you I have been to the depths of Blackrock Mountain. I have been to the heights of Mount Hyjal. And not one hour ago, Bree, I was at Salvation Army, and I saw it there. Warcraft, the Axe of Duotan. And I bought it. Wait. Really? Yeah. Yeah. We were just at Salvation Army and we walked right in. You know, they do all these displays and sometimes they put the really nice stuff. And there was in box the Axe of Durotan from the Warcraft movie.
$4.99. And I'm like, yes, please. And my wife went, question mark, question mark. Why are you buying a children's toy? I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. See, Warcraft. I have to own it now. She's like, what are you going to do with that? I'm going to put it on a shelf. I don't know. Lord it over my youngest, who will be jealous that I have a better axe than he has. Because I have the axe of Durotan!
I think it's so dumb I would have bought it too and I don't even play anymore. I'm still kicking myself the day I walked out of Goodwill and I did not buy game developer Barbie. and i swear that's the thing and i saw it and i i sent you a picture of it this sounds familiar and you said did you not buy it i'm like no and i should have game developer barbie i love it yeah
That's really niche. Like what made them think that was something people would buy? You know what I mean? I don't know. I don't know. It's yeah. There you go. Anyways, welcome back to the Massively OP Podcast, a podcast in which you go thrift shopping with Justin and Brie. And yeah, you'll want to be over on my side of the aisle. Brie is contagious or something. I'm going to try not to cough on you guys. Yeah. She's suffering. My kids got me sick again.
So she will suffer with us. This better be the last time because this is their last week of school and they're running out of opportunities to get me sick again. So I'm safe for like three months. Oh, no. I'm going to have them go to the playground and lick all the things. Oh, no. Please, please stop licking things.
Well, as we were kind of foretelling last week, this past week's been just kind of all sorts of nuts. We, of course, covered some of the big news that was going to happen last time, but there's still more news to talk about. There's an overflow. I have plenty of MMO news to discuss on the podcast today, including Summer Game Fest, which I think Bree was stalking the YouTube as it was going on the stream. And I was out.
taking my kids to taekwondo and i'm like having way more fun yeah i'll catch up with elliot and chris were with me it was fun there you go it actually wasn't that bad a show I feel like there was actually kind of a lot of MMO-ish news, and even a couple of actual MMOs. I'm trying to compare it to like past events where it was like there was nothing. It was like, okay, well, there's a couple of multiplayer things that no one cares about. Our audience doesn't care about.
And last year, of course, it was completely dominated by New Worlds, the Aeternum stuff, right? That was like a complete, it just completely took over the narrative. All those other games might as well have not shown up as far as MMORPG players were concerned. And this year, no, it was kind of like it was a lot. I was actually at one point kind of like, OK, there's like three games. They just I'm trying to find trailers and this is actually good stuff. People are going to like it. So.
All right. Well, hold on to your horses. I will. We'll get there. We'll get there. But yeah, I'm glad. I'm glad that wasn't a waste of your time because that is really disappointing when you go through those shows. Yeah. They're like, oh, yeah, we're going to give out, you know, best online service award to, you know, and that the categories are just so sad. Fortnite. Yeah. They don't do awards at this one or if they do, it wasn't at this keynote anyway. Right.
Well, what did you get time to play this past week between all your drugging and your comas and whatever else you're into? I actually played paleo, which is not going to surprise anybody. That is where I am living right now. But I actually made some serious progress on stuff I was working on.
Got a Shep, finally. It has taken me this whole freaking time. You got a what? It's called a Shep. S-H-E-P-P. It's like this part of the main quest line where you have to like... decide who's going to be like your mentor kind of but you have to work them up to level four friendship first and that has taken me a while to get somebody i wanted up to level four i really wanted
Einar, who is the robot fisherman in all of the trailers. You know Einar. He's so freaking cute. I love him so much. So it took me a really long time to get him to four. And finally I did. So now he is my ship. And I could finally finish off that. But the other reason it's kind of like a meme is because...
Because if you let it sit in your quest log for a long time, right? Every time you finish a quest, that's the one that pops up and takes its place. And you have to keep taking it out. I wonder if the game does do that, doesn't it? It's really annoying. So that's been like at the time. of my list for like a month while I tried to get to Einar and make him like me so we're bros now we have we share oneness so that's really fun and I also finished
I finished my romance, not completely finished, but I got my romance pin from Hassian, who is the character. You can, like I've said before, you can romance like anybody. You can romance everybody, I think. But I'm just one at a time. I can't handle more than that. Grumpy hunter dude. Grumpy hunter dude, yes. And his really cute dog. I mean, really, it's the dog. But you can't romance the dog because that would be weird.
Anyway, I finally made it through his quest line and fixed his mommy issues. Literally, his mommy's issues. I have a feeling that plot isn't over with. I have a feeling I know what happened to his mama. But anyway, we'll get back to that. fun so i i'm actually kind of impressed i really i don't know we're not talking like mass effect levels of romance but it is it's sweet it's endearing it's perfect for a cozy game What else? Oh, I made it to Elderwood.
That was the actually important thing. Not the friendship and the romance stuff. No, I finally made it through the main quest line that takes you into Elderwood, and I spent a lot of Saturday just kind of exploring it. I haven't actually gone very far into the questing. Honestly, I got to the point where I realized I could finally get palium, the ore, from that zone. I have never found palium in Bihari Bay. I have looked. I have waited for people to say, hey, there's some in, you know, B6.
or whatever because people will shout that out i've never been able to find it and i walked into elderwood and it's like there's paleom freaking everywhere and i'm like yes so you need paleom to actually make your exquisite level crafting tools so i didn't have them Now I finally have like half of them and there's a couple more skills I still need to do. It makes things go so much faster. Like it really is a big deal. Like the farming stuff, the mining is faster. It's just...
Oh, I'm so glad I have that. So it's made gathering much more enjoyable. So I actually spent a ton of time just like running around, like exploring, mapping, doing everything. Obviously I still need to work out my bug.
catching bugging bug what is it called whatever it's called and my um uh fishing those are the two that are really behind oh cooking is really behind too i really don't like the cooking in this game it is very uh minigame-ish it's minigame-ish you can't not pay attention but you also really need the food and you need it to be good if you're going to invest the time you want to invest the attention
It's just kind of a nuisance. I find it nuisance gameplay. I'm going to even talk about this in the Daily Grind coming up because I'm borrowing a phrase that Tyler used. He called it attention tax. And I was like, yes, I was Leo DiCaprio in that meme, like pointing like, yes, that's that thing. When there's like no real value in doing this, but it captures your attention and you can't look away. it's not in a fun way. And that's, that's what that is.
But anyway, yeah, I'm still having really fun, a lot of fun in there. And I am a little like sad because now that I can see the map, like all of the map of Elderwood, which is the new expansion they just launched a month or two ago, whatever it was.
Like that's like the end. You know what I mean? That's like the finite cap on like my experiences will end when I finish this zone and finish my skills and that makes me kind of sad. I know it's sandboxy and I can, you know, keep doing the daily stuff and doing the gardening. and doing the housing stuff forever, but I feel like this game needs content faster, and I kind of understand why people were nervous, why they were so grumpy that Elderwood took like a year or so to even come out.
So I'm a little nervous about that. I will say I checked the Steam stats. Let me refresh them because Chris and I were just talking about this. And they broke, yeah, they have 11,000 people just on Steam right now. playing which like i'm impressed that's like more than it's like twice as much as they've had concurrent um on average uh in the past so
Again, I'm super impressed. They had a brand new peak of 18K. That's just Steam. So we don't really know how well they're doing on console and the Switch. I'm guessing way better than that because this is such a console and Switch-friendly game. But yeah, Daybreak and Singularity 6 have to be really, you know, tickled.
with how well this has gone. Especially with everything else that's come out. You know what I mean? It's not like we don't have any other cozy games to play. It's not like none of these other games got updates. It's not like MMO players aren't deluged with content we're going to talk about later on today. And yet they're still holding a nice big number. I'm impressed. That's bigger than a lot of MMORPGs right now.
Yeah, I got a lot of paleo time in this past week. Yes, what are you doing? I feel bad for people listening to the podcast. Give us a couple months. We will get it out of our system and we'll go back to playing other things you don't like. Don't worry. Well, you might.
you know, liked it. And I, I'm, I of course just pokey little puppy it. So it'll take me a lot longer. I I'm only up to like fine level of, you know, crafting tools and stuff like that, but having, yeah, having good time. Like every time I log in.
There are certain things I'm starting to get comfortable doing every single time, but very quickly. And then just kind of pick a different... different tasks a different objective and go okay today i'm going to work on some gardening or i'm going to try to pursue you know this quest line or i'm going to try to you know get this particular crafting station online
I was kind of forced into Pahari Bay for the first time this past week, just because I really needed heartwood and iron, and some of the quests and things I needed to make were demanding that. So yeah, okay, fine. I'm tired of... mining copper all the time. So let's go there. I spent a whole session doing nothing but crafting furniture. That's fun to get that out of your system. It is. And to clear out space and storage.
storage was starting to max out and I needed to do that. My, my garden's coming along. I can't wait till I can start getting trees because it's, you know, I want to do fewer plants and. more profit and it's sometimes it feels a little too fiddly to still
okay, I've got to hoe everything and then I've got to plant and then I've got to water and then I've got to weed and then I've got to do this. Like, oh my goodness, this is actually like gardening. It's okay. That's fine. There are fewer real bugs and it's less hot. How's that? That's true. Yeah, it does make a ton of money. I've made most of my money gardening. And as I told you, I splurged. I spent five whole U.S. American dollars.
on the starter pack yeah i got got that outfit i actually really like that little starter outfit that's really nice i i'm pretty happy with that i don't feel like i need anything else at this point and got got a little what cat dude that runs alongside of me and then um 850 coins so i just spent it on the autumn plot to make everything look autumn what do you think of that i haven't bought one of those yet i like it it took it took me about
a minute to figure out where you actually change that in the settings uh but i did figure out that without going outside of the game i the one thing i was disappointed in is The whole environment is autumn, but your house and all of the prebuilt trees are still like green. And so it's a complete mismatch. So now I'm like, oh, now I got to chop down all these, all my trees and find, I don't know if you can.
but find autumnal trees to plant or maybe fir trees or something like that. So, yeah, no, I like it. It's a nice change of pace. I do kind of miss the mountains, but it's more water and stuff like that. I would really have loved to get the winter one, but it's so expensive. That one would look even weirder with all of the trees.
Yeah, the non-evergreen trees, which is bizarre. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's a good time. I do like the personalities. I'm starting to really get to know all the characters and where they are and that 5 o'clock, 5 p.m. tip really pays off. I'm able to hit like almost all of them really very quickly every day.
So, yeah, it's good. And it's kind of hitting a really nice, relaxing summer vibe, which, of course, now that we're in June, it feels like it's a really good time to do that. I'm over there in Lotro. I finished up my minstrel on all that high-level Update 44 content, so I'm fully done there. It was good. It did really feel like a... an intermission style you know content pack well it is i mean it is so that's that's fair it was just supposed to be content it wasn't supposed to be end all be all
Right. I kind of feel like probably when the expansion drops, you can easily just bypass it and then go straight to the expansion. So I've got my Moria character and she's going... going through the red horn loads right now and i've got my uh lore master and she's going through the shield aisles so just um actually making up my project this week to take
up close pictures of mobs faces like getting really close and looking at the art design of different mobs and um seeing you know like the stuff where usually the cameras what That's kind of neat. I've never seen anybody do that before. We're usually pulled back camera wise, right? Yeah.
So there's some significant distance between you and the mob unless you are playing first person for whatever reason. And so it's kind of really interesting to get really up close and look at their animations and look at their faces. And some of the details are really... incredible and i've never really noticed that before like i was just you know fighting this saber-toothed tiger thing and it had a different kind of pattern on it which was interesting
But also one of the tusks was broken off, like one of the two. And I'm like, oh, that's kind of a really neat little detail. Like, I don't know. So doing that and then over in WoW, just continuing on through some side questing over there in the caverns, the Ringing Deeps. It's probably my least favorite zone in Out of the War Within, which is...
Probably good. It's not a bad one. It's just it's so... dull in comparison to the exciting other zones uh it just didn't really have a chance to to gain a lot of popularity i don't think so um there i'm kind of feeling like more in a holding pattern till Something interesting happens. I know a lot of my guildies are looking forward to... Yeah, you're just a couple weeks away, right? Yeah. I don't know when that's coming out.
Legion Remix is not dated yet. Oh, you don't have a date for that one. Okay. Yeah. Well, then what's the thing coming out in a couple of weeks? It's not a couple of weeks, is it? They're like rolling out some... Yeah, they just said the Arathi Highlands campaign. Is that what I'm thinking of? That might be. I need to go do that whenever that launches. But, yeah. I mean, there's always stuff to do. It's just how rewarding. No, it's Legacy of Arathor. Yeah.
That was two weeks. So actually that's not even two weeks out. That's literally next week. Oh my God. Yeah. June. What the heck? They're jamming summer full here. So. So yeah, I mean, it's not bad. I haven't really felt an itch to play too much else outside of those three games. I mean, three games is more than enough. I've had almost no time to game this past week. So just little bite-sized sessions. here and there. My daughter actually is very interested in Paleo.
And she's like, oh, yeah, it's like Stardew Valley. She and my son, they both like seriously went through Stardew Valley several times, like completed the game several times over. And this is very much like that. And she's like, oh, can I roll? character on your server i'm like well you can only have one character so uh we'll have to set you up but i said but you know it's on it's on the switch we could probably get it oh yeah on that and you know you guys could just play on that so why not
Good idea. Yeah. All right, well, speaking of Switch, there was some Switch news this past week. We don't normally talk about consoles, but, you know, when a new console comes out and we might be able to play some MMOs on it, we should probably mention it. So the Nintendo 2... I'm sorry, Nintendo Switch 2 launched. I kind of got a feeling like the Wii U, like they just went, what do we call the sequel? Yeah, we're not going to put a lot of work into it. It looks cute.
I don't know if at this point I'm feeling a huge push to update. I do like, I think it's a little bit more full featured. I like the post here that talks about some of the improvements here, including being able to use it like a mouse. the Joy-Con Like a Mouse, which they showed in the initial trailer.
At the same time, I'm wondering how much of an improvement it is and how many, you know, Switch 2 exclusive games there's going to be or if we can just kind of limp along on the Switch 1 for a while longer.
Yeah. No, I'm kind of in the same boat. I don't think we're going to – not anytime soon. Like, honestly, I think we'd be more likely to buy – another switch one i know that sounds crazy but they're so inexpensive by comparison and i mean we've already got a gazillion games on them you know what i mean it's i don't know It's ended up, and I shouldn't be surprised. This is Nintendo. This is kind of what they do. It's such a good group party console.
like my our family loves to sit down and do like stick fighter or mario kart or something like that and just kind of brings a bunch of people together in a room and we can all do it and you know my wife is not not too happy with the teeny tiny tiny little fidgety joy-con thing so she always asks you know i need the two i need the two joy-cons and put them into the controller so yes my adult hands aren't you know cramping up here but
Yeah, it's cool. I'm glad Nintendo is continuing on with this. I don't know. I don't have too much else to say about it. We did kind of link to a list of, you know, there are some online games like, you know, No Man's Sky, of course, and Diablo 3. And what are some of the other ones? Oh, my gosh. You can play Warframe.
over there i think you play today my brain is saying dcu yeah i think that's on the switch um my goodness yeah there's a lot of like smaller smaller like multiplayer games that aren't necessarily mmorpgs i know they keep talking about was over there um wizard 101 i don't think it's made the jump yet but they kept talking about launching it on there I'm gonna have to look that up.
Justin wrote an article on this, I swear, at one point. Yeah. You, Justin. I'm pretty sure you did this. I did. It was a perfect 10. It was good. I'm glad we got up to – it wasn't actually that hard to get to 10. No. They have not talked about – They've talked about bringing it. But it's not actually there yet. No, the last time we talked about it was almost a year ago. So maybe it's kind of entered into a limbo state, unfortunately.
So we'll see about that. Did Trove come to the Switch? My brain is saying Trove is also on the Switch. Yep. Trove is on Switch. Sky Force, Sky Children of Light, those are some smaller ones. Oh, yeah. My daughter has been playing the Sky Children and the Light game. I played it for like 10 minutes and I was like, bleh. And she loves it. She plays it all the time. So it appeals to apparently 10-year-old girls, I guess. Maybe not to me. You know, that might be an interesting...
perfect 10 to do is like games that might've had a better chance that they had launched on a different era or year. And I keep thinking like free realms on the switch. Oh my gosh. It was clean up. Totally. Yeah. It just might not have been the right time in the right console. So there you go. Switch 2 is out. And of course, we asked people if they went ahead and doing the day one, cutting edge week one.
purchase or if they're holding off or if they're just not interested in all so it's always very interesting to see those responses um yeah i i had such strong you know of course my childhood was very dominated by the super nintendo and even the Nintendo 64, eh, that was more of a multi... You just played it to play GoldenEye and Perfect Dark, but...
The GameCube still has a place in our home, and we still love breaking that sucker out for Zelda and Mario Kart and some other titles. My one kid was playing... oh shoot what was it the other day i don't know what it was but just having wired controls that you did not have to worry about charging and that just felt so good in the hand i think maybe we've
Nintendo's kind of lost a little bit with trying to shrink everything or make everything touchscreen. But, you know, of course there's always adaptations and dongles and stuff like that. So there you go. But now we can talk about Summer Game Fest 2025 because that was another kind of industry news bit that we want to cover here and a lot of different titles that were covered there. So what was the big standouts here?
People too lazy to read your article. No, it's fair, honestly. We were just live blogging and putting in the trailers and like, oh, they talked about this and they talked about that. And then we spun out some of the more interesting ones. I would say the most interesting thing I saw the whole night was that, um, the cube, which was, yes. I, I like didn't realize it was an MMO until Jeff Keighley called it an MMORPG shooter. And like my ears went bing.
because I had been tuning it out because the way they presented it was they presented Atomic Heart 2 first. And then I kind of didn't realize we were watching a different game. I was like, oh, wow, two trailers for the same game. Anyway, ignore, ignore, ignore. And then he called it an MMORPG shoot. And I was like, holy crap. Zing, back paying attention now. Yeah.
It looks like Destiny. It doesn't really look like an MMORPG. In fact, when you go digging, they're not even calling Atomic Heart Brain. I've forgotten who the developer is. Sorry, I don't play Atomic Heart, so this is like Mudfish. Mudfish.
They're not calling it an MMORPG. They're calling it a multiplayer shooter. But honestly, it looks like an MMO looter shooter to me. It looks a lot like Destiny. Destiny even has one of these vibe things where they've got this weird geometric shape floating in the air. like that's what this reminds me of it looks just like it but here it's like this weird cube thing that keeps shifting in the biomes keep changing around and yeah I just thought that looked really cool
I didn't know it was coming. I was kind of taken aback by it, especially once they implied it was MMO-ish. That's pretty cool. What else did we get? I'm parsing this New World console launch thing that's coming in October. Oh, that was last year. Why am I linking to last year's Summer Game Fest? Oh, yeah, you were very confused. Here, let me link you. Justin thinks I'm totally high over here. Okay, now I swear.
I bet you looked up. Is there a new console launch? Just new world? I thought they did that last time. Poor Justin. Justin, yeah. Okay, now you're good. Now you got the new one. You're good. My brain is not working well today. That one was really cool. I want to say.
Arc Raiders got an announcement date. We'll cover that one at some point, but apparently people were really upset because they thought it was going to launch. They thought this was a countdown to the launch and said it's a countdown.
to date and so people are very grumpy about that but arc raiders does look really good if you're into shooters that's nexon's upcoming team shooter um we got the one thing i noticed about it yeah just it's very esoteric but the um the design of the logo it it really looks like late 70s 100 oh my god i love it so much that whole vibe i do too it really gets me like i don't even know why but like anything 70s is like what i want everything to look like all the time Um, Chrono Odyssey.
Got its testing dates. We knew there was going to be a June test date and we there's only so many days in June so many weekends kind of had to be so 20th 22nd you can you could sign up for that In fact, you probably already have because they've been taking signups for a long time at this point.
um ncsoft announced blade and soul heroes and that kind of came out of left field i wasn't expecting that either in fact i thought it was going to be you know like a mobile game and i did some digging no it's a real mmo rpg but it's kind of a gotcha game so gotcha mmo in the blade and soul universe they're really going ham on making use of blade and soul they are not just gonna let that drop so that was pretty cool there's a video for that Yeah, Wildgate and Linked both got new...
videos let's see guilders 2 got a new video i don't know if you guys saw that it was kind of weird because it had nothing to do with absolution which dropped on tuesday it doesn't even mention it it was like super generic kind of video like come play here That was odd. And then there was some other stuff that happened not on Friday, but over the weekend. Like Elder Scrolls Online had some stuff that we actually covered this morning. They dropped a new...
A controversial video. We'll call it controversial because some people didn't like the music choice. I thought it was great, honestly. And then Fallout, of course, is... I saw people in mainstream press calling... Fallout this is their cozy game moment but it's just the fishing stuff guys don't get too excited so that came out too along with a new trailer
Am I forgetting anything? I mean, there's a bunch of not-quite MMORPG games, but that's the big MMO stuff. No, I think that's a pretty good one. Yeah, I was really pleased to see NCSoft especially kind of show up, like really show up, because NCSoft... often doesn't do videos at shows like this. You would think they would, but Guild Wars 2 often doesn't get a lot of effort.
To see them shell out for Blade and Soul Heroes, I was really impressed. I don't know. It's so expensive to get a trailer onto these shows. It's only a two-hour show, right? There's a lot of people vying for airtime there, so I know this costs...
probably tens of thousands of dollars to get an ad spot here. So I'm always surprised to see which studios are willing to shell out for it. Mike Morhaime's company came out, came out too. I mean, they had, they had a bunch of trailers this weekend. Yeah. All right. Well, and one of the things, I think Dune Awakening had a trailer, right? Yep. New trailer because that's launching technically on Thursday. Thursday? Wait, hold on. Am I right? Tomorrow.
It's the 10th, not the 12th. Yeah. So, yeah, as most of you are probably hearing this, Dune Awakening, the official launch date, is the 10th here. It's been in this head start. period for the past weekend and i think we've got some people trying to get in the game so we can bring you have five people in the game not counting larry who bought it on his own dime so yeah we will have plenty mj and larry streamed it last weekend if you want to see what it actually
I didn't get to check out the preview, but then we have four other writers doing write-ups at some point, including... Did I get one for you? I never got it. Did you send it to me? I could have sworn I got one for you. I should be so last on that list. I just saw the email saying you were asking for it. No. Just give me a second. I'm going to look this up. You don't have to look it up right now. No, because I want you to get to do this. I'm pretty sure I got you and Ben.
Ben and MJ, Andy. I'll get in there this week and I'll find some time. I'd like to write this up. I can't find it. Where is it? I just figured I was dead last on that list and I'm totally okay with that. Sam. Sam was the last one. No, you got a key. Go look it up. Here, I'm going to resend it to everybody. So Justin doesn't know it, but Justin is also in this little preview. Yeah, I got a game. I can go play and have to work. Okay.
I've re-sent it to the team so you can see it again. Best job ever right here having to play video games and write about them. You know, people always say that, but it's a lot of work and it changes how you play games and it makes them a little less fun. The problem is my children look at me and go like, oh, this is a... reliable career it is not it is definitely not no one makes money doing this not not anything you can live on
They're like, well, I could be a game tester. I'm like, oh, no, you will hate any game that they put you on. You will play the same level a million times. All you're doing is bug searching and you're going to get paid peanuts and you're not going to be full time. You're going to be some contractor that they can just cut loose. No, no, no. You don't want to do that. You don't want to do that. You just want to buy games and play them for fun. Just do that.
Do your fun stuff on the side. Anyways, okay, so Dune Awakening is what we're talking about here. He's not wrong. Yeah, so some pretty strong initial numbers. How is the... head start i haven't really been again my last weekend was crazy pack so how was the head start it had some problems on like the first and second day and i know it was getting review bombed the first day but like it pretty much turned things around uh they started putting up more servers and like
handling capacity problems. And now their reviews are sitting up in the positive zone. So they're actually doing fine. I saw them break 100,000 concurrent Which, you know, I don't know how to judge that because you had to pay $70 at least to get into this stage of the Head Start, which is a lot of money for a game, for a survival box.
in a world where a lot of survival boxes with this much content are $20 or $25. So not everybody buys into Head Start at all. I don't know how to judge that, right? I mean, you know, we've had some MMOs in the last couple years.
break a million concurrent in the first week but some of those are free to play so it's just really hard to compare I think because this is such a a weird game straddling a couple of different genres so i think we'll have a better picture on how well the game is going to shape up like not just tomorrow after the everybody else gets in the looky-loos who are only paying 50 actually gets to play but like a couple
A couple of weeks from now, I think we'll get the better picture of how it's going to form out, like whether it's going to be. the next Conan Exiles for Funcom, because Conan Exiles was huge for Funcom. They were not prepared for how well Conan Exiles was going to do, which is bizarre when you think about it, because they bought that, you know, they acquired that license for Conan on purpose so that they could milk it.
I don't think they realized they were hitting just the right moment for survival sandboxes and just the right tone for that moment when it launched, however many years ago it was, seven years, eight, I don't remember. And I'll give them maybe one month, but preferably less for them to get out and start talking about what's coming up. Sure.
Dune Awakening because they really need to capitalize on the momentum of the launch and keep it going because there's going to be something new coming along down the road. I mean, this year has already been... really nutty in terms of all the releases and new games and new projects and right yeah today dune awakening is a big thing next week maybe not so it needs to keep needs to keep going especially you know with dune 3 coming out
You know, they definitely want to. When is that coming out? I don't know. Not this year. I don't think it's this year either. I didn't think they were even finished. But they definitely want to keep this strong so that they can capitalize on that when it happens. Right. Oh, yeah. I'm sure that's what they're hoping, but I'm sure they were also hoping to get it out in time for the second movie.
The game kind of took longer, I think, than they were planning. But yeah, no, I think you're absolutely right. And I did see that, I think it was yesterday or today, they started rolling out some of the endgame event type stuff, like the zone event type stuff. um so i don't know how that's going yet or i'm not actually in it to see it i am not buying this game not anytime soon
So I'm literally living vicariously through MJ and Larry. Did you ever play like the original Dune 2? No. Back in the 90s, it was Westwood Studios, like one of their first big RTS games. nope before they did command and conquer and yeah so i which is weird because justin in the 90s i was much more of an rts well not rts i was a turn-based strategy player that's what i did all the time in forex games that was my bread and butter yeah it was me too like
Master of Orion. Oh my god, Master of Orion. I literally would take a zip disk. Zip disks, y'all! I would take it to school and put it in the little zip drive so that I could play Master of Orion on the computers at school. I remember walking into my friend in college and seeing him play Dune 2 and going, what is this? And he's like trying to explain what real time strategy is. Oh my gosh. This is, whoa, my head, you know, then just a year, a year or two later.
Later, we had like Warcraft and Command and Conquer and Red Alert and all these. Oh, it was such. I love that genre. It's one of my favorite RTS games for a while there. That's all I played all the time. Wow. I know they still exist. It's not what it used to be. Yeah, but really not what it used to be. It's too bad we never got it properly.
like Warcraft 4 or some of these other series that just kind of petered out. But anyways, that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about MMOs. But there are MMOs, RTSs, right? Somewhere, maybe? I don't... We've covered some in the past. I think a lot of people wouldn't consider them MMOs. Yeah, I'm not even really sure. Maybe the Age of Empires Online, that sort of stuff. Yeah. It's okay.
All right, well, let's talk about New World for a hot minute here because New World rolled out a new server, which is what they're calling a hardcore semi-perma-death server, but it's going to be a seasonal server, like a temporary experience. this isn't something for the long haul but rather to get in there try to see how much advancement you can do in terms of speed leveling.
You can do, you know, zip all the way up as fast as possible in terms of like, you know, a couple of play sessions you might be able to hit max level. Yeah. Six hours. You could totally do that in a day. Don't die. If you don't have a job.
And don't ever get up. No, I mean, they've made it really fast on purpose. It's not just faster through the existing content. They actually changed the content itself, right? So if you just follow the new quest line, you'll get all the way to the end and be ready to go. But don't die. Like.
There's a reason we keep calling it semi-hardcore. It's because you kind of fall off the ladder. You don't lose your character. You can still play. Yes, you can still play. But you don't really get all the rewards that you were there for in the first place. And those rewards transfer back to the live server. So you want to do that.
Yeah, I was actually listening to somebody, one of our followers on Mastodon actually this morning was saying that... he or she was just checking it out just to see if it was any good and ended up like playing sinking a ton of time into it said it was way more fun than they were expecting and now they're kind of wishing that they weren't going to end it so fast because it ends in like july isn't that what i said I think it's July. It's only here for like a month and a half or something.
Which is like crazy. Like you go to all this trouble to build this. I don't know. I guess that's the vibe of the seasons. They're not supposed to be super long, but this isn't even as long as one of the seasons. Like the season actually launched weeks ago. I don't know.
It's very much like what Dungeons and Dragons did. You know, pull up these hardcore servers, go ahead, do the content, but do get all those rewards for the live server. So you feel like your time is being at least invested into potential rewards instead. just an experience.
But hey, maybe they'll bring it back or keep it around or make it a permanent thing if enough people really like it. I mean, that's really why they're experimenting here, right, is to attract players. And if this attracts players, there's definitely, I think, a chance that they would... would hang on to it they're not gonna would not be the first time an mmo studio has changed its mind because something's insanely popular again look at world of warcraft and hardcore rule exactly like yeah yeah
So, you know, I just love this. I love that we're in 2025 and what used to be this dirty word, permadeath, is now a legitimate game mode that MMOs have finally figured out how to wield in a way that isn't going to rot. everybody of like hundreds of hours of hard-earned fun and rather you know just kind of there you go i feel like we're coming full circle though justin right yeah because because the way they're going about this is they're
They're devaluing the amount of time that you're putting in. Right. And I don't mean that in necessarily a bad way. I'm thinking of like the original sandboxes like you owe. The whole point was that everybody wore trash. You know what I mean? You weren't supposed to spend, you know, eight. months.
hardcore raiding to get the best gear ever only to lose it nobody was doing that we were wearing like crafted stuff you know what i mean we were we were wearing whatever we found on the last body that we of the last pk we killed and we would just throw that on and keep playing there was like
this sense that the... important thing was the playing not the gearing up and like a lot of mmos modern mmos have like completely flipped that equation where like gearing up is the point now and so the idea of taking away your gear taking away the time that you put in level traveling is like it sounds horrifying and it kind of should be a lot of mmos would be completely taking everything you've done away whereas neo it was like oh well guy kanked again big whoop
throw in some more regs and let's go you know what i mean just you got used to that and since you weren't you didn't have anything of value losing it didn't matter that much either and that's what this reminds me of even though you're not losing your
gear you know what i mean you're you're just losing a character you put in six hours on big deal just do it again you know what i mean as opposed to spending six years of you know leveling to 150 and every side skill and all your achievos and all that stuff you're not losing everything you're just losing a few hours and that's what this reminds me of and I think it's really really smart a compelling way to actually do PvP I think maybe that's why it's resonating with people
Yeah, I just want to continue to see Game Studios experiment with different server rule sets. Man, I was beating on this drum like probably 10 years, 15 years ago going... They used to do that. Talk about Full Circle. Really early on in the MMO genre, they were rolling out crazy ruleset servers. EverQuest had like six or seven.
and then somewhere along the line it just got all funneled down to pve or pvp or maybe rp if you were right and that was it just got all down and then people started studios started realizing we can Do so much more with rule sets and it's easier to monkey around with the rules than it is to create brand new content and new zones. It's repurposing.
You know, the entire game that people might have gotten bored with, you know, it's a little stale. Well, change up the rules and suddenly it's really fun again. And I just cannot say enough about how smart it is for studios to be experimenting like this. No, I totally agree. And as you said, they can always walk it back. Like if this isn't really working, it's not a permanent server. But if it really is working, go ahead and make it a permanent server.
Right. And then they can experiment with all kinds of things. Like, this is a safe place to experiment and lose and to fail. It's okay, not just for the players to fail, but for the studio to fail without feeling like they've wrecked their entire game and all of their, you know what I mean? And pissed off everybody. No, it's... It's just this little experimental thing over on the side. No, I completely agree with you. It's just a smart way of going about it, and I understand why some of those
Old school megalith companies were like, no, we don't have time to have 10 builds and worry about pushing out changes to all of these different variations. Nobody can keep track of that. And I understand that, but this is just a smart way of going about it, right? Like you said, you're repurposing stuff. You're getting extra value out of every single asset, every single map, every single class change that you make. It's actually smart to do this.
It's not actually a drain on your resources. It's the opposite. It's an amplifier, a magnifier. Well, a couple weeks ago, we were talking about Chrono Odyssey and how we were still trying to wrap our heads around what is this upcoming MMO from Kakao that feels like it should be bigger or should be more prominent, and yet a lot of us are kind of shrugging our shoulders.
shoulders and going, I don't know what this game is and why I should be excited about it. Does seem like the studio is talking a little bit more about it. And then we sent an intrepid reporter named Brie Royce and she went right in and did an interview and got a
lot more details about chrono odyssey boy i'd say that but justin i did this interview and i still feel like i don't fully understand it like that's what i wanted to ask you like did you get a better feel for the game or is it still kind of
I think it's still very Black Desert-y. That's still where it fits in my head in terms of like it's not entirely... a korean grinder and it's not entirely a sandbox it's sort of somewhere in the middle with it's got pvp it's got pve but the pvp is fairly opt-out which reminds me of a lot of the way that black desert has gone in in recent years
They're very focused on things like life skilling. They're focused on the dynamic weather. Those are the kinds of things that made me feel like it's more like a sandbox and not just a grinder. It's not just like Lost Ark or something. Although as I say that, Lost Ark has a bunch of...
sandbox elements too anyway see it's complicated is what i'm trying to say but i don't think it's gonna end up like you know terrorist land or thrown in liberty where those seem a little more you know quests there's like a pipeline of questing to endgame this seems a little bit more sandboxy than that okay i was just kind of curious i read through your interview and i went like i don't know if i got
too much of a better feel for it but it's got some more details and i really do appreciate you going through that yeah i mean cacao is taking it really seriously and one of the things i asked them was like are you calling it an mmo like
When you're calling it an MMORPG, are you doing this consciously, understanding that that word... means a million things to a million people and it's almost controversial to use it is this really an mmorpg and they're like yeah i mean this is totally an mmorpg we're trying to you know kind of create a new thing but it is absolutely massively it is you know not
not something where we're just applying the label to attract certain kinds of Western players. It actually really is a combination of traditional and modern MMO design, which is like, okay, that's all I really needed to hear. You know what I mean? That's like everything else is gravy. Yeah, and you asked them, like, what is this very similar to? And they said, well, you know, you'd be very familiar with, like, a Souls-like game, which I – that's kind of important for me to –
Do you not feel like that's fair? I don't know because I haven't actually played it yet. I actually hope that that's not true. I was too, because that's not my genre at all. Yeah. That stuck out at me as something interesting that they said. Right. Like, is this really just more like... I'm comparing it to Black Desert, but maybe it's more like Crimson Desert with a multiplayer component. That makes me nervous. I don't know.
No, it's funny because I actually just I just finished briefing this. You guys will see it later this week. But Tyler has gone in and has been playing. Vindictus Defying Fate, which is the Nexon's new, it's a single-player multiplayer spin-off of The Vindictus series, which is itself a spinoff of the Magno, like this is a long MMORPG lineage here, but it's technically not an MMORPG. It's a dynasty. Yes, there you go. He went in, he was like, oh, this is going to be, you know.
trash and he was like actually it's really really good like it's amazing i was impressed by the character acting i was impressed by the stories and he's never impressed by anything i was impressed by the graphics he was like the only thing i don't like is it's really hard it's a soul's life game and it's way too hard like I'm playing it on easy and I couldn't beat the boss the last boss and I'm like
Okay, Tyler's really good at this. I know his rank in Overwatch 2. He is not a bad gamer. He is a very good gamer. But if it's too hard for him, it will definitely be too hard for me. You know what I mean? So I can probably sit that one aside. I get very nervous. I don't know whether cacao here when talking about corner odyssey is meaning it's souls like in like vibe, you know what I mean? Or whether it means in difficulty.
I took it as a difficulty, like the design element and the difficulty. Maybe. Again, we're just going to need to see. And we will know in, what, 11 days when Western players get their hands on this sucker. Hopefully. Sorry, I had a frog in my throat. Oh, man. Take care of that. Yeah. Yep. There we go. All right. Well, let's move on to the mailbag. You still want me to read this? You go ahead and read it. I've been talking too much as it is.
Magnet Head sent us in this one. This is actually in response to episode 509 in our discussion of MMO storytelling and raids. So Magnet Head asked us, first, some context. Destiny 2 expansion, the final shape, ended the original long-running story of the setting. A raid was involved in this finale, but the actual climax was set after the raid and totally viable for any player.
Once a player finished the regular story, they'd unlock the raid, which was called Salvation's Edge. Salvation's Edge continued the story of the battle against the final shape's big bad, but when you beat the raid, you didn't kill them or end the greater war. You simply beat them. back ruined their planes dealt them a wound that would allow for their final defeat additionally once the raid was beaten for the first time that unlocked the matchmaking enabled activity excision excision
Is that even a real word? Is that excise? No, it's excision. It has to be excision. That's a word. Excision. Okay, let's just do that. Which was the actual climax of the story. Excision is not a raid, but more like a massive match mode public quest. It's large scale, but not especially difficult. Open to any player who's finished the regular story.
Thus, the raid involved the main story, but any player can partake in the actual conclusion, and the raiders helped the rest of the player base reach that conclusion without putting any of the honest of the skill on the average Joe.
To put forward the question, after all this context, what does Massively OP think of an MMO storytelling approach like that? The larger story is open to the public, but the baton is briefly in the hands of the raiding parts of the community to breach the villain's defense. I kind of like it. It's not terrible. No, I mean, like... I don't see how this isn't inclusive of everyone. And that's my goal. I'm not trying to take everything from the raiding community and give it to everyone.
But I also don't want the opposite to be true either. I don't want to take everything from everyone and give it just to the rating community. This seems like a nice... collaborative way of going about it. And also, the average Joes get to cheer on the hardcore people who are actually going to unlock it for the server so we can get on with this. I don't see the problem with that. I think it's really clever and creative. I say go further.
Go further with it. Yeah, if you're going to do this sort of thing where the storyline is kind of coming to a head and this big bad who's been kind of looming over the expansion or the storyline for a while needs to be taken down.
have have the raiders do their part but why don't you also have crafters do their part like a multi-faceted campaign where you have different elements of the community you know the pve questers and the crafters and the raiders and the pv peers or whoever like organize them and say okay like we've got these five bars that need to all go to 100% and watch each part of the community has done its job then it finally unlocks the final
confrontation or showdown and that way you know like you can just participate in whatever you want to i i mean the only downside of this is it really is it like a gates of anchorage kind of thing like once it's done it's done and you can't do it twice right you know But for the meantime, maybe. But the way that they structured this, yeah, I do like the fact that the raid isn't the culmination. It's kind of the penultimate thing. And that's, yeah, that's not a terrible way.
to go about it as long as it doesn't feel like really the average person's super missing out on on some heavy parts of the story i mean i i'd be okay with that but yeah i'm trying to remember like
I can't even remember how big raids are. I didn't think raids were all that big in Destiny anyway. They're just really challenging. My husband's done stuff like this, and he's, you know, not an elite gamer at all. He's playing for fun, so if he can do it, I'm sure it's not even that hard. But then you wouldn't.
have to i don't know i'm i this reminds me a little bit of like what guild wars 2 does but it's not exactly this organized right because yeah like each of their expansions will or a lot of their bigger zones will have like a big meta for like the open world players but then it'll be like tied in somehow to like something that people are doing in the raids i don't mind that so much like that's not really the problem you know what i mean i didn't the problem with those those events is that
Once people have moved on, people have moved on. And it's really, really hard to get anybody involved in caring about that meta ever again. Which wouldn't be a big deal, except that a lot of things are locked behind the meta, right? Like, you need to do other things after that. And if you can't get through the meta, you can't get to the last room or get that pet or, you know, finish that achievement or whatever.
it is there's a bunch of different things depending on which one we're talking about i don't i don't think that's necessarily a problem with with destiny so i don't really think they have to worry about that quite as much I'm trying to remember. Didn't we just cover this not that long ago where one of the things people complained about with Destiny was that the content was going away. Like after...
Not that you can only open things once. I mean, that's sort of like a given, right? If there's going to be this big world event, you can't keep repeating it. Like you said, the gates of Ankara can only open once and then it's done. And that's fine. That reminds that.
It feels like the good kind of FOMO. You know what I mean? Like that's the kind of thing that can draw people to the game right now and all in the same spot and all working toward the same goal. I don't necessarily have a problem with that. Same as I thought a lot of the stuff in Guild Wars 2 Season 1. was actually really fun because it really did bring everybody all together because they knew this was only going to run for a couple of weeks and if they wanted to see it they needed to show up.
That was really fun. But the problem is then when the associated content, not the unlocking, but like whatever was being unlocked then goes away also. And that's, I think, what Destiny 2 is working on. They mentioned that they were going to take some of that old content and also new content.
content and make it more permanent instead of dead after the season. So as long as they're not doing that, I really just don't have a problem with this. This seems like a really cool system. No complaints. Maybe having a different... additional content to like or additional systems to replace the time limited stuff that in the future again like guild wars 2 would it
you know, how to figure out how to deal with, you know, season one's living story that we had already passed by and is in the rear view mirror. Right. Okay. Well, you know, there are clever ways that people can repurpose that. And we're about to run right into this again with Elder Scrolls Online. This is happening like this is literally going to happen.
This year, we're going to put this to the test because they have that writhing wall event that's opening in, I guess, September or October, somewhere in it, someone in there. And we're going to see what actually happens because... But honestly, ZeniMax has really not been super forthcoming about what exactly will carry over. Like, what's... doable only once and they made it sound like they thought that was going to be FOMO but I don't know how much of it is and that's that's a little concerning.
Because now we've gone back to, instead of finding, this literally ties into that other discussion, Justin. We were talking about ways to reuse content. This is a way to bury content. This is a waste of content. That makes me really nervous. But as to the actual, Magnethead's actual question, I think that's a brilliant way of solving it. I know, complimenting Bungie, who am I? But yeah, I think they did good on this one.
I appreciate that. I really do like it when our listeners and our readers who have just such a wide variety of perspectives in a lot of different games can bring up very targeted answers and examples like this. So thank you. And of course, you can continue to send in your own comment or question here at the Massive EOP podcast for us to discuss. And maybe it is something like this where it's.
following up on a story on a discussion and you're like, you want to get your two cents in, but also get our take on. Your take. So if that made any sort of sense, go to our podcast show notes there. And we've got a link right there. So you can go ahead and send in your own questions and opinions. And we'd love to talk about that on a future show. Check out our Patreon.
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journalism to the industry uh you know with only only 75 ai these days you know that's pretty good right you can't say things like that because people people don't understand sarcasm they don't understand irony they will be like oh my god i just heard that blah blah blah and it'll be on reddit 65 and then it'll show up on google for like the next 10 years because people are very bad at this you cannot joke zero percent we're all real oh my gosh i am a real human And she is a real human bot.
So, yeah, anyway. We make too many mistakes to be AI, I'm afraid. They make dumb – they'll say dumb things, but they will say it in generally correct grammar. We just misspell stuff. That's how you know. That's how you know. We're perfectly imperfect. So thanks for everybody for supporting Massively OP. Continue to read our site. Of course, as we just said, we're going to have some really good first impressions of Dune Awakening.
So if maybe you're on the fence, that's a lot of money to kind of buy into a game and you want to see if this game is right for you. You can watch our streams and read our first impressions and hopefully get a really good idea. Like, is this something you would like to be doing with your summer? And if it is. Have fun. Wear a dust mask because it's really dusty out there. That's all I got for today. And I wish my co-hosts a better.
Thank you. Get better there, and we'll see you guys in a week. Later, everybody.