Guild Wars 3's on the horizon—and as part of that release, developer ArenaNet got a little nostalgic in a news post last week. It shared a healthy handful of details on its incoming MMO, including an aim to fix something that shook PCG's own Lauren Morton off the second game.

It also shared an interesting tidbit about the first Guild Wars game. Namely—try as they might, ArenaNet couldn't shake off the MMO tag: "Guild Wars Reforged is, at its core, a game about a small team: a player and their assembled team of henchmen or hero NPCs or other players they want to bring along with them, overcoming challenges in a predominantly instanced game.

"Unless you invited them along, you never saw other players except in the game's social hubs. When we released the original Guild Wars, we branded the game as a CORPG (cooperative online RPG); however, the branding never stuck, and everyone informed us we'd released an MMORPG."

I suppose I'm guilty of doing the same—though it makes sense, given I'm a Final Fantasy 14 fan, and that also happens to be a set of basically single-player RPGs that just so happens to share an online world. Granted, there's plenty you can team up for, but the same goes for Guild Wars 1.

It's particularly interesting because the things that ArenaNet determined as setting it apart from other MMOs are actually more popular in modern MMOs than they've ever been. FF14 and World of Warcraft both have systems where you can fill out your party members with NPCs, and a higher emphasis on soloable content as the years have gone on.

It was a point of contention for Raph Koster (who worked on Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies) when I spoke to him earlier this month for our MMO column—observing that open-world sandbox MMOs, the type Guild Wars 1 sought to set itself apart from, fell out of favour in exchange for instanced theme parks with social hubs.

In other words, when you describe a game where you rarely interact with players outside of social hubs, you can describe a ton of modern MMOs depending on how strict you're being—sure, I'll see players occasionally divebomb a mob in my periphery in WoW or join a mob of particle-effect flinging adventurers for a public event, but I'm not exactly talking to anybody.

Anyway, ArenaNet eventually leant in: "We even won multiple MMO-of-the-year awards! We gave up on the CORPG angle since it didn't stick with players, and we simply embraced what everyone told us: we'd shipped a unique kind of MMORPG."

Inside me, there are two people. The first, a rational adult, understands the legalities of private servers, and how typically incompatible they are with… well, existence. I can't say that certain servers, like TurtleWoW, played it safe either—while you do need to pay developers, opening up a cash shop for a game you're running off a stolen IP isn't smart.

The second has a grim understanding of the state of the genre by virtue of writing this very column. Not only have I personally observed that MMOs are an aging genre with very little in the way of newcomers, but I'm also not the only person who has identified a problem—I spoke to Raph Koster (Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxies) earlier this month about the miserly state of things. Jack Emmert of City of Heroes fame also thinks there are huge problems. It's not just me getting nostalgic and misty-eyed.

Regardless of the cause, one thing is true: New MMOs aren't surviving, or they're being shut down. There are a couple indie outliers like Project Gorgon that're doing just fine for themselves, but we aren't getting the big hitters anymore.

And while I might not mourn servers like TurtleWoW or Project Ascension quite like I might, say, wince in sympathy for poor Matt Frior—who made Project Blackbird for years only for it to be slain in the cradle by Microsoft—I still feel a little sad to see Blizzard folding in on them, even if they're well within their rights to do so.

Because it's not like Blizzard isn't taking pointers, right? Of course, Ion Hazzikostas isn't gonna walk out one day and say "yeah, we were inspired by the private server we shut down". But there's absolutely a pattern. Blizzard will muscle in on a private server, and then a year or two later, come out with their own version of what that server was doing.

The original example is, of course, Nostralius, which Blizzard came for in 2016. The server reached a major height of popularity as a version of oldschool World of Warcraft maintained by passionate fans, something Blizzard had previously rebuffed with the now-infamous quote: "You think you do, but you don't."

Two years after Nostralius shuts down, Blizzard opens up World of Warcraft Classic, an experiment so successful it's still working through expansions today, both in the OG Classic and in Anniversary servers that are doing the whole time loop again.

I also don't think it's a coincidence that a lot of these servers were offering Classic-adjacent experiences with clever twists around the time Blizzard put out its Season of Discovery servers or Remix events, either. Or, indeed, that Blizzard has a mysterious "Project Camelot" on the horizon in the wake of these C&Ds.

I'm not accusing Blizzard of copying homework, mind. These versions of WoW are very much distinct from the dying servers—whether that be Project Ascension's ability draft or TurtleWoW cooking up entirely new classes. But they were made in an environment where there was concrete proof that an appetite for interesting, experimental takes on the good old days are incredibly popular.

To be clear: I'm certainly not in the business of defending Microsoft, and I don't think Blizzard needs defending when it comes to what it's done. Stating that Blizzard has a right to shut these servers down is an outlining of the facts, rather than what I purposefully believe should be the case in a utopian society. The law and what I want are two different things.

But the facts are: We do live in a capitalist society with copyright laws. Blizzard is legally obliged to snub these things to protect its IP. There are alternatives, such as NCSoft's treatment of the City of Heroes server Homecoming—but that was achieved under years of meticulous and very, very careful manoeuvring by the private server's devs, who never once accepted donations beyond what they required to run the server.

They certainly didn't open a cash shop. Again, TurtleWoW did itself absolutely no favours, even if I think what it was doing was rad in a vacuum.

So why am I still sad? Well, two reasons.

Well, in isolation, I think these private servers are often just doing cool stuff. I think it's neat that Project Ascension had an ability draft version of WoW. I think it's neat that TurtleWoW was cooking up entirely different classes and zones—just as I thought it was neat that Homecoming made new archetypes and story arcs.

While the scale of passion projects to actual illegal business varies from server to server, the MMO genre is a space that's in dire need of innovation. And if Blizzard has been taking notes, it's these servers we have to thank for a lot of the precious scraps of invention the company has been allowed to make.

Not necessarily because the devs have been nicking ideas. As a matter of fact, I think they're plenty creative—but they're bound to the laws of capital in a way these private server mavericks just aren't, and they can't just disagree with management because… well, it's their career. A private server getting popular, however, means developers can point at their playercounts when pitching to the people with money.

I am willing to bet that we probably wouldn't have WoW Remix or SoD without some of the servers that're getting shut down. We certainly wouldn't have had Classic without Nostralius.

But I'm also sad because, in a healthier videogame industry, with fewer layoffs and studio closures, might some of these private server devs have found positions within actual studios? In a world where companies aren't obligated by copyright law to send cease and desist to fan projects, could these private servers tick along just fine?

And more to the point—in a world where the MMO genre wasn't suffering from companies hounding after the next quarter (and, to be fair, ballooning development costs)—would these servers even exist in the first place?

It's a pipe dream, I know. But I think private servers are a symptom of a wider illness, not a disease—and I have watched genuine creativity and effort be poured into them by people I can't rightly blame for being unable to find legitimate work in this utter hellscape of an industry. It's a sorry state of affairs, one I doubt will change in my lifetime—but I'll quietly wish it would.

Guild Wars 2 is one of the biggest MMOs going, but it's a sequel to a game that's just barely an MMO—the original Guild Wars is more of a mission-based ARPG with shared town hubs that feels like an MMO due to its huge roster of character classes and /dance emotes. When a game like Guild Wars 3 gets announced, an obvious question follows: will it be an MMO or not?

According to a blog post from ArenaNet studio head Colin Johanson that went up earlier this week, the answer is yes, but with an asterisk. In the post, he lays out the studio's taxonomy for the first two games. The first Guild Wars game, Johanson reckons, was a "cooperative online RPG," but when everyone started calling it an MMO, ArenaNet followed suit. The second is a true-blue MMO that was always intended to toy with the genre's conventions.

As for the third? It "lands near the middle of the MMO spectrum … While it fits the definition of an MMORPG significantly more than Guild Wars Reforged does, it doesn't try to replicate the large-scale gameplay pillars that so uniquely define Guild Wars 2."

"This ensures that all three of our games can coexist as different experiences on different timelines, telling different stories about the world of Tyria," the post explains.

Johanson concedes that this declaration is "broad and vague," and it's true that we only have the roughest idea of what Guild Wars 3 might look like at this point. That said, social media is ablaze with prospective players trying to guess at exactly what sort of game GW3 will be—speculation has ranged from a New World-like to a GW1 successor to a singleplayer game—which I suppose is what happens when the only two games in your series hardly play like one another.

If nothing else, we know it's an MMORPG of a sort, or at least an MMO-like, which somehow feels like a relief. It's like stumbling onto an oasis at a time when, as PC Gamer's Harvey Randall put it, "loving MMOs … is an exercise in frustration, grief, and moving on."

Patch 12.1 is on the horizon, and it looks like we were right—that ominous monologue Zul'jan had during World of Warcraft: Midnight's main story quests was absolutely a setup for the next major patch. Curse of Ula'tek is going to take us to The Coiled Isle, where we'll be digging further into the troubled history of the Amani trolls.

One surprise from the patch is the inclusion of Mythic+ world bosses via lairs, as explained in the overview video below.

Essentially, a lair is a one-boss delve-like instance that plucks out the usual world bosses that'd be prowling a patch zone like this and places them in an instanced, delve-like arena with some variable difficulty settings, all the way up to "flexible Mythic" 15-25 man groups, which'll presumably have the same bite as the other Mythic content in the game.

I'm of two minds about this, honestly. On the one hand, I think it's really neat that WoW's continuing to add varying difficulty to all of its activities—using the whole buffalo is the smartest way for MMOs to design their encounters, and I was a huge fan of the Prey system on launch for making my open world activities spicier.

And yet I'm not too excited about them being instanced. Part of the appeal of a world boss is… well, that it's a boss in the world, and the MMO feeling of piling onto some schmuck with a gaggle of strangers in a chaotic melee of spells is more appealing than this alternative from a community perspective.

The patch also includes, naturally, more story quests, an in-zone talent tree, a new dungeon, delves, a raid—all that good major patch stuff. As well as some much-needed brush-ups to the cooldown manager, the ability to add pets to housing (score!) You can read the full details on the official website,

At this year's EVE Fanfest, the developers of EVE Online sister game Frontier were touting its new driving controls and gamepad support⁠—features that have already resulted in a vastly different game than Fenris Creations' (formerly CCP Games) original MMO.

As a big Steam Deck sicko, I was naturally curious whether Frontier's gamepad support opened up any portable PC possibilities, and it turns out some members of the team have been on a "side quest" to make it happen, to quote game director Sæmundur Hermannsson.

Frontier product manager Scott McCabe has been personally experimenting with the game on Valve's handheld. "I wanted to get on the Steam Deck," said McCabe. "I have one at my desk, and we're just kind of testing it out, dipping our toes in the water."

"Anything that runs on [Linux compatibility layer] Proton can basically be squeaked onto a Steam Deck," McCabe said, pointing out that, at that point, there's little separating the Deck from a normal PC aside from power and performance considerations.

The original EVE Online, by contrast, has been playable on Steam Deck for some time, but is a much less obvious fit for handheld play with its more mouse and keyboard-centric control scheme. "As soon as you start having a control system that works with a game pad," said McCabe, "There's absolutely no reason you can't put it onto these types of devices."

McCabe cautioned that Steam Deck support was not on any official development roadmaps, but that "it makes such obvious sense with the manual controls now." Hermannsson was even more bullish on the prospect when I asked him about it the following day.

"It's a no-brainer," the game director said, joking that "I don't know if the marketing people will punch us or whatever" for over-promising. Hermannsson echoed McCabe's point that making Frontier gamepad-friendly in the first place was a far bigger challenge than anything specific to the Deck.

"We already have experiments running on Steam Deck," said Hermannsson. "We just couldn't get it in time⁠—we want to focus on the gamepad stuff instead. The biggest problem we ran into was actually the launcher. It's not the game itself, it was just like some config files."

A number of high-profile multiplayer games are unplayable on Deck due to their anticheat being incompatible with Linux, but EVE Frontier sidesteps this issue by eschewing traditional anticheat altogether. Frontier is being built to be highly moddable⁠—eventually open source⁠—but with guardrails baked into the game to prevent cheats or exploits, something the team at Fenris refers to as "digital physics."

Hermannsson said he was less personally invested in Deck compatibility as he wasn't much of a handheld PC gamer, but he sees it as a way of broadening the appeal of the complex, experimental game as much as possible. Frontier development director David Bowman put it succinctly when I asked him about Deck support: "Our goal is to get this to as many players as possible."

Life is about to get much easier for World of Warcraft players tired of having to track down guildmates to get a group together for a raid. Blizzard is officially acknowledging that Discord is the most convenient solution to this problem and will be integrating its chat directly into the MMO in the next update.

Blizzard announced that patch 12.1, Curse of Ula'tek, will bring cross-platform chat between Discord and WoW guild chat. Messages will show up in the MMO and in Discord, and can be set up so it's all-in-one combined chat or separated into individual channels.

The only requirement is to link your Battle.net and Discord account and have a guild leader or officer adjust how they want the chats to work. Once that's done, you'll be able to see people chatting directly from Discord with the logo next to their messages in-game.

This is big news for guilds with hundreds of players across different time zones. WoW's in-game chat just isn't equipped for that, especially without an easy way to scroll through an archive of messages across multiple days. I have two monitors so it's not particularly hard to swap between Discord and a game, but I'm sure solo monitor and laptop players will be relieved to hear they don't need to stop doing their dailies to answer a ping.

This does make me wonder if we're about to see Discord chat show up in more games as a replacement for developers having to build a guild or clan chat system. It's not just MMO players who need to wrangle people together; I could see this being useful in other multiplayer games, like Arc Raiders or Overwatch.

All of this might be moot by the time Discord gets around to rolling out its extremely unpopular global age verification, which is supposedly happening sometime before the end of the year. If that goes awry, WoW players might be back to juggling chat apps trying to see if enough people are online to run some Mythic+ dungeons.

Final Fantasy 14 will give you a dog (among other rewards) for paying your taxes—if you're in Japan, that is. There's really nothing else I can say that isn't funnier than the truth of the situation, though I'm not pointing and laughing at Square here. It's a genuinely sweet incentive to have players contributing to other municipalities.

As reported by Famitsu, Square is partnering with the Shibuya Ward (which it has an office in) as part of Japan's "Furusato Nozei", a system whereby urban Japanese residents can voluntarily put forward some of their money to rural areas of their choice, such as their hometown—in exchange, they get gifts, such as travel tickets, gift cards, and so on.

If you do this for Shibuya, you'll get a dog. Specifically, you'll get the Megashiba mount if you donate 9,000 yen (the equivalent of $55)—or a bunch of other rewards, including five fantasia (used to change your character's appearance), the Collegiate Attire set, the Magitek Attire set, or a bunch of dance emotes, all with varying donation amounts.

The donation amounts are all far more expensive than their store prices. For instance, the Megashibu's usually around 2,530 yen (roughly $16)—but if you're a Japanese resident that's feeling particularly charitable with your money, it's a neat way to get some items while also contributing to the place you grew up.

Also, you can get a tax write-off if you're over a certain amount—which is the slightly more self-serving reason to do it. But hey, if you're paying a similar amount of yen in income tax anyway, it's a neat way to get a free digital dog out of the whole deal. If you happen to live in Shibuya yourself, you can go to the official collab site to sign up.

I'm thrilled by the announcement of Guild Wars 3, but there's a little voice in my head that keeps whispering "you know you won't have time for a new MMO." It's a fear that ArenaNet seems keenly aware of as it begins to set expectations for the sequel, which plans to begin beta testing in 2027.

In a blog post this week, ArenaNet laid out several things that it believes are the "core philosophy" of Guild Wars 3: no subscriptions, no pay-to-win, respecting your time, and evolving the MMO genre.

"Historically, MMO engagement has been viewed as an experience like a second job, where players spend large amounts of time preparing to have fun before they can actually engage in the fun parts," ArenaNet says. "Only have thirty minutes to play? Don't play an MMO; you'll need that time just to organize your inventory, figure out what content you're going to play, get your character set up, and—oh, no! Time's up, and you haven't even begun the gameplay yet."

The "preparing to play" problem, specifically inventory organizing, is exactly what made me drift away from Guild Wars 2 after its Path of Fire expansion despite having thousands of hours in the original Guild Wars and probably double that in GW2. Every time I logged in I would find my bags stuffed with Halloween tonics, miscellaneous currencies, and all sorts of other consumables whose purpose I couldn't recall. It felt like I needed to clean my room before I was allowed to have fun. Eventually I stopped logging in.

ArenaNet has gotten the message that managing a slew of currencies from the past decade of expansions and story updates is one of the biggest pain points for GW2 players, lapsed or otherwise.

"We want you to feel good about the time you invest, whether you're playing every day, only have an hour or two every week, or are coming back after a long break from the game," it says.

ArenaNet says it approaches MMO design by identifying a problem with MMOs as they currently exist and building a solution. It's true that my problem with most MMO options right now is that they're all trying to lay claim to the same precious few hours I've got between work and bedtime.

If ArenaNet's answer to that really is a snappier MMO with less homework, I'll be excited to see it. I can't help but think of the end of new content updates for Destiny 2, sometimes affectionately called a "dad game" for its (relatively) low-stress, drop-in qualities. I wasn't ever a Destiny gal, but I'd be psyched by the rise of a "mom MMO" equivalent.

A new version of World of Warcraft was just discovered and it's called "World of Warcraft Camelot". Instead of some kind of Arthurian spin-off, however, the dataminer who found it theorizes that it's just a codename for an enhanced version of World of Warcraft Classic.

Dubbed "WoW Classic Plus" by hopeful players over the years, this hypothetical version of the MMO would branch off from the original and become something new based on something old—just like Old School Runescape.

Wowhead dataminer Stiven found licenses for two versions of "World of Warcraft Camelot" on Blizzard's servers, suggesting that it will have multiple editions available to purchase. They also said that this branch of WoW is on the July 2006 patch that introduced a raid you might remember from the viral Leroy Jenkins video.

That happens to be the same patch a version of WoW was mysteriously running on last year. With BlizzCon coming up in September, it would make sense for Blizzard to start testing WoW Classic Plus so that it's ready to be playable on the show floor. Not to mention that it recently invited a bunch of WoW Classic streamers to its offices in Irvine to see something new under an NDA.

Blizzard has a track record of letting things slip by way of their internal server updates. Most WoW players know to start preparing for a new patch when a PTR server shows up on there. And sometimes big announcements, like Diablo 4's new paladin class, are accidentally leaked by poorly named internal builds.

At this point, WoW Classic Plus has been talked about so much that it would be hard to imagine Blizzard won't give it a shot. It already dabbled with the idea of mixing things up with the original MMO via Season of Discovery, and it's hinted that something similar could happen again.

With WoW Classic's popularity waning these days as the MMO gets closer and closer to catching up with the regular version, a WoW Classic Plus could be Blizzard's solution to the problem. I'd like to see it try because playing a version of the game without the conveniences of modern WoW always puts me off of it. I'd be way more inclined to try something that isn't so beholden to the kind of suffering players went through a decade ago.

Earlier this year, the private World of Warcraft server Turtle WoW announced it would shut down after Blizzard served it a cease and desist and filed a copyright infringement suit. Second verse, same as the first: Project Ascension, a different private server project with several realms, is the subject of a new suit filed last Friday (thanks, Aftermath).

"The defendants … have built an entire business on large scale, egregious, and ongoing infringement of Blizzard's intellectual property," the complaint reads, noting that Ascension is "among the largest private WoW servers available today … with 'over a million players.'"

If you're unfamiliar with the fan server, it's a modded, classless, free-to-play version of the game where you stitch together existing and custom spells to fashion unique playstyles. "Build the character of your dreams," the website beckons. It also looks like there's a different project in development which adds new ideas to World of Warcraft's classic incarnation, not unlike Turtle WoW or that secret thing Blizzard seems to be working on.

Also similar to Turtle WoW, the server allowed players to buy in-game items with Donation Points—the complaint alleges this has made the Project Ascension team "millions of dollars." The complaint also says the game's pirate servers are "hosted on 'bulletproof' servers associated with the Russia-based Aeza Group," which the U.S. Department of the Treasury has targeted for "enabling cybercriminals and technology theft"—an association which allegedly "signals willful intent to engage in unlawful activity."

While the team behind Turtle WoW initially urged Blizzard to consider an official licensing framework for fan servers, no public word has come from Project Ascension just yet. Fans of the server are not hopeful: "Welp, we're fucked," reads one thread from Reddit user AnaTheSturdy.

User micro_Ampere replied, "Thanks for the memories. I had a better time here than I had on any other [private server] currently out there. Shame to see all that creativity gone to nothing. Good luck devs, but surely you knew this was coming."

I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Raph Koster about his upcoming MMO, Stars Reach, which is trying to recapture the oldschool sandbox magic of some of his prior games—namely Ultima Online, which he worked on, and Star Wars Galaxies, which he was the creative director for.

Needless to say with that sort of experience behind him, we also got into a chat about the industry writ large—namely about how it kinda sucks out there. Granted, there are several very good MMOs you can enjoy, but they're all typically over a decade old—and newer MMOs, whether recently released or still being developed, have been subject to a massacre.

The survivors have drifted towards the theme park, seasonal, encounter-based model, which Stars Reach is deliberately trying to get away from:

"I think ever since World of Warcraft, the genre kind of narrowed back into 'Kill 10 Rats', with classes and levels and raids, and that gameplay style is actually from 1991. It predates sandbox MMOs. It was a text MUD staple. "

"EverQuest was very much that game with graphics, and then World of Warcraft was very much EverQuest with usability, and a lot of quests—because WoW came along and spent more money than every other MMO combined in history to that point, right, and was able to build that quest-led game."

And while the MUD staple of knocking a dozen vermin upside the head, rinsing, and repeating is old hat, Koster says that sandbox MMOs were actually responsible for more innovation—which proliferated across videogames writ large:

"Despite that dominance—they did a great job, I'm not knocking that—if we look at what sandboxes brought to the table, you craft in video games because of sandbox MMOs, you decorate houses before the Sims, thanks to Sandbox MMOs. You raise a pet in a game because of Sandbox MMOs.

"I apologize for crafting, actually," Koster jokes, "Because now it's everywhere, and you can't avoid it, and it seems to be largely my fault."

'We hit the wall'

It's actually through discussing the role of sandbox MMOs as the breeding ground for videogame mechanics that Koster gets into the spectre plaguing the genre writ large: Games are expensive, and MMOs are the canary in the coalmine for costs ballooning out of control.

"Making static content is something that the industry has figured out how to assembly line, and they figured out how to monetize it very well, and so the business calculus there is: 'It'll cost us millions of dollars to go make this static zone.

"The zone will be obsolete in three months, players will consume all of it, it takes us nine months to make it, but it will be obsolete in three, but along the way we will spit out the following cosmetics, or the following things, and because we are not a sandbox, we will prevent people from trading them'."

Koster goes on a bit of a tangent here that I'm including because I nonetheless agree with him: "Honestly, most things in these games now. They aren't actually items, they get soulbound to you immediately—[which makes them] stat mods. They're skinned as items, but they aren't actually, they're not even things. They're character perks."

Anyway, monetisation: "The influence of the monetization model, the development costs, all of that tends to lead companies into this, because they see it as a lower risk than trying to solve problems like 'how do we make a dynamic world with emergence'."

But the math stops working in the face of ballooning videogame development costs, as Koster explains: "I think the story of the current industry troubles is the story of being wedded to that model and having costs run away. I did the math right before Covid. The cost of games goes up 10x every decade. That's not sustainable. It was predictable, and we hit the wall."

"1997, Ultima Online, $2 million dollars. Star Wars Galaxies, 2003, $10-$12 million dollars. World of Warcraft, 2004, $63 million. Star Wars: The Old Republic, which embraced all of the things I said more than any other MMO? Over $200 million.

"So, those models, they're not working anymore, and that's why we get fewer and fewer MMOs too, because MMOs are at the bleeding edge of that problem … It's a recipe for making static worlds with ballooning costs, with lower returns, which quickly become not-viable as a business."

Which means if you're a big studio, you won't "make anything fresh, and if you do make something, probably go make something else, right?" Alas, staring at the shot-out-back corpse of Project Blackbird, I feel as though Koster's bang on the money, here.

'They are bored'

This unhappy marriage—MMOs being tied to a business model that's becoming more unfeasible as time goes on—impacts playerbases, too, says Koster:

"There's no question—and hopefully nobody gets mad at me for saying this—the biggest change in the MMO community is that they have grown bored. They are bored, frustrated, they feel like their hobby is no longer getting supported by the industry, and they've grown very jaded as a result. Right?"

Koster adds, laughing: "I don't know if I can fix that—that's a tall order. I hope what we're doing is a breath of fresh air and opens new doors ... People are still people, right, but they do react based on what they're offered and what's available, and for a very long time the scope of what's available has narrowed down.

"The MMO audience feels underserved and over-monetized, that's how they feel about what's going on."

As far as Stars Reach goes, I found myself curious, but cautious—Koster's enthusiasm for the game is infectious, but also filled with a lot of very optimistic big-swing goals I'll need to see before I believe. For Koster, the hope is that "what we are doing is offering them something that is fresh, as something that's novel, that they haven't seen before, that makes them go, 'Oh, games can do that?'"

Star's Reach plans to go into early access sometime this summer.

Playing Final Fantasy 11 after all these years is a lot like returning to your hometown only to find it desolate and different. All the old buildings are still there, but the faces aren’t the same. And that feeling I had—that indescribable sense of belonging—is gone too. It’s a bit alienating and tragic, to be honest, but really what else should I expect from an MMO that’s almost 20 years old and clearly nearing the end of its days?

Though I was never as obsessed with Final Fantasy 11 as I was other MMOs like World of Warcraft, I can still vividly remember the summer months I spent playing it. My love for Final Fantasy 11 is the definition of a summer romance. All I wanted to do was spend my time adventuring across the lush fields of Vana’diel, but my parents decided that wasting my break playing videogames was a bad idea, so they regulated my playtime to a few precious hours each day. But I wasn’t going to give up that easily.

I found an old 11-inch TV-VCR combo set buried in our storage closet and hid it in my room. After everyone had gone to bed, I’d quietly grab my PlayStation 2 and bring it to my bed, plug it in, and play Final Fantasy 12 until the sun came up—until the day my mom’s mischief detector finally got her attention and she busted me and refused to keep paying the monthly subscription fee.

Maybe that’s what’s missing now, I think as I walk the streets of Windhurst trying to reacquaint myself. But I know that’s not entirely true. Final Fantasy 11 wasn’t great because playing it was against the rules, it was great because it was an MMO built from the ground up to encourage cooperation and friendship. A relic of an era before World of Warcraft ruined the entire genre by being too popular.

Old relics

Unearthing what makes Final Fantasy 11 great doesn’t just require a shovel, you need a damn excavator. Before I could even log in, I had to wrestle with the infamously complicated PlayOnline service, an esoteric artefact in itself. Back when Final Fantasy 11 launched on the PlayStation 2 online services were beyond rudimentary, especially on a console that wasn’t really designed with internet multiplayer in mind. That’s why Final Fantasy 11 came bundled with a 40GB hard drive and a network adapter.

PlayOnline was an ambitious push to normalise online console gaming. Square Enix designed it to be a kind of platform for all of their multiplayer games and it included ambitious social features for the time, like personal email accounts. It was Steam for the PlayStation 2.

Today, though, PlayOnline is an enormous burden. Even the simple act of registering an account feels like an arcane ritual. PlayOnline ID, PlayOnline member name, PlayOnline password, Square Enix ID, Square Enix password—you probably need them all at one point or another just to get access to Final Fantasy 11. Menus and prompts are so confusingly arranged that more than once I found myself in some weird dead-end corner of PlayOnline with absolutely no real clue how to get where I was going.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Like many older MMOs, Final Fantasy 11 is virtually unplayable in its original state. Its graphics engine can’t count pixels higher than 800 and the client will crash if you so much as even glance at another program.

Fortunately, modders have come to the rescue with a tool called Windower that allows for modern resolutions and graphics options as well as a host of addons and mods to make in-game tasks easier. It’s an incredible godsend.

Takin' it slow

I spent more than two hours that first night just getting everything set up, reading guides, and installing addons before I actually started playing. But even when I was ready for some adventuring, Final Fantasy 11 likes to start slow. A beginner’s guide I found first had me tour around the major districts of Windhurst clicking on teleportation points and joining various crafting guilds for an initial boost of experience points and currency that I could use to buy some decent armour.

Everything in Final Fantasy 11 takes an enormous amount of time, but that’s actually something I like about it. Modern MMOs are too eager to please, too afraid you might play something else so they try to make everything as frictionless as possible. But Final Fantasy 11 doesn’t give a damn. It’ll make you spend two minutes walking back and forth between a pair of quest givers half a dozen times. It’ll make every interaction, like simply trading items with another player, require twice as many button presses than is reasonable. It’s almost cruel.

But I also know that this was an enormously complicated game that Square Enix admirably tried to make playable with just a controller, so I’m willing to forgive it. And it’s not like Final Fantasy 11 doesn’t have its charms either. Beneath that thick crust of absolute bullshit is a genuinely innovative MMO. And when I finally got out into the field and started killing monsters, I began feeling that familiar pull. That feeling of being sucked into the world and excited by its mysteries.

The job system, for example, remains one of Final Fantasy 11’s greatest triumphs. Instead of needing to make a new character for each job (the equivalent of a class), I can just switch on the fly and level a different job instead. Final Fantasy 14 iterated on the idea, but Final Fantasy 11’s execution of it is still unrivalled. There’s 22 jobs to unlock and level, each one offering a distinct playstyle. And after reaching a certain level you can take on a secondary job, giving you access to even more abilities to augment your primary ones. It’s MMO theory-crafting at its finest.

At a crossroads

In the few hours I spent exploring Vana’diel, I started to feel myself acclimate to the slower pace. The lack of modern conveniences, like fast travel, and the awful control scheme are jarring at first. But there is a distinct appeal to playing a game that forces me to adapt to it instead of the other way around.

It’s like selling all your belongings and living out in the woods, off the grid. At first the change seems hellish, but then you start to settle in and appreciate the little things—the catchy music, the subtle rhythm of combat, the rush of levelling up.

The only thing that’s missing is other people. Though much of Final Fantasy 11 remains unchanged, one major new feature is that players can now summon their own party of NPCs to help them in combat. Unlike other MMOs, Final Fantasy 11 was designed so combat almost always required a party of players.

It’s one of the reasons Final Fantasy 11 was such a social experience. But as its popularity has waned and almost everyone has moved on, Square Enix has had to make concessions to give newcomers like me a chance.

Each level used to be a hard-fought achievement, but now I can just summon my party of NPCs and quickly grind through a dozen levels in a few hours. Alone.

Though I understand why it had to happen, it’s a reality that makes me uncomfortable. So much of what I loved about Final Fantasy 11 was the social dynamics, but now the only evidence I have that I’m not alone is the constant barrage of messages from people trying to sell items.

I’m not sure whether I’ll continue playing. A part of me is already invested in the journey to reach max level for the first time and do things that childhood me only dreamed of. But if those achievements are earned alone—if I’m the only one fighting and celebrating—is it worth it?

EVE Frontier is a weird game. It's had an uphill battle winning goodwill from EVE Online's infamously dedicated community, running into a refrain of, "Why should I play this crypto spinoff thing?" It's gone through traditionally closed, often unsightly stages of early development in full public view, with players offering feedback along the way.

It has justified its blockchain integration, to my eye, by repeatedly demonstrating a freeform, server-side modding system unlike anything I've seen in an MMO⁠—or really any game⁠—and it's stuck with the controversial tech base well after the early 2020s crypto gaming gold rush ended⁠.

At this year's EVE Fanfest, I spoke to members of the dev team and tried Frontier's new gamepad support for myself. Promises that were once cool but abstract are starting to crystalize into a hardcore space sim I can see myself playing. Frontier is a game that promises to combine the emergent economy of EVE, the sense of exploration in No Man's Sky or Elite, and two things I've never seen before: The aforementioned server-side modding at runtime, and a Rust-like survival experience that trades tree punching and bedrolls for asteroid mining and space stations.

Fragging out

My latest hands-on was night and day from my experience almost exactly a year prior: Frontier was built on the same Carbon engine as EVE Online, and until recently had similarly zoomed-out, mouse, menu, and hotkey-centric gameplay. This was a two-pronged problem, as Frontier needed to differentiate itself from what EVE fans already had and also make itself more approachable for new players.

Even as a lover of crusty old CRPGs with way too many stats and classes, the first build of Frontier I tried was tough to get my arms around. Luckily, it's a problem the dev team was aware of. "Let's go back a year ago. Get into the game, so you think [you'll press] Q or W or something, right? And nothing happens," Frontier product manager Scott McCabe told me. "You're like, 'Okay, so how do I move?' There's a disconnect, so it's about making the thing more natural."

Fenris Creations (formerly CCP) had demo stations set up on the Fanfest show floor, and the Frontier team was offering a combat arena slice of the game, with show goers trying to frag each other on a 10-minute timer. On two runs through, I think I scored three kills total⁠—the record on the floor was four in a single run, to give you an idea of the slow time to kill⁠—and it's shocking how good of a space shooter it was given Frontier's origins as an RTS-scale MMO.

It was slow⁠—not in a bad way, but weighty and chunky like a survival horror game. McCabe stressed that they weren't trying to make a zippy starfighter sim, but rather a big boys-only experience, one where the smallest vessels you could use were corvette-scale.

The free-for-all took place among debris and ruins in a moody nebula, and the close-in perspective gave me a new appreciation for Frontier's art direction and sound design. The thrum of your ship and the distant sound of fire being exchanged were substantial but muffled, like being underwater.

Meanwhile, there's been so much focus on Frontier's tech backend and emergent possibilities that it's easy to overlook the game's striking look. It's the sleek cyberpunk of EVE Online crossed with something ancient and unknowable: Ziggurats in space and disturbing, mega-scale statuary emerging out of nebulae like the dusty ruins of Las Vegas in Blade Runner: 2049. Even the UI is memorable, boasting a minimalist, retro computing vibe that reminds me of Bungie's Marathon.

In a major departure from EVE Online, Frontier now offers both manual aiming and auto-targeting weapon systems, with the choice between the two being a balance and player preference question: Big, meaty skillshots, or reliable slow-burn auto targeting? I had one weapon system of each type in the demo, but I relied more on the skillshots. "This is a pretty huge departure, obviously, from EVE Online," said Fenris community developer Ben Sisson. "EVE Online is much more like a MOBA in that way, where you just sort of select the target, you press the button, and it'll auto-target."

There was this great tension to chasing down opposing players, missing a shot as they banked and flew behind me, then having to slowly bring my ship around for another volley. Sisson described what they were going for as "like World of Warships in space."

At this stage, the main thing I found missing was feedback: The UI was still very much a fit for a mouse, keyboard, and desktop monitor that I found hard to parse on a big TV, and my FPS-loving brain yearned for clearer indications of weapon cooldowns, enemy health, and when I'd successfully scored a hit⁠—even the vulgar pft pft of CoD hit markers would have been welcome. But I very much got the vision of tense, ponderous submarine duels in space, I'd gladly play again, and Frontier's devs say it's just the beginning.

Future perfect

One thing that really intrigues me is where Frontier is going with those megastructures, the ziggurats in space. The team is treating them less like the highly-crafted dungeons in other MMOs, and more like the ones in the Elder Scrolls: They're desolate points of interest that can surprise you while you're scanning a system or on your way from one place to another. In a hands-off demo, I was shown gameplay exploring one such megastructure, turning Frontier into something more resembling a six degrees of freedom shooter like Descent.

"Environments have to be the focus," said Sisson, "And have had to be the focus for a while, especially interior spaces. It's cool just to go through space, and that's awesome, but a lot of games do that." He explained that very few space games do the same sort of seamless interior/exterior transitions as Frontier because the scale is so daunting.

"A lot of the things that are going on, though, are about the camera and not the ship," Frontier development director David Bowman explained regarding refinement of the driving controls. "We can easily get the ship to be physics-accurate and modeled, but the camera is your way of perceiving that. We want to make sure that you stay comfortable, that you stay in control, and that you don't get the 360 blur of which way is up. It's more about the camera than it is about the ship."

Moving forward, Fenris wants to bring more active gameplay like the skill shots to other areas of Frontier, such as mining⁠. McCabe and Sisson described slicing up asteroids with mining lasers rather than the "set it and forget it" process currently in the game, for example.

Frontier has already made the process of scanning systems more active and engaging. In the hands-off demo, I was shown a massive, manual-aimed scanning cone that could tell a player everything in its confines⁠—incredibly powerful in a game that emphasizes exploration, surprise, and asymmetric information⁠—but it would also effectively broadcast your position for a significant distance both in front of, and behind you.

"If you need information quickly, you're going to want to ping the sonar, you're going to want to actively scan for something, but as soon as a submarine pings its sonar, everybody knows it's there," said McCabe. "We talk about the idea of every pulse, essentially, as a beacon, and every sweep being an announcement. Get information, but the tradeoff is you broadcast your presence."

If you'd like to get your hands on EVE Frontier and follow its development firsthand, Fenris Creations continues to offer founder access to the game on its website. But maybe wait a tick: EVE Frontier's next server wipe and major update, Cycle 6: Sanctuary, is set to go live on June 25.

In a downright intriguing turn of events, it looks like real money trading (RMT) gold sellers—whose peddling of gold for actual cash is against World of Warcraft's terms of service—have taken to the streets of WoW Classic Anniversary to advertise casino games as a way of raking in cash (thanks, WoWHead).

They are spending money to boost level 58 casino bots now 🤣🤣🤣 from r/classicwow

These bots, boosted to level 58 (presumably because doing so via the store gives you 25 gold to play around with—and to protect themselves from ganks, more on that later) have been standing on street corners in major cities and trying to lure players in with the promise of gambling. Which—and I write this with pride—has led to players devising new and inventive ways to kill them.

Take this example posted by Reddit user Purple_Resident2930, which suggests players travel to the Netherstorm, pick up a debuff that spawns a monster on expiration, Hearthstone back to the city and run at the casino bot in question. This is a little like voluntarily letting an Alien-style chest burster sit in your ribcage so you can sic it on a spam caller

This doesn't work as well if they buy the aforementioned boosts, mind, but there are other ways of gambling-based murder—for example, kiting a level 60 elite over from Ashenvale to squish them.

Anyway—anti-casino arms races notwithstanding, Blizzard has marked, recognised, and promised to do something about these yapping slot machines. Tom Ellis, a senior game producer on World of Warcraft, writes via his personal X account:

"The casino thing that's vogue right now. Just to confirm we're aware, it's still against policy to advertise a casino, so keep reporting them (or dropping infernals on them). Digging in, it looks like the RMT crowd (that's gold sellers) have realized this is an easy way to make gold quickly and cheaply, which has driven an uptick in the behavior.

"You caught Watcher's attention so we have a few folks looking into ideas on how we can make getting these people out of the game much faster so the activity is less lucrative and in turn, they will hopefully piss off."

It's a fascinating little development, all told—though it makes a certain kind of sense. Casinos in real life operate by tipping the odds in their favour, and drawing people in with the allure of being one of the rare lucky winners that makes it big (this is where the saying "the house always wins" comes from).

In other words, it's absolutely a smart, albeit ToS-violating, strategy to encourage people to gamble with a game of chance because, writ large, it will make you more money than it loses you. Unless, of course, you get repeatedly murdered any time you try.

"Don't expect any sort of big fanfare 'Mission Accomplished!' banner for this one," Ellis adds, "This is one of the ones that you hopefully don't even notice stopped happening if we get it right."

It's rare that I'll open up a preview about a game by saying "hear me out", but in the case of Stars Reach, it's appropriate. I will readily admit, upon a cursory glance of Stars Reach's Steam page, that my inner cynic (who I try not to pay too much attention to) had written it off as a bog-standard, boilerplate survival game with MMO elements.

I'm not here to tell you that Stars Reach will knock your socks off—it is a deeply ambitious thing that might burn up in atmosphere—but it's certainly far more interesting than its trailers give it credit for. And that's not even to knock the people who made them. It's a difficult game to describe, one that's trying to spin a lot of plates at once, and revive a genre of MMO that's fallen by the wayside.

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing its creator, Raph Koster (who worked on Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies)—he described it to me as a blend of SWG, RuneScape, Eve, and Ultima Online. The makeup of Stars Reach is a web of procedurally-generated planets that players can lay claim to and establish rules over.

The vision being that said players get to decide what a planet is—in theory, you could have a PvP-enabled planet that's an absolute warzone, or a PvE-only trade hub city—all connected by wormholes that open and close as needed:

"In our case, our galactic map is not a static map of zones," Koster explains. "Zones can be created on the fly, generating whole new planets, new space areas. Wormholes can be created that open up new territories to go explore and mine out and adventure and kill. And if you stop going to one, the wormhole needs traffic that needs to get transited to stay stable. Our map will lose the link, and we will throw the zone away."

Terra Forma

As for what that boots-on-the-ground experience looks like, there's a lot of simulation going on that'll make survival enthusiasts pleased, true, but it's really in service of that sandbox MMO feel: "There are hundreds of different materials in the game. They have different hardnesses, different statistics, different properties, and they act in realistic ways."

Koster and his team give me a couple demonstrations, heating rock up to melt it into lava: "We can even use the chrono phaser tool to erode that rock into dirt, we could erode marble into limestone, and then into chalk, and then from chalk into sand, and then we could heat up that sand, and it would be left behind as a patch of glass."

Later in the demo, Koster also carves out a channel for a lake to drain, and surely enough, it starts to erode the rock it paths through as it pours into a valley. Koster is effusive about this stuff to a degree which has that inner skeptic rattling its saber again, but I did absolutely see live examples that seemed, at least in a limited capacity, to be working in the way he said they would.

What gets me actually excited about Stars Reach, however, is the profession system. If you've played Star Wars Galaxies back in its pre-NGE heyday, or OldSchool Runescape, or even Project Gorgon—think of that. A range of potential XP tracks that span the gauntlet from useful (combat and weapons skill trees) to hyper-specific (journalism—more on that in a second).

"You have over 40 different professions, you earn XP in each of them separately. So, if you want to play combat, you fight, you get combat XP, you spend it on combat skills. There's over 1,000 skills here, with more coming all the time," Koster explains—your character can multi-class into four professions at any given time, but can level up all of them independently.

"Many of them are familiar, like crafting or cooking or whatever, but many of them aren't. Botany and xenobiology are essentially embedded mini-games of Pokémon. Leadership is a skill track, explicitly for pro-social behavior, for the kinds of players who found guilds, engage in the politics of running planets, you earn XP in that by doing things like rescuing people under fire or leading groups.

"The humanities line there is actually explicitly for roleplayers … there's a journalist track, an in-game news net that allows you to post in-game articles or links to your videos, players can look at that stuff in-game, give you likes, you earn XP, you can charge money for it, and that then can result in you earning things like drone cameras."

The thing that really gives me hope are the things that Koster says players are already doing with this sandbox-level freedom—for example, one of playtesters' largest guilds is an animal conservation union: "They actually try to preserve all of the different species of animals and plants, because if you choose to pave this place over, you can actually drive the creatures extinct. That species will never appear again in the game."

Koster also says that "players have practically invented steam power. They have invented subways and elevators. They have built entire cities, formed governments. They have zoned public lands to build zoos, public parks, community gardens. They have astonished us, frankly, with their creativity. They've been making music videos about their cities."

I don't know if Stars Reach will fully deliver on everything Koster wants it to—but I honestly think it deserves a fair shake, given how dry and formulaic the MMO genre has become. I've nothing against themepark MMOs with glossy raids and pre-planned encounters, but as my time with Project: Gorgon taught me, I think there's a deeply unaddressed market for that oldschool MMO vibe.

There hasn't been a modern, non-niche version of that, and whether Stars Reach pulls it off or not, I'm just glad that someone's giving it a go. Stars Reach intends to launch into early access sometime this summer.

MMOs are, in many ways, the cradle of live service games—the place where the model we all know and loathe got its start. They have, in turn, tried to adopt some of the live service models that have proven to be the most popular, such as seasonal structures and, in some cases, battle passes.

Sometimes it works out well! For instance, WoW has a battle pass-esque system in the Trading Post, but it's completely free, encouraging players to do a bunch of activities in-game to earn some bonus cosmetics. In others, not so much.

Guild Wars has always tried to buck popular MMO trends, though—escaping the relentless gear grind with horizontal progression in Guild Wars 2, for instance. And with Guild Wars 3, deliberately taking a stance against a battle-pass esque model of gameplay.

That's per studio head Colin Johanson, who spoke with IGN during the Summer Game Fest where Guild Wars 3 was announced.

"I think there's become a modern version of the subscription that we've seen evolve over the last few years in battle passes, and paid battle passes, where—it's basically a subscription kind of hidden and wrapped with other stuff around it.

"We've challenged ourselves to ask the same question: Can we make a game like this that doesn't have a subscription fee? And doesn't have a battle pass fee buried in it as well, because we think players are sick of those, too."

The antidote? Similar to prior Guild Wars games, Guild Wars 3 will be very 'buy and play', with no subscription fees, seasonal loot treadmills, or mandatory grinds:

"This'll be a game where you can buy it, you can play it as much or as little as you want, we will respect our player's times, and if they love it, they'll have other stuff they can buy from us in the future. But we're not gonna hold their time hostage, and we want them to be able to go play other games."

I'm not feeling cynical about ArenaNet's chances of pulling that off, mind—because it's absolutely done so already with Guild Wars 2—but I do think it's a steeper challenge than simply "respecting player's time", which is an admirable goal, but also a phrase that's been repeated so often in the MMO space it's starting to lose meaning.

The issue with these seasonal battle pass structures is that they tend to work, giving players easy hopping-on points with manageable grinds and decently-paced rewards. If they become overbearing, sure, I tend to tune out, but I've seen the other end of the spectrum—where a game has so little in the way of rewards or regular incentives it actually sabotages its own offerings—and that's not great, either.

I truly can't believe they're doing it. ArenaNet is making Guild Wars 3. Unlike every other live-service game and MMO around right now, determined to shamble on as a "platform" into eternity, Guild Wars 2 is making room for a third game the way Guild Wars did before it. Even so, ArenaNet affirmed its dedication to supporting GW2 beyond the launch of GW3—they're doing it all. I've collected everything we know so far about Guild Wars 3 ahead of its first planned betas in 2027.

Is there a Guild Wars 3 release date?

The first beta for Guild Wars 3 will be in fall 2027, but there's no release window announced yet. For reference, the first closed beta tests for Guild Wars 2 began less than a year before it launched.

It's hard to say if we should expect the same timeline for Guild Wars 3, but in its breakdown on what to expect for the future of Guild Wars 2 (more on that below), ArenaNet mentioned a time frame of "the next 18 months," referring to improvements it would be making to GW2 before GW3. That would put us in December 2027, which is still pretty soon after the first beta tests are supposed to begin in autumn. Without being able to pin a timeline on it, it definitely seems like ArenaNet isn't planning to dawdle on Guild Wars 3.

Guild Wars 3 platforms

For the first time in the series, Guild Wars 3 will launch both on PC and on PlayStation 5. What that means so far is that ArenaNet is focusing on action-RPG combat and controls that work for both gamepad and keyboard & mouse. As someone who does actually enjoy playing with a gamepad at my PC, color me curious.

Will there be a subscription?

Nope, the Guild Wars series has always been a buy-to-play model and ArenaNet has confirmed that there won't be a subscription this time either. It also won't have any battlepasses "because we think players are sick of those too," studio head Colin Johanson told IGN.

Guild Wars 3 trailers

The reveal trailer for Guild Wars 3 really leans into the "joy of movement" that ArenaNet has been emphasizing. You can see a character riding their mount and wall-running (mountain running?) which is the bulk of what's shown aside from introducing the fabric and embroidery visual themes that are also used in that ribbon-y new logo. Lotta flag imagery happening here.

Guild Wars 3 gameplay

Guild Wars 3 story and setting

Guild Wars 3 takes place 1,200 years before the events of the original Guild Wars and is set in Orr, "a vast wilderness frontier imbued with the world’s magic." We'll all be playing as a Vaelwarden, a member of an adventurer's guild that wants to protect the nature entities called Vael spirits, each with our own larger spirit mount called a Seeker. Our own adventurer's guild is in conflict (perhaps a war, even) with others over how to protect or exploit the Vael spirits. That's right, we're going back to the guild wars.

How will it play differently from Guild Wars 2?

Guild Wars 3 will lean into playing as an "action-adventure MMORPG," ArenaNet says, with combat designed to play on both gamepad and keyboard & mouse. Anet has emphasized GW3's "one-of-a-kind movement system that transfers your momentum between modes of travel" which include gliding, riding, jumping, and wall-running.

It also said: "As players seamlessly transition between various movement modes, they can harness their speed and turn it into bigger damage and impact when fighting their foes." Guild Wars 2 already has so much interesting use of movement with its mounts, dodging, and flying, and it sounds like GW3 is going well above and beyond that by factoring mounts into combat.

Lastly, Guild Wars 3's website says its combat will involve "strategic skill use, positioning, and movement—where action RPG combat meets Guild Wars build-making." To me, that sounds like it's definitely diverting from the hotbar mashing style of combat I've grown so tired of in MMOs. I'm well interested in a system that prioritizes skill context over cooldown timers.

Guild Wars 3 playable races

ArenaNet hasn't confirmed the exact details on playable races (or classes) but, based on the initial concept art reveals, it sure looks like we'll be playing as thousand-year-in-the-past versions of:

• Humans: Every RPG's vanilla option, you can still play them in GW3.
• Asura: The small but brainy folks first playable in GW2.
• Kodan: The massive bear folks, never before playable in the series.

What's happening to Guild Wars 2?

After announcing GW3, ArenaNet posted an entire video talking about the future of Guild Wars Reforged and GW2—basically, that there is a future for both. Guild Wars 2 is planning a period of quality-of-life updates prior to the launch of GW3 and will be pausing expansion development during that time. After the launch of GW3, it will "return to shipping annual major content updates."

Here's what's coming in those game updates to Guild Wars 2:

• A Hall of Monuments system similar to the one in the original Guild Wars for logging your account achievements so they can be reflected on your Guild Wars 3 account
• Modernizing and polishing GW2 by bringing older content "up to more current design standards"
• A new World versus World map for the first time in years
• A new explorable zone set in Orr "bridging the Tyria you know and the Tyria you're about to discover in Guild Wars 3"

The same thing happens every summer—the jaded, cynical monster inside me mopes around and pretends he's not going to get excited about SGF (and before it, E3) announcements. There are too many of them, and I've been around too long to become a victim of hype.

And every summer, the hype starts bubbling away anyway, more and more, until it engulfs the jaded, cynical monster. There's usually one announcement that does it for me. This year, that honour went to Guild Wars 3.

MMO announcements get me buzzing with anticipation quicker than most game-related news. I love an MMO. I usually have at least two in rotation, though frequently more, which really shouldn't be the case now that I'm a middle-aged man with limited time and too many responsibilities. But I always find room for my beloved timesinks.

The excitement is even greater this time, though, because it's the latest in a string of brilliant MMOs.

Evolution and revolution

OG Guild Wars taught me to not be terrified of PvP, and instead to thrive on it, by creating structured, accessible PvP that didn't just throw you into a big mess and watch you get murdered over and over again. And it could have just been that alone, but Guild Wars also conducted some brilliant experiments in PvE, as well, and solo-PvE specifically, most notably in the form of NPC companions.

Guild Wars 2 then shed that PvP focus, but not by ignoring PvP—it was given the same attention and love that it received in the original game, but it shared the limelight with a PvE layer that still feels revolutionary today. It swapped heavily-instanced co-op PvE with traditional, text-heavy quests for a more organic structure.

A lot of MMOs like to talk up their living worlds, but Guild Wars 2 took this boast seriously, replacing quests with events and activities that were constantly popping off, ready for you and every other player to jump in. You would just encounter things happening as you explored the map, often in media res.

Maybe a farm's being plagued by pests, and you discover a dozen players furiously squashing little beasties into extinction—a noble mission you can contribute towards without even joining a party. Or maybe you wander into a dynamic warzone, with humans and centaurs locked into an endless feud, allowing you to dive into different hotzones to complete objectives that will contribute to the ongoing conflict, culminating in an epic battle.

14 years on, this still feels novel. This concept that things are just happening around you, rather than waiting for you to start.

The announcement that Guild Wars 3 is coming, then, is not just exciting because it's more of this series I love. It's exciting because I have no idea what shape it's going to take. This is not a series that rests on its laurels. And what little we do know sounds markedly different from its predecessor. Guild Wars 2 now offers a vast world to play around in, and instead of initially going bigger for Guild Wars 3, ArenaNet appears to be going more specific—at least when it comes to its setting—by honing in on the frontier of Orr.

Orrible place

By the time of Guild Wars 1, Orr was a mighty kingdom, but it had an Atlantis moment and was destroyed off-screen. In Guild Wars 2, you can travel to its ruins. So we'll be witnessing the birth of this kingdom, 1,000 years prior.

We're also getting spirit companions, known as Seekers, which will serve as our mounts, and ArenaNet's already making a big deal about how it's transforming movement. "Run, slide, leap, and bound across Orr with a one-of-a-kind movement system that transfers your momentum between modes of travel, providing a free-form joy of movement through a world alive with adventure," it says.

Oh yeah, it looks like we'll be finally getting playable bears, too.

The setting, the time period, the focus on new mechanics: Yeah, this isn't just going to be Guild Wars 2 but prettier and modern. And that makes even more sense when you take into account ArenaNet's continued support for GW1. These games have entirely different vibes, so they don't get abandoned just because there's a sequel.

Beyond the specifics, there's something just innately thrilling about the promise of a big new MMO. There was a glorious period where this would not be noteworthy, when every year I'd be checking out new MMO prospects every few months. Lamentably, session-based live service games have taken over, and there are so many MMO corpses littering the annals of PC gaming history that I absolutely understand the reluctance to embark on another possible folly.

That's a huge loss for our hobby, though. Not just because I love me an MMO, but because few other games can replicate that feeling of countless people charging into a brand new world together—making impromptu parties to murder surprisingly tough low-level foes, delving into those first dungeons and not having a clue what's going on, figuring out the meta. It's that shared experience that makes them special. That genuine sense of discovery.

It's why, even though I knew almost immediately it wasn't going to be for me, I still got some real enjoyment out of the early days of New World. Sure, I hated the boring forests, terrible quests and uninspired monsters, but I loved discovering that I didn't like New World. I loved that sense of potential—the thought that maybe I'd actually become a New World player.

That's such a rare treat these days. New World launched five years ago, and in January 2027 it will cease to exist.

Not dead, just resting

Sure, there have been other MMOs since then. Games like Pantheon and Project: Gorgon, which attempt to tap into the nostalgia for classic MMOs. Playing them, I did experience a flicker of that old excitement—especially in Project: Gorgon, which is delightfully unhinged—but the problem with these throwback MMOs is that I already played these things back when they were novel (and also when I had more patience). They have old bones and old sensibilities, but I crave new adventures with a bit less grind and where it doesn't feel like I'm being punished for simply trying to play.

That leaves me with Dune: Awakening, which Funcom says isn't even an MMO. That's nonsense, of course; it absolutely is an MMO. Unfortunately, it's a survival and crafting MMO, which I find exhausting. When I say I love MMOs, what I really mean is that I love MMORPGs. So I played for a month and never will again. I was so busy crafting bullshit, avoiding heatstroke and trying to earn enough to pay my taxes that I didn't have time for fun.

Pantheon, Project: Gorgon and Dune: Awakening all share one thing: they're niche. Yes, survival games are niche. Sure, they're a big niche—a really, really big niche—but they are still games for a specific type of player, just like Pantheon and Project: Gorgon are for the old school MMO crowd. And that can make it tough to find your groove.

Which brings me to the other thing I love about new MMORPGs: finding your people.

In FF14, for instance, I'm just in it for the fashion. All I care about is finding new clothes—and to a slightly lesser extent new minions and mounts. In Star Trek Online, I'm just here for the cool ships and the episodic content, ensuring that even during fallow periods where there are no Trek shows, I always have some new adventures in the final frontier. In GW1 I was all about the PvP, in WoW I got super into raiding, in City of Heroes it was all about buildcrafting, and in Star Wars Galaxies (RIP) I got seriously into roleplaying.

These were the doorways into the varied communities within these MMOs. So yes, I like a good niche, but I want to be the one who picks it. I don't want to be railroaded into that niche. With hyper-specific MMOs, even when they do offer a variety of distractions, you still need to be a certain type of player already. A survivalist, for instance, or an Everquest stan.

For some people, they know who they are going to be when they dip their toes into a new MMO. But not me. It's a voyage of discovery every single time. I can't wait to see who I become in Orr. Is it time to get way too into PvP again? Or will I take a cue from my partner's obsession in GW2 and get super into cooking? I am beyond excited to leap into this endless well of potential.

That said, I do know that whatever kind of GW3 player I'll become, it will be bear-shaped.

Aion 2 didn't have the most graceful launch in town—its release in Korea and Taiwan last year was notoriously pay-to-win and NCSoft's stock price tanked immediately in the following days—but that hasn't stopped it from preparing a launch overseas for this year. Thanks to a trailer from Friday's Summer Game Fest, we finally know when: September.

In the same fest, a reveal for a different NCSoft MMO turned heads: Guild Wars 3, which has a beta coming late next year. As if that weren't enough to keep folks busy, ArenaNet announced a commitment to delivering more stuff for both of the other Guild Wars games "for the foreseeable future."

It's funny how the timing works out on these things. One minute, there's no new MMOs in sight, and then all of a sudden two get release windows simultaneously. In an interview with PC Gamer's Wes Fenlon, executive publishing producer on Aion 2 Merv Lee Kwai said the two games might have "some competition between them, but I think it's friendly competition."

"ArenaNet is close to NC, right? The corporate relationship there. So I view, as a member of NC America, ArenaNet as a sister company of sorts. So I'm just extremely proud that we have the two MMOs that are being brought to market right now, " Kwai said. "I'm just happy that we're both bringing products to market during this period where MMOs are struggling."

"Struggling" might seem a bit harsh, but it's plain to see what Kwai's referring to—PC Gamer's Harvey Randall wrote last year that while the most firmly entrenched games in the genre are (for the most part) only getting better, the future looks as familiar as it does volatile. "If you want new MMOs to get excited about, you're out of luck," he wrote, adding that whatever game you do like is bound to be unrecognizable in a few years as it warps with the times.

When new games do arrive, it doesn't always end well, and most projects in the modding/private server space that amass a decent following earn a C&D-shaped sword of Damocles for their trouble.

Even though they're entering a crowded space, NCSoft chief business officer Seung-Uk Baek reckons GW3 and A2 are different enough to find their own niches.

"I can't reveal too much because [GW3] is still under development," he said. "But there is a directional difference … Aion 2 focuses more on massive numbers of players, like RvR. The more users, the more fun. Whereas Guild Wars 3 is more about segments of small groups playing that makes the gameplay more fun. That's all I can say at the moment."

As MMOs have continued to adjust themselves for a more modern (and aging) audience with pesky things like 9-5 jobs, children, and—heaven forbid—other social responsibilities, they've tilted towards more solo-friendly content. Most of Final Fantasy 14's main story quest can be played without grouping with a single living person—World of Warcraft now has solo-friendly endgame options like Delves or Prey to keep you busy, and so on.

Not to mention the wider design—on the whole, casual content requires less coordination and classes are more self-sufficient. It's entirely possible to log into an MMO, play for a few hours, and dip without having ever said a single thing to anybody beyond a wave when you enter a dungeon, or a "ty4p" at the end of it.

Heck, I've been guilty of this, occasionally. I get most of my socialisation in MMOs out during roleplay, but when it comes to actually playing the game and running content, I'm a bit of a lone wolf. I'm polite, sure, but I don't tend to stick around to chat with strangers. I've got my cosy little bubble and I'm sticking in it.

As a matter of fact, while I'm very sociable within the gaming communities I'm a part of, I'm a little bit standoffish and nonverbal when it comes to the wider gaming public. Not for any fear or anxiety, mind, I just have a limited social battery and choose to spend it on the nice folks I've already got in my Discord.

Which had me thinking—how social are you, Terminally Online reader? Do you make time to chat to strangers in cities? Do you dig into player housing nightclubs and strike up a conversation with somebody, or flag someone down while they're levelling? Or do you just play MMOs to have a little bit of company in the background during your gaming time?

Thanks to the power of magic (and also our poll system), we can find out. Fill in the poll below—and if I've not covered your unique social interaction style, feel free to hop into the comments and discuss.

In a video blog published today, ArenaNet said that Guild Wars 3 won't mean the end of development for Guild Wars 2. It and even GW1 will be getting new updates "for the foreseeable future."

"We are not replacing your favorite games. We'll be supporting them," said ArenaNet head Colin Johanson in the video. "We know this is not the norm, but it's something our studio has been preparing for."

Johanson pointed back to Guild Wars 2's release, when the final Guild Wars expansion, Eye of the North, set up the sequel's events and the game was essentially replaced, at least in terms of active support in the form of new patches.

He explained that if the studio were going that route a second time, "we would have stopped development on Guild Wars 2 over a year ago." Not only is the current expansion not quite wrapped up yet, but the original Guild Wars has started to get new dungeons after years of relative silence, so it's clear this approach has been in motion for some time now.

In the short-term, this will mean that Guild Wars 2 will slow down for a bit. The video notes that a few smaller things are on the way while GW3 prepares for release—an optimization pass, a reprise of the Hall of Monuments system where players can earn GW3 rewards in GW2, and an updated version of the Zhaitan fight in base GW2—though GW2 will continue to get more expansions once GW3 is out.

It will be interesting to see if these plans change if GW3 turns out to be a runaway success, or the opposite. There are some parallels to be drawn with Final Fantasy, which has two active MMOs in 11 and 14, RuneScape, which has Old School and modern versions, and World of Warcraft, which is split between all sorts of different era-locked servers.

Special commentary on this classic PC Gamer review provided by:

Guild Wars 2 review - PC Gamer issue #245 (UK, November 2012)

From the archives: The review below appears as originally written, with only minor changes in formatting and newly taken screenshots. By Chris Thursten

Players gather on the staircase leading down to the Ascalonian catacombs, filling local chat with group requests. A few run about, periodically charging up a nearby hill to repel another assault by harpies on a Durmand Priory dig site. Others dance, or run a sleep emote. A significant number are crammed in underneath the waypoint that links this part of the plains of Ashford to the rest of the world of Tyria.

Within the Catacombs, a norn ranger—Eir Stegalkin—searches for an ancient weapon that could help reforge her old guild, Destiny's Edge. These heroes are the key to defeating Zhaitan, the Elder Dragon threatening the world. They also serve as mentors for each of the game's five races, accompanying you on personal story missions. Another Destiny's Edge member, Rytlock, has followed Eir into the catacombs, angry that she's trespassing on his people's land. We're here to stop them from killing each other.

I'm grouped with an asura warrior, a tiny sword-wielding gremlin in red and gold armour—Pinky and the Brain in platemail. He's telling me about his build. He has stacked an array of slottable utility skills—passive bonuses, in this case—and combined them with an advanced character trait that grants an extra boost for having several abilities of the same type. This is one of many builds that are possible across Guild Wars 2's eight professions and dozens of weapon combinations. He's proud of it: his critical hit chance, he tells me, is very high.

This is what waiting to do a dungeon has looked like since World of Warcraft first placed a swirling portal between five players and the rest of the world. That slight disconnection between theory and heroism, that tension between action and boredom. The moment stands out now because it's the first time in over 30 hours with this character that I've found myself in it.

Long story

As a human, I began my journey in Queensdale—rolling farmland ransacked by centaur warbands during a time of political discord, a symptom of a once-dominant race now in decline. If I had been an asura, I would have come from the jungles of the southwest, via a science fiction-fantasy story that drags in everything from mind-controlled golems to time travel. Tyria's youngest race, the sylvari, are plant-people inspired by celtic folklore and Arthurian myth, making their home among the branches of a big tree.

The bestial charr, Guild Wars' former villains, have been reintroduced Klingon style: Ashford is their homeland now, but the fragility of their warrior culture creates tension both within and without their race. The gigantic norn, who spend their early levels working their way down from the frozen mountain where they spend their exile, struggle the most to stand out: their Norse-derived society, which values individual glory above all else, is a pretty on-the-nose metaphor for what most MMORPG players spend their time doing.

Whatever choices you make at character creation, the result is a breathless charge into this new world, and it's only when the game delivers its first instance at level 30 that the brakes are applied.

I'm not disappointed, exactly.

MMO downtime produces friendships—even marriages, from time to time. It's just that the journey to this point has been about anything but waiting. I've charged off into the countryside and fought bandits. I've intervened to defend towns from centaurs and disguised myself as a pirate to win a drinking competition.

I've painstakingly customised a suit of armour—from stats to colouring—and warped sideways into a wholly different game, a sprawling fantasy conquest mode where whole servers crash into each other in the phenomenal, punch-the-air return of Dark Age of Camelot's much missed factional PvP. Theorycrafting while waiting for groupmate number five is like getting the bus to work on Monday morning after a spectacular lost weekend.

It's easy to make flash judgements at moments like this. Here, ladies and gentlemen, is one of your massively multiplayer online roleplaying games. We queue and talk shop: we sit on the bus and wait patiently for the next fun thing. Look closer, though, and every aspect of this picture has been made strange by ArenaNet's bottom-up recalibration of the genre.

Those group requests? They're not class-dependent: Guild Wars 2 has no healers or tanks, and therefore no roles that must be filled before fun can be had.

Those players charging up the hill? They range from level eight to eighty, with more powerful characters downscaled to match the encounter, the elite player rubbing winged pauldrons with Jimmy Leatherjerkin.

That waypoint? It links to every part of the game I've previously visited, allowing me to instantly go off and do something else if I want to.

These are the innovations and conveniences that make the game so enjoyable, that make it a viable prospect for players traditionally unwilling to step onto the MMORPG treadmill.

Old habits

Fast-forward 25 minutes, and our group is falling apart. We've died multiple times while trying to crack basic enemy encounters. We're making progress, thanks to instant in-dungeon respawns—but it's slow, frustrating, and we're racking up a debilitating repair bill. The asura warrior rushes back into the fray, and allows a hammer-wielding ghost to smash him in the face. Our ranged companions—a necromancer and a ranger—stand still and pour on damage from the sidelines. When one of them is wounded, they're left to bleed out: after all, a wipe is a wipe, right?

The asura starts talking again, this time to complain. These monsters hit too hard, and have too much health. The maths is wrong, and this encounter is impossible. You can't even level up or get better gear, because everyone in the Catacombs is functionally level 30 and there's no core power differential between equipment of a certain level, regardless of rarity. You can't beat this MMORPG encounter by making your numbers bigger: therefore, the logic goes, this encounter is broken.

"Then get out of the way," I snap, before feeling bad and clarifying. "Dodge or block. Wait for the tell—that hammer attack is slow."

Guild Wars 2 isn't a game where a melee attack will connect because the server determined that it would three seconds earlier. It's not a game where a fireball will turn in mid-air to hit you. A clever build might save you, but planning isn't enough—you need to react, pay attention, and improvise. It's not even that prior MMORPGs downplayed these things: most actively discourage them. The worst thing a traditional raider can do is disrupt the status quo. Once upon a time, Leeroy Jenkins was the model of the bad groupmate—a view that ignores the fact that he's the most compelling person in that video. He's the one charging in, odds be damned. He's the hero.

Guild Wars 2 isn't Leeroy's MMO—its tougher fights certainly demand coordination—but it is the MMO that figured out that Leeroys have all the fun. Its combat mechanics allow for accidents to be wrestled into victories, be that by heroically intercepting a killing blow in PvP or using a knockback strike to punt an annoying NPC down some stairs in a dungeon. The funny thing about learning these systems is that it's a case of remembering how things would work in any other type of game.

It's a case of thinking past tanking and healing and DPS—abstractions that have been piled on by the need for successive MMOs to refine and codify the experience of beating up a ghost. If someone was trying to batter you with a giant hammer in an FPS, you wouldn't just stand there: you'd duck.

How much of a hands-on role you take depends on your profession. Warriors spend a lot of time in the middle of melees, and as such will either learn quickly to counter or avoid damage, or get used to life as a fine paste. Guardians match heavy armour with magic, setting up shields and flinging out bolts of damaging energy. Thieves specialise in quickly disengaging, leaping and vanishing across the battlefield to subdue enemies. Mesmers create duplicates of themselves, necromancers use pets and status effects to manage the flow of battle and elementalists flip between four elemental attunements to reduce foes to ash. Engineers and rangers control battles from the sidelines, using turrets and gadgets or pets and traps to maintain a position of ranged dominance.

Mix and mash

Without traditional class roles, you're free to create the character you have in your head—the rifle- wielding warrior, the pistol duellist mesmer, the engineer with a flamethrower—without worrying that you'll lock yourself out of a group further down the line. Best of all, you can jump into eight-on-eight PvP at any time and be instantly levelled up to 80 and handed your entire profession to play with.

Completing a linear 10-minute tutorial with any class allows you to try them out at the high end straight away. With a little experimentation, it's very difficult to create a character you won't ultimately like.

ArenaNet have taken MMORPG combat, disassembled it, and put it back together with some of the original promise of having a fantasy adventure with your friends restored. To my mind, it's a resounding success, but one that doesn't play its hand until you've committed time and thought to figuring it out. That process takes longer the more experience you have with other MMORPGs, and it's not until level 30 and beyond that the game forces you to really learn the ways in which it is different. It's substantially innovative, but quietly so, and in trying to keep the game's first few hours quick and painless ArenaNet have set themselves up for a fall in the eyes of players like my asura groupmate, who was playing an entirely different game until the hammer came quite literally crashing down upon him.

This is the model for Guild Wars 2 across the board. It's also true of the events system, where static questing areas known as renown hearts are accompanied by dynamic happenings that act as a breadcrumb trail of adventure to lead players through the world. Chasing these events from place to place is what the game wants you to do, and the large experience bonuses for exploration make rambling the quickest way to level up.

Exploration has other rewards, too: Tyria is a beautifully designed and masterfully executed world. The game's hub, Lion's Arch, is a multi- tiered pirate city made of ships repurposed into bridges and houses.

The charr live in a steampunk Death Star built into a crater. Wander south-east in the human area of Kessex Hills and you'll find a village in the shadow of a massive floating fortress patrolled by trained elementals. This isn't an emergent online world, but it does have a tremendous sense of life and it's a wonderful place to level a character.

Chasing down points of interest and panoramic views not only earns you experience but can lead to entire adventures. In one case, I followed a player who had offered to show me the way up to a particular vista: this lead to a precipitous dive down a water-slide built into a cave, a chase through a magic maze, corridors full of traps, and a jumping puzzle that takes place in total darkness before emerging into the throne room of a ghostly pirate. Why is this here?

Seemingly, because it can be, because it's fun. The knowledge that these secrets can be stumbled into at any time makes the whole game a more compelling prospect.

Fools rush on

ArenaNet have built a cooperative model that superficially reflects what has come before—you're still filling progress bars—but reworked it to support a different psychology of play. More adventure, fewer boxes to tick—and it works! Unfortunately, it isn't enough to stop many players from wanting to stay in one place to tick boxes, and a lack of participation can leave those players feeling underleveled, particularly if they're determined to endlessly rush on to the next step in their ongoing personal story chain.

At this point it usually falls to local chat to point out that you could be crafting, or playing world vs world PvP, or just climbing that hill over there, and that any of these things will earn you the experience you need by the dopamine trigger-load. The game desperately tries to teach these things, but it uses dismissible tool-tips and mouse-over explanations that no one in the history of computers has ever actually read. The experience can be overwhelming, both for players who don't get it and for those who do and don't understand why other players keep complaining. There are features in place to solve these problems, but the game could do more to tackle them.

These issues are defensible because they result from innovations that make the MMORPG fresh and enjoyable in a way that it hasn't been for years. Second, and perhaps more importantly, they come from an attitude to game-making that seems to think more of its players than other games do. Guild Wars 2 expects you to want to charge off and help a villager—or to discover new items in its experimentation-based crafting system, or to leap into player vs player—because it assumes that you've got an active interest in playing and an inherent ability to excel. Its core design casts you in a flattering light, and as such it stands in stark contrast with MMOs that'll crown you God-Emperor of the Universe if that'll get you to shut up and get back into the machine.

This is why the lack of a subscription fee is such a masterstroke. Just as Guild Wars 2 takes apart the mechanical absurdities of its genre, it strikes a killing blow to the old business model. Players have come to expect that you need to pick a pocket or two if you're going to finance a game like this, and Guild Wars 2's rejection of that assumption should be the moment that we finally see the idea for the anachronism it is. By being free beyond an initial purchase—which frankly makes it one of the best value propositions in gaming at the moment—Guild Wars 2 suggests, quietly, that you should rethink your policy vis-à-vis recurring hammer blows to the face.

There have been a few teething problems at launch. The game's overflow server system means you can almost always get into the game, but you may find yourself in a separate shard to your friends, and it can be difficult to group up. Support systems such as guild chat, the auction-house-style trading post, and the in-game store are sometimes down. World vs world PvP queues can be lengthy.

These are the chief frustrations in a game that is otherwise remarkable in its comprehensive attention to the player's urges, and when they're solved then there'll be very little that Guild Wars 2 does not do as well if not better than its contemporaries. PvP on both large and small scales, freeform cooperative roaming and tight, focused group play. Branching storylines for each race that never stray far from the fantasy wheelhouse but manage to be packed with enjoyable characters and variously funny and dramatic set- pieces. It's all here, on day one.

Altogether now

ArenaNet seem to have wilfully ignored the fact that gamers have, over the last decade, segregated themselves into camps: PvPers and PvEers, hardcore and casual. GW2 wants you to be a generalist.

Overcommit to a single part and the experience suffers: you'll either burn out on chasing down vistas, grow weary of competing over the same four PvP maps, or lag behind the levelling curve of your personal story. The experience suffers when the pace falters, but it's a solvable problem. You can always do something else.

Whether you consider Guild Wars 2 revolutionary depends and, appropriately, it depends on you. If you'll accept nothing less than the fall of the house of Warcraft, then no. If you'll accept nothing less than EVE's green light, the player-driven persistent world that seems to get further away every year—then no.

Guild Wars 2 isn't chasing a single vision. It's pluralistic and the pointed critical thought apparent in each of its component parts belies a whole that is smooth to the touch. Trying to impress upon someone why Guild Wars 2 is important is like trying to stab them with the sharp end of a ball. The temptation is to bludgeon.

It's important, ultimately, because of that pluralism, the collective egoless talent on display. In losing the monthly fee ArenaNet have given themselves the freedom to excise the MMORPG's accreted dross: the subscription-prolonging treadmill, the trickle-down economics of fun that says that only your elites have paid enough to get to see the cool dragon. Then, that spirit of change has passed through every other assumption that MMOs make about themselves and their players and touched each in turn. Nothing is ever so fixed that it shouldn't be broken and remade. It's not perfect, but it is ideologically and structurally sound in a way that few MMORPGs manage at launch, if ever.

Guild Wars 2 is not a revolution, but it is a call to arms. Tomorrow's MMORPGs will be held to account against its standards: generosity, variety, and respect for the player's ability and time. Of course, by that point, it won't be Guild Wars 2 waving the banner. It's not a revolution. It just quietly suggests that we start one.

Amid all the chatter about when Star Citizen will launch and how much money it has raised in player funding, what you can actually do in Cloud Imperium Games' space MMO often gets lost. Star Citizen may not be finished, but it is playable in an alpha that gets updated relatively regularly. Only last month, patch 4.8 added a massive new mission type that involved players embarking on a combined space and ground assault on a heavily fortified asteroid.

Alpha 4.8.1 continues with the asteroid theme, as a fleet of mysterious raiders besiege mining stations through the systems of Stanton and Pyro. As such, the law-abiding security group Foxwell Enforcement, alongside the criminal organisation Headhunters, are both enlisting pilots to help defend the beleaguered mining operations.

According to the patch notes, there are 385 missions in total. These missions will see players "defend asteroid bases throughout the systems, prevent the attackers from destroying key resources, and escort escaping workers to safety as needed". Successful completion of missions will earn participating pilots "credits, reputation gains, and unique blueprints available here for the first time"—though CIG doesn't specify what these new blueprints might be.

They sound fun enough, although players over on the Star Citizen subreddit are reporting some slight teething problems with the missions. "Failed every one so far because the pilot you're supposed to escort flies into the hangar and the doors never open so he just explodes," writes Zealousideal-Ad2695. Poordutchguy points out that this is not a new issue: "That happened when these missions were active in the past. I did 13 missions. 1 succeeded."

Obviously, Star Citizen is still heavily in alpha. But after 14 years and $1 billion in funding, I don't think it's entirely unreasonable to expect a mission type that has apparently been in the game before to be playable when re-added to the experience.

Then again, if reports are accurate, the bulk of CIG's attention may currently be on the single-player campaign Squadron 42. Chris Roberts recently said that CIG's solo space adventure was in the "closing stages" of development, and there's rumours that Squadron 42 may show up at Summer Games Fest, albeit with the possible announcement of yet another delay.

At today's Summer Game Fest, one reveal in particular had me leaning forward with great interest: a follow-up to Guild Wars 2, a game I have well over a thousand hours in.

It's where I experienced one of my most treasured MMO thrills ever: completing the mapwide boss encounter Dragon's Stand for the first time. It's also where I sat through an equally unforgettable disappointment: the conclusion to the Icebrood Saga, which sped through a lore event that had been hyped up for years beforehand only to deliver a notoriously flat anticlimax.

Being a Guild Wars 2 player has always meant putting up with inconsistency only occasionally matched by the MMO's contemporaries. This is best embodied by its update and expansion schedule, which has seen overhaul after overhaul from year to year.

Developer ArenaNet switched focus frequently between seasonal "living world" updates, big expansions like Heart of Thorns and Path of Fire, and most recently, an annual schedule for smaller, more focused expansions. Even the endgame setup never quite sat still: the game originally did away with traditional raid instances entirely, until they showed up anyway, and then those got replaced with smaller-scale "strikes," until the two merged and became the same thing.

At any given moment, it was hard to know what to expect for the future—even the reveal of a new game arguably continues this trend of constantly switching gears. Compare that to a game like World of Warcraft, which has such a predictable patch cadence that it went and announced three expansions in advance just a few years ago.

PC Gamer Editor-in-Chief Phil Savage wrote at length last year about how ArenaNet struggled to deliver satisfying conclusions with its current annual expansion strategy, saying that both Secrets of the Obscure and Janthir Wilds "[limped] towards their finish." While I have fuzzy memories of the game's biggest expansions from back in the day, that model had its problems too: long waits between updates, and living world follow-ups that varied in quality.

I don't think MMOs, or any live service games for that matter, bear the responsibility to go on forever. It's okay for games to wind down or move on to sequels. But Guild Wars 2, despite its casual-friendly flat progression and lack of subscription fee, encouraged the player to invest countless hours into Tyria. It's easier to feel like that's worth the time with a surefire future ahead, especially if you're in it for the game's story—which, as is typical for MMOs, moved from beat to beat at a glacial pace.

Guild Wars 3 is a fresh start for the aging fantasy series, and while we don't know all the ways it will be different from the games that came before it just yet, I hope I can rope in my friends using the same ease with which I'm able to recommend MMOs like Final Fantasy 14, WoW, and even Final Fantasy 11.

ArenaNet teased earlier this week that something Guild Wars related would be at the Summer Game Fest showcase. Naturally, we wondered if it could be Guild Wars 3, but fans of the MMO series tried not to get their hopes up.

Turns out high hopes were justified: It is Guild Wars 3! There's even a Steam page up now.

"The MMORPG genre has millions of players worldwide eager for new, modern experiences, and the opportunity to harness that excitement is immense," Guild Wars 3 game director and ArenaNet studio head Colin Johanson said in a press release. "Our approach with Guild Wars 3 is to push MMORPGs forward, to create an online game world that feels believable, rewarding, responsive, and innovative while at the same time respecting players’ time and providing a positive, supportive space to build community and enjoy new stories in our universe."

ArenaNet tells us that Guild Wars 3 is set over a thousand years before the events of Guild Wars, and takes place in the Tyrian region of Orr, "a vast wilderness frontier imbued with the world's magic."

Speaking on-stage at Summer Game Fest for Guild Wars 3's reveal, Johanson said the prequel-threequel will offer "usher in an entirely new type of MMO experience."

The trailer doesn't show much that you could call gameplay, but it does illustrate a core aspect of the MMO: Each player will have a Seeker, a spirit which serves "as a connection to the spirits of Orr and a mount that will carry them on their journeys through the game's open world."

In other words, it's—you know—a cool horse. A really cool horse.

Guild Wars 3's movement system is particularly emphasized on the Steam page: "Run, slide, leap, and bound across Orr with a one-of-a-kind movement system that transfers your momentum between modes of travel, providing a free-form joy of movement through a world alive with adventure."

And that sounds great and all, but both Johanson and the Steam description overlook the most promising thing shown in the teaser: There's a bear guy sitting there. Barely any MMOs let you make a bear guy. That's the kind of innovation I'm looking for.

In all seriousness, while ArenaNet is making some pretty massive promises, it's tempting to hear that a studio is investing some serious thought into experimenting with the MMO form in 2026, years after most of the industry has left the genre behind. We take it for granted now, but in their heyday, MMOs celebrated the magic of a exploring and coexisting in a shared, online world. If ArenaNet can find a way to recapture that magic, I'll eagerly give it my attention.

No release date for Guild Wars 3 has been announced, but a beta is planned for fall 2027.

I've always been deeply impressed by Final Fantasy 14's solo only challenge runner RathGames—who has been working through the MSQ on his lonesome. Or, as much as is possible given the circumstances. See, FF14 is an MMO, it's not meant to be done on your own, there are explicitly mechanics, encounters, damage checks that are designed for a full party of four to eight people.

Furthermore, RathGames refuses equipment from quest rewards, making most of his gear himself—the one time he's had to renege on his promise was within the Crystal Tower, in which he assembled a group of other solo-only challenge runners because the game quite literally wouldn't let him inside otherwise.

The other time he's technically broken the rule of the run was recently with Shadowbringers' Hades fight. Though I'll say he did so by the letter of the law, not in spirit. RathGames beat that duty with a second character, but he swapped between them by alt tabbing without any external programs, and he levelled that second character all the way through the MSQ a second time without help.

Alas, it didn't take long for RathGames to hit another wall—the Seat of Sacrifice, a battle that has a massive group-based check: Ultimate Crossover, wherein Elidibus throws a Limit Break 4 at the party. Usually, you need to counter this with a Limit Break 3 from a tank, but given RathGames doesn't have access to those, it wasn't looking good.

Thus once more came his alt character, Solo Savior, to the rescue. Rather than trying to out-DPS the fight so that Ultimate Crossover never triggers, RathGames instead showed up running two clients: One with his main as a Blue Mage, and his alt as a Sage—a healer.

Blue Mages are a 'limited job' with a bunch of gamebreaking spells and, as such, aren't usually permitted in group content (but viable via an unrestricted party). They can obtain an ability called Self-destruct, which does what it says on the tin. Rath waited until Elidibus began casting Ultimate Crossover, had his Blue Mage main blow themselves up, and raised them with his Sage.

Because raises in Final Fantasy 14 have a grace period of one minute, and a brief invulnerability window after the target's resurrected, Rath was able to skip the mechanic entirely by timing his main's acceptance of the raise spell, being either in the raise animation or invulnerable for the oncoming damage.

He only had to do this once, mind, given the fight gives you a checkpoint afterwards—but still, the amount of preparation needed is immense, and it's not as though the rest of the fight was a cakewalk, either.

What ensues is a delicate dance where Rath has to use the Blue Mage's diamondback spell to avoid certain death, occasionally raising his sage alt (who spends most of the fight dead) to deal with other mechanics, usually causing them to immediately die afterwards while his Blue Mage lives on.

It's another incredible feat, and one that took multiple arduous streams just to theorycraft and tackle. Rath's determination in the face of absurd, self-inflicted (a little worryingly so) odds continues to be an inspiration.

We haven't heard much about Riot's League of Legends MMO—basically nothing, if you get down to it—but it's still alive and kicking, and today it kicked again: Brian Holinka, who spent more than a decade at Blizzard, including nearly five years as the lead combat designer on World of Warcraft, has joined the dev team.

"Today is my first official day at Riot on the League of Legends MMO!" Holinka wrote on LinkedIn (via PCGamesN). And, well, that's the extent of it, except that the page indicates Holinka is now employed as principal game designer on the League of Legends MMO.

Holinka actually left Blizzard in 2023 and joined Fantastic Pixel Castle, the studio founded that same year by former Riot Games vice president Greg Street. Prior to his departure from Riot, Street had been heading up development of the League of Legends MMO, and Fantastic Pixel Castle's debut project was also meant to be an MMO—but that fell apart when NetEase ended funding in 2025.

The hiring of Holinka comes less than five months after Riot added former World of Warcraft lead producer Raymond Bartos to its MMO development team, and confirms continued turning-of-the-wheels on the game. Riot has never formally suggested those wheels weren't turning, to be clear, but the League MMO was revealed in December 2020 and it's been pretty much dead silence ever since, except that Street—the guy who announced the game in the first place—was leaving. Riot previously added former WoW lead software engineer Orlando Salvatore to its roster in October 2024.

Street, for the record, also apparently has a new gig in the games industry, although he hasn't yet revealed what it is. He did say on his own LinkedIn page that "it's not an MMO, at least not yet."

"The wind stirs. The world shifts. Stand ready," the official Guild Wars account posted on its social media channels on Monday. Accompanying the message was a cryptic video, showcasing lightly animated concept art with a clear fantasy theme, and a date: June 5th, 2026, when we'll all be watching the Summer Game Fest 2026 broadcast.

Some fans are immediately jumping to the most optimistic conclusion: Guild Wars 3?

The wind stirs. The world shifts. Stand ready.

— @guildwars2.com (@guildwars2.com.bsky.social) 2026-06-01T20:44:22.368Z

In an email to PC Gamer, ArenaNet offered an official "no comment" when asked if the teaser is, in fact, for Guild Wars 3. Whatever Friday's announcement is, the MMO developer chose not to temper expectations.

The evidence for this being more than an expansion for the existing MMOs is fairly strong. The teaser was posted across both the Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2 accounts, and Guild Wars 2's latest expansion is still unfurling. The original MMO's remaster, Guild Wars Reforged, has already been announced for mobile. While an expansion announcement is still a possibility, the official Arena Net account also posted a message of its own along with the video: "Big things in the #games industry are brewing. Will you be watching?" That doesn't strike me as the kind of language you use to tease an MMO expansion unless you really want people to expect something more.

It's also possible that ArenaNet is gearing up to announce a spin-off rather than a sequel. In October 2024, a game titled "Lion's Arch: GuildWars Arena (Private Playtest)" leaked via SteamDB, and Massively Overpowered connected the dots to a collectible card game that parent company NCSoft had previously been hiring for. Whether it's actually a card game, or even the project ArenaNet is currently teasing, remains unconfirmed—but it seems like we'll find out Friday.

The saga of TurtleWoW was perhaps inevitable—operating pretty brazenly under the nose of Blizzard, the World of Warcraft private server featured bespoke content for its own vision of the game, and advertised itself as an actual game might.

It also featured in-game microtransactions, and while some private servers for other MMOs (like City of Heroes) have received official permission from the developers to keep operating, they've usually done so via years of muddling by on strictly-documented donations that only cover server costs.

In other words—regardless how neat the work of TurtleWoW's developers was? Legally-speaking, that's cruisin' for a bruisin'. In October of 2025, Blizzard filed a lawsuit against TurtleWoW, and while the team behind it put on a brave face, it didn't matter. Come April 2026, TurtleWoW was given a cease & desist and announced its closure several days later.

Well, as per the TurtleWoW (now Moonwhisper Games) Discord, its developers have said they'll make their own MMO: "This isn't the end of our journey together, but rather the beginning of a new one! We'll be transitioning the team into a game development studio Moonwhisper Games.

"... We've decided to begin work on our own MMO! We know this is an enormous undertaking. MMOs are among the most ambitious and demanding projects in game development, and we're under no illusion that this is something that can be built quickly or easily."

However, as the team points out, it's also sort of been getting in a lot of practice with TurtleWoW itself—regardless of whether the server was playing stupid games and getting stupid prizes, the amount of work put into its extra content was commendable. We're talking new zones, classes, dungeons, the works.

"At the same time, we're not starting from scratch completely. We have spent years building MMO experiences, managing communities, creating content, and learning both the strengths and shortcomings of the genre. We know how challenging this road will be, but we also know it's a challenge worth taking on."

Honestly? Bully for them! While I wish we'd all live in a world where IP laws allowed people to make cool stuff, I do absolutely understand why Blizzard had to put the screws on, here. TurtleWoW was playing with fire—but that doesn't mean its devs shouldn't get to keep making cool stuff. I'm excited to see what Moonwhisper Games'll put together in the coming years. God knows the scene could use an injection of new talent.

About a week ago, one of my colleagues asked me, "Whatever happened to Empire of Sports?" it's an MMO we covered in issue 197 of PC Gamer back in 2009. Developed by a french studio F4, it was basically designed to be an MMO version of Wii Sports: A big hub where you could go play soccer, tennis, ski—that sort of thing. You can find the interview below, in case you're curious.

The answer is: Nothing really happened to Empire of Sports. It was one of those sad but uneventful anti-success stories of the MMO goldrush between 2005-2015: It released in 2007, trundled along for a decade without much in the way of fanfare, and then shut down in 2016.

But it did have me thinking, what other weirdo games came and went from that era? So I decided to roll up my sleeves and find some interesting cases, which I'd like to present to you today in celebration of their strangeness and in mourning for a time gone by. Games like these simply don't exist anymore, and may never again.

These games aren't even necessarily that good. They are, however, important milestones in the genre that I'd like to talk about, either because they were ahead of their time or, as is the case with our first example, unleashed a great evil into the world.

Pandora's Lootbox

Zhengtu Online, as identified by PCG contributor Steven T. Wright back in 2017, is credited as the progenitor of the dreaded lootbox. Here's an article that first appeared in the Chinese newspaper Southern Weekly, archived by Danwei, that describes a then 27-year-old sonogram technician Lu Yang falling down the proverbial lootbox stairs:

"Gamers can buy keys and chests from the system for cheap: one yuan per set. When the key is applied to the chest, the screen will display a glittering chest opening. All kinds of materials and equipment spin inside the chest like the drums on a slot machine as the wheel of light spins. Where it stops indicates what you’ve won."

It's a fascinating window into the pre-legislation wild west of lootboxes—we might think about them as a mostly modern phenomenon, but here they were, consuming people's lives back in 2007. Yang even describes a web cafe that she frequented, where promotional materials and posters encouraged you to spend more and more money:

"The awe-inspiring hero in the posters tacked up at the entrance to every web cafe stared at you, and diligent salesmen frequently appeared beside gamers."

Zhengtu Online closed in 2018, but in its heyday, it apparently boasted a monthly profit of 120 million Yuan ($15.52 million at the time). Adjust for inflation, and that's 174 million Yuan in today's money, or $25 million. Basically, it made a crapton of money.

Not the cheeriest example on this list, but an important one—Zhengtu struck upon the formula that would consume the markets of the day, starting a trend of effective money generation that we're still dealing with, albeit never in quite such a brazenly corruptive form.

The Red Pill

Per this excellent retrospective by PCG contributor Luke Winkie. The Matrix Online had a ton of DNA I see now in popular live service games—released in 2005 and living for four short years, the game was a mess, but it also had some novel ideas.

For instance, players could swap out abilities whenever they wanted with a flexible class system—speaking with Winkie, a player named Dan said: "In other MMOs when you chose your role you had to stick to it, but I loved the freedom to change my loadout when it suited me."

And while not quite a direct analogue, there are plenty of MMOs that've had some form of this system, or developed one over time. WoW has long since abandoned hefty respec costs, allowing you to pretty much retool your entire build and specialisation whenever you get a free moment. Final Fantasy 14 lets you level every single class on the same character, too.

The Matrix Online also had a "Live Events Team, which was composed of genuine Sony developers who would take control of important lore characters—think Morpheus or Seraph—and act out a crucial junction of the narrative in real time."

I can't help but feel echoes of that, both in later events to try and capture a sense of living progression (think Guild Wars 2's "living world"), or in the big events that take place in the modern day's live service games, like Fortnite. It almost feels like a prototype of that craft, and the fact it happened with an IP as big as The Matrix boggles the mind.

Everything I read about The Matrix Online makes it sound like it was ahead of its time, for better and for worse—but I salute the fact it tried, recklessly and messily.

A long, dark fall

Darkfall arrived in 2009, and made it to 2012—and, like The Matrix Online, it was similarly ambitious and similarly short-lived. It was a full-loot PvP MMO, which produced all the banes and boons you'd expect out of that concept. It also struggled at its launch, with developer Aventurine having to quite literally throttle its sales because of its server traffic.

I won't go into the full story of what caused Darkfall to peter out over the next few years—it'd take far too many words—but one central part is that this thing was simply too competitive. The grindiness of an MMO (and Darkfall was a very grindy game) jutted up against players' desire to optimise. Exploits were found in quantities Aventurine, which had already struggled with the game's release date alone, simply couldn't tackle in a satisfactory manner.

That's not to say the ideas Darkfall had were poor—when I look at the core concept of Darkfall, and other large-scale PvP MMOs, I think a whole lot about extraction shooters. Of course, something like Arc Raiders isn't necessarily comparable at a 1:1, but it does circumvent a few issues.

The need to grind in games like Arc is nixed by both having a seasonal loot structure and by limiting players' time in the outside world to those bitesized windows, and while you'll never have the kind of large-scale efforts and classic MMO feuds that Darkfall was aiming for, the social interaction, the psychological warfare, and the uncertainty of a hostile environment filled with players that could help or hinder you?

That's all there. Darkfall, like The Matrix Online, also feels like an ambitious proto-concept for the kinds of games that now dominate a massive slice of the industry.

Otherland

The last game from my little excursion into the annals of MMO history is Otherland—releasing at the tail-end of the goldrush in 2015, I cannot say that Otherland was a good game. But it is absolutely bloody fascinating. You can read PCG contributor Matt Elliot's downright concussive experience with the game, which I shall quote here:

"My initial reaction is one of pervading, intangible wrongness … I’m never sure if I’m doing things correctly because the feedback is always just off. It’s like playing Guild Wars with someone else’s severed hands. While suffering from the flu. More generally, I have no idea who anyone is, where I am, or what I’m doing."

The problem, and blame, somewhat lies in the concept: Otherland was based off Tad Williams's science fiction series of the same name. William's downright cyberpunk vision of the future envisioning a full-immersion VR world is considered to be somewhat prophetic and, indeed, pretty good grist for an MMO.

And while Otherland, to put it bluntly, kinda sucked, I'm quite simply enthralled reading through the archives of its zones: A steampunk simulation of Mars in the throes of revolution. A multi-story mall with a seedy underbelly. A virtual chess-board who—actually, no, I cannot do a better job describing this than the site itself did. Here's a quote:

"Have you ever had a strange dream where you were a mere pawn on a chessboard and nothing you did could change your doomed fate? Well, this nightmare is true for every citizen of EightSquared, a simulation of a living, breathing chess board. Queens, bishops and rooks are locked in eternal warfare, with death and rebirth happening daily without anyone seeming to care."

From a worldbuilding perspective, this shit rules. Oh, and there's also Bug World, where there's bugs.

Otherland is a fascinating failure because of how deeply interesting it could've been. So much so that YouTuber Josh Strife Hayes went on a multi-hour long video series just dissecting the thing—and its closure in 2021 also feels like the final nail in the coffin of this period of MMO history.

In an industry plagued by studios trying to reach for (as Jack Emmert puts it) WoW-level scope, you just don't get little weirdos like this anymore. I don't mean to sound cynical, but we all know that a 2026 version of The Matrix Online would be some kind of bland survival crafting game that takes no risks. And you certainly wouldn't get Otherland.

That old-school spirit does still live on in games like Project: Gorgon, but these days it's either indie or nothing. So raise a glass to the weirdos of the MMO goldrush—whether they unleashed microtransactional evil onto the world, were punished for making a template a few too many years before it became popular, or were simply too ambitious and harebrained for their own good. I shall miss those halcyon days.

At the end of 2025, a guy who had been playing notorious space MMO, spreadsheet-in-disguise, and corporate espionage sim EVE Online for just six months basically got a $7,000 ship out of nowhere⁠. After a brief, agonizing period in which he might have been lowballed or otherwise thwarted like a Coen Brothers character sitting on a hot score, this player sold the goods. He's now living like a dark future king, even paying for his own subscription to EVE with his instant fortune.

As a dumb guy, I can best understand EVE Online's Titan-class Molok as a classic car that's too valuable to drive, the EVE equivalent of a priceless Ferrari you'd see in Jay Leno's garage. The major difference (aside from the digital/physical divide) is probably the Molok's utility to EVE's warring player factions: According to zKillboard, only four have been destroyed since the ship was first added to the game in 2017⁠—which makes for an impressive k/d ratio paired with the Molok's 4,782 kill count at the time of writing.

Speaking to me at the end of last year, EVE community manager Peter Farrell estimated that fewer than 50 players have ever scored a kill with one, owing to its more or less exclusive use as a high-value asset for EVE's player corporations and alliances.

"You could play for over a decade and never even be in the same location as a Titan, let alone own one yourself," EVE brand manager Maziar Shahsafdari told me.

"The ship is so rare, when you first get it, the first thing you do is you either shoot your friend, or you shoot your alt [account] or you just shoot something that you know can get you in that record book," said Farrell, "Because you want to be one of the first."

The consensus on a Molok's value appears to hover around 700 billion ISK (EVE's in-game currency), which is more than double Farrell's own net worth as a 20-year veteran of the game, a member of EVE's economic 1% who considers himself basically set for life.

So how does someone join that club and become a hundred billion ISKionaire overnight?

Reap/sow

You can usually only secure a blueprint to build the Molok through high-level group PvE, but EVE opened the aperture for the 2025 Crimson Harvest, a seasonal Halloween event. Shahsafdari and Farrell explained that it's tended to favor experienced players in the past, but CCP Games Fenris Creations opened it up with lower-level activities while offering a special capstone reward: A loot box available only through event participation (or purchase from another player who did) with the potential to drop anything from workaday ships, to the mighty Molok.

The developers are secretive about precise drop rates, given the blueprint was a gameplay reward and not a premium purchase, and that this knowledge would affect unopened crates' trade value between players. But Farrell did say that, as far as the team could tell, three Molok blueprints⁠—the rare drop necessary to build the Titan⁠—were obtained across the entire playerbase during the event.

And one of those was our guy, a relative newcomer to the 23-year-old MMO. With Fenris' help, we got in touch with the lucky Molok winner, who preferred to remain anonymous. "When I finally obtained the reward container, I knew there was a chance of getting some good ship blueprints," he told me. "So—without exaggerating—I remember thinking to myself, 'What if I get lucky?'

"I then opened the container and saw the Molok blueprint, but I didn’t recognize what ship it was and didn’t look it up. I simply sent a screenshot to my corporation saying, 'Everyone gets this for free, right?' After seeing my corp mates’ reaction, I realized I had just received the holy grail."

Farrell and Shahsafdari, seeing this transpire in the game's database, watched the player's subsequent activity closely. "There was this moment of like, oh shit. Does he know what he just got?'" Farrell recalled. "We were just agonizing. Will he leave it in his hanger and then just quit one day? Will he get scammed? Will someone say, 'Oh yeah, this is only worth a few 100 mil. That's a lot. Let me take it off your hands.'"

Due to the nature of EVE Online's economy, in-game currency and possessions do hold value in cold hard cash. What's a Molok worth in real-world dollars? It's complicated, but I'm going to say that 700 billion ISK is about $7,000. EVE has a premium subscription currency, PLEX, that costs $5 for 100 units. You can buy and trade PLEX with ISK, and that's ranged from 4.5 to 6 million ISK for 1 PLEX⁠ over the past year, hewing closer to 4.5 million at the time of writing.

The rate fluctuates a lot, so let's say 5 million ISK/1 PLEX for simplicity's sake (and my sanity). 500 million ISK equals 100 PLEX equals $5. 100 million ISK per dollar means the Molok is a $7,000 digital ship⁠—not too shabby. (Many thanks to PCG contributor Len Hafer and MMORPG.com managing editor Joseph Bradford for helping me with that math.)

I was wondering if the Molok might have proven too hot to sell, like trying to pawn the Mona Lisa or something, but the winner said it was no huge deal, once he realized what he had. "Thanks to my corp mates' guidance, I avoided falling for scams or attempts to buy it at a lower price," he said. "In hindsight, I probably should have set a higher buyout price, just to see how far someone would go."

C'mon man, haven't you seen Uncut Gems or Bad Lieutenant?

"After following all the recommended steps to avoid being tracked, I put it up for auction," the player explained. "A few days later, while I was chatting with some newer players, a veteran corp mate asked me, 'Why isn’t your auction showing up?' That’s when I realized it had sold instantly at the 700 [billion] buyout. I almost popped a virtual bottle of champagne."

Cashing out

"It was just so amazing to see it go the way you hope it goes," said Farrell. "What's he going to do next? Because he can now do anything. In a world where you suddenly wake up and find that you can do anything, what is it that you choose to do?"

"The first thing I did was make sure I bought a long stretch of game time as [Omega premium subscription]," the player told me. "Honestly, my day-to-day gameplay hasn’t changed that much—I still mine and manufacture ships—but obviously at a completely different level of efficiency thanks to the vast resources I have now.

"Everyone in my corporation has known from the very beginning, and they joke about it constantly … In real life, my friends know what I managed to pull off, and in their words, 'only you could have that kind of luck.' I guess I’ve always been a lucky person, but this time I might have used it all up."

In 2017, a new era of Star Trek was born. More than a decade after Enterprise's cancellation, we returned to the pre-ToS period with Discovery. We had drama, betrayals, twists and movie-quality set-piece space battles. Also mushrooms or something. Next year, a decade after it began, this era will be over.

Discovery ended in 2024, and while we're still following the exploits of a pre-Kirk Enterprise in Strange New Worlds, its final full season will air this summer, followed by a truncated fifth season, likely next year. Starfleet Academy, meanwhile, will only be getting one more season—for a total of two—also airing next year.

Beyond the Discovery era, we got Picard and two animated shows: Prodigy and Lower Decks. All three have concluded.

In total, that's six shows that have concluded or been cancelled, though two of them have still to finish their runs, since Star Trek returned to our TV screens. But throughout this period another Star Trek property has been quietly trucking along without any indication that it has a shelf life: Star Trek Online.

A 16-year mission

STO launched on PC in 2010, and it's weathered some storms since then. MMOs were a lot more common back then, and didn't have a deluge of live service games to contend with. But STO has kept up with the changes. It shed its mandatory subscription years ago, and now it doesn't even offer optional subscriptions for those who want them—it is entirely F2P, supported by a cash shop and a wide range of microtransactions.

I've been playing it off and on since launch—initially to get my Star Trek fix during a long fallow period where all we had to look forward to was the occasional middling film from the Kelvin timeline (or the Chris Pine timeline, if you prefer), and later to enjoy some more old-school Trek after Discovery dramatically changed the universe's tone.

And I'm still here. These days I'm flying around in a Lexington-class monster—a ship originally designed by the Terran Empire in the Mirror Universe, eventually adapted by Starfleet in the prime universe. It's got a big ol' cannon on top of it, and I've customised it to look like it's been assimilated by the Borg Collective. It is my prized possession.

Look, Star Trek Online wasn't exactly cutting edge in 2010, and now it's positively creaky. The cinematics are low budget, the ground combat is janky and even though onboarding is a lot better now than it once was—in part thanks to recruitment events where everyone can roll a new character and get all sorts of bonuses and goodies—the new player experience is a bit messy. But there hasn't been a better Star Trek game, it's still one of the best MMOs around, and it genuinely has something for every kind of Star Trek fan.

You can play as a captain from any era of Starfleet—starting out in that era, before you're dragged to the current era—as well as a Klingon, Romulan or Jem'Hadar captain. And my god, the ships. The ships! You've got the classics—like every version of Enterprise—but you've got just as many deep cuts. Remember that episode of Lower Decks where chief engineer Billups has to visit his overbearing mother? It's the one where he has to avoid having sex so he doesn't inherit a throne. It's a good one. And now you can fly his mum's incredibly ostentatious ship in STO.

Plenty of ships are given away for free as you progress through the ranks, though the best ones are typically locked behind the cash shop or loot boxes. My Lexington cost me over 20 bucks. But! All of those fancy ships can still be earned without dropping a dime. STO always has some kind of event going on, where you can unlock ships or fancy bits of gear—and completing all the events in an event campaign nets you vouchers that you can use to pick up both cash shop and loot box ships.

With a bit of effort, almost every ship can be yours without ever opening up your wallet.

Flying solo

Some players will tell you that you need to join a fleet and grind, grind, grind away to get the most out of the game, but that's nonsense. I've been in a grand total of one fleet in 16 years, but I've spent most of my time as a solo captain. There are some ships and modules only accessible if you're in a fleet full of heavily invested players, but there's simply no reason to get stuck into that side of the game unless you care about competitive PvP.

If you just want to live out the fantasy of being a captain, you can do that without much work or investment. And that's what STO does best.

You'll get into space battles with planet-destroying ships and alien entities, solve diplomatic incidents, travel across time and dimensions, get into ethical debates with megalomaniacs, become a war hero and go on holiday to Risa. If something happens in an episode of the show, you'll be able to do it in STO.

STO's main PvE quests follow an episodic format with season-long arcs with themed rewards, multiplayer battles and, frequently, voice acting from Star Trek luminaries. Some of my favourites follow on from TV episodes, fleshing out the original stories or spinning them off in unusual directions. Like the fate of Harry Kim. No, not the Harry Kim who made it home with Voyager—that was Harry from another universe. I mean the Harry Kim who died in the season two episode, Deadlock. Well, it turns out he's not technically dead, and he gets a whole new character arc in STO.

Ultimately, it's a Star Trek toybox. Collect tribbles! Hang out with Hugh of Borg! Play minigames for Q! Squeal with delight as you fire off ToS-era phasers, complete with accurate sound effects! It's Heaven.

But it's also increasingly hard to ignore that Star Trek Online has been going for 16 years. The ships look great, space combat looks pretty good, but everything else? Yeah, it's looking a bit long in the tooth. When new episodes come out, they are built on ancient bones, and you can tell. There's also a ton of bloat—so many activities and systems and quests that have just been pushed to the side instead of being removed or reconfigured.

For years now, STO has been surviving. The team continues to craft new storylines and ships, and occasionally we'll see some new mechanics or the odd experiment thrown in for good measure—but for the most part it's all felt a touch perfunctory. Just enough new stuff to keep the dedicated players hopping back in their ships. These days, I'm mostly just coming back for events so I can get newer, fancier ships—feeding my addiction.

Next generation

Steam concurrents haven't risen above 5,000 since 2014. There are still players using the standalone client, and there's a separate console version—though it's even less populated. What's impressive, though, is that the player count has remained pretty consistent over the last decade. Dedicated fans and the odd space tourist have been helping keep the turbolifts running.

But how do you turn those numbers into something that could justify a big reinvestment? It might help now that STO no longer belongs to Embracer—a publisher that we now dread hearing has acquired any studio. Arc Games is now the independent publisher of STO, with Cryptic remaining as developer.

In January, Cryptic CEO Jack Emmert returned to the studio after a decade away—and this is a man who knows his MMOs, having worked on City of Heroes, Champions Online, STO, Neverwinter, DC Universe Online, Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons & Dragons Online.

Upon his return, he said, "I cannot promise results, but I can promise effort. I’m going to do everything I can to live up to the team’s and your expectations. I want to make sure that together we make our games flourish. If you’re a current player, THANK YOU! And if you’ve once played but are reading and simply curious, COME BACK! I’ll be actively getting feedback from all our various channels and even more importantly, I’ll be holding a LIVE Q&A session regularly."

This doesn't sound like a man who's happy for STO to just keep doing its thing. But how much can he do with only the backing of a newly-independent publisher without any big cash-generators in its stable?

So I guess what I'm saying is: Come play Star Trek Online with me! It's awesome, even with its creaky bones. And it's especially awesome if you're just starting out. Once you get to grips with it, you'll have 16 years of adventures to enjoy. And with there being no clear plan for the TV side of things at Paramount, and the only two remaining shows on Death Row, there's really no other place to get your fix.

In particular, there's a lot of great stuff here for Star Trek fans who've felt a bit left out by the modern era. I'm not talking about the anti-woke babies who want a show about a socialist federation of planets to feature no politics and only space battles. I'm talking about the folks who love the politics and ethical conundrums, but who felt like the Discovery era ended up being a bit too much like an extended therapy session.

STO has all of that good stuff, plus fun space adventures, without every episode devolving into a series of heart-to-hearts with a bunch of people suffering from some emotional trauma. More debates about the ethics of time travel, fewer people bursting into tears because their parents had too high expectations. It's the perfect balance.

So! I hope to see some of you the next time I blow up a cheeky Crystaline Entity.

It's hard to make a new MMO nowadays—sure, if you've got over two decades of expansions to back you up, you can keep your players entertained by using every bit of the buffalo. But if you don't have that? Good luck.

MMO design veteran Jack Emmert, who recently returned to Cryptic Studios and has worked on multiple games including City of Heroes, Neverwinter, Champions Online, and Star Trek: Online, says hounding after scope is part of the problem in an interview with GamesIndustry.biz.

But there's also an issue with developers not using what's already there to its fullest potential: "It's not that I need a gajillion number of dungeons. What I need is to make sure the progression is worth it.

"In fact, I enjoy doing things a gajillion number of times, because each time I get a little bit better, and then all of a sudden I'm an expert and I'm telling other people what to do. But other people will say, 'Well, that's impossible, people get bored or whatever'. That misunderstands the point."

I feel this on a personal level—Final Fantasy 14 has struggled with this for years now. Its latest Variant Dungeon is excellent, but doesn't have the rewards to back it up, like almost every Variant Dungeon before it, and it struggles with meaningful reasons or progression contributions that might encourage players to go back to it.

Just like every other bit of beautiful but ultimately DoA content in that game. Heck, sometimes Square Enix gets it wrong in the other direction, making something so unavailable that it's basically for nobody.

Emmert's point is "don't go nuts … You just start with something, and if you have a committed live team, you can grow it into whatever the players want. In fact, it's even bad to launch a game with one million features and a ton of content, because you don't know yet what the players really want, not really. So you're wasting a whole bunch of time and energy on stuff which they might not ever touch.

"The launch does not need to be everything with an MMO. It does not need to be 200 hours of unique content. It just flat out doesn't … the key is that the game launches, and then three months later there's something new, and three months later there's something new."

Emmert says this sort of thinking is what's made his games successful, and look—I'm not personally a fan of a lot of the games he's made (Champions Online's content droughts have stung me before) but I do have to admit that they're all still around and kicking.

Even my favourite of the games he's worked on, City of Heroes (which did get shut down) was so popular that a fan revival managed to get permission from the current IP holders to keep operating, and if that's not a sign you know how to capture a loyal group of fans I'm not sure what is.

Of EA and Microsoft, Emmert quips: "I think I'm going to eat their lunch, because I know how to prototype quickly. I know how to make stuff inexpensively. I'm not trying to be everything in a box of rocks. I know who I am: I make niche games," then, as a chaser to the shot, "There's probably a reason why EA never wanted to hire me."

The MMO is in dire straits at the moment. Don't get me wrong, it's popular—but it's an aging genre, to the point where we even didn't have a single MMO make it to our Top 100 list last year, because while there are still many popular ones going, they've been losing too many points for recency and relevancy.

Meanwhile, when it comes to new MMOs, it's a bloodbath. They're either getting axed like New World or snuffed in the crib like Project Blackbird—and the ones that do truck along with a few thousand players are small-scale indie projects like Project Gorgon. Everyone else is an old dog in search of new tricks to keep humble playerbases ticking over.

Sharing my consternation over the state of things is Jack Emmert, an MMO veteran designer who has worked on games like City of Heroes/Villains, Neverwinter, Champions Online, Star Trek Online, and more—many of which are still up and running.

Speaking with Gamesindustry.biz, Emmert puts it plain: "People want MMOs, and the sales of New World proved it. But I don't believe that the infrastructure and the strategy was there to sustain it, and so ultimately they shut it down.

"I think that the idea that the MMO crowd doesn't exist is belied by the number of players who are still in World of Warcraft, or in my games, or in the Daybreak games … They want something new."

He still believes that the spectre of being a WoW killer is haunting newer MMOs even to this day—killing them via ballooning scope: "In [the publisher's mind], they needed to spend hundreds of millions of dollars, and they also needed to appeal to the widest possible audience.

"These new MMOs or MMO-adjacent games become so watered down by the expectations that it's got to be everything. And so you see games that are basically features, but without any soul... And so they fail, and you've seen it over and over again."

The antidote—and it is a big ask—is a publisher that's comfortable with setting reasonable expectations, rather than desperately trying to make the next WoW or Destiny. They need to "establish a reasonable budget with a reasonable projection, stick to it, and have a very distinct vision of what you're trying to do."

He uses the example of Neverwinter, which released with a pretty straightforward set of features: "A major publisher would have said to this game, 'Oh well, you're going to need to build your own house, and you're going to need to cut down forests: What's going to differentiate you from World of Warcraft?'

"When I made Neverwinter, I never even thought like that. I was just trying to make the experience of what I had work. I didn't worry about competitors. I didn't worry about the X factor that's going to make me stand out. Just didn't even think about it."

Makes sense to me. Sometimes the only winning move is not to play: "Players don't mind, it's the publishers who thought you needed a bajillion number of things."

I think Emmert's assessment here is fair—I can certainly see echoes of it in the horror stories surrounding Anthem, wherein Mark Darrah said that the ability for mechs to fly was tossed back in very nearly last-minute as part of BioWare's "highly dysfunctional relationship with decision-making."

But sometimes a game just gets kneecapped out of nowhere even if it's doing fine. Maybe New World didn't have too much soul—but it's still very possible to make money off a game with 10,000 players. Perhaps Emmert's right in a different sense. There's a humbler, leaner version of New World that would've made its publisher comfortable with those numbers.

Great moments in PC gaming are bite-sized celebrations of some of our favorite gaming memories.

I like pirate survival game Windrose a lot, but playing it mostly just made me pine for my favorite pirate game of all time: Sea of Thieves. It's been years since I played Rare's oceanic sandbox, so I dragged several of my PC Gamer associates back into it with me and we've been sailing together again a few times a month.

A lot has changed since we last set out to sea: new enemies, new factions, new systems, season passes, and more cosmetics than you could shake a peg leg at. As we've tried to come to grips with those changes, it's also been nice to see that some things haven't changed at all.

We were sailing along on a multipart quest, having visited several islands over the past couple of hours, and were headed back to an outpost to sell off our loot. Then one of our crew members abruptly got a notification. It was an achievement titled "This is Unacceptable!" which informed us that "Another crew took one of your chests and cashed it in."

It was a surprise: we'd definitely seen a couple of other players out on the seas that night, but as we were on a four-player galleon and they were on two-player sloops, they all kept their distance. Or so we thought. Apparently, at some point, one of them had got close enough to sneak aboard and pilfer one of our chests, then slipped away to sell it somewhere.

No salt. Just admiration. Stealing treasure from other players in Sea of Thieves is a thrill, and as this mysterious and bold pirate demonstrated, it doesn't always have to involve cannonballs and sabers. Best guess, they waited until we'd disembarked on one of the islands, swam or row-boated over (if they'd shot themselves out of a cannon I think we'd have heard it), climbed onto our ship, and absconded with a bit of our loot. By the time we knew about the crime it had already been committed. Well played.

In the early days of Sea of Thieves I stole my share of loot too, though I was rarely as surgical. My main strategy was to spot a ship in the midst of a mission and then head to the nearest outpost to wait for them. When they sailed over to drop off their loot, I'd have posted up with a couple of carefully placed explosive barrels, and when they ran down the dock with their arms full of treasure chests, I'd open up with my sniper rifle. Boom. Their treasure is mine now.

It wasn't exactly sporting, and quite often it wasn't even successful, but there's something to be said for letting some other industrious pirates do the hard work of finding the treasure and then taking it off their hands so you can sell it yourself.

It's so satisfying to steal from someone else that I don't even mind when it happens to us, like when that silent, slippery buccaneer made off with some of our loot. All you can do is tip your tricorn hat. We're pirates, after all. Stealing's the name of the game.

Terminally Online, the column you are currently reading, is typically a place where I put forward either interviews or opinion pieces on the current state of MMOs—however, I don't do that every week. I like to give myself a break by opening discussions or starting polls to find out more about you, my dear reader.

Thanks to several of those polls, I now have a somewhat-accurate understanding of how my readership actually conducts themselves. The result? You're all really fashionable healers. Well, the majority of you are. Here's the first Terminally Online roundup, a deeply unofficial and unscientific census that I am, nonetheless, interested in.

In this questionnaire from February of this year, I asked you all what role you tend to play in MMOs. At the time of writing, I've discovered that 32% of you are healers—a clean 5% above DPS, and 7% ahead of tanks. 10% of you are like me, playing any role you'll get, while around 6% of you play Guild Wars 2 and have thus hit escape velocity from the holy trinity. Good for you!

In this poll from April, I asked how many of you are interested in fashion, and the majority of you—36%—answered that "fashion is the true endgame". 16% of you will occasionally go out of your way to get a vital piece of glamour, 17% are only occasional outfit collectors, and 7% of you keep up appearances at a basic level.

That makes 24% of you who don't care at all, and just huck any old bit of gear on. Perhaps the real fashion isn't caring what other people think of you? Much to think about.

You're also all decently patient. In the poll I just linked, 70% of you told me that you don't care if a dungeon run is a little slow—that it's only a problem if things are grinding to a near halt. The remaining 30% were cleanly split between folks chanting "gogogo" and those who don't care at all, 16% to the former, 15% to the latter (our poll software does some rounding up).

In other words, Terminally Online readers are, on average, fashion-forward healers with a medium amount of patience. Honestly, not the worst demographic to have reading my column, thank you for being here.

The most interesting poll result, however, was from this article, wherein I asked you how many people thought classic MMOs (tab target, lots of keybinds) were going out of style. I sort of did a twofer here, also asking how you felt about it.

The majority of you think that those kinds of MMOs are going out of style—but among those of you with strong feelings about that, you're completely split. And I mean a clean split, right down the middle: 28% of you answered "Yes, it's about time", while 27% of you answered "Yes, and I yearn for the olden days."

If we take the yes/no out of the equation, things are a little less even stevens:

• 35% of you gave anti tab-target answers ("I wish they would/It's about time").
• 42% of you gave pro tab-target answers ("If they go anywhere I'll be very upset/I yearn for the olden days").
• 23% of you were ambivalent ("I couldn't care less/If they did I wouldn't be upset").

As a pro tab-target, keyboard turning MMO player myself, I am at least glad to know I'm not just some old fogey that's resistant to change and ambivalent at best to having dodge rolls in my MMOs. But what about you? Does the profile of fashionista healer with a dose of tab-target nostalgia align to you, or are you a maverick in the minority? Feel free to let me know in the comments!

World of Warcraft: Midnight seems inclined, like its past couple of expansions, to be less demanding of entry-level requirements for Mythic+ and high-end raiding—there's more ways to gear up a character solo than ever via activities like Prey, and there's no mandatory Torghast-esque chores to tick off or borrowed power item to grind out points on.

And yet, some players have found themselves on an economic treadmill—as broken down by this solid analysis on WoWHead. This had mostly passed me by, given I'm not pushing keys—though I'd been aware of shield-wielding tanks getting shafted.

The issue? Repair costs. Now, repair costs are important to your average MMO—see, MMOs are technically printing money all the time. Every mob you kill, every bit of trash you vendor, every dungeon you complete, adds some form of money into the economy.

And if there's too much cash going around, then inflation becomes a major problem. And you can't just make non-player sources of gold generation more generous, because that'll only make it worse.

Still, when you look at WoW's repair costs for the highest-end players, it's nasty. Gear quality (what "track" it's on) makes a large impact, with Mythic gear being around 67% more expensive to repair—WoWHead compares a Mythic-tier two hander (523 gold) to a Champion-tier one hander (93 gold) to demonstrate.

Overall, WoWHead puts the average cost of a single death for a Mythic at 250 gold—if you want to kill the latest Mythic boss, WoW's Progstats puts that at an average of 343 pulls, rounded down. That's 87,750 gold to clear one boss—and that's not even including the extra gold costs required to raid at that level.

As a matter of fact, let's figure it out with the prices on my current server, even being charitable and assuming I've got a crafting friend who's willing to foot the bill for my gear and gems and enchants. WoWHead's Outlaw Rogue BiS for consumables suggests the following:

• Flask of the Shattered Sun (917g per hour).
• Thalassian Phoenix Oil (40g per hour).
• Void-Touched Augment Rune (846g per hour).
• For a total cost of 1,803 gold per hour of progression.
• (I've not put the recommended food here since it can be shared with the whole raid.)

That's just the hourly stuff—Light's Potential, a combat potion, and the SIlvermoon Health Potion can be added onto that per-pull cost, a combined total of 585 gold on my server. Using progstats' average progression timing of 29 hours (rounded up), we can actually figure out how much it costs to beat the Midnight Falls raid, purely in repair costs and consumables.

• Repair costs are 87,750 gold (250 gold x 343 pulls).
• Per-encounter consumables are an eye-watering 200,655 gold (585 gold x 343 pulls).
• Hourly consumables are 52,287 gold (1,803 gold x 29 hours).
• 52,287 + 87,750 + 200,655 = 340,692.

So if you're a Mythic raider, being as tryhard as you possibly can, it costs 340,692 gold to prog and clear Midnight Falls. Now, that number's probably a little high—that Light's Potential and health potion are by far the biggest cost factor, and you might not be using a per-encounter consumable on every pull if you still haven't seen enrage.

But even without them, repair costs being significantly more expensive than your hourly consumables budget is wild, and players are feeling the sting in their wallets. As one player pointed out on the WoW subreddit this month, it all adds up very quickly: "I as a Warlock am paying 20 THOUSAND gold in repairs and APPARENTLY I am on the LOWER END. The Protection Warrior is allegedly (in his words) paying over 35k a raid night."

Which is rough. I can absolutely see why some costs are there—again, MMO economies do need gold sinks, or stuff gets out of hand real quickly. You don't want a SWTOR situation circa 2023 where a level 24 accessory is being sold for 49 million credits.

But it does seem countermand to WoW's anti-busywork philosophy in recent years. Sure, you can get gold from just about anywhere, but demanding players foot a steep bill just for the honour of hardcore raiding does seem like an extra layer of unnecessary punishment.

Final Fantasy 11 is a seasoned MMO with grey in its beard, at this point—not entirely unheard of in the industry (World of Warcraft itself is over two decades old), but absolutely in its veteran years. I mean, this is a game that originally came out on the Playstation 2 as well as PCs.

Still, it's trucking along quite nicely. That's per a Famitsu interview (translated here by Automaton) with Yoji Fujito, the director and producer of FF11.

There've been some events that the developer says were expected to give a player bump—such as the crossover raid series with Final Fantasy 14, Echoes of Vana'diel, as well as a Welcome Back campaign and giveaways. Fujito expected things to even out, but the new playerbase has, to his surprise, kept steady:

"Overall, the player count remained stable at a high level, and we never saw the kind of sharp decline we had anticipated, so honestly, the outcome exceeded our expectations and came as a surprise."

That doesn't mean the team isn't facing problems, though. For one, FF11 is encountering a similar problem to Old School RuneScape, wherein the developer is running out of IDs for in-game areas, requiring large systems architecture changes to accommodate new expansions (the following quote's been machine translated):

"However, we know that we can free up a few more ID slots if we are creative, so we are investigating how we can make that work. If we can make it work, adding a new area will not be impossible … Depending on the results, I have a feeling that some kind of project may start moving forward."

The idea of fleshing out FF11 with full-blooded expansions is exciting to me—not because I've played the MMO, but because I'm excited about MMO conservation in general. I think these games are important, and I always feel a sad kind of melancholy when I see an old titan diminish and go into the west. Especially since nobody's really making them anymore.

Final Fantasy 14 isn't the only Final Fantasy-related MMO. Its ancient ancestor, Final Fantasy 11, which released all the way back in 2002 before World of Warcraft reshaped the landscape for massively multiplayer games, is still trucking along. It's not exactly bustling next to the likes of FF14, Guild Wars 2, and WoW, but it occasionally attracts so much activity its dusty old servers buckle.

It seems like Square Enix wants to bring the game, if one small step at a time, into the current decade as well. Its website just got a shiny overhaul, and now it looks like something from 15 years ago rather than 25 years ago. Just to be clear, you still have to wrangle the abysmal and esoteric PlayOnline installer to get the game running; this is just a fresh coat of paint for the web.

It's part of the game's 24th anniversary celebrations, which you can read about in more detail in a blog post on the new site. The post talks about some in-game festivities as well as new features, like the ability to replay story missions. It also links to a nifty FF11-themed music video which looks like the opening credits to an anime that doesn't exist.

"The fact that the game has continued to thrive for so long is due to the tremendous support it has received from all of you adventurers out there and the 'culture' you have created around the world of Vana'diel," wrote game director Yoji Fujito in the post. "The game's success has forced us to update our long-term goals for the project yet again … the entire FFXI team will be hard at work to further solidify the game's foundation and help it reach its 30th anniversary."

It certainly sounds like more is on the horizon for the classic MMO. A livestream from Square Enix reportedly shared another tidbit of news yesterday, though I can't verify it myself as the stream is in Japanese. Reddit user hikiri translated the stream's FF11-related info in a post, with the headliner being that the game's 14-day free trial limit will no longer be time limited and will allow players to progress to level 75. "The areas are limited like normal, but you'll be able to play forever at level 75 on the trial in the OG zones," the post reads.

In any case, it's remarkable to see such an old MMO with a more popular sequel by the same company continue to draw in players and get substantial updates. With some MMOs of FF11's tenure, you're lucky to find a decent private server that isn't a cease and desist away from oblivion.

I'm thinking about Final Fantasy 14: Evercold's keynotes, and something in them's been rattling around in the back of my skull—during them, Hikaru Tamaki (who was affectionately coined as Mr Prime live on stage)—revealed that the design team was considering making the new version of Dragoon, which'll be arriving in the expansion, have a 90% damage reduction buff while using its new Sky High action.

Since I've been playing it (circa Shadowbringers), FF14 has been praised for having an almost pitch-perfect balance between its jobs. We're talking separations of a few percentages between the DPS of different classes at the highest level. That's in part to having no talent tree system to speak of.

But it's also led to one of the biggest criticisms of the game: Homogenization. Every tank plays the same, every healer plays the same, every DPS hits its burst windows at two minutes. It's something that the developers are directly taking aim at. Whether they will is another question, as my colleague and fellow FF14-head Mollie Taylor rightfully pointed out earlier this week.

But it got me thinking: What did perfectly balancing those jobs in that way do? Who did it serve? And there are a few good arguments in favour of that. Even in a purely PvE context, MMOs aren't balanced like singleplayer games. They're social activities, and class balance matters not just for competition, but for cooperation.

If your class or job is underpowered, people aren't gonna want to take you on diddly squat in higher-end content; Learning how to master a class can feel like a waste of time if some guy on the flavour of the month out-damages you with two buttons; And MMOs are grindy, which means jumping to those new classes can take multiple hours.

Heck, even if you're just a filthy casual, it can feel pretty crappy to see your name in the muck at the bottom of damage meters. If there's something MMO players don't like, it's a sense of inefficiency.

So why is FF14 moving away from that and tipping the scales? Why do people still play classic WoW servers, where Feral druids, for instance, had to grind out inventories full of Manual Crowd Pummelers if they wanted to be fully-optimised because of a weird interaction with their weapon scaling? Why did Star Wars: Galaxies die by trying to bring its professions in line?

Because perfect balance is bad for MMOs. That's the hand-on-heart truth.

What makes you special

One of the main draws of the MMO is the idea of inhabiting a character within a wider world—and inside of that draw, being able to exist in a space in a community where your contribution is valuable. This, as we all know, is an unattainable fantasy and only possible in videogames.

Anyway, the memories that stick with me aren't the ones where I had an internal itch for justice scratched by the meticulous numbers balancing of a developer team—they're when I saw certain classes being unique. WoW understood this very well back in the day.

Hunters could kite raid bosses halfway across the continent, rogues could pick locks in dungeons to bypass lengthy attunement questlines, warlocks could summon players to raids, which meant something before the advent of LFR and dungeon finder.

These things are still present in modern WoW, sure, but they're less relevant. You don't need to bring a rogue to unlock a shortcut in a Mythic+ dungeon if you want a fast time. Hell, sometimes five bears can cut it.

City of Heroes is another example I like to trot out, because it's even more granular, down to not just your class choice, but your selection of "powerset"—having a kinetics character on your crew gave you a massively impactful roster of buffs unmatched by other powersets. Some archetypes and builds were such team players that they were basically useless on their own—while others could be custom-built to solo challenges meant for full teams.

Being able to provide a specific service, or bring a certain ability? That made you feel special. The iron grip of the holy trinity is probably inescapable, sure—but that doesn't mean it has to puncture every aspect of play.

The worry is, of course, what I mentioned above: That certain unique skills or talents or abilities might invalidate some classes for some raids or dungeons—and I am painting a very rose-tinted picture here. It's cool that, say, fire mages in WoW were useless in Molten Core, but better in Naxxramas—right until you have to respec or regear them.

But I honestly think that's a price worth paying, especially if you can build intentionally around it.

Built different

Evercold's also taking steps to accommodate this new philosophy, which is great, because FF14's already got the foundations of a game that can support more whackadoodle job design.

In the game, you can play every job on the same character, switching between them just by equipping a new weapon. You still need to level them up and gear them individually, but that doesn't take all too long in the grand scheme of things—it's something you're able to do passively just by ticking boxes on your roulettes.

With Evercold, Square Enix is taking that one step further by letting players "sync" their highest item level to other jobs. If you want to fine-tune your stats and get best-in-slot gear, you'll still have to grind for it—but if you suddenly need to swap jobs to bring a better-suited one to a boss, you'll be able to have a statistically viable version of that. Just a little weaker than a specialist.

In other words, if it ends up that certain jobs excel in certain fights, it's basically not the end of the world—players won't be given an unreasonable amount of work to have a swiss army knife of viable picks ready to go at any time.

In much the same way I feel about tab-targeting MMOs, where it feels as though MMO developers could improve the system that's already there rather than trying to reinvent the wheel, I feel as though class balancing teams could take on all their knowledge of modern MMO design and apply them to this "purposefully imbalanced" template, too.

Much of the interesting friction and complexity of these older games was almost an accident, and they left unviable classes in the dirt for months, if not years. Modern-day balance and design schedules are both far more reactive and are done with deeper understanding of their own systems. Developers are more transparent, posting breakdowns of their choice-making. Even if those breakdowns are sometimes a little baffling, at least they're doing it.

I think there's a world in which a developer finds the right version of that oldschool, Star Wars Galaxies-esque formula—where every class, profession, or job has something it excels at, but needs help from others—that'll actually stick with modern audiences. And I think that MMO will be better for it.

Y'know. If a new MMO can actually be developed and made in the first place. Which isn't a sure thing.

I will admit, when I first heard about EverQuest Legends, a reimagined version of the classic MMO as it existed at launch, I had some trepidation. For years I've told anyone who will listen that what made EQ special was the friction. Slow resource recovery, meaningful danger just getting around, and extreme penalties for death and carelessness made it important to work together and gave us downtime to build relationships. I still believe all these things, but having spent the last week playing the Legends closed beta in advance of its July release, I believe something else as well. Smashing hordes of mobs is fun.

You get to load your character up with three classes in EQL, and for my first run I chose magician, shadowknight, and wizard. Not because I thought they were a particularly strong combination, but because they were iconic to my experience with EverQuest. My first ever character was an ill-fated high elf wizard who wasted most of his time looking for a crimson robe instead of a green one, my main man back in the classic through Planes of Power era was a shadowknight, and the little dude I spent truly obscene amounts of time on during the pandemic was a mage on p99 Green.

The start of leveling was a very familiar experience. I ventured into the noobie area outside the gnome starting town of Ak'Anon and started hunting skeletons, kobolds, and clockworks. Cast a little nuke, send pet, and commence beatdowns. Very quickly, however, I started to notice my strength. Instead of being just a squishy mage, when I pulled agro off my pet I was tanky enough to beat the mob to death with my sword. I had lifetaps and harm touch to go with my mage damage. And at level 10, I got access to wizard with even better nukes and access to root so I could split packs.

You choose a primary class, which is locked in until you get an unlock token at level 50, but you can freely swap your secondary and tertiary classes as you like. All classes get XP until level 10, but after that you only level up the classes you have equipped. This lets new players do tons of experimentation as they start their journey, not that I did any of that. I was too busy blastin'.

I leveled to max with my first three classes in about 50 hours, which included a bunch of dinking around and taking notes. By the time I hit my final ding, I was pulling huge packs of frogs or kobolds or whatever, blasting them with a supernova, and shrugging off all their hits with planar armor while my water pet shredded them with dragon loot and they broke themselves upon my damage shield. In short, I felt like a god. And that's without playing enchanter or bard!

All systems go

This isn't to say that I spent all of my time alone, though. I felt totally able to do what I wanted to do by myself, but I also spent tons of time in groups. One of the brilliant things they've done is to give every player credited with a kill the loot. We kill the frenzied ghoul, we all get a shot at a Flowing Black Silk Sash. This made the usual problem where surly neckbeards sit on rare camps just… not an issue. I would roll in somewhere, get an invite, and we'd just jam. I didn't have to have any loot arguments with anyone, no one was /randoming for stuff, and there was just way more gear to go around.

All of this extra gear doesn't go to waste. With a system called item merging, you can feed additional copies of duplicate items to one another to level them up. They go from +0 to +10, and gain additional damage, AC, and stats as they do. You can also crank up the difficulty of zones, which makes the monsters stronger and gives them a chance to drop higher level items. Challenge difficulty 4 zones and you'll find +4 items as well as higher level currency items called motes of potential that can be used to level up your gear.

This is all very helpful when you want to start leveling additional classes. At any point you can go to a town and swap your loadout to change things around. When you do so, your character level becomes the lowest of your equipped classes, but you keep your alternate advancement (AA) points and equipped gear. This arrangement ends up being not only lots of fun because you get to experiment with new things, but also serves as a recycling system to get max level players back into lower level zones so there's more people to group with. You also make tons of AA experience when you do this, so you're adding to your overall character power at the same time.

Going in, I thought the item merge system was going to be a balance nightmare. Couldn't we just merge a bunch of common, low level items together until they were OP and circumvent the best parts of EverQuest, like finally looting that Ykesha? In practice though, I've really enjoyed it. Not only can you level items up, but hitting certain level thresholds lets you pull out their procs or focus abilities and stick them in other items, and that opens up a whole new world of customization. The yak I got in Lower Guk I picked up was useful when I got it, but it was even more useful when I merged up a +7 Footman's Sword and socked in that stun proc. I'm sure the system won't be perfect, but it's enough fun that I think we're solidly in the realm of worth it, and the devs have been very active in the beta tweaking and tuning things.

All in all I think experienced EverQuest players will find a lot to like here, and it will be substantially less intimidating for new folks. Old heads like myself will appreciate the classic zones without weird updates like the Freeport overhaul or *shudders* Luclin character models. New players will probably appreciate the fact that they can start their enchanter without having every level 1 monster be a mortal threat, as well as some other modern quality of life features they've included like spell loadouts and a group summon ability.

EverQuest Legends isn't slated to release until July, and I'm sure there will be lots of changes in the intervening time. Major systems like raid instancing are just starting to hit the beta server, and lots of questions remain. I know a lot of folks, myself included, would love to hear an announcement from Darkpaw about a brand new EverQuest game or a true remaster, but until that magical day comes I think EQL is going to be another solid way to enjoy Norrath.

The original director of BioWare's long-running MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic—which is now being run by Broadsword—had not played a single game in the genre when he started work on it, he has revealed.

In an interview, BioWare veteran James Ohlen described the studio's founders Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk calling him into their office in 2006, halfway through the development of Dragon Age: Origins, and asking him to oversee a new office in Austin, Texas, making MMOs.

"And I was like, 'I hate massive multiplayer games. But all right, I'll do it.'

"The day after, I created a character in World of Warcraft and started down that path ... I was playing all the MMOs and getting to a high level and I forced myself to love them," he says, chuckling.

"But before that, no, I just wasn't a fan of the genre."

The Old Republic, which is still going today, launched in 2011 and was the most expensive game ever made at the time, with estimated costs north of $200 million.

"How the hell did they trust me with this much money? And I didn't even like MMOs! I don't understand how the world works. The world is weird."

He said he was "depending on his lieutenants" such as lead writer Daniel Erickson, lead combat designer Georg Zoeller and lead PvP and flashpoint designer Gabe Amatangelo, who was the "MMO expert" handling the endgame.

"And really I was just making sure that they weren't all going to kill each other," he says. "I was making decisions at the highest level, but really it was like, how do I empower [them], and how do I make sure that story is still a big part of it, because that was supposed to be the big differentiator."

Ohlen—who was also lead designer on Baldur's Gate 1 and 2, Neverwinter Nights and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic—quit BioWare in 2018 after 22 years.

In the full interview he discussed his regrets around The Old Republic's rocky launch. The team built around 200 hours of content for players spread across eight origin stories—in hindsight, Ohlen would've preferred 60 hours across a couple of meatier origins, he says. He wanted it to be Knights of the Old Republic online, but in the end it felt more like "WoW in space".

"When you're doing that much content the quality starts going down. You have to start depending upon rules instead of creativity, and the content got more vanilla. I feel like if we had maybe just two storylines and a shorter game, that would have had a huge impact," he says.

He also revealed how his grand plan to relaunch the game under a new name—Star Wars: The New Republic—was denied by EA's board despite the backing of EA exec Patrick Söderlund (EA acquired BioWare in 2007).

"The big challenge was Patrick Söderlund, who hates Star Wars: The Old Republic. And I convinced him … it was one of the greatest accomplishments of my career," he says.

"We were going to be able to have a Star Wars: The New Republic, until the board of directors of EA, who all remembered the launch of Star Wars: The Old Republic, and remembered spending $300 million, they're like, 'Why the fuck are we gonna spend a bunch more?'"

It ultimately marked the "beginning of the end" for him at Bioware, he says.

The Old Republic's longevity proves its success. It underwhelmed at launch despite rave reviews but it has, by all accounts, kept a loyal fan base. In 2019 EA revealed it had brought in close to $1 billion.

2019 was also the year Ohlen co-founded Archetype Entertainment, the studio behind sci-fi RPG Exodus, but he left in December 2025 and in the interview he explains why. "I was running on fumes, and it was hurting my health, and my personal life, and everything. I just need to step away."

World of Warcraft: Midnight has had some trouble with its class balancing—some of this is fair enough, given Blizzard completely redesigned the game's specialisations (there's close to 40 of them) to better suit a world without UI mods. This had, uh, some consequences.

Consequences like, for instance, five bears rocking up to your dungeon and flattening it with absolutely no regard to the holy trinity. See, the Guardian druid tank spec received some buffs to help it maintain threat, as bear players were struggling to keep mobs hitting them as nature intended (thanks, WoWHead).

About two weeks ago, Blizzard wrote: "Guardian Druids have continued to overperform in single target contexts, while experiencing difficulties with threat and sustained damage outside of cooldowns. With these changes, we’re aiming to reduce burst potential and transfer some of that power into more reliable and consistent abilities to aid in generating and maintaining threat."

That's all well and good—Midnight's also been struggling with a burst-based meta that saw a lot of classes' power being funnelled into big damage spikes, which doesn't feel great in solo content especially.

The buffs, largely to the spec's damage with Thrash (200% to its direct damage, 100% to its bleed damage) quickly resulted in five Guardian druids rocking up to a level 20 Mythic+ dungeon key and managing to "time" it, which just means beating the dungeon within the stringent time limit. For context, gear rewards cap out at level 10.

Just hopping on over to the warcraftlogs of the run, and oop, yep. There's Thrash on the top tank of the group accounting for 59.38% of their damage. Anyway, Blizzard quickly stepped in to revert the change yesterday, with community manager Kaivax writing:

"Our recent adjustments to Guardian have made the Elune’s Chosen build stronger than intended. We’re going to take steps to bring this back in line with realm restarts during scheduled weekly maintenance this week."

Reactions have been pretty funny, all told. Here's a thread on the WoW Subreddit directly blaming these five bears for getting the class nerfed:

Guardian druids right now from r/wow

Honestly, while WoW's recent problems with its latest patch have been… let's call them not great, I think this sort of chicanery is to be celebrated. Not on Blizzard's part, but the players'. I just think it's neat to see folks trying absurd things just because they can. And also because Blizzard buffed one of their abilities by 200%. That also.

Ever since Blizzard released World of Warcraft Classic (and maybe even before), players have been begging for it to take a version of the old MMO and experiment with it. This proposed "WoW Classic Plus" wouldn't follow the timeline of updates the original MMO did, but veer off in a new direction as if it were a modern game—much like Old School Runescape.

With no major WoW Classic releases announced, WoW Classic Plus believers are convinced their time is almost here. Blizzard recently invited a bunch of well known WoW Classic creators to California for something none of them can talk about until an NDA is lifted. As far as I can tell, this hasn't happened before and is, at the very least, compelling evidence that Blizzard is working on something that isn't just another expansion re-release.

"I did just get approval to say that I will be gone a little bit next week," WoW creator Xaryu said during a recent Twitch stream, smiling as his chat exploded with "Classic+" messages. "Because I am visiting Blizzard next week—good news—for something that I cannot say, but I will be there."

If it wasn't for the fact that Blizzard specifically picked WoW streamers who focus on WoW Classic, like Sodapoppin and Esfand, I would've written this off as wishful thinking. But you don't invite these people to see the next release of an old expansion early. It might not be Classic Plus, but it's gotta be something new.

Even though Blizzard has never said it's working on a WoW Classic Plus, there have been a couple signs that it's interested in doing more with WoW Classic as a format. Chinese players currently have access to a version of WoW Classic that remixes old raids, and it doesn't seem to have an expiration date. And a 2025 wrap-up post teased that the team has been "cooking on the long-term future of WoW Classic," with a bunch of plus signs drawn below it.

It's possible the streamers are seeing the result of Blizzard's only WoW Classic Plus-like release, Season of Discovery. A seasonal version of the MMO that let you bend the rules with things like healing mages and tanking warlocks, Season of Discovery was an exaggerated version of the old MMO that didn't quite satisfy people who want a permanent version with new material. However, Season of Discovery's surprise success could've sparked Blizzard to start working on a Classic Plus for real.

Given how much nostalgia there is for playing with WoW's old systems in its old world through the likes of WoW Remix and Season of Discovery, I think a WoW Classic Plus, be it limited-time or permanent, is inevitable. BlizzCon is in September, which makes this seem like the perfect time to start teasing a new-ish version of WoW.

Ah, the tab-target MMO—multiple glorious rows of action bars, dozens of abilities, spells, and skills to use, and the demand from the game designer to play your way through your rotation like a pianist, desperately contorting your fingers into all sorts of eldritch shapes just to stay in tune with your rotation while you try not to stand in the fire.

I'm talking about needing shift AND control modifiers to hit all my buttons. I'm talking using all of my mouse's additional real estate. I ask you this: if I'm not slowly developing carpal tunnel that'll come back to bite me in my late 30s, am I really gaming?

If you couldn't tell, I like the old MMO traditions. As a matter of fact, I've defended them on this very site before! But I can't quite shake the feeling that they're going out of style. Maybe it's just because my game of choice, Final Fantasy 14, is seriously thinning its amount of keybindings with the upcoming evolved mode which, let's face it, will probably be phasing out its "reborn" counterpart in a couple years' time.

Even in newer entrants to the genre, no-one's really trying to capture and perfect that keyboard-turning rhythm of eld. Even Fellowship, which emulates WoW's Mythic+, isn't a fully-fledged MMO, but a shorn-down dungeon runner with a similar meta-structure to something like Darktide.

Which I think is a shame because, as Fellowship showed us, there's still innovation to be found. Still ways to make that two-dozen keybind, tab-targeting, classic MMO feeling all the slicker without so much as a dodge roll or a dedicated block button or a third-person-shooter camera angle in sight.

But what about you? Do you wish an MMO would try and have another swing at the kind of game that makes one of those multi-button mouses real appealing? Or is it being sent to a deservedly shallow grave? Head on down to the comments and let your loyalties be known. Or if you're feeling shy, here's a poll instead.

Crowd Control Productions (CCP Games) was founded in 1997 in Reykjavik, Iceland. It is best known for EVE Online, its anarchic space MMO from which stories of intricately-plotted depravity emerge on a disturbingly but entertainingly regular basis. It has over 300 employees.

The Communist Party of China was founded in 1921 in Shanghai, China, by Chinese intellectual supporters of the then-recent October Revolution. It was victorious in a civil war against the Guomindang—Chinese Nationalist Party—and has governed the People's Republic of China since 1949. It has over 100 million members.

These organisations are difficult to tell apart.

So difficult to tell apart, in fact, that CCP Games recently announced it was jettisoning its name entirely. It's now Fenris Creations, putting an end to all our japes about the upcoming EVE version of the Yan'an Rectification Movement (it's possible only I was making those japes).

In a recent chat with GamesIndustry.biz, CCP—sorry, Fenris Creations CEO Hilmar Pétursson said that, yeah, the company pretty much took the opportunity to change its name because it was sick of all the Chinese Communist Party gags and misunderstandings.

"I'm not going to fight the Chinese Communist Party over who is the CCP," Pétursson said, wisely (China maintains over 600 nuclear warheads). And besides, "in the English-speaking world, we have increasingly had problems… reporters write stories about us where we are literally referred to as 'the other CCP'. We have CCP employees going to the US and being questioned over the name. These are not big things, but I can sense where this is going."

I am almost certainly one of the reporters who made that joke, so sorry about that one, guys. But it's also a slightly dispiriting indicator of the state of the world that company employees were getting the third-degree over its name at US border control.

In fact, Pétursson notes the mix-up between CCP (videogames) and CCP (vanguard of the proletarian revolution) is pretty much entirely a western phenomenon: "Obviously, the Chinese Communist Party doesn't think of itself as the CCP. That's a Western construct. They refer to it by a Chinese name. They're not called the Chinese Communist Party in Iceland either; we call it the Kommúnistaflokkur Kína in Icelandic."

So, our fault again. Still, at least it's all in the past now. At least unless and until Xi Jinping announces the funniest brand pivot in history at the next party congress.

Old School RuneScape is one of the old guard—with the original version of the game being released way back in 2004. This is where I'd usually tell you about the good old days, but I was nine years old at the time. Sorry.

Anyway, that means it has some legacy code issues that need wrangling with—which, per some developer comments on the 2007scape subreddit (thanks, GamesRadar+) will make the game explode if not dealt with. Well—"explode" is a bit dramatic. It just wouldn't allow any more scenery to be added to the game if not fixed. Lest it explode.

Okay, it might not be that dramatic.

In this thread, which shares a fake screenshot from Mod Ash claiming the doom of RuneScape, Jagex mod Nin actually chimes in and writes: "You joke, but we are imminently going to run out of IDs to assign to models and scenery so we need to do a bunch of work to stop the game exploding soon."

This, as one player points out, isn't the first time this has happened: "Isn't this the second time something like this happened? The first time was around 2018 before [Theatre of Blood] came out, no?" In response to which, Nin confirms: "Yep, around May 2018. Either the developer at the time was in a bit of a hurry (likely) or didn't have much faith in the longevity of the game (who knows), as they only doubled the available capacity."

I did a bit of digging, and I was able to find the 2018 dev post Nin's referring to—my thanks to the OSRS Wiki—wherein Mod Ash saw a crop of surprising ladder icons flooding a room, indicating the presence of "scenery pieces" that weren't actually supposed to be there:

"The two of us spent a while investigating it, liaising with the tools developers to see if our map editor had malfunctioned, and eventually noticed that the Theatre's development branch now had about 32,800 scenery pieces defined, up from about 32,400 in the live game ... those numbers are suspiciously close to 32,768, which is a power of 2.

"We theorised that, just as the game can't handle coin stacks of 2,147,483,648 (2 to the power of 31), it similarly can't handle 32,768 scenery piece definitions (that's 2 to the power of 15)." In other words, they were running out of IDs.

The post claims that Mod Atlas "confirmed our diagnosis, and confirmed with management that raising this limit for OSRS was more urgent than the other work he'd been due to do.

"Over the subsequent week, he was able to rework the engine's handling of scenery to let us define more scenery pieces. That wasn't an insignificant change, and it needed considerable testing from Mod Wolf and Mod Noldor's team of tech QA staff, but it needed doing if OSRS was going to be allowed any more scenery ever again."

By the sounds of it, the team at Jagex are well aware of this upcoming issue and will have more than a week to fix it, but still—it's a good reminder that numbers rule all in the land of videogames, and one should never assume a computer can count to infinity. Because they, er, really, really can't.

I'm bleeding to death. I've got six minutes before I'll be too exhausted to do anything but lie down and die. I wish it was the worst of my problems. But it's not. The real problem is that… gamers are bastards.

Lost. In the middle of a dense forest, crowded with ravenous mountain lions. I'm kind of ravenous myself, since Egg and I had all our belongings taken away. Egg's my only friend in the world, and right now he's staring death in the face over a mile away. I just don't know in which direction.

This is Wurm Online. It is a very good game for redefining your concept of a bad day.

Slitted sunlight shines down on me from the treetops as I tear up grass for plants I could try and make a bandage out of, or herbs for a poultice. There's nothing here. My health bar ticks lower as blood trickles from the wound in my arm. Probably only five minutes left now.

Egg's messages are still coming up in my local chat, censored by the game. "You know I figured you guys might do this," he says. "But I also figured you might not be ?%?!s."

"egg do you like karma?" asks Darkdragoon.

"dark your too slick," says Cndo.

"i think and anilize the situation," says Darkdragoon. "i quickly see wats going on. and i dont rest til thiefs lose everything."

Egg disappears from my local chat, and I'm not kidding myself that he managed to get away from this place. The man is dead.

Two hours ago I was a little yeoman with prospects and dreams, working in the fields around Glitterdale, one of Wurm's starting towns for new players and their talentless peasants. I was chopping trees, foraging, whittling, and watching my skills tick up. Just how bad things went in that time is a testament to Wurm's goal: to make a realistic fantasy MMO. Reality, let's not forget, is a bitch.

"OK," my flatmate announced from the other side of our living room, gazing at the map on his laptop. His name is Egg, but don't judge him for it. "West of Zion, south of Emerald Coast. There's a lake for water, clay, and it's in the middle of a forest." That was an hour and a half ago. The two of us decided to march out into virgin wilderness and build a homestead.

The chance to play pioneer is the most exciting aspect of Wurm Online. In a game in which you're reliant on raw materials, everything from herbs to trees to mineral veins gets very thin on the ground. Since you can build anything anywhere it makes sense to go off and find somewhere lush to painstakingly put together your own shed, farm, village, inn, whatever. There's no such thing as a proper border. The nearest you get is a rough estimate of where you can walk without catching an arrow with your thigh. Welcome to the Dark Ages.

Setting up in a forest has a second advantage. Egg isn't a good enough blacksmith to make a lock. We're terrified some jerk will stumble across our shack when we're logged out, and make off with our meagre possessions.

"OK," I say. "But what are we going to do? Drag our carts over that mountain?" I point at my monitor and the grey expanse of rock between us and our new home.

"Yep. Man up!" Egg says. And that's exactly what we do.

We drag the two carts, laden with everything from pottery to anvils, up a mountain. We make progress. Dragging the cart might be an almighty pain in the ass, but it only makes my excitement more potent. Soon we'll be armpit deep in Wurm proper. We'll be clearing a space for ourselves in the forest, discovering local landmarks, finding the best fishing spots. We'll be throwing up walls and planting barley for bread. And then…

"There's someone here!" Egg almost shouts. There's enough tension in his voice to make me think he's talking about our flat, but he's referring to a figure emerging from a cliffside cabin we're about to pass. We keep moving. No sudden movements now. It pays to be careful when the single toughest animal you can safely slay is a cat.

The guy says hi. Turns out we've got nothing to worry about. He's just minding his own business putting up the support beams for a house extension. The soil around his cabin has been turned and packed, and the brown, dry earth looks hungry for development.

We press on, reaching a plateau. As the sun sets on our backs we get our first look at our new home.

"Look at all this shit!" I tell Egg as he pulls his cart up beside mine. The virginal landscape below is packed with treetops that only occasionally break to show a lake or stony hilltop. Maybe we weren't being ambitious enough. We could build a farm out here, with an archery range. Then if we got really good at skinning cats we could make leather armour, and before we knew it we'd be warriors worth a damn.

Farm life

Wurm does have players in dragonscale armour, but it's that much more impressive because absolutely everyone starts off as a mouthbreathing yokel. It's funny reading MMO developers' claims that their game "doesn't start with any kill-20-rats quest... It drops you straight into the action!" The first thing you do in Wurm is find some clay, cut some kindling, build a campfire and make a pottery bowl to eat out of. You don't mess with rats. Those bastards will chew the veins from your legs in the time it'll take for you to look up from your farming.

We decide to leave the heavy carts where we'll be able to find them again and check out the surrounding area quickly. What we find is Emerald Coast.

The player-drawn maps you find on the Wurm wiki are charmingly shit. It turns out Emerald Coast is a few eras up from the lonely guard tower it was labelled as. We stroll out of the woods into an opulent albeit unfinished village. Abandoned stone carvings of children and demons line the lifeless paved streets, which link huge wooden townhouses with gaping holes in their sides. The place seems proud and cold.

Something turns in my stomach as I notice that the local chat box, which lists all players within a mile and is currently listing way too many people, contains chatter about myself and Egg. Someone called Darkdragoon is bitching that "thouse nubs quin and egglet wont go away from this area." Something's changed in the atmosphere of the game, as if the water I'm in is now too deep to stand up in. I look around but can't see a damn soul.

"Look, everyone is a nub once," Egg says.

"mayby looking 4 a home to rob," says Dragoon.

"we shouldnt be mean to new players," says a guy with the name Cndo. He asks why we're here and whether we're thieves, though by that point Egg and I are hightailing it back to the carts.

"hold on now," says Cndo. "we do need slave labor."

By the time we get back to the carts it's the dead of night. In Wurm that means not being able to see a damn thing.

"We can keep moving if we go to the shore," I realise. "We go around Emerald Coast to the shore and walk along it until sunrise." It's a brilliant plan. The best bit of thinking I've done all day. So off we go, and after just five minutes tramping down the coast, tugging stuck carts out of the sand, a coastal village looms at us out of the moonlight. Bayview has problems.

The human element

Everything in Wurm takes damage and breaks over time, so this abandoned settlement has become a warren of fences, locked and unlocked gates, and building materials seemingly dropped by the builders at precisely the location they lost interest. We have to find a way through.

There's something organic about Wurm. Instead of creating goals or quests or NPCs the developers spent all their time creating a rich selection of player actions. The whole world, from the settlements to the industry to the pitched battles, has been put together by players. It's like EVE, but with more narrowing your eyes at passing strangers and slowly equipping your axe.

Twenty steps into Bayview I realise I'm taking ludicrous damage. I turn to find the biggest black bear I've ever seen, swinging at me with its paw. I scream out loud under a hail of bone-crushing swipes, drop the cart, sprint away from the thing and finally drop off a ledge into the sea. After Egg's stopped laughing he goads the bear further down the shore then swims back to me. I'm not going to be climbing anything anytime soon, but I'll live. We're poking through the darkness for my cart when our local chat starts buzzing again. It's Cndo.

"may i help you boys," he asks. He slides out from behind a dilapidated building, a shortsword in each hand. It's a weapon choice that sets my nerves on edge. The man's flashy, which means he's more likely to be an idiot, which means this is more likely to come to a fight. The permanent skill loss that comes with dying makes this scary enough, but we're in the middle of nowhere and I'd wake up back at Glitterdale. No way I'd make it back here before someone looted my corpse.

Egg senses the hostility too. "He is looking for his cart and trying to avoid a large bear," he types. Cndo replies with a flurry of short messages.

"hold on there. those arent yours. the cart. and stuff in it. not yours. you stole it." My sinking feeling gets worse as I examine Egg's cart and see what Cndo's seen. It has BAYVIEW carved onto it. Once upon a time someone living right here made it. I look around for my own cart and make out Darkdragoon in the distant darkness, stock still, staring at us from the forest's edge.

"we dont take too kindly to thieves," says Cndo. "as you can see. you are busted."

I start thinking to myself that maybe if we're only accused of thieving that's not so bad. These guys aren't bushwhackers. Maybe with a little diplomacy we'll—

"We've seen you gimping about guys," types Egg. "It's not like you're a crack squad of heroes. Seriously do you think you're Professor Layton or something. What of it is yours, exactly? What did we take? Do tell. Since you have SPIES and EYES and all that good stuff."

"What are you DOING?" I ask Egg in real life.

"It's fine," he says. "They can't prove we've broken any laws so if they attack us now they'll be tagged as outlaws."

"Dude that stuff came from nowhere near here," Egg goes on. "All you are is thieves pretending to be heroic heroes. So how about you just turn about and go back home to wherever the hell your home is.'

"This is my home," says Cndo.

"Nice bear," I type.

"ty" says Cndo. "He's the mascot."

The rising sun begins to cast faint light all across Bayview. The town's less scary and more sad in the day.

Darkdragoon starts typing from his now less-shady vantage point. "they have all teh missing stuff in the cart. 5 gold ore 10 clay 11 flasks 10 iron lumps. small anvil. iron cauldron. small barrell. practice dummy."

"figures," says Cndo.

"You STOLE MY CART?" I first shout it, then type it. They must have dragged it away during the bear attack. I start to feel angry, then queasy. I don't know which way is up anymore. The stuff really isn't ours. We found it all in an old farmhouse in the middle of nowhere that was so old the fence had crumpled, and that makes it fair game.

I'm pretty sure Dragoon is using Cndo, and working his zeal for justice to get his hands on our loot.

This is one more reason why Wurm distinguishes itself from other fantasy games. There is no good and bad here. There's just humans.

In the events ticker I notice Darkdragoon is, apparently, now being mauled by a mountain lion. This is my chance. I run off from Cndo's bullshit, through the town toward the forest where Dragoon was. If I can find my cart I can grab it and Egg and I can walk out of here and there's nothing these two jerks can do about it, unless they have the balls to stick blades in our backs.

I'm just realising finding the cart is going to be a nightmare when I come face to face with my very own scrawny lion. I got lucky with the bear. Not this time. Two claw swipes on the same arm turn a medium wound into a severe wound, and it's all I can do to turn off autofight and keep running.

It's only when I stop that I notice how badly I'm bleeding. I have no idea where I am. How did everything go so wrong?

I look over at Egg's screen and see he's looking at a second cart. My cart. Dragoon must have dragged it back to Bayview.

Cndo is still talking. "admit you stole and you can keep stuff."

"Here is our deal," Egg barks. "You keep the cart you actually stole from us, and you just plain $@!% off and go back to your paranoid ways." I watch as he approaches the cart. From behind a building another lion leaps out and starts savaging him.

"Oh, God," I say out loud. Dragoon must have deliberately dragged it here. As long as he's still lugging his cart, Egg can't run.

"You know I figured you guys might do this," Egg types, slowly dragging himself away to no effect. He has seconds to live. "But I also figured you might not be ?%?!s."

And then he dies.

Far off in the forest I find lovage, and combine that with some rosemary, moss and mud to create a poultice. It stops the bleeding. I'm going to live. I look over at Egg, the real Egg, in our front room.

"I'm going to kill them," he says. I have no idea how serious he is. "I'll build a fucking catapult. I'll create cave-ins when they're mining. I'll come back with fire and friends and burn their town to the ground."

I have none of his anger inside me. I just feel hollow.

Back in the forest, Cndo is sending me private messages.

"meet me somewhere. i have your cart. dragoon has gone crazy." I wonder if he's noticed it's not their stuff or if it's just a trap. I tell him to "?%*! off" anyway.

Cndo's final messages arrive as I take my best guess which way Glitterdale is and start hiking. "tell egg to be careful. if he comes back. dragoon is unpredictable."

Life goes on

A week has passed. Egg and I have moved into an abandoned hovel called Cliffside Cottage. We're renovating it with a couple of friends. I'm the group's carpenter and lumberjack. It's a nice life. I thoughtlessly cut down some of the young oak trees a neighbour planted around his house yesterday, but he was good enough to accept my apology. I'm borrowing his scythe today. The fields of wheat and rye I planted are only tiny, but they're a start.

We don't talk about what happened on the other side of the mountain. There's no way Egg's forgotten about it, but he might have let it go. I really hope so.

Egg's the group's blacksmith. You see him working his forge all night, churning out butchering knives, iron files and nails. One day he'll be able to make weapons and armour, and he's already talking about making chainmail for our group. He says he wants it as a uniform of sorts.

It's not something I want to think about. My cotton plants need weeding. I take my rake and smile as I sink into the soil.

We're all pretty aware that crypto probably isn't, erm, what you'd call a safe investment for the future. Especially since, as of earlier this year, it's apparently in a "collateral death spiral". Which doesn't sound great.

But if you made a different bet—say, by purchasing Old School RuneScape bonds, converting them into gp, and then ruthlessly violating the terms of service to peddle that gold to players for real cash, you would've outperformed one of the biggest cryptocurrencies, Ethereum, this year.

To be clear, I'm not saying you should've done that. But hypothetically if you did, and you were able to find a buyer that'd match the money you put into those bonds to buy coal 1:1, it is a statistical fact you would've made more moolah.

That's per X account Arkham, which tracks all sort of cryptocurrency trading stuff (thanks, Eurogamer). According to the graphs shown below, Coal grew around 40 percent, whereas Ethereum only grew in the low 30s. Ethereum, of course, being one of the main currencies that was part of the crypto coldrush circa 2021.

And coal, of course, being… coal. It can be used to smelt a variety of bars in OSRS, giving it a constant, reliable use that would be a heck of a lot more stable than a speculative, decentralised currency.

As one commenter on the thread notes: "Why is an MMO economy based on middle ages weaponry etc more fair and balanced then the one we designed to imprison ourselves." Oof. Most assumptions that spawn from that line of thinking on X (presumably from a bunch of crypto investors who don't play videogames) also assume that RuneScape is an economy of peasants and serfs, which isn't how MMOs work.

If anything, it's a little more like the modern age—players carve out their niches, and if they get in early, they hit it big. Sometimes MMO economies spin out of control and their designers have to grapple with inflation, sometimes their economies are so intricate that, in the case of EVE online, they hire actual bankers to manage them.

Point being, nobody's tilling the field in service to their liege lord. If someone did somehow manage to make more money off coal than Ethereum this year, then they did so with the same entrepreneurial go-getter spirit as that guy who ate over 500,000 trouts to manipulate the fish market.

In a recent interview with MinnMax, ZeniMax Online Studios founder Matt Firor discussed the death of its new MMO, Project Blackbird, as well as his thoughts on the games industry's current economic crisis. The takeaway? While things are bad, he thinks we're still in a boom and bust cycle that will come back around, and he's heard some of this routine before.

MinnMax host Ben Hanson asked if Firor had come into any recent epiphanies about working in games, leading the developer to express his disagreement with analyst Matthew Ball's bombshell report on the state of the industry.

Essentially, Ball argues that gaming has hit a saturation point, with fewer new people entering the hobby, and companies competing over the remaining audience share with not just each other, but also social media. Gaming is "losing the War for Attention," according to Ball, with short form video in particular representing a major threat to the industry's continued growth and health.

"That was very, eerily similar to E3 2001, when we went to E3 with Dark Age of Camelot, with no publisher," said Firor. "We met with⁠⁠—I'm gonna say 18, but it was probably five⁠—publishers. And four of them were like, 'There's already enough MMOs out there, no one is ever gonna play a new one. There's Everquest, Ultima Online, Asheron's Call. I mean, really, what are you doing that they can't?"

"Forunately, the fifth one was Vivendi, and they ended up publishing Camelot. It's just cyclical. It's always cyclical. There's always a boom and a bust, and we're riding a pretty weird bubble right now, tech-wise, but I've seen it before."

This prompted Hanson to ask if a new MMO could potentially succeed no matter the market conditions, so long as it was good enough. Firor had a more reserved, perhaps less optimistic answer on that front. "I would like to think that's true," he said, "But there are a lot of really good games out there that nobody knows about.

"Discoverability is a big issue. But in general, if you have the right game with the right features and the right crew that's helping you get the word out to the world, that's the recipe for success. No guarantee, but every game that has been successful has pretty much followed that model."

I'd like to share Firor's optimism about the cyclical nature of such layoffs, particularly since he lived through them himself, and he draws a compelling parallel between the "saturation point" idea expressed by both Ball and those publishers at E3 2001, but the sustained nature of gaming's current layoff crisis gives me pause. It's been three years of this, with no signs of slowing down.

I don't think gaming is too big to fail, but it's too diffuse for there to stop being cool new games to play: Too many developers working at varied levels of complexity on every continent. What seems to be an open question is whether you can reliably live a good, dignified life making games, something one gaming CEO recently described as a "romantic idea."