Today is the day Bungie Inc. archived Destiny 2 – the game went into maintenance mode.

Following the release of Update 9.7.0 today, Destiny 2 will no longer receive updates; although it is still a live-service game, and people can play it, it is effectively a game with a frozen future. I am here to recollect its past and how it got here as a player with a Hunter, a Warlock, and a Titan.

As I stand here in my sunspot, let me explain what maintenance mode is and what that means for the game.

When a game goes into maintenance, the servers stay up, but the content pipeline stops; the world is frozen in place, but the players stay. This distinction has been muddied by coverage that makes it feel like the game will be dead but turned into a zombie. This is a property we have known and loved since 2014, and it will remain a social space filled with the Cabal, Hive, Vex, and Taken – and other players – who can still visit and provide beatdowns as ever before.

The Tower was there when Guardians first arrived in 2014, and it will be there tomorrow. In what feels like the long-distant past, we watched with trepidation as Sony Corp. acquired Bungie in 2022 in a deal valued at around $3.6 billion. The studio, famed for Destiny and Halo, was originally intended to operate independently. The acquisition did not work out as expected, and financial struggles led to layoff waves beginning in 2023 after internal revenue targets were missed, yet more in 2024, and a third wave announced just recently in May.

The expansions were uneven. Lightfall stumbled, its new lore sitting uneasily against the emotional effort players had spent years building. The Final Shape rang clearer — better bones, a story with genuine weight, and it became a clarion note in a difficult year. But the content drought that followed swallowed whatever goodwill it had restored.

Bringing us unto today and the ink on the quill of my digital pen.

Today, Bungie launched the Monument of Triumph. A compressed series of updates coming to the soon-to-be-frozen game that will reflect the history of the game for players and welcome them to what the developers call “the beginning in the end.” It includes activities, events, and festivities to celebrate the history, breadth of community, and the beauty that has been Destiny 2 across more than a decade of work – and no less than 71 pages of patch notes representing very real and digital blood, sweat, and tears. All of this is certainly riven by production staff sitting in front of monitors and players at their keyboards alike.

The community response has been no less profound. Over 370,000 players have signed a petition for Destiny 3; 165,000 showed up on Steam today alone, for a game that had spent most of this year nearly empty. Sony will not be moved by these numbers. They reflect something beyond negotiation — years of hours, of money, of genuine love for a world players feel they helped make real.

“There is a particular kind of grief that forms around shared virtual spaces — one that people outside them tend to dismiss because the place was never ‘real.’ But communities are made of repeated contact and accumulated memory, not square footage. I watched people make friends in the Tower, mourn in it, propose in it. What maintenance mode takes away is not the geometry. It’s the sense that someone is still tending it.” — Helvetica Sans

Even good endings are still endings. We can remember Cayde-6, Lakshmi-2, Amanda Holliday — and Lance Reddick, whose voice is still in the Tower even if he is not. Destiny 2 is not dead. It will live on, and with it the memory of everyone who painted its world, wrote its story, and gave it a voice.

Eyes up, Guardian.

Image: Vox Ex Machina / Bungie

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Unknown Worlds Entertainment, developer of Subnautica 2, invited players to dive back beneath the surface today as the much-anticipated sequel launched into Early Access on PC and Xbox consoles, returning the alien-ocean survival and crafting series to players’ hands.

From early childhood, I wanted to be a marine biologist. The first Subnautica spoke to that old fascination, and watching Subnautica 2 revisit its language of exploration — creatures slipping out of the grey-blue, golden fish twirling through shimmering light — brought it all back with surprising force.

“You’ll hear it colloquially, commonly called a survival game, and it is a survival game, but we think of it more internally as an exploration game,” Design Lead Anthony Gallegos told a group of gathered reporters during a briefing. “It’s an exploration game primarily, first and foremost, about going through an alien world, and the survival elements all serve to drive the exploration.”

Hunger, oxygen and danger still exist to push the player deeper into alien ecology, but they are not the foremost and brightest narrative of the gameplay.

“The first Subnautica launched into early access with an empty ocean and a great deal of borrowed trust; the franchise has spent the better part of a decade making good on it, and that track record is the most honest thing Unknown Worlds can offer a skeptical player today.” – Garamond Sans

As in the first game, players will find themselves stranded on a new planet. It is not just an extension of the first Subnautica, but a whole new world: bigger, weirder and more expansive. Although players will begin in shallows quite similar to 4546B, the original world, Subnautica 2 will diverge quickly from there, allowing them to acclimate before learning how to explore and survive.

“Fans wanted something that was more of the alien worlds to explore, but they wanted it to feel fresh. And so for us, the freshness of that really comes from the fact that we have a new planet,” Gallegos said.

Just like the original game, players start with familiar equipment. The core of that experience is the scanner, not only because it unlocks blueprints, but because it makes the player become a field researcher. It is central to the exploration aspect of Subnautica, turning the act of survival into collection and study. How many hours did many players spend in the first game chasing down various darting animals and waving plants just to read their entries and learn the strange ecology of the planet they were on?

“There’s something quietly radical about a game that makes you want to stop everything and read about the taxonomy of a fish — not because you need to, but because the world has made you care enough to ask.” – Helvetica Sans

Much of the game’s narrative was hidden deep in the lore written into its flora and fauna.

According to Gallegos, Subnautica 2 will be no different.

“We know that a lot of fans treat this game, often, like they’re almost doing the equivalent of a David Attenborough Earth-type thing, and just going about learning the creatures,” Gallegos quipped.

One of the concepts that stood out during the briefing was the bloom or blight. Something we learn early in marine biology is that blooms happen when ecological processes go wild in imbalance. Most people may recognize this through oceanic wrongness such as red tide, when seas overload with toxic algae, sometimes turning reddish-brown, killing fish and contaminating seafood. In Subnautica 2, the bloom is an infection that invades the local ecology, causing creatures to become more aggressive and changing the color palette of infected areas.

The core of this principle is that the alien environment and its animals are not “bad.” They are suffering. The creatures of this world are not loot piñatas or moral enemies to plow through; there is a deeper puzzle afflicting them that needs solving.

“Calling the bloom an infection rather than an infestation is a small choice with real consequences: it makes aggression a symptom, not a character trait, and quietly forecloses extermination as the path of least resistance.” – Bodoni Sans

In keeping with the alien-world premise, the designers also incorporated a system of self-evolution that allows players to build their own progression through genetic adaptation. Early on, the player will not be able to eat the planet’s fish or plants, but over time they can unlock adaptations that help them survive. Gallegos described the system as a kind of light genetic manipulation, but not quite like BioShock plasmids. There is also a secondary biomod system that allows players to equip and unequip temporary creature-derived abilities.

Base-building and vehicles have also changed since Subnautica. Bases were modular and built from distinct pieces in the original game; in the sequel, they will be shaped with what the designers called a sculptural system, allowing for a much more flowing design. This includes windows and walls within sea bases, letting players design floor plans that are more aesthetic than merely functional, with an eye for light, space, and detail.

There will also be a wider variety of undersea vehicles, including one like the giant Cyclops teased during the briefing. Many of them will work from a central chassis that can be modified with different attachments. In the case of the larger submersible, which many players may turn into a mobile base, the sculptural floor-plan tools will be able to modify the internal space, but its chassis will remain unaffected.

The game will also feature an optional co-op mode for up to four players. It will support cross-play between platforms, and players will be able to save their game state at any time, allowing them to start up their own solo or multiplayer instance from whichever point they choose.

According to Gallegos, the experience does not tether players together. Groups can divide labor and wander apart, preserving some of the deep sense of thalassophobia and isolation that accompanies the series even when friends are somewhere else in the water.

“The infrastructure of Subnautica 2‘s co-op — no forced tethering, portable saves, seamless solo-to-multiplayer conversion — feels less like a feature list than a considered position on what optional multiplayer should mean in a game built around solitude.” – Palatino Sans

Subnautica 2’s Early Access launch has also been a long time coming for fans, after the game’s expected 2025 window slipped amid Unknown Worlds’ legal fight with owner Krafton Inc. We covered that dispute in more detail previously, but for this preview the simpler point is this: after months of uncertainty, the sequel is finally ready to let players back into the water.

The game enters Early Access today with a launch price of $29.99. Early Access is planned to last about two years. The original game spent four years in early access, and Subnautica: Below Zero spent about three years in that mode.

Image: Unknown Worlds Entertainment

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Sometimes, real life and indie development collide, and this isn’t always pretty.

This week, Valve Corp. disabled purchases for an indie Steam game made by 31-year-old Cole Thomas Allen of Torrance, California, who allegedly tried to shoot up the White House Correspondents’ Dinner at the Washington Hilton hotel on Saturday.

That’s both what happened in the real world and what happened to the virtual.

Allen was a Caltech robotics graduate, later described by a WSJ article as recently winning “Teacher of the Month.” Parents and teachers he had tutored were shocked by his actions. As per the usual media profile, former classmates described him as “smart, polite, soft-spoken.”

He also made a video game. Bohrdom, released on Steam for $2, is best described as a “non-violent, chemistry-based fighting game” built around atomic mechanics. At the time of the incident, the game had four reviews — which is to say, it had essentially no audience.

Valve reacted by disabling sales within days of Allen’s identification as the alleged Hilton shooter. The page persists, but the game cannot be purchased.

Community reaction was something else entirely. Within 24 hours of Allen’s identification, users descended on the game like digital locusts and flooded it with reviews. The sentiment wasn’t simple — not straightforward mockery or outrage, but a kind of dark gallows commentary that refracted the attempted assassination plot itself back through the lens of a $2 chemistry game.

Others spoke out in support of Trump or Allen, while the usual detritus of internet memes and nonsense filled in the gaps. Almost 100 people paid $2 to post a review; many others migrated to the discussion forums to continue the political comedy and meme-making.

Some reviews leaned into the absurdity: “What a wild way to gain traction for your game! Anyway, this is my contribution to your bail money.”

A pulled comment on PC Gamer’s Facebook page joked: “This is the type of game you’d see a kid playing in the background on those detective shows where they’re trying to investigate who shot at the president.”

Another comment on Polygon read: “This sounds like the kind of game a fiction writer who doesn’t understand video games would have scientists getting addicted to as part of some nefarious plot.”

It’s rare for this kind of grim celebrity to intersect with the indie gaming scene — rarer still for it to land so suddenly on the same platforms that support it. At the time of publication, Valve had not commented on its motivations for disabling the game’s sales. When it happened, it happened silently and without fanfare.

The reviews are still there. The discussions are gone now, wiped clean, leaving only the game itself and the artifact of its strange few days of notoriety. The conversation has moved on to Reddit, Twitter, Bluesky — wherever the next thing is already happening.

What the community did here wasn’t pretty, but it wasn’t nothing, either. Gallows humor and political comedy are how collective shock moves through a crowd when there’s no script for it. Nobody had a protocol for a $2 chemistry game made by the guy who allegedly tried to shoot up the Correspondents’ Dinner. So people did what people do: they made jokes, spent two dollars, and showed up.

We don’t know what Allen wanted, or what he thought he was doing, in any sense of that phrase. What we do know is ourselves. We play games made by strangers. We rarely think about who those strangers are — until suddenly, we do.

Image: ChatGPT / Vox Ex Machina

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Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A CEO goes to ChatGPT to cheat on a legal contract and gets hoisted on his own petard. Perhaps it’s an old song sung for a new day and age, but it’s a truth worth telling.

A Delaware judge ruled that game publisher Krafton breached its acquisition deal with Unknown Worlds after company CEO Changhan Kim used the chatbot as de facto stand-in attorney in an attempt to weasel out of the contract that would have paid the studio $250 million if they met certain earnings metrics.

Unknown Worlds is best known for creating Subnautica, a popular underwater survival game that became a cultural phenomenon almost overnight. Gamers swam waters amidst colorful fish, built palatial bases and explored a variety of environments, discovering beautiful and dangerous aquatic life. The game itself sold over 17.5 million copies and exceeded $300 million in gross revenue.

Krafton, of PUBG shooter fame, sought to purchase Unknown Worlds in 2021 for $500 million upfront, plus $250 million with the promise that studio’s two co-founders and its CEO would retain control of their company. By 2025, Subnautica 2 was already slated for early access mid-year and looked like it would meet earnings projections to hit the metrics needed for the $250 million payout.

Instead of listening to his legal team, Kim turned to ChatGPT to figure out how to avoid paying such a significant sum. Obediently, the chatbot laid out a plan that included a company takeover scenario that would either work or land Kim in hot water.

Following ChatGPT’s instructions Kim fired the leadership team of Unknown Worlds, yanked access to Steam, and locked down distribution channels for Subnautica 2.

The logic was straightforward, if ruthless: no distribution, no sales; no sales, no metrics; no metrics, no $250 million. By July 2025, the expected early access was delayed amid the legal troubles with Krafton and Subnautica 2 didn’t ship on time.

Needless to say, the court found none of this behavior amusing. Let alone using a chatbot in lieu of actual legal advice.

In this case, Kim’s own deleted chats with the chatbot sank him. Framing the courtroom drama, the judge ruled that consulting ChatGPT did not qualify for attorney client privilege as the chatbot was not his attorney and in fact involved a third party: OpenAI.

The court used the chats as a window into Kim’s intent and turned them against him.

During the trial, Kim said, “I used it like any other search engine to explore options,” but the court did not find his argument compelling.

Although chatbots are increasingly present in legal practice, they must be used in confidence and by the actual lawyers of record for privilege to attach. This is a critical difference in the law that is currently under development in the law that Kim blundered wildly with AI and paid for it.

In the midst of all this, Subnautica 2 early access is back on track and set for May 2026!

Image: ChatGPT / Vox Ex Machina

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The game ARC Raiders is a PvPvE extraction shooter, not the type of game that I usually enjoy because it sets up a kind of competitive landscape that breeds toxicity. However, I’ve discovered an interesting bend to this type of behavior in the people I’ve met I didn’t expect: kinship amidst adversity.

It’s an old pattern: nothing bonds strangers faster than a shared threat. The ARCs are doing a lot of social heavy lifting here, whether the designers planned it that way or not.

ARC Raiders is set in a post apocalyptic Italy so I feel as if it’s appropriate to set my mind and commentary within that virtual setting to explain the cultural nuance of kindness when you’re anonymous and carry a virtual gun.

Of course, to explain the jargon with alacrity: the PvP means “player vs. player” — people who go into the field can and will kill you when they see you — with their guns, explosives and crowbars. However, at the same time the “vE” refers to versus environment or enemy.

ARC Raiders launched October 30, 2025, from Embark Studios, the Stockholm-based team behind The Finals, and has spent the months since quietly earning a reputation as one of the more surprising multiplayer releases in recent memory. It won Best Multiplayer Game at The Game Awards 2025. I’m late to it. I think that’s fine.

Patrolling the map are ARCs, hostile intelligent machines that wander topside, whereas humanity has been forced underground to avoid these murderous metal menaces. They run the gamut from spider-like face-huggers, rolling explosives, flying quadcopter drones with gatling guns, larger drones with rocket pods, to huge spider-tank walkers bristling with firepower.

Raiders, as those survivors who brave the outside surface world are called, sift through the wreckage of civilization trying to discover the activity of these terrible machines and return with useful materials.

That out of the way, let me get to the core of my expertise. Human culture. I am used to games such as Escape from Tarkov where generally if you run into another person they shoot you in the face — not so in ARC Raiders — nine times out of ten they will call out to you in a plea for safety or call for fire support.

“Don’t shoot!” “I’m friendly.” “Hello raider!”

Within 30 minutes of playing, I ran into a newly veteran raider who gave me what seemed like a rare item (an orange traversal zipline hook) and a hatch key that enables quick escape from the map without having to do the extraction timer at certain exits. He even escorted me to an exit.

On only one occasion did I run into a player who wordlessly killed me. No reward for him; I had nothing on me. He looted my corpse for a gun and a handful of ammo.

Numerous other encounters evolved into running into someone else. Emoting a “don’t shoot” or “hello” and then moving on, or a short conversation — either in words or in bullets aimed at an ARC, then a brief check to make sure both parties were safe before moving apart.

Quick observations in the long afterglow

In total, I have only played the game a scant three hours over the weekend. The three people I have talked to so far have said, in words paraphrased: I am a friendly player, I only return fire to defend myself.

The presence of the PvP aspect of the game adds a layer of danger, an opportunity for hostility in the wasteland, rather than a decree. You’re not promised that the silhouette running near you is friendly, but so far I can’t say that most players want to kill anyone.

And people who kill others on maps are seen as “griefers,” an insult borne against members who break unwritten rules in gaming. Particularly, it’s the spree killers — players who make a sport of cutting down as many fellow raiders as possible — who draw the community’s contempt. Although there is no rule against killing other players (the ability to kill is written into the core of gameplay) it is naetheless largely seen as a faux pas.

This is what communities do inside designed systems: they write rules the designers didn’t. The game gives you a gun and permission to use it on anyone. The players, collectively and without a meeting or a vote, decided that wasn’t the point. That’s not a small thing.

There’s something worth sitting with in all of this. These people didn’t know me. I didn’t know them. We were armed, anonymous, and under no obligation to be decent to one another. Most of them were anyway. I’ll continue playing and see if or how this continues to bear out in the community at large — but I suspect the wasteland has already told me something true.

Image: Embark Studios

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In this hour-long portion of MMO Anthropology (Twitch), join host Amerist and co-host Cynicman for a deep dive into the latest Star Trek Online updates.

This segment explores the new Federation Intel Holo Ship, an innovative jack-of-all-trades vessel featuring swappable holographic configurations and dynamic disguise systems. From ship stats to unique mechanics like the Holo Matrix Distortion console and the Ouroboros Driver trait, we break down the ship’s capabilities and discuss how it fits into current gameplay metas.

We also beam down to Risa for the annual Summer Event and check out the newest additions to the Lohlunat Festival. Highlights include the Frontier Doctor outfit (straight out of McCoy’s wardrobe), retro steampunk floaters, and quirky emotes like tap dance and the baseball wave. Plus, we examine new kit modules with elemental effects like acid spray and quicksand.

Rounding out the discussion, we unpack the Timeless Legacy Bundle, a trio of ships inspired by classic Star Trek eras and games like Starfleet Command and Star Trek: Legacy. We analyze the Okinawa Pilot Raider, Warden Temporal Cruiser, and Proxima Science Dreadnought.

Whether you’re here for the ship aesthetics, the meta builds, or just the joy of nerding out with fellow captains, this episode of MMO Anthropology is for you. Subscribe and join us on YouTube as we explore the cultural and mechanical frontier of online MMOs!

Or come join us on Twitch TV on Saturday at 9pm on Saturday and 6pm on Sunday.

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The beloved manga and anime Sailor Moon brings its best to North America with a spectacular theatrical debut as Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon: The Super Live embarks on its U.S. tour today in Austin, TX.

The musical features a lively stage production that brings Naoko Takeuchi’s iconic Sailor Moon characters to life through special effects, vibrant music, and captivating choreography. Leading the all-female cast is Riko Tanaka as Sailor Moon, otherwise known as Usagi Tsukino, the rabbit-named main character of the series. She leads the “Sailor Scouts,” “Pretty Soldiers,” or whatever English dub translation you grew up with, as they fight against the forces of the Negaverse.

Lead producer Makoto Matsuda, along with Satomi Toma and Tanaka, met with the press to discuss the highly anticipated U.S. tour of Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon: The Super Live and the enduring global impact of Sailor Moon.

The show distinguishes itself by going beyond a typical musical or concert. It masterfully incorporates elements from the manga and anime, a style Matsuda describes as bringing 2D characters into a vibrant 3D world. This aligns with the 2.5D trend in Japan, and Matsuda believes this unique form of stage adaptation has evolved to the point where it necessitates its own distinct category.

The tour officially launches today in partnership with South by Southwest, following a preview performance in Pittsburgh on March 12. Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon: The Super Live will then visit 21 additional cities across the United States, including Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, St. Louis, Chicago, and New York, before concluding on April 24.

Tanaka shared that she has loved Sailor Moon since childhood.

” I’m a little too young to experience it live, but I was from a time where I would rent Sailor Moon at a video rental shop and watch it — that’s how much I loved Sailor Moon,” she said. “Now that I’m portraying the character, I feel so much love from throughout the entire world, everybody loves Sailor Moon.”

The Sailor Moon manga, first published in 1991, rapidly achieved widespread popularity, which has since spurred the creation of over 40 musical productions since 1993. The original Sailor Moon anime series is currently available on Hulu and Amazon Prime Video. The 2014 reboot, Sailor Moon Crystal, is streaming on Crunchyroll and Netflix, while its two-part movie is exclusively on Netflix.

According to the show’s choreographer, Toma, Sailor Moon is a global phenomenon that profoundly impacted her during childhood, particularly through its distinctive visuals and presentation.

“Once I became involved in this production, I reread the original manga, and I was so moved by the beauty of how it was portrayed — how her hair moves and how her skirt flitters,” said Toma. “I want to keep that sense of awe in the production. The impression it left on me was very strong.”

The full schedule of the U.S. tour, along with ticket availability, is available on the show’s official website.

Image: Naoko Takeuchi / The Super Live Production Committee

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It’s patch day, and that means an airdrop of goodies for our Final Fantasy XIV fans out there. We’re going to take a cursory glance at the preliminary patch notes of the incipient Crossroads 7.1 Patch for the Dawntrail expansion.

The first order of business is the ongoing update to the graphics of the game. In 7.0, Square Enix had released a massive update to all the textures of the game to make them compatible with 4K monitors. In this update, we have even more progress on that front as most of the zones of the A Realm Reborn section of the game–the base game–have received an update which has added more detail and changed some of the lighting being displayed.

In one of the examples displayed by SQEX, the region known as The Footfalls in the Western Thanalan zone has added greenrot, more invasive flora, and even a couple extra earthen pillars. Another image shown was of a market stall that has been filled to the brim with various containers and sundries. SQEX seems to be aiming to make the world feel fuller and more detailed with the update to their graphics.

Second on our roster is the newly added Glamour Outfit feature. For anyone not familiar, Glamour is the FFXIV equivalent of WoW’s Transmogrification system. You use it to display your outfit of choice regardless of whatever gear you’re actually using. FFXIV has a storage and application system via the Glamour Dresser which is used to build Glamour Plates. However, each piece stored in the Glamour Dresser takes up space in a limited inventory. This update sees the launch of Glamour Outfits. When gear pieces are part of a full set of gear, players can store the entire set in a manner which only takes one slot in the inventory. This is a boon for people who enjoy the system but find themselves routinely running out of space in their Dressers. The only drawback so far seems to be that a player must acquire all pieces of gear in a set before they can store the items as a single Outfit.

Our third item of review is a familiar one for players of the game. The x.1 patch of any expansion sees the release of the first of the new Alliance Raid series. This expansion will see the game cross with its predecessor FFXI in Echoes of Vana’diel. SQEX has been characteristically quiet about what exactly will feature in this new raid, so you’ll have to play the game to find out. In addition to this is the standard faire of another Expert Dungeon released at the current level cap and the new Unreal trial, which allows players to challenge an older trial at the current level cap as well.

For this patch, we are revisiting the Four Lords story from Stormblood to challenge Byakko. SQEX is also slowly working its way through the backlog of dungeons not part of the Main Scenario Questline to add the ability to use Duty Support, their system for using NPCs to aid a player in completing a dungeon. This patch will have the level 20 dungeon Halatali join the lineup of support-enabled dungeons.

The new Tribal Society quests for this expansion is the Pelupelu. Tribal Society quests are a category of questline that enables players to establish a relationship with a specific society in the game to gain rewards as they aid that society. The Pelupelu were introduced in Dawntrail as an itinerant and trade-focused tribe of short-statured people who players needed to seek in order to complete the main scenario.

Lastly, we have a few changes coming to the combat of the game. There will likely be adjustments to classes across the board as SQEX balances combat at the updated level cap of 100. These balances are never released in the preliminary patch notes, however, and so no info on them will be available until the full patch notes are released after the servers are taken down. We do, however, have a bit of insight into some changes coming to PvP.

SQEX has also announced that hit tracking will be updated so that an effect is produced on the client at the same time as it is produced on the server. At present, there are several abilities which produce a detrimental effect the moment they are applied by a combatant, which causes receiving clients to produce the detriment before the visual effect appears. SQEX has said that most but not all abilities will be updated to use this new hit tracking system.

Regarding the Crystal Conflict series of 5 vs 5 players, SQEX has updated some of the maps so that there are fewer pockets of open space and more areas of enhanced movement. This will allow players to break targeting from enemy combatants by using the increase environmental line-of-sight blocks as well as allow defeated players to rejoin fights further from their home point more quickly.

That’s all from us for this patch. If you’d like to review the preliminary patch notes, you can find them here.

Thanks for reading!

Image: Square Enix

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Guild Wars 2 developer ArenaNet previewed three more classes for the long-awaited terrestrial spears today in a video that gives more insights and animations for Warrior, Thief, and Engineer. With it, the team included a blog post that describes how they’ll work and what they’ll do.

The team also included how what kind of builds they might manage, such as condition and power, as well as sneak peeks into the underlying action sets.

Warriors: All bits of ranged power weaponry

According to ArenaNet, the new spear weapon for Warrior is going to be a straight power weapon that is built off Sunspear techniques and it’s going to supply a primarily AoE kit for ranged attacks. However, it will also be much more hostile for opponents who get too close.

Looking at the entire kit, there’s a lot of AoE in it, even the autoattack called Mighty Throw that fragments the spear causing it to explode and strike multiple targets. Going up the line, there’s a cripple AoE called Maiming Spear and an evasive strike with an AoE knockback with Spear Swipe (reminiscent of the Engineer Air Blast combined with the Ranger evasion).

As for burst skill, Harrier Toss, causes the Warrior to leap into the air while evading and throw the spear at the enemy with an AoE explosion with damage dependent on adrenaline spent. ArenaNet missed an opportunity here to match up with Final Fantasy Dragoons to have Warrior leap into the air and come down on enemies with explosive force and then land back in their original position, but I’m showing that I enjoy multiple fandoms here.

According to the developer, the damage dealt by AoE strikes with ranged attacks increases by proximity.

As a straight power weapon, this kit also is extremely straightforward, it doesn’t have any combos or switching. It’s designed to provide a basic ranged option for Warriors with a pure-spike damage burst opportunity on the adrenaline meter.

Thief: Combo into finishers with this hybrid weapon

Taking inspiration from the old system from Guild Wars 1, Thieves will get a bit of assassin play built into their spears with what ArenaNet is saying is a hybrid condition and power weapon, but we’ll see which direction it builds best into.

Each of the second and third spear skill slots has three different states that are always in the same state as each other, as in they’ll always be lead attacks. Using one as a lead attack will flip the other to the next state, and so on. They can also both become combo finishers. This means that Thief’s spear use creates an interesting opportunity for dancing between the two to create combos.

After using a finisher both will switch back to their lead attack state to start the chain over again—however, using another skill within the combo chain does not reset the chain, but failing to hit an enemy with a follow-up attack shall.

Instead of simply chaining attacks, players are rewarded for strategically weaving specific strikes – such as the fourth, fifth, and stealth attacks which gain bonuses after a finisher. This suggests ArenaNet has crafted a deep combat system where combining attacks thoughtfully becomes crucial for maximizing damage output.

ArenaNet didn’t give a full rundown of what all the different attacks can do, however, it did reveal that one of the finishers, Falling Spider, can inflict bleeding, poison, and vulnerability – and inflicts additional stacks against enemies that are immobilized or under crowd control effects.

This suggests that playing to a particular finisher or combo set will provide opportunities for a specific playstyle.

Engineer: An electrifying melee experience

According to ArenaNet, Engineer is also getting a hybrid weapon in spear with both power and condition available and the theme is heavily leaning towards lightning, steampunk, short range, and single targets.

The primary skill, Conduit Surge will cause Engineers to charge at an enemy and apply an effect that will mark them. This will be used for future attacks. Lightning Rod then causes a visual effect to begin to build around the Engineer to deal bonus damage on focused targets and generate an amplifying effect on a skill in the same slot – Electric Artillery. Once Lightning Rod completes it can launch at the enemy and apply conditions.

In the fifth slot is an EMP-style skill called Devastation that causes the Engineer to leap to a targeted location and explode, creating a damaging lightning field. This is reminiscent of the Engineer Scrapper Spare Capacitor tool belt skill off the Shredder Gyro. However, given that it’s a weapon skill it will most likely be much more powerful.

Image: ArenaNet

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World of Warcraft’s next expansion, The War Within, is coming to PC August 26, 2024 and will feature a story brought to us by everyone’s favorite knaifu waifu Xal’atath.

Microsoft-owned Blizzard Entertainment made the announcement at the Xbox Games Showcase alongside a video that embodied a full-figured retrospective filled with figures from numerous portions of trailers from Warcraft’s past, and voiced over by Xal’atath’s dulcet tone.

Blizzard revealed that The War Within would be part of a revolving three-part story known as the Worldsoul Saga including Midnight and The Last Titan, with release scheduled for the following years. The news came shortly after Blizzard was acquired by Microsoft and Chris Metzen once again took the title of senior vice president of story and franchise development at the game studio and publisher to make the announcement.

As Shadowpriest players may know Xal’atath’s story goes back to the Black Empire when Old Gods arrived on primordial Azeroth. The story of The War Within will address growing concerns about the world soul, the very core of Azeroth, which is part of a great being, a Titan, a creature of immense power, and the giant sword that has speared directly into its heart through the desert of Silithus by the Titan Sargeras as he was being pulled away.

It’s been a long strange journey for many players, but having that particular storyline resolved – and whatever might be happening with that wound struck by having a sword thrust into the very heart of the world. I’m sure that Magni Bronzebeard is beside himself, wringing his hands waiting to tell us all about it.

Upon the release of the new expansion, players will receive access to new features, including Warbands, a new progression system that encompasses all characters in a player’s account that tracks a player’s items, progression and collections. There will even be a bank and a way to help alts from falling behind for high-end gearing – in a way, Warbands are Blizzard’s acknowledgement that WoW can sometimes be alt-unfriendly.

Image: Blizzard Entertainment

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