MMORPG News: Project S, New Guild Wars Spin-Off? Gran Saga, Bless Eternal, Magic: Legends & More

Before we get into today’s news video, I just want to say that 2019 was a pretty awesome year for MMORPGs. Steam listed their 100 top selling games of 2019 and you know what was there?
MMORPGs like The Elder Scrolls Online, Final Fantasy XIV and Black Desert, while MMOs and large-scale multiplayer games like Warframe, Destiny 2, and Path of Exile all made the list as well.
That’s pretty impressive, given so many people complain the genre is dead.
With that being said, however, let’s jump straight into today’s Weekly Byte of MMORPG News as we got a lot to talk about.

Let’s kick this off with the most anticipated MMORPG of the next few months: Temtem. Mrs Stix did her full review of the first half of the game – it was posted just a couple days ago if you want to check that out.
Now, as for Temtem itself, the game has been in the process of running several stress tests to make certain the game can handle the influx of players when it launches into Early Access on Jaunary 21st.
The stress tests aren’t going to retain any data once the game officially launches, and the game is going to be buy-to-play, meaning that you’ll have to pay a one-time fee to play it.
Honestly, though, from what I’ve seen through upwards of 30 hours of Alpha gameplay, I can say that I’m incredibly excited for the game and although we don’t have a definitive price, I feel like it’ll be worth it either way.

Corepunk is an upcoming MMORPG announced last month – they dropped a trailer that I thought looked pretty good. The gameplay looked a little slow but otherwise I was impressed with what I both saw and heard.
After my video on the game, Eugene Kiver, one of the Producers at Artificial Core, reached out to me via email not only thanking me for the video on the game, but also stating that they’d heard player feedback and were making every effort to remedy as many concerns as possible.
Eugene went on to release several videos – one featuring the content and gameplay issues, showcasing improved movement and attack speed. The second was to thank Youtuber’s that did videos on the game – and you know who was right there at the top?
Yup. Granted, there’s a lot more the game is going to have to prove to players before our appetites are whet with anticipation, but it’s looking good so far.

I haven’t done a dedicated video on this yet because… well, I’ve talked about Bless and Neowiz plenty over the last year or two.
But I felt this was appropriate to include in a news video because.. like I called in the past, Neowiz is launching ANOTHER Bless MMORPG – and no, this isn’t the Bless Unleashed Xbox One MMORPG, this one is called Bless Eternal and is for mobile devices.
Yeah.. as if the failure – well, multiple failures of Bless Online, and the relaunch of the game – granted, in altered form onto Xbox One wasn’t enough, now Neowiz are trying to milk the mobile market with a mobile Bless built on Unreal Engine 4.
Not much has been revealed thus far pertaining to the game but I can assure you, players are not at all impressed.
While yes, I’m certain the game will no doubt do well because people are suckers for pretty mobile MMOs I’m just.. appalled that they’re actually going through with this. It’s ridiculous.
I’ll do a more updated, dedicated video on Bless Eternal for the mobile channel as more info is released, but I’m not impressed.

A couple days ago Cryptic released the trailer for their brand new upcoming MMO “Magic: Legends,” and there has been quite a lot of negative reactions. Yes, it really wasn’t very well received.
This is attributable to several different factors: First, it turns out that for the most part, the game is really not going to be very MMO-esque and would be more apt to be referred to as a multiplayer action RPG.
Initially, they were marketing the game as an “MMORPG” on their website, but shortly after changed the classification to merely an “MMO.” Now, people are coming to the realization that the game is going to barely even go that far.
Additionally, the UI, the graphics.. everything about the game screams “mobile game” and that has left quite a few people very upset. MMO players have a strong disdain for mobile games so that’s 2 strikes so far.
While this is still very early Alpha footage, the game isn’t looking like it’s in a very good place right now.

So some of you may not be familiar with NPIXEL. They’re really only known for their mobile game Seven Knights – which was very popular on mobile devices but I highly doubt many PC gamers ever gave it a second glance.
Now the developers are looking to expand into a brand new market by announcing the release of several new MMORPGs.
I reported on Gran Saga once in the past, and I’m pretty excited about that considering, much like Genshin Impact, the game is going to be cross-play compatible with PC and other platforms.
However, I was under the impression that that was going to be it considering it’s difficult to develop more than one MMO at a time for a company – but here they go announcing another MMORPG, “Project S.”
It’s unconfirmed what platforms this’ll be available on, but judging by the fact that Gran Saga is going cross-platform, and NPIXEL are looking to be major competitors in the South Korean MMO market going into the future, it’s safe to assume it’ll likely end up cross-platform as well.
They also went on to state with the mass amount of funding they’ve received recently – they have several other games in development to add to their ever growing library of games.

I’m a pretty big fan of Kritika, and was pleasantly surprised when ALLM, the developer behind Kritika announced their plans to re-release the game in the West themselves.
They made promises – that new content would be rolled out faster than ever before, new classes would be introduced and the game would expand at a rate the playerbase has never seen.
True to that promise, ALLM have dropped a brand new trailer showcasing a new female Warrior class. While yes, there’s currently a male Warrior in-game, the female Warrior will have a different gameplay focus.
Where the male Warrior is more traditionally a slower, hulking berserker, the female is going to be more of an agile samurai.
While this announcement was for the South Korean version of the game only, the North American version of the game will likely be receiving it in the near future.
We’ve already had one large content update thus far, so I’m excited to see what 2020 will bring for the game.

Man it’s been a while since I’ve had anything pertaining to TERA to talk about. This is.. well, both good and bad news, depending on how you look at it.
As of a few days ago, the entire South East Asian region of the game, published under Playwith have given Gameforge all rights to publish the game within the region.
Thankfully characters weren’t lost and servers weren’t merged into current servers already operating, and all players located within the SEA region will remain segregated from European players.
However, that doesn’t mean SEA players will be unable to play with European players, it’s now as easy as switching servers. This might see a nice increase in terms of playerbase for both regions.
While TERA in North America is pretty dead, this is further proof that TERA’s European playerbase is profitable enough that they’re willing to take on another entire region of players.

This one.. well, this one’s actually about the company, ArenaNet as opposed to any game in specific. If you weren’t aware, ArenaNet is known for publishing Guild Wars 2.
However, a couple weeks ago they posted a job opening for an art director for an upcoming – but unannounced “3rd person fantasy action console title.” That’s awfully vague, but at the same time incredibly specific.
They’re looking for someone with experience in Unreal Engine 4, which is unusual since Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2 both used ArenaNet’s in-house engine.
What’s even more unusual, is the fact that they have a team large enough to warrant investment into a console title considering they laid off so many people last year.
They haven’t confirmed whether or not the console game will be an MMO or singleplayer game, but people are already speculating it might be a Guild Wars console game of sorts.
Maybe a sequel to Guild Wars 2? Maybe an entirely different IP? I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

I know there are still plenty of people that play Albion Online. In all honesty, I have a video I plan on doing on the game in the next month or so – and it’ll be on this topic in specific.
See, the team behind the game announced that their newest update, titled Queen, is launching on January 20th. Yup – that’s like.. a week and a half away. Less, even.
According to Sandbox Interactive, it will be the “largest update since the game’s launch in 2017,” bringing a complete rework of the Outlands continent, a place to live out in the open world in the form of hideouts, and open-world territory battles in conjunction with the new Crystal League.
They’re also working on quality-of-life improvements as well, but I feel like that’s a given with updates in this day and age.

So this one is a little weird. See, if you’ve ever heard of Tales of Wind you’ll know it’s a Mobile MMORPG. But that’s not what we’re talking about.
Rather, the developers behind the game announced at the end of December that the game would be launching onto PC as well.
Honestly.. I played the game on mobile for my mobile channel and I think it’s safe to say that the game.. well, it just isn’t a quality enough game to warrant a PC port.
Like, upon reading the official Facebook announcement, it looks like it’s the mobile version of the game but playable on PC just like using an emulator.
I know some of you might be interested in it, thus my making a note to talk about it right now but I can guarantee this isn’t a traditional PC MMO. Nevertheless, if you’re interested in playing it.. it’s available right now.