any of these out i would have felt like a bad human being and oh and somebody would have attacked you for it like well dare you not talk about my thing Preservedly so. I try to give everybody a reason to hate me on a weekly basis.
Oh, we'll see what happens with you guys this week. All right. Well, you know what? We're going to jump over. I don't even want to know what Brie was playing. I don't even care. I didn't play anything. I actually tried to like.
plan some motro stuff but i didn't get very far because my freaking guild won't pick a server so i don't know where i'm going so i don't know that's the rp server yeah that's where i want to go but i've got some some you know pve centered i don't even role play anymore i just want people to group with and i get that i understand it's why people were on brandywine in arkenstone in the first place right
It's because they wanted people to group with. They wanted a big server. I totally get that. But also, I play Lotro for how soft and gentle and sweet our roleplaying community is. I just, I don't want to... log in and just play wow but token you know what i mean i want to log in and
Be part of the atmosphere. At least they let you transfer between the two servers for a while. That's true. But then I'll manage to lose my names there. I can't claim all my names. So that's risky. I'm probably going to divide my tunes. of them go to one and some go to the other so I can just play on both but I
I think I even mentioned this last week, Justin, I said I had everything meticulously organized. But if I have to divide it in half, now it's chaos. Like just trying to figure out who gets what. Are you divorcing yourself? That's what I feel like.
We're divorcing Landreval is what we're doing. Oh, my gosh. Well, we're going to talk about that in a couple minutes with all the server craziness that's going on over in Standing Stone Games. But let's work down the list of news. Let's see what we can do. Do you remember the Micro Machines guy?
who had that super fast talking voice on commercials. Oh my gosh, that's a throwback. It is. And he would just like, he had the motor mouth. I'm not going to do that. Sometimes I get accused of talking too fast.
it is so i will slow down as we speed up through the news we're gonna start with world of warcraft big patch this week patch uh update 11.1 is arriving here today on tuesday and that is undermined that is the first of two huge patches for this expansion and we should probably just expect those two major content additions and
addition to the smaller ones until we get to the next uh expansion but this one's pretty significant we've got a new zone which is undermined finally taking us to goblin town so if you like goblins you like explosions you like chaos and Anarchy. No straight lines whatsoever. You're going to love the steampunk. I don't know. I like goblins. I like goblins in the game. It's the one thing that makes me kind of regret not being horrid most of the time.
because goblins are awesome so i'm very excited with the update comes yeah not just a new zone there's a new dungeon new delve new raid Your delving companion can now tank. There's a new mount system, which is called Drive, which is that super fast Mario Kart style drifting. I don't know it's again it's chaotic I've watched videos of it it looks so much fun and so crazy so
So a lot of things happening in World of Warcraft and we'll probably be talking a lot about it next week. I'm very excited to get into 11.1. There's... new factions and things to do and grand theft auto style car jobs that you could just zip around and how far into the content do you think the car stuff is because that's that's what everybody 20 minutes Okay, so next week you're going to tell us all about it. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm probably not going to do anything else.
Because apparently I'm eight years old and that's all. Maybe it's gimmicky, but I don't care. Do it anyway. No, have fun. I don't know. Maybe that's a daily grind topic. What's the most fun temporary mount system that you've experienced? Sometimes people get really cranky over... having to be put into a new type of mount system. But sometimes it can be a lot of fun, especially if it frees up the developers to...
be creative because they're not worried about it going to be a legacy system and just kind of keep it contained to a portion. But then again, don't you kind of want it to be a legacy system? You probably should. Although I think if World of Warcraft suddenly became like Grand Theft...
auto everywhere it would just improve it demonstrably no i don't think so i would like to see new blizzard you're right i don't i don't usually like these kinds of things but this looks really cool so i don't i might make an exception right that i would i would hope that new blizzard actually
Plays it forward. Finds new things to do with cars. Cars on every street corner, people. I just love that you can customize it, including the horn. Because that's obviously the most important thing is how I'm honking at everybody on Road Rage. Precisely. Do you remember back in the PlayStation era, there's those games like Twisted Metal, which was like those car demolition, but you had weapons on them? I never had a PlayStation.
I know. That explains a lot. Well, as a kid, I mean, I didn't buy a PlayStation until PlayStation 3, and by then it was already so old. I bought it cheap on eBay. You were already so old. I know. I was not really a console person. I was a PC gamer even as a kid. Well, why don't we talk about another PC game? So we actually got a release date for early access for Dune Awakening. Oh my gosh. Not a small thing here. Yeah.
So not only did we get the release date, which is? May 20th. May 20th. You know, the early 2025. That's pushing it a little bit. It's not really nice to have fun time. I think they're just hiding a little delay here. Yeah. A little side eye for whatever. It's not that big a deal, but we see what you did there. Yeah.
Yeah, I think it's actually a really good time if they want to kind of ramp up a little bit more hype and give themselves like an early, early summer release. Yeah, I don't think they should. launch it early. I just wish they would have admitted they were launching it late. That's all. It will be a $50 buy-in. You're going to need to buy the box if you want to play it. However, there's a nice little asterisk there because you can actually check it out right now at least the character creator.
which I think is really cool. It's one of those things I wish every MMO that was upcoming would always do is just give you the character creator in advance so you could get a feel for the game. They get a little bit of publicity and then you get the time to just...
create your character get it ready to go and then when the launch happens you're not spending the first like two hours if you're us you know like fine-tuning every tiny little thing and and yet feeling that pressure of i want to play i want to play this way
You can have it kind of both ways. So it's really smart. I agree with you because because it's like it's like that shopping idea, right, where you're trying to get people to touch the item because if you get them to touch it, they're more likely to buy it. It's going to end up in their cart. If you can get people's fingers all over.
the character creator they're more likely to buy the thing at launch i mean it's it's amazing how much you can get a feel for the game just from the character creation screen sometimes how do you feel about the uh the may 20th date I mean, what else is coming that could really conflict with it? Because we don't have an ESO chapter this year. Yeah, there's no chapter coming.
Guild Wars 2's got stuff every three months, but I don't think that will conflict. Final Fantasy doesn't have a big expansion coming this year. Warcraft's expansion is not coming early. At best, it'll be end of year. so like there's there's a lot of space here unless gta 6 shows up early but i don't think that will happen either i think may is is a smart time for fun come to launch that's why i don't mind that they've you know taken more time here
And GTA 6 isn't coming to PC right away anyways, right? Right. And this, good news, this isn't coming to console right away. So consolers can't play it anyway. This is literally just for PC. And they're still, I mean, they're still talking about, they're making Dune 3 and they just, I heard them last week just start talking about Dune 4. So, I mean, we're in a full world. Wait, are you sure about that? I thought Elinu said he wasn't doing.
Somebody else is doing it? Yeah, they were talking about another director that they grabbed for it. Gotta milk that thing while you still got it, right? I haven't even seen any of it yet. I haven't either. it's just i will look at him like it's not that i don't care it's the two and a half hour time and i'm like uh ain't nobody got two and a half hours like i barely put aside 90 minutes to watch a movie some days but i guess i could just watch it
in chunks. That's really funny to me because Justin is like literally a resident movie buff. You literally run a blog about movies. I know, but I hate like movies over two hours. I just, I do not have the patience for it. Lord of the Rings. You know what? And I'm one of those people who go, I don't like the expanded editions. I don't. Never have. Never will. No. I think it's a lot of extra fluff. And we just...
I mean, we liked it because we wanted more of that world, but I can see why they cut out a lot of it. And it's it seems better on the shorter side. Wow. Way too long when you try to marathon all three extended editions together. But I'm OK. with it it needs to be it needs to be precisely as long as it needs to be that's funny but i'm with you though i don't like to i don't have the
patience and large blocks of time to sit down and just watch and binge an entire movie. I say that as if I don't sit there and binge like... multiple chunks of seasons of shows but which is even more so different i know i don't know why it feels different but it does it feels like less of an investment somehow
anyways you can check out dune awakenings character creator right now you go over to steam and download it if you don't want to do that you guys should check it out on wednesday because larry and mj are going to stream it y'all know larry and mj are like hardcore
funcom people larry's like a conan exiles expert and mj you know has literally been a secret world fan for a million years so they're gonna they're gonna critique it and drag MJ through the character creator piece by piece to see if they can break it.
and i'm gonna write a little something about it too as long as that's okay yes please i would love all of that i think there's yeah there's some genuine excitement over this so that's it's going to be a major event when dune awakening arrives and we'll see i know some people just completely
burned out on funcom i totally understand that trust me i've been there too i've been hurt i've been hurt by this company can they redeem themselves is this is this a good time is this a good franchise is the final product ready to go we'll see when that happens early access next month on the 20th
So, all right, let's talk a little bit about Standing Stones games. Lord of the Rings Online and DDO both had some news pieces this past week in regards to the 64-bit servers. Let's talk about LOTRO first, because we also got data. for that and it's happening very very soon in fact it's happening next week i am not prepared i log in you were the one who wrote us guides for how to prepare And I'm writing the guide instead of preparing. So you see how that works?
Ain't got time for that. No, I'm more or less ready. But it's still going to be crazy. So March 3rd is when VIP players can get in, grab their three names, and reserve them. March 4th is when you can officially start. transferring like start the character transfer from any uh 32-bit server except for i think the the new um angmar and mordor servers so all the 32-bit servers you can transfer your characters over get them ready to go on the fourth and then on the fifth
they're opening up the four new worlds, two in North America and two in Europe. And so March 5th is the big day there for Lord of the Rings Online. And I don't have much more to say about that. It's going to be nuts. very pleased. I think we did a piece this morning that they are refunding 100% of your housing writs, whether you decide to close up shop on your house early or you just wait for the transfer. Either way, you get a full refund of your house.
that you can buy a new one and i'm just i'm just talking about premium houses not standard ones they don't give you back yeah they don't yeah here's your gold i do care about my reds Oh yeah. Oh my gosh. And the ghost servers are back too. I was really excited to see that. Yeah, they're doing it kind of weird though. They're doing it like staggered. They're starting it on the 12th.
So March 12th, they're opening up a couple of the dark worlds or at least one of them. And then like every few days or every week for a little while afterwards, they're opening up some more of them. So they didn't want to like throw the door wide open on all of them. For when it breaks. I mean.
If it breaks. If, if. Yeah, if. I love you, SSG. I hope it doesn't break. I especially hope it doesn't break because we've got characters. A bunch of people in my guild have characters coming from there, so. Come on, Silverload. Everybody's nervous. Everybody's like that bundle of excitement and nervousness and it's mixing together. And so you see it in world chat, just as palpable. Man, I hope everything's going to be good. I can't wait. Also, I'm. terrified, but I can't wait.
Like, okay. This is fair. Because we have seen Standing Stone games quit itself in the past, and we have also seen it go, hey, we're updating to a new database. Should be fine. The game is down for like the next two weeks. Right. They tried.
they try their darndest like i don't feel like it's you know incompetence i don't feel like it's a lack of caring it's just this is an old game and there's old tech and there's not enough money behind like we all know crossing fingers that it actually goes well oh gosh It's a big moment here for Lotro. And DDO is not far behind. In fact, DDO released its producer letter slash roadmap for 2025 this past week. A little late. I think it's one of the last roadmaps we might get.
this year, although we do see some trickling in. We got a couple more, yes. Didn't you write Istaria this morning? Istaria! We've got that one and World War II online. That's a name I haven't heard in a long time. They keep coming up with road masks.
gonna keep covered i'm like is that the game with the the dragon player yep yep anyways we're talking ddo so ddo released their roadmap that the two big takeaways here are they're doing an expansion in the third quarter and that's going to they're going back to Ravenloft for that but in the second quarter which is coming up relatively soon
they're also going to be releasing 64-bit servers. So I think that was pretty much assumed. A lot of people thought, well... Yeah, I can't imagine why they wouldn't. Lothro's doing it and you have this new tech and this is kind of the direction you're taking your whole studio in. Why wouldn't she do it for DDO? And Cormier went so well that why would she not do that? Well, I mean, the first day was horrible. It does exist, yes. It did fix it on the second day, but still. Yeah, we'll see.
i think it was it was one of our um our tipsters crimson who pointed out to me that a lot of this is probably being done and we might see it from other games too that are still running you know older hardware like that ahead of some of the microsoft changes that are upcoming in the next couple of years so this is honestly a good thing it's ssg getting out in front of you know deprecation of some of their hardware so all right i'll take it i feel like this is only a good thing for yeah
looking at the long term, trying to make sure these games are in a good place to go another decade or two or ten or whatever it is. I don't care. As long as it's a while. We don't have an exact date, by the way, for DDO's new servers. I don't think they even talked about how many of them they're doing. Nope. I would guess like just one U S one EU and just slam everybody down on those two because a DDO does not have quite the population. Okay. It really does need it, but we'll see. We'll see.
So there you go. Standing Stone Games has its hands really full. We didn't even talk about how Lotro and DDO both have a big update coming relatively soon. too so just you know why not just throw that on your plate there ssg just all the things all at once See if your heads explode. I feel so bad for the devs right now and the engineers. Yeah, they're not going to get any sleep for a couple of weeks. Yeah, easily.
Sorry. All right. What's going on over there in Lost Ark Land? I hear we might be getting a new class. Yes, it's coming this week. Well, I mean, it's new in quotation marks because obviously it already exists in Korea. Like most things in Lost Ark, it's already out technically. So we knew it was coming. We didn't have a date until literally last week. And now we know it is literally coming Wednesday. What is that? The 26th. So it is almost here. And she's like, um.
I don't know, like a shape changer? She's got like... A critter. I think one is a bear and one is a fox. Or no, it's a nine-tailed fox specifically. Nine-tails. Yes. She can shapeshift into either one of those. So, yeah, I think it's going to be really... Honestly, I'm really just glad Lost Ark is getting anything. It seems like it's gotten very quiet comparatively over the last year compared to the couple of years before that.
But now we're just getting free Korea content ported over, which I guess that's what people expect anyway. I am disappointed because I'm reading this article that Elliot wrote and he listed some other possibilities that she could be trans. And giraffe is not one of them. He might have been trolling a little bit there. Yeah. Ah, giraffe would be so cool.
I would totally do a shape-shifting giraffe, yeah. But you know, Ninetale Fox is not bad. No, honestly, I really like that vibe. So it's cute. She's going to be fun. The other big thing that happened was the clawback of the relic books.
thing I don't know if you saw that it doesn't seem like anybody cares I saw this and I was like oh my gosh this is like insane to me that you would do this and nobody's cricket absolute crickets which again is a little worrisome from lost ark but i guess what happened was they the devs accidentally let this thing drop too much and when they realized it was happening instead of going oops our bad oh well you know bank
error in your favor they were like actually we're gonna claw them back we're gonna take back the extras and if you already used it or sold it we're gonna take back something worth you know roughly in value as the ones you got like that is the most insane thing i have ever heard they're like well you know it's
It's for the economy. I don't care about the economy that much. Come on. It's been happening since October. So it's not like it was just like a couple of drops last week. It's been months. I don't know. This sounds absolutely mind boggling to me. Am I crazy? Yes, but not for that reason. Okay. You're on point.
It reminded me of when devs put out a character that's super overpowered and then they nerf it really hard to where no one wants to play it instead of trying to find a different way to balance it and balance other characters around it.
that's what this is it's the economy version of that instead of finding some sort of sync for these items or like an exchange program like we'll give you a free cosmetic if you turn in your extras no they didn't do that they just took them whatever amazon that just doesn't seem like a good way to like make your player base happy i don't get it but i guess they don't care all right so if you wanted to give your game a name That's just reeked of the 90s. Yes, you could go extreme.
Extreme, you know, just with the X at the beginning. That would be a good one. But another good one would be to work the word in Neo. Oh, my gosh. Oh, and that's what's happening here with Blade and Soul Neo. And I looked at this. I'm like, oh, we've got it. new game launching and my next question was what is this i don't think i have actually actually written any articles on blade and soul neo and i so i haven't read any of them and so i started reading them i'm going i have
I still do not have any idea what Blade & Soul Neo is, other than NCSoft saying this is a reimagining of the classic game, which does not answer any questions. No. no i went to that press thing i guess it was like a month ago it's been a while at this point because i had the same question like what the f is this and the best way i can describe it is it's blade and soul classic
plus like it's what you wanted out of wow classic plus or wow classic plus plus you know before we actually had that right it's technically a do-over for the game it starts kind of from the beginning but not totally from the beginning a lot of stuff is already in place and then they're like
adding a bunch of things like quality of life stuff that definitely does not exist in the regular version of the game. So they're evolving it in a different direction. And then, yeah, then they're retaining the right to evolve it, like you said. add whatever they want completely deviate from the original game so it's not really classic it is neo
All right, I have another question from the MassL EOP outlet here. Is this replacing Blade & Soul? Is Blade & Soul going away? It is not going away. Blade & Soul is still being developed in Korea and here. American devs were very, very explicit on this, that they are continuing to develop regular flavor Blade & Soul in its own direction. And that there's some parity, right? There's between Korea and the U.S. or the Western version, the global version. Which means it will get shut down.
down in about a month you know why it's when the developers are saying that the loudest and you just go I don't actually think it is, but I could be wrong. I will say that when Neo launched in Korea last fall, Blade and Soul as a franchise got a huge bump out of it for NCSoft's bottom line. Now that they're kind of tied together, it's really hard to see how one is doing versus the other. But I can tell you that Blade and Soul has been on a long downward slant for years and years and years now.
updates were drying up and we were really concerned this really bounced it back up so i'm kind of hoping that it will be like like a wow situation where one kind of feeds the other that some people were just going to play both which is probably a good thing for you know, from original flavor, Blade & Soul. Now, if they have this, they have Blade & Soul, Blade & Soul Neo. They also have the mobile version. Yeah, I don't think... Are they working on Blade & Soul 2? As well, aren't they?
Are they working on Blade and Soul 2? No, they're working on Ion 2. I thought there was a Blade and Soul 2. I don't remember if they're working on a Blade and Soul 2. Obviously, I'm not staying on the cutting edge of this, but it just seemed like this is becoming a bless kind of situation. so many versions. I need a flow chart.
Bless is confusing because they were almost doing that on purpose. They were just throwing everything out to see what would stick to make something of this franchise. Whereas this is just what NCSoft does. Like NCSoft has like, you know, the lineage games.
six or seven of those and they're not even all developed by ncsoft so it does get a little confusing and if you're trying to put them together in like a chronology good luck because i don't even know what it is you know we yes we did report on blade and soul 2 but it might have been this i mean the last Yeah, see, that's why I'm not 100% sure that it wasn't just like an early name. Sure.
I don't, I'm not sure. In any case. They haven't been talking about it in their investor calls, if that tells you anything. So either it's not coming here, so they're not really talking about it, or it's far off, or it's morphed into something else, or it's back burner behind ION2. you i don't know it could also have been one of the canceled games and ncsoft had to cancel a ton of stuff last year so i'm not sure i don't think we mentioned this so uh blade and soul neo launching
Today, the 25th. The 25th, yes. So you want to get on the ground floor of this game, kind of experience a... go back a bit in time, but see, you know, maybe a new, better version of late in soul or just a different journey than you've taken in the past. You have that ability to do that right now. Right.
And it is free to play. We should point that out so everybody can do it. I don't think it's on Steam right away. I think it's on NCSoft's proprietary launcher. I've forgotten what it's called. That makes it the best. Purple. It's called Purple. Purple.
I don't know why it's called purple, but it is. Okay. So there you go. I know there's like pre-order stuff you can pick up if you really want the cosmetics and all the perks and stuff, but otherwise it's free to play. So you're good to go. All right.
All right, Blade and Soul Neo. Good luck. We'll see how you do on the other side. All right. As one game comes, the Lion King taught us the circle of life means another game must depart. And we're going to talk a little bit about Legends of Aria Classic. aria classic aria uh sorry that was my aria uh you're not the only person who knows music stuff okay
So Legendaria Classic is sunsetting. Again. Yeah, again. And how many different... I know that we had like two versions of this game at one point. Yeah. Now all of them. going away where was this the last standing or is there still one out there so technically there are some player run versions of it that are still going which is actually good good sign because that's kind of how they designed it too right that like i don't mean like illicit
versions that they're not like illegal emulators this is literally designed so that players could buy the game and then host their own servers and then change the rules that was how it was supposed to work this is literally shards online i mean that was like the whole the whole vibe right when they when they back
We kickstarted this a million years ago. So there are a couple of them. In fact, I found Shards of Britannia even had a statement on all of this and said that they are definitely still developing and they're not affected by the sunset. So if you do want to play it and you still... own it you can either make your own server or join one of the existing player run ones that has managed to weather all of this chaos i think you're probably safe on sob but yeah justin this whole
this whole drama it's like consumed as it's when did they kickstart did i write that down 2014 so 11 years of drama from shards Yeah, including a name change, multiple versions, a lot of community people supporting it, but also a lot of controversy and people fleeing it. It just, yeah, it was a title that you couldn't.
couldn't tear your eyes away like it was a horrible road you know road wreck and you're just like oh my goodness it didn't have to be that's the wild part it was fun it was actually cute and it was a good idea It was kind of a really good idea for it to develop like a Neverwinter Nights sort of.
design where people could take it and run with it and develop it and as you said at least it's ensuring that some version of the game is going to endure but the official versions are going to be gone as of march 18th is when the legends aria classic classic is gone right because the originally like they closed down I'm trying to remember exactly the chronology when they got bought out when the studio name is escaping me it'll come to me
i forgot the name of the studio citadel citadel was like sold out to this nft company do you guys remember this this was a part of the drama and then they were gonna reinvent the game they i don't know if they closed down the official server i think they might have like taken it and like they were calling it legacy or classic or something and they kept it going but it was like you pretty much needed like a to know the discord existed to even find this place
and while they were developing this new version that was going to have nfts and it was going to be you know our super hardcore uo style blah blah blah well anyway that didn't happen they tried to put out their nfts they collapsed there was nobody playing that was It never got finished. And then they went belly up last year. And like, I don't know, like a couple of weeks after that, they basically said they were done. Citadel was back and was like, yeah, we're relaunching.
We're relaunching the game as Legends of Aria Classic, the original. And I was like, okay. This was what, last spring? So what's actually sunsetting is technically that version. That came out on Steam. It was kind of like, you know.
pretty decent sized story we probably even talked about it here because we were so glad that they was getting another lease on life right but i get the impression that they just did not have enough people playing to continue funding continued development that's just all there was to it that's pretty much
You know, what they were saying on Patreon when they were talking about shutting it down. They just aren't making the money to actually do it. So they're dissolving the company, which sucks. Like, I mean, but at the same time, it's not completely gone because of those player servers. Could be worse. Just giving you guys a heads up. It's not the complete final chapter of this game, but it does seem like it's...
toward the end of the book. We might not be talking too much about Legends Aria Classic or Legends Aria at all, but you know what? Stranger things have happened.
And, okay, there you go. We'll close things out with another patch that we want to talk about. Project Gorgon came out with a long-awaited patch, and we didn't even know if this was really going to... happen in a timely fashion because of sandra powers passing away last month but it did and now we have a new patch that not only adds a brand new area to the game for a high level area for people
to explore vidaria but also you can become a vampire because of course you can it's project gorgon what other skills do you not have at this point That's what I said in that post. Vampirism is one of the most normal things Project Gorgon has ever added because most of their skills are kind of crazy. They have everything from mushroom studies to...
I want to know if you can combine them so that you could be a cow and be a vampire cow. I saw people on Reddit saying they wanted to be a vampire butterfly.
I don't know if you can do that. Murder fly. And I can't find out. I'm going to have to trawl the... uh discord to see what people have actually come up with my character is not anywhere near capable of this level it's like level 90 stuff this so you need like skill levels pretty high up to actually even get to this zone and do the conversion
So I'm not going to see it anytime soon. So I need to rely on Heidi's to actually tell us how it actually works. Because you guys know their patch notes do not spoil things that much. They're always very vague. You guys are those people who... like mmos tell us too much stuff i want the wonder back this is the game you want
because they don't want you to explore and discover and collaborate it's a little annoying sometimes when you're trying to figure out how to do the thing and no one will put up information on it because you have to figure it out yourself like no i just want to do the thing i'm done Yeah. Yeah. Vampires. That's awesome. So.
It's still on my back burner. It's one of those games. I mean, I really do before the end of the year, I really do want to get back into Project Gorgon and give it a really solid shot. But I'm happy to see. I don't know. This just makes me happy. I think the game, the community, they took such a hard blow this past month that this seems like it gives them a little bit of a win. Not comparable, but you know, it's up. I know. Yeah. Yeah.
So it's a cool, and it's a cool update. How many games outside of maybe Elder Scrolls Online let you become a vampire? Can you go around and bite other players? I want to know. Can I just become, unleash my inner Edward?
Just get out there and it wouldn't surprise me if you can do that like um you know like with permission like consensual because that's the kind of thing that they would build in it really is but not like a flock of vampires just like swarming on a poor guy draining their blood where's my good points going
ah the griefing potential would be glorious no no there's no griefing and there's not even really pvp right it's not that kind of game all right that's all the news we had we actually have time for mailbag look we did it all right
First one up is from MinimalistWay who says, your recent post about a tale in the desert reminded me of the idea of non-combat PvP. My PvP experience in some games means getting killed a lot and fast with not even understanding why it happened or who did it. One-shot kills are not- fun for the victim. I don't mind competition, but it doesn't have to be combat. So what other kinds of PvP can MMOs offer?
But it is. I mean, that's true. You're beating people to the best deals. You're trying to scope out what things are worth. You're hedging the market.
being an evil capitalist whatever you're doing that is pvp even just you know sitting there putting in penny bids you know trying to overbid or underbid people depending on what you're up to that's that's econ pvp it's not you know fisticuffs in the streets but it is competitive right it's just not scored in a you know leaderboard kind of way your scoring is how much money you have compared to everybody else in a video game which is really sad when i say that out loud
Sorry. You just devoted an entire lifetime to talking about video games, so let's not get too pensive about that right now. Yeah, okay. What about races and stuff? Yeah, races are a really good example. Just for fun, let's speed around, let's see who can be first. I know Competitive Crafting, or I'm sorry, Gathering, they had that in Lotro.
Well, even if it's not scored like Lotros, like any game that doesn't have, you know, multi-party, like old school WoW. Does WoW even do that anymore? I have no idea. I haven't played WoW in years. You know, like whoever gets to the node first gets it. Is it still like that? Okay, so there you go. But that doesn't work in Guild Wars 2 because everybody can have it. Right, but in retail while everybody gets it. Lots of old games though.
yeah and so that's really pvp it's getting there first or figuring out how to train mobs onto people or you know be kind of sneaky about it so yeah instead of a win-win situation it's a win-lose you know somebody somebody comes out on top somebody doesn't and that's just how that is uh you know i think of like and bigger scales of
guilds versus guilds or communities versus communities um back in the day like the the opening of the gates of ancrage and and wow oh yeah where you had the factions you know that that was our first real experiment like how can we pit the factions against each other that's more than just world pvp and it was an interesting experiment i don't know if it really
you know like both sides eventually would win but you know like it's still fostered a bit of that competitive atmosphere um i i think and i'm trying to think of specific examples but i know that there have been mmos where like two groups could go into a dungeon and like speed run it to see who gets oh yeah to end um you might even say like i'm gonna do that i could have sworn that was a wild star thing
I always like the idea of that. Although I think in practice, it's, it doesn't really pan out as usually. Yeah. It's just such a lopsided competition because if you have people just vastly overskilled, it's not even, it's like me, me.
trying to you know out sprint an olympic runner yeah okay so no sprinting involved what about costume contests do those count as pvp i would not say that counts as pvp oh really okay so why not because it's extremely subjective and a pvp should have a hard objective uh win loss This is just, you know, people. I mean, yeah, if you got judges, I guess that's they can give you scoring. And if they really want to have like.
hard criteria for what makes up something successful but usually it's just people going ah that kind of tickles my aesthetic fancies a whole bunch of city of heroes people just got really mad at you right now yes i knew i would have said somebody today told you to wait haters
if you view it as pvp i'm not gonna like i'm not gonna grind my teeth and not sleep tonight i'll be okay okay what else i had one good one and you just and then i interrupted you and now it's out of your head forever you talk for a bit i'll think of it wait no i can't think of one
just said one um not non-combative pb oh yeah yeah yeah um card games a lot of a lot of uh do include like head-to-head hearthstone you know triple triad you know those kind of card games where yeah you can play other people it's not necessarily combat but it's definitely a game and you're doing you know, win-loss kind of thing. And so you could expand that to any sort of multiplayer mini game.
where you know as you as you said like you know not just racing but think of back like free realms like how many of those mini games where they would throw a whole bunch of people in and you know someone you know first second third place there you go
so yeah i mean there's there's there's a bunch there's a bunch that are um instead of just like racing mounts and stuff what about like racing to content i know that sounds kind of crazy but like i'm thinking of like old school everquest especially or like plane jumping and trying to get to the camp first and trying to you know find the named mobs so you could take them down before somebody else could that you know you could never really attack each other but
There was all kinds of competition going on there. Or the whole world first scene and raiding guilds and stuff like that. Yeah. Obviously, I've been world first many times. I can speak from great experience. World last, maybe. I don't know. But yeah, that's a pretty big one, too. Totally. Yeah, I don't know. There's probably more examples. So it does seem like there's a lot more competition in MMOs than just butting heads together. And that's kind of cool.
I'm not necessarily a competitive player. There's a lot of tension and stress that comes with it. But I don't mind as long as the stakes aren't super high. I play Marvel Snap. every day i don't mind if i lose i like to win and i i get that sense of satisfaction when i do but there's not a lot that i could lose from a game so i'm not stressing about it too much i can just kind of sit back and play and and enjoy it but if i'm worried like
I'm going to get into a PVP situation. I'm going to be corpse looted. No, thank you. Oh, no, that's like, yeah. That just kept me away from EVE Online and other titles like that. That's just not fun. If that makes you happy, great. But no. Yeah, it requires such a special kind of game and a special kind of amount of time to devote to that game to make me even consider doing that again.
Yeah, I feel like those days are probably in my past too. I don't know though, Justin. Sometimes I'd like to say I'm really chill here, but I get really into economy. The auction hall is my weapon, and I really like it. But I'm not losing sleep over it, and I'm definitely not getting up early to underbid stuff. You know what I mean? I have limits, and I'm very lazy. As long as I'm making enough money to like support whatever weird habits I have in that game and I'm usually okay. I'm not gonna.
go nuts over it maybe a long time ago i would have but not anymore people get really protective over like certain recipes or certain angles on the The economy, like, they found an inn and they just do not want anybody else to discover, like, that's their territory and they have a monopoly on it. Ain't nobody got time for that.
Some people do. They just don't have other things. All right. What else do we have? You got another one? Okay. How about this one from Tom says, Hi, Justin and Bree. What are your MMO comforts? Be they activities, music, cosmetics, locations, what have you.
common comfort for me is turning my brain off by engaging in a mindless grind while listening to and or watching something on my second monitor. Once in a while, that second monitor media happens to be one of the soundtracks for the original Guild Wars. They're nostalgic and beautiful. Thanks for the podcast. Wishing you well. I'm reading all of the lovely things he's saying because it's making me happy and I need that right now.
Tom is Tom is a veteran. I don't know if y'all know this, but Tom has been been writing to us and correcting our any typos for at least 15 years now. So I love you, Tom. You're awesome. Okay. What are our comforts? Comfort activities. Yeah, there's a few when I really want to disconnect. And I think he just hit on one of them, just farming. I love a good farm. And sometimes just killing stuff, finding a good camp.
And just kind of doing the endless loop. You know, maybe it's like completing a Slayer deed for Lotro. Or just, you know, like trying to get some money lucratively. But also like a farm where... right now in lord in world of warcraft i'm working on my engineering skill which means i have to work on my mining skill and going through all the old expansions and so i set up like a pattern i'm just flying around zones endlessly looking for that you know little icon that pops
up saying go go go get the node and yeah it's that's actually it's a wonderful super chill relaxing way to kind of end the day and i've been doing it for the past couple days and yeah again i'll listen to an audiobook or a podcast or a youtube video or some music or something on the side so i'm not
completely atrophying my brain. But it definitely... Just a little. Yeah, just a little. But it doesn't feel like I have to give my full, full, undivided attention to solving whatever's happening on screen. I'm just brain shut off mode. The other thing that I really... do enjoy is if you know i got the time just going kicking back at my house my virtual house and going like i have i save up some you know i get some
decor and i keep that in my inventory and every once in a while i just go okay today's the day i'm just going to go back to my house and tinker around with stuff try some new things whatever and yeah that's that can be super relaxing and talking with my guild of course is always uh a nice way to kind of chat communication and my mmos what is
grunting what about you when you said farming i was like yeah farming and then you were like no not that farming yeah i mean with those that kind of farming can be that's the first thing that popped into my head and it has to be the right game but like i love
of lotro farming i i find the farming system in that game to be very like i don't know i was gonna say musical but that's not the right word but like there's like a repetitiveness to the way the keys move while you're farming and the buttons you push and the order and how long it takes. And I get into this flow with it. And it's really easy, like Tom said, to watch something else or listen to something else. Flow, that's a good term, yeah. Yeah, while you're doing it.
i don't know that i find that very comforting and profitable which is extra fun you can always do something with the stuff you're farming up um mapping is an obvious one for me although i i admit it's not quite flow it's more choppy especially when I'm like, I can't find that stupid underwater cabin. Where do I find it? I have to look it up, and it can create, like, choppiness to it. But I find that very, I don't know, enjoyable in Delaware Shumes specifically. Hopping bubble wrap.
No, I mean, that's how I look at mapping. Like the whole thing is untouched at the beginning and then I'm popping all the little nodes, points of interest, whatever I need to do until finally the entire thing's done and we can move on. it is it is soothing and especially in modern guild wars 2 i think it works because i feel like it's af
I don't mean AFK-able in that you can do it AFK. I mean, like, if I am suddenly interrupted by, you know, children meltdown, I can just hop on my sky scale, float up, and just AFK for a second. You know what I mean? I'm not going to get myself killed. I don't really have to log out in between whatever it is I'm doing. I can usually just move away and not get owned. That matters a lot to me in how enjoyable I find an activity.
like that i was not able to do this on pvp servers and wow for example that's not a good idea like ever um what else um shopping oh that's gonna sound really funny but like like in star wars or back even in uo i did this all the time i would i would come up with like loops in uo before they added that like the bizarre that you could search there were like loops i would have rune books of like okay these are all the good
shops I'm going to just go one by one all the cool shops on this the server see if they've got anything new and literally just going around window shopping and in Star Wars you can kind of do that too I have a list of stuff I'm always looking for and I'll go to the bazaar and I'll type it all in and see if anybody's got anything and if so you know you bookmark it
save the waypoints and then you just kind of flit around the galaxy and go to these places and you stumble into houses and you go to cities and it kind of gives you this random roadmap for places to go that might have something you want.
And along the way, you're like just touring what other people have built. And I find that really like I could just do that for hours. I guess it really only works if you have a big old bankroll to actually pay for it. Otherwise, you're just window shopping again.
that i find that really fun and maybe even more enjoyable than running my own shop you know i i love to do that and it is definitely a pattern when i log in i have a whole system set up where I have to check this and I have to flip my vendors and I have to flip my factories and I have to craft new things and I have to start them but that's not really as enjoyable as just screwing around like just looking just visiting just touring that's way more
fun um let's see playing with character creators but only some character creators like I'm thinking City of Heroes. I literally could just log into that and make characters and not even play them. Just over and over and over, making costumes. Not necessarily playing them, but maybe I'll use them later. Sometimes I like to make a list of things to do.
projects i want to accomplish in a game and sometimes just ordering that is it's very fair it calms like there's it kind of calms myself down on the inside because i know i can't do it all at once, but at least I can see the shape of it and organize the steps that it takes to get there. And sometimes just having that, it's like, oh, I've spent the evening just kind of organizing my future plans. That's kind of nice. I'm going to make a spreadsheet.
maven out of you yet sir well i don't know if i'll ever get to the level you're at someday it'll happen i like that question though it's a great question i think i think way too many people still think of mmos is like i don't know like a challenge instead of like an enjoyment yeah and i i tend to like the content that isn't anymore and i it's definitely changed over time oh i got one like yeah it's fun to just like raffle stomp over low level stuff Sometimes.
like really just flex how powerful you are and just run like if you if you can down tune the difficulty of a dungeon or instance or something and just go yeah i just want to storm it you know whether it's you know maybe farming it for transmog or something like that or just to feel like you know you guys were such a challenge back in the days but guess who's back i am back and i'm just gonna walk all over your face yeah that can be there's no challenge right there's absolutely no
challenge to doing that sort of thing but it's still kind of fun because you feel like you flipped god mode and you can just you know go for a little while so yeah sometimes i like that I have I have to take it back. I said when I was when I was younger, I was much more into the, you know, the high achievement stuff. But you know what?
I played UO back in the days of literally logging in and doing nothing but bank sitting. Like, literally, it's just people watching. That's the game that spawned the term bank sitting, where you literally just hang out at the bank and see what happens.
you know just everybody is at the bank right everybody's coming in and gating in and out and there's thieving going on and people are selling stuff and guilds are recruiting and like just just standing there being in the throng is like amazing and i know i enjoyed that like even now i kind of want to log in and see what's going on in lunar right now on my server i wonder who's still playing i wonder what's you know what i mean that's just being in the game
can be comforting and not having like expectations on what you do there. Okay. I don't know. Maybe I'm weird. Deep down, you know. And you guys might know out there too, and these are great questions, and maybe you're listening to this and thinking, ah, I have a take on that. Yeah, give it to us in the comments. We'd love to hear your thoughts on comfort activities or non-combat PvP activities.
some of these other stories we've talked about today. The comments are your playground. Just play nice with others and talk with everybody about... all these things going on in MMOs. There's so much going on right now. And hopefully 2025 keeps up the, the excitement, the interesting part of it. And we didn't even mention stars reach.
That's happening tomorrow too. Yeah. I think we'll probably be talking about that next week. We're going to see how it goes. Oh my gosh. I'm so nervous. It's not even me and I'm still nervous. I know. Well... It's a lot. There's a lot. She's not wrong that there's a lot happening right now. May you live in interesting times. And yes, we certainly do. Here at the Massively OP Podcast, we thank you for listening. We want to encourage you to check out our Patreon program. Follow us on social media.
Send us in some podcast emails. You can check out the show notes for pretty much. most of that. And of course, keep reading our site for all the latest and greatest MMO news, columns, opinions, streams, and everything else that keeps Bree up and running. Obviously not string cheese. Up at night is what she was going to say. It's both. It's both. All right. I'm going to go finish my last thing of string cheese. You guys have a great week and I'll talk to you again soon. Later, everybody.