MMORPG News: Astellia Beta, New League of Maidens MMO, TERA Origin

Back on June 12th I did a video on the new Shai class introduced into Black Desert. I didn’t have the option of trying her out and testing how she played but that’s alright.
We’ll get to next week as the Shai class officially launches on the 26th. However, if you’re burdened with an insatiable need to create her now, long before she is made readily available to play, then go right ahead.
You’re capable of creating your Shai character right now – several days before being able to officially play her. So what’re you waiting for?

ARK Survival Evolved has been an astonishingly large survival game for several years now. Averaging 40,000 players playing concurrently at any hour of the day is a feat in and of itself.
Their latest game, Atlas didn’t fare so well with critics but I’m sure that’ll launch a couple years from now to quite a sizeable audience as well.. if they’re lucky. Maybe not. Probably.
Now with their main focus on Atlas, you wouldn’t expect them to release a new map expansion but here we are, Wildcard announced a new map, Valguero would be available for everyone to play.. completely free of charge.
If you’re a fan or ARK you’ll likely recognize this map as it was an original mod from the Steam Workshop over a year ago. It functions more like an updated Ragnarok – with Aberration zones added in.
So if ARK is your thing, you should go ahead and try out the new map. My wife MrsStix and I will be this weekend!

I’m not sure how participants for the first stage of stress-tests were chosen.
I never applied and never attempted to test out whether I could get in or not because I never played Classic and didn’t want my first impressions of it tainted.
But from what I was aware of, a very small selection of people were chosen.
However, as of the 19th – Wednesday specifically, Blizz opened up registration for anyone with an active subscription to the game located within North America, South America and Oceania.
This meant that it was your opportunity to get in and experience what Classic was going to be like. All characters and classes were made available however they capped players at level 15.
Various instances were made available for players to participate in like Deadmines – which is suicide for people under lvl18 from what I’ve seen and Warsong Gulch for those of you that want to test out PvP.
Hopefully you got in and got to scratch that itch for WoW Classic. Quick question – what did you think of it? Is it what you expected? Are you going to resub for Classic?

Okay so speaking of Atlas earlier, Wildcard just made somewhat of an unusual announcement. See, ARK is a smaller game. It’s playable with what? 80 other players on your server I think?
But Atlas was announced to hold 40,000 people per server.
If that isn’t the very definition of an MMORPG – 40,000 players all fighting, gearing, leveling to fight bosses at endgame whilst simultaneously attempting to murder one another… yeah I dunno what is.
Anyway, I digress. Wildcard announced that they are working on a single-player version of the game to play alone, as opposed to thousands of other players. Why? I dunno.
Maybe it’s because unlike ARK which has upwards of 40,000 people playing concurrently, Atlas has only been able to attract a mere 4,000. This is.. noticeably lower than ARK.
I dunno. It’s a weird direction to take their game but they cite it’s due to player demand.

I believe it’s been a long while since players got to participate in the Dragon Bash events.
So, put on your nostalgia goggles because it’s coming back to Guild Wars 2 on June 25th, lasting until July 16th.
Why this was reintroduced after such a long absence remains to be seen but some people are theorizing that it may be there way of cleaning out the closet looking for things to provide players with until Season 5 starts.
Festival of the Four Winds was introduced last year as well after being absent for.. a few years itself, so. While it’s never a bad thing to get long-since-gone content back, it’s a curious choice.

If you were a fan of the classic old tale of Dekaron but it’s just.. too dated to really play anymore, then you’ll be happy to know – or maybe you’ll be unhappy to know that ThumbAge is announcing Dekaron.. Mobile.
Yup, because every MMORPG that isn’t a Western one anyway needs to have their very own copy>pasted mobile adaptation these days. The only details they went into were that it will “have the best features of the PC version.”
Something we didn’t want nor need but hey, thanks anyway!

I figure since these are technically going to be different games with different update schedules, it might be best to henceforth keep them separated.
World of Warcraft, if you weren’t aware was having some serious issues retaining players. They’re leaving the game left right and center. This is because Battle for Azeroth is a critically received expansion and it was mishandled.
Thankfully, Rise of Azshara looks to fix some of those issues and you’re in luck – it actually goes live next week on the 25th.
Since you’ll likely have a subscription if you played Classic you might as well take a look and see if this update interests you, right? Worst case scenario? It still sucks.

It’s that time of the month again – Blade & Soul is receiving another update, this time titled Empyrean Shadows.
It brings with it quite a surprisingly large amount of updates including the new Act 10 story, and most importantly, the Blade Master and Kung Fu Master third class specializations.
Additionally, the Warped Citadel, a new 6-player Heroic dungeon is now available for players to tackle as well.
So if you’ve been bored with the content at your disposal, then fret not as Blade & Soul never seems to disappoint. Well, they do with the actual game, but never with the frequency of the updates for it.

I know, many of you aren’t interested in TERA Origin but I have to do a segment on this because.. well, there are currently 4 other TERA MMOs in development for mobile devices. I’m not even kidding.
Apparently TERA is such a hot commodity right now that there’s TERA M, TERA Frontier, TERA Classic, and TERA Origin. That’s not counting the normal TERA.
Regardless, Netmarble have announced that TERA Origin is going into closed beta testing so if you’re interested, then you can sign right up!

Astellia could potentially be this years big Korean MMO. People have been excited for its release since the end of 2018 and for good reason: It looks like it could very well be the next TERA.
So you might be a little excited to know that it’s launching a closed beta testing phase this month.
According to the team behind Astellia, this closed beta will be to test the server performance and PvE progression while showcasing the implementation of active dodging, improved animations and various other combat improvements.
Do note though that just because the game is going to be playable, it is in beta-form meaning there will likely be quite a few bugs and performance issues.
Beta keys will be sent out to random players like every beta, but if you want to ensure you get in to the beta then you’re going to want to grab the Preorder package, which is a whopping $100.
I’ll be participating in the beta, and the team behind the game are providing me with several keys to give to our viewers so if you want to obtain one, let me know in the comments below!
I’ll have an updated video with my Astellia impressions soon!

If you’d forgotten, then Final Fantasy XIV is rolling out their Shadowbringers expansion on the 28th for those of us that pre-ordered the early access version of the game, and on July 2nd for everyone else.
Don’t forget to tune into our channel to watch us stream the introductory levels of the game and.. probably die repeatedly to bosses in dungeons.
It looks like it’s gonna be a hell of a time and I look forward to seeing you all there.

I did a video on this a couple weeks ago and will have a more updated video on it soon but the League of Maidens team have doubled the funding they have for the game and are taking the time to listen and implement changes their players want.
If you want to have your voice heard and have any ideas for the game then now’s your chance to let them know!

Finally, for the handful of those of you that still play MapleStory 2 you’ll be.. well, excited is taking things a little too far. I’d say.. maybe, potentially.. interested? In their new Guilded Glory update.
The update in question adds some things exclusive to guilds such as new tiers of guild raid dungeons, rebalancing the current guild raids, guild quests and adding the Blackshard Nexus dungeon, a brand new dungeon exclusive to this update.