MMO Monday: Flaming Sword Cat Edition

Welcome to another edition of MMO Monday. After a suspicious week long absence, I’m back with some more news and livelihood in the MMO world. Also, MMO Monday will become bi-weekly as to allow me time to actually write these things. You get presumably more news, on time! It’s a win-win situation. Trust me.

If you ever wanted to be The Thing is real life, keep dreaming because it’s not possible. Champions Online has the next best thing though, with its new Mountain Archetype. The archetype allows you to dress yourself up in all manners of earth and stone and gives you a tankish power set, allowing player to keep enemy attention on them and away from teammates. The new type is live now, so go make an earthquake or two.

“Beat Em Up” style MMO Vindictus got a new update that brings players new areas to explore. You can now check out Rocheste’s sewers, as well as getting a new skill so you don’t get completely swamped in the underground. PvP players can expect a new play type called “M-Match”, in which two teams go head to head, each having a boss monster under their control as well. There also some new chained boss fights for the masochistic. Update should be coming soon to the NA territory, so prepare those attack buttons.

What do The Lord of the Rings and Batman have in common? They’re both might be getting Korean Based MMOs! It’s rumored that Warner Brothers has licensed Inplay Interactive (developers behind another WB property, F.E.A.R.: Origin Online) to create a Lord of the Rings MMO and another one based on Batman from DC. This is all rumored, but it looks like WB heard RockSteady mention “Arkham World” and then thought it wasn’t a bad idea. I hope for their sake (and mine, I love me some Arkham-anything) it’s not.

Ghost Recon Online is shaping up to be a pretty exciting multiplayer experience. Developed by Ubi Singapore, the PC version will be free to play, and Ubisoft is currently letting anyone sign up to be considered part of the beta queue, so long you have a U-Play account. We’re looking at a release later on this year, as well as a Wii-U version to come out whenever the Wii-U becomes a real thing. I just want my shoulder mounted heat ray gun. Nobody would mess with me if I had one of those.

League of Legends has a brand new champion! Sejuani is a Freljord warrior who rides a boar into battle to do all manners of tanky things and generally make you run away because she’s riding in on a fucking boar…except you can’t get away because a goddamned boar is chasing you. Along with her came more patches to gradually get rid of the Dodge Mechanic and runes, which should be virtually erased from the game by the end of this week. Cool stuff, but I’m going to miss Sivir’s Dodge passive; it helped me suck less.

Speaking of Riot Games, both Riot and Red 5 (developers behind them MMOFPS Firefall) both announced their support for all things against the controversial and scary-as-hell SOPA/PIPA bills. Red 5 shut down the closed beta for FireFall last Wednesday, and both developers have pledged to boycott E3 in response to the ESA’s support of the bill, and are gaining traction with other developers around the world.

Guild Wars 2 is getting its beta, and I couldn’t be more happy. Opening up to select members in the press first (I LOVE YOU ARENANET hinthintwinkwink), the spring is when the beta will gradually open up to more users, up until the release date later this year. Not a concrete release date, but I’m still excited that Guild Wars 2 is finally happening; can’t wait to run my Char Engineer.

Finally, The Old Republic is going full steam on the update train. Bioware is planning to add a second part to the “Rise of the Rakghouls” update, as well as adding two more Warzones and expanding the Legacy System. The UI is all getting an update to, for more customization options, which is always welcome. I don’t know about you, but I’m really sad I can’t jump into The Old Republic right now. I need some cash so I can get my Bounty Hunter on.

And there you go! That’s the news for the past two weeks. Have anything you want reported on? Wanna know where some of us get all MMO? Hit the comments or hit me up personally at mclean@gamegavel.com. Later Folks!