Judging from player interest in the WoW: Forever beta, it seems like Blizzard's got a good start at channeling nostalgia into its retirement home for aging MMO millennials. But there's only one thing that'll determine if it's a successful rebottling of the old lightning, and that'll be whether or not I can find myself shuffled back into the same game of Alterac Valley that I'd logged out of 18 hours earlier, where nothing has changed except the number of times an orc has been cursed out in text chat for wasting effort by fighting over the wrong graveyard.

Nothing else matters.

A common early World of Warcraft experience was to stumble into a series of corpses lying on the ground that, when looked at from the right angle, spelled out a URL for a site where you can pay real money for in-game gold.

Gold was scarce back then, which spawned an entire market for buying it instead of grinding for it. Even if you never touched one of those sites, it was impossible to not see ads online or splayed out in front of you in a popular city.

Blizzard has taken a light touch in the past when it comes to punishing people who willingly violate the MMO's EULA with real-money trading (RMT), but promises that won't be the case for World of Warcraft: Forever.

In a recent Q&A, senior game designer Josh Greenfield addressed concerns about guilds letting players bid on items with gold (known as "gold dragon kill points" or GDKP) and the risks of RMT in WoW: Forever. He emphasized that Blizzard will "very aggressively punish gold buyers," to prevent the in-game trading economy from getting out of hand.

"Being frank, we've been probably too lenient on gold buyers and it's been a little bit easy to get around some of our actions before and we are taking it very seriously," Greenfield added. "As someone who's got a 22-year-old World of Warcraft account I can tell you it's not worth losing it permanently, it's not worth losing any of your accounts permanently, so I would very strongly recommend [you] don't do it, it's not worth it."

Greenfield doesn't say it outright, but is implying that anyone who breaks the rules with RMT will have their account banned rather than temporarily suspended. Whenever I see discussions about RMT, people will always say that it would help if Blizzard didn't slap offenders on the wrist and actually took away their access completely. Whether or not that will be how it's handled in the full release remains to be seen—nobody cares about becoming rich in the beta—but it's at least promising to hear that it's a high priority for the studio.

In an MMO where the level cap will never be raised and updates will introduce new things to characters of all levels, the last thing you want is for severe inflation to kill the value of trading with other players and therefore the value of learning a tradeskill altogether. Greenfield stressed that the sanctity of the economy is an important part of the experience and that Blizzard has tuning knobs for controlling supply and demand to balance things out.

The more I've gotten into Path of Exile 2, an action RPG built around player trading for rare drops, the more I've witnessed how quickly things can go haywire. An exploit that lasts two hours can have devastating effects on the price of items, so I hope Blizzard is also prepared to handle whatever crops up organically, too.

When the gates opened on the World of Warcraft: Forever beta, it was a free-for-all. Everyone fought to be the first to "tag" enemies with their attacks so they would count for their quests—a problem that is essentially obsolete in modern WoW.

My memories of doing this in the real classic WoW came flooding back as I frantically tried to claim enemies before someone else did. But that old frustration also prompted old solutions: Whenever I came across a quest to kill seven wolves or whatever, I invited other players into my group so that everyone got credit.

This, according to senior game designer Josh Greenfield on X, is exactly what Blizzard wants to see.

Greenfield responded to a conversation about whether or not shared enemy kill credit should be a thing in WoW: Forever to say pretty firmly that it's not going to change.

"This is one of those things that we simply must hold the line on," he wrote. "I think there are other things we can do to help alleviate some frustration here but shared tagging is not it."

"It's hard to see the value in something like this when you are frustrated in the moment," he added, "but it is extremely important to our social pillar to maintain some of this friction."

The chaos of the beta launch is a limited-time thing. It'll happen again on November 4 when WoW: Forever fully drops, but eventually it's not going to be as much of a problem as the population of players spreads out across Azeroth.

From that point-of-view, I like the firm stance Blizzard has on this. It requires almost no effort to invite someone to your group for the 5 minutes it takes to finish a quest, and in that short amount of time there's the possibility for a longer-lasting friendship to grow. I've certainly met friends this way before and it would be neat to have it happen again.

But at the same time, I hope Blizzard is prepared for what will probably be an overwhelmingly popular launch week. Hundreds of players squeezed into a small field with 30 wolves is only going to cause frustration if there's no solutions for things like slow enemy and item respawns. Beta players have already posted screenshots of people lining up to interact with a quest object that only shows up every few minutes. That's the kind of friction nobody wants when they only have a few hours to play.

World of Warcraft: Forever has a nice little toggle that lets you switch between Classic's old-school models and Retail's newer, shinier ones. But which one are you using?

Personally, I'm sporting the HD models. The big braided mohawk style on trolls just looks so much better. You can see a little comparison of my current Forever Shaman up in the ol' header image; peep how she looks in each style and let me know which one you like more!

I swore I'd never become this evil

Anyway, this beta is not designed to be a competitive experience. For those not in the know, Blizzard will be wiping all of the WoW: Forever progress when the game launches in November.

But I am going to be treating it like one, because all of my morals have crumpled into a hole with a sign that says: "I want to be 3 levels higher than everybody in October for like two hours." I'm especially (on paper) against the idea of min-maxing in a beta, where your progress means absolutely nothing. And yet. And yet.

Here's the issue—I am currently an inch away from level 19. I have a bunch of quests I'd like to do, including finishing the new Ruins of Lordaeron dungeon. I am not doing this, however, because Blizzard will at some point be increasing the cap from level 20 to level 30.

But I also have a massive problem: I don't want to stop playing my Warrior. I'm hitting some absolutely meaty crits. So what is a lad to do? Well, while you can still do quests in the beta, there's nothing to say you actually have to turn them in, especially because Blizzard has increased your journal limit from 20 to 40.

If you're picking up what I'm putting down: I will be continuing to quest in level-appropriate zones through this new Azeroth, I just won't be turning anything in. I am going to, like some kind of maniac, flood my questing journal with 40 batches of EXP, then get the biggest dopamine hit of my life when that level cap is raised sometime next month.

Why am I doing this to myself? That's a very good question, and one I'm too busy grinding to answer.

WoW Forever is basically my first time experiencing Blizzard's MMO for a significant amount of time—that level 13 Paladin rotting away on my retail account for the last eight years doesn't count—and you know what? Even as someone who isn't rocking around Azeroth in rose-tinted glasses, I'm having a pretty sweet time.

I even surprised myself by how endeared I am to all its old-schoolness. I like that there's no globally shared tagging, even if that means you party with a handful of randoms for 10 seconds and never speak to them again. I've even been fine with its archaic gathering quests, where all of its nodes are server-side instead of client-side. Want to go and pick that cactus fruit, but some other player beats you to it? Well, it's gone now. Go and pick another one.

Well, I was fine with it anyway. That is until I arrived in Orgrimmar, the Horde's capital city. My initial arrival was dizzying, bearing witness to its densely-populated streets and rapid-fire global chat where recruitment messages are quickly buried by folks talking about how many rolls of toilet paper they go through each day. Yeah, I dunno either.

I was having a lovely little time exploring, picking up just about every quest I could find. And then it happened. I innocently scooped up a quest called Rocks to Rest, tucked around the back of a building where a group of troll children are gathered.

Go and get some rocks so we can have chairs and tables, I'm ordered. Okay, easy enough. Right? WRONG.

Turns out that whimsical server-side gathering nodes become significantly less so when there are at least 10 of you vying for sporadically-spawning rocks. And you have to collect eight of the damn things. I scooped up my first one with relative ease, before the rest of my quest devolved into the chaos of rapidly swinging my camera around waiting for one to spawn, before watching everybody (me included) dash off in its direction for the hopes of being the chosen one who gets to loot it a millisecond before everybody else.

Now I've seen queues and orderly lines form for some of these quests, but Rocks to Rest? It's the wild west, baby. You snooze, you lose. I made the mistake of rotating my camera away from a rock that spawned directly behind me, and before I even had the chance to swing it back around and begin looting, I was beaten to the punch.

I was expecting a raid boss to be the thing that broke me. Maybe dying one too many times to a quest mob, or trying to navigate the game's multitude of systems as someone who has barely set foot in this world before. But no, it was a freaking boulder.

World of Warcraft: Forever has a new two-name system, given it'll be taking place on one big megaserver—which has a few advantages, like making sure you can typically get your chosen first name without the sheer volume of players snapping it out from under you.

Naturally, being a bunch of silly geezers, WoW players have been using it to mercilessly run bits. Here's a quick list of some of my favourites that myself and my colleagues have seen, plus a gallery of images to reassure you that they are, in fact, real:

• Rotten Nutz
• Skonch Prime
• Minion Cuck
• Lancedalot Nowimdead (notably, an undead paladin).
• Huge Bulge
• Take Meds
• Zugzug Workwork
• Gotta Poo
• Girlwho Suggestsyaoi
• Ballbag Billy
• Po Tayto
• Supplement Bottle
• Looks Maxxer
• Floorpov Povfloor
• John Warcrimes

But beware: If you wish to join the ranks of these absurdly-named heroes, Blizzard has confirmed it'll be removing beta access from people who name themselves something terribly rude: "Character names must adhere to our naming policies, including in Beta. If you violate those policies that may result in the removal of beta access."

World of Warcraft: Forever's beta has been utterly rammed with server issues—issues that I'm pleased to say were fixed in relatively short order, and one I certainly don't resent anybody for. What does jump my eyebrows up my head is the fact that its developers are shocked that the game's popular.

For those not in the know, Forever's essentially Classic+. A version of the game as it was back in 2004, but with a bunch of changes made not to modernise it, but to make that old school vision better. Over 1,000 extra quests, new zones, redesigned talented trees, new racial abilities, and some major improvements to lighting.

It's pure, distilled liquid nostalgia. A fat, juicy worm for shmucks (like me) to chomp onto and be shocked when there's a hook in our mouth—a fact that apparently completely disarmed the beta's development team: "AHMAGERD, this game is 20 years old, how do you still suck at this!?!" Rhetorically asks Tom Ellis, senior game producer, on X:

"Heh, fair enough, short answer is, this is our BETA PTR environment stack, it's not a production stack by a long, long, long, long, long, long shot. Betas for WoW aren't usually huge meter movers so this environment just isn't that powerful. This led to the first problem you saw today."

From the dev's end, nothing was amiss when players were being booted out after a long queue time: "We were hitting the BGS metering system that protects their services from falling over under extreme load. Our tiny little REGIONAL [server] with its two connections that were trying to login A LOT of users, even though it was nowhere near capped on CPU, was completely screwing the math that system was using. We scaled that 2 to an 8 and immediately the flood gates opened once again."

Ellis adds that this is completely unprecedented: "First time anyone's seen it kick in when there wasn't an obvious CPU issue to go along with it. 20 years, always something new."

You can read the full post for the technical mumbo jumbo, but the point is, it's all working better now: "Right now things are incredibly smooth for the first few hours of a public beta, Classic teams watching and fixing anything blocking that comes up but we're otherwise pretty much done for the night, enjoy!"

Josh Greenfield, also a senior game designer, commented: "The craziest numbers I've seen in 17 years working at Blizzard and almost eight years on classic. We've got something really special here."

And you know what, I'm inclined to agree. Forever has me in a chokehold. I've both had rose-tinted goggles forcibly drilled into my face, and I've been genuinely impressed by the changes made already. Forever crawled out of an alternate universe where the modern MMO was never invented, and all the inconvenience and friction of the past was conserved, but not entirely left to burn you.

How come the future in videogames is, more often than not, dark and gloomy? Where's the hope? Where's the optimism? It's all in Loftia, an MMO life sim with a delightfully cheery, eco-friendly aesthetic. And, as was just revealed at the PC Gaming Show Tokyo Direct, you'll be able to get your hands on it November 3.

For those of you not in the know, Loftia is an eco-optimism life sim MMO that's been in development for the last four years. You and other players inhabiting the world will each get your own floating island to call home, and you've got a bunch of sustainable ways to decorate and power your slice of sanctuary.

You can grow crops in cute hydroponic shelves, rescue animals, and go on adventures with other people. These aren't focused on combat, and will instead feature puzzles and platforming challenges. There are also community projects that everyone can join in on, so you can live out your commune dreams.

"We wanted a relaxing online world we could escape to with our friends—a third space with a welcoming community, things to do, and a home we could keep on coming back to." said Michael Su, co-founder and studio director of Qloud Games.

In the new trailer, we see a lot of the customisation on offer in Loftia. From your avatar, to your pets, to your home in the clouds, you can decorate pretty much everything. It also hints at the main point of friction that will be driving you forwards. Some world-ending event is coming, causing literal cracks in the sky islands, and it'll be down to you and everyone else to come together and figure out how to save your community.

Loftia launches into early access November 3, 2026. You can wishlist it on Steam.

Check out our Steam page with all the games, updates, and DLC featured in the show. You can also read our roundup article which includes every announcement from the show in the order it aired.

I've been having a jolly old time with World of Warcraft: Forever—for the most part, it really does just feel like an alternate universe where the Cataclysm world revamp never happened and, instead, Blizzard simply funnelled more quests into the old world. There's still plenty here that's familiar, but there's just enough new stuff to do to smooth over the levelling and questing experience.

A questing experience that is otherwise unchanged. If anything, the oldschool-ness of it is actually elevated by the changes, reflecting some of WoW's best questing areas. It's as though every single zone has become The Barrens, flooded with lots of little tasks for your dopamine-starved brain nugget.

And let me tell you, I've been staggered at how much fun I'm having. Not just in a "nostalgic oldschool rose-tinted goggles" sort of way (although I'll concede that is part of it) but from a genuine perspective of someone playing a modern videogame. Because the quest design that captured an entire generation of MMO players back in the early 2000s? It holds up.

Not in terms of the "collect five bear arses" thing, but in terms of how it's all structured. See, in the good ol' days, WoW had questing hubs wherein you'd flood your journal with anywhere from five to fifteen tasks, some of which had their own branching storylines and quest chains.

You were then faced with a map and a decision of how to complete them—okay, clarification time, the quest markers on a map ARE new, but it's not like we didn't have quest helper AddOns back in the day. Anyway, keeping that decision-making interesting are what I'm gonna call the three layers of questing friction: Ordering, travel, and level variety.

'Ordering' is the most straightforward—simply put, the player has to decide what the most efficient way to do these quests is with limited information. Sometimes, you might finish your batch of quests, only to discover that if you'd turned in a different one first, you'd be able to be far more efficient. Womp womp.

'Travel' is the idea that quests shouldn't be within a convenient distance of each other all of the time. Sometimes, you should put a quest just far enough out of the way that the player is encouraged to go: Ugh, I might as well. The journey to these quests is often just as interesting as doing them, and you can put even more quests on the other side of that journey to make them feel worth it in a surprising way.

'Level variety' is the fact that quests should have a small variation in both enemy level and location—Zalazane in Durotar's a good example of this. He's a couple levels higher than everyone else (level 10, compared to level 8) and is a bit of a pain in the arse to kill. You either need to group up with folks, come back when you're a higher level, or develop some kind of cheese strat to make things easier. Or hey, maybe you're just a class that has an easier time soloing and you're fine. That's good too.

You'll notice that retail WoW has cast all three of these things aside entirely. Modern WoW questlines are often delivered in batches of two to three quests which are turned in as small parcels, usually while following a character through a linear narrative, so no ordering required. Travel is nixed because you have a flying mount—one that's become far faster with Skyriding. And level variety isn't a thing anymore because everything scales.

There is a reason why this approach was adopted, don't get me wrong—it's smooth, a nice little breadcrumb trail of dopamine shots to keep you blissed out in a "numbers go up" loop. But it's trading ease and comfort for satisfaction, because… I mean, look at this.

I think I speak for us all when I say: God. God yes. Ugh, that's the stuff.

What makes Forever so delicious to me is that it eases up on the friction a little bit by giving you more to do, but it still keeps that core satisfaction of coming up with your own routes. In my recent quests through Tirisfal Glades, I had one quest send me way far afield, up a mountain, and across a lake. And I still chose to do it, because I was already halfway there and my hearthstone was almost off cooldown.

The level variety thing also encourages you to group up more often, too—sure, you could come back and knock Zalazane over later. Or you could ask if anyone wants to kill the guy now. Grouping in this case isn't a strict requirement, like in the case of an "elite" quest, but it saves you time in the long run.

Vanilla WoW was by no means perfect—sometimes all that friction gave you ropeburn, feeling more accidental than deliberate. But that's kind of the exercise that Forever's attempting, here. Rather than tearing out the old world entirely in favour of more modern quest design, there's been a considered effort to polish out the friction just a smidge. Plugging holes and gaps in a zone's quest design while keeping the overall structure the same.

And in the same vein as my love of tab-target MMOs, I think it's nice to see this oldschool technique be given a second swing. You can improve an old formula to bring it up to date without ruining what made it special, and gosh, I think Blizzard really might be achieving that here.

I've been getting stuck into World of Warcraft: Forever's beta—though I'm a little less levelled up than I'd like to be. Initially, I just chalked this up to launch-day queue problems, but as it turns out, there's a little more to it than that.

See, I live in the UK, and Blizzard rarely does beta testing with EU-region players in mind. Forever's no different, the servers appear to be located solely in the US. Which isn't too much trouble, mind, I can deal with playing on 100+ ping for a beta test. What I can't deal with is logging in, having 300 ping, suddenly spiking to 2000 world MS, and then disconnecting.

The solution? A VPN. The moment I set my VPN to a US region, I received a cosy 100 ping and zero disconnection issues. As I quested through Durotar during EU times, I was able to corroborate the fix with plenty of other EU players who were experiencing the exact same thing with the exact same solution.

The EU WoW Forever beta forums are on fire with (understandable, though perhaps overexpressed) outrage: "We shouldn’t need a VPN service just to get a playable connection to a game we already paid €60 for," writes one player. "Can confirm VPN fixes it, I have <100ms ping on VPN and basically don’t feel lag. But obviously, [I] shouldn’t have to do that," adds another.

If this were, say, simply a closed-invite beta, I wouldn't even blink at this issue. But the fact of the matter is that Blizzard has used the beta to sell the Skyborne Epic Pack, it's pretty rough. Here's the store page for the EU: While the pack is keen to mention beta access, I can't find any mention of the beta's server locations on the page—just a notification of the dates it's taking place.

On the other hand, this is clearly some sort of network issue that Blizzard will doubtless fix. VPNs aren't magic, they can't make the internet go faster. What they can do is reroute your internet connection in a way that can skip routing issues—as is the case with me, and other EU-based players.

From what I can see, these connection problems aren't a known issue on the forums. As such, I've reached out to Blizzard for comment, and will update this article if I receive a response.

WoW: Forever, Blizzard's modernized twist on WoW Classic, launched a beta today, but most people have only experienced a login screen so far.

Following a live Q&A, Blizzard turned the WoW: Forever beta servers on. The queue times weren't too bad to start: I had about a nine-minute wait when I first logged in. But once it finished, I was disconnected and kicked to the back of the line for another, even longer queue.

It appears I'm not the only one who has made it past the queue only to be disconnected and prompted to start the whole process over again. Players and streamers are all reporting similar issues, although some people have successfully made it in.

Blizzard acknowledged the issues on X: "We're working through some final issues, and we expect the doors to open soon."

There doesn't seem to be any trick to the queue. You just need to wait it out and pray that it lets you past the initial login screen.

WoW: Forever is the first version of WoW that doesn't use realms, or servers, in the same way as the others. Instead of picking a realm, you pick a ruleset (normal, PvP, or Roleplay) and join the same server as everyone else. Blizzard did it this way to help preserve the social aspect of the original MMO. This might also be why the queue times are so rough.

Wowhead and others have been busy datamining the game's files for new details. You can already go through all the new class talent trees and peek at some of the reworked armor sets. It might be worth taking a look while you wait to get in, or, if you're like me and don't want to spoil everything, cross your fingers and hope you can play a little before the risk of long queues gets even worse on the weekend.

There will be plenty of time to play the WoW: Forever beta, however. It'll stick around until October 21 before Blizzard fixes it up for its November 4 launch.

I've had a very good time with Final Fantasy 14's new Beastmaster, and I've very much enjoyed the Crucible of the Unbroken—but that doesn't mean there aren't problems. While the first few boards are a great time, problems start to pop up when you try to be competitive.

Those problems have grown so numerous, in fact, that Square Enix has postponed the first season of the Crucible of the Unbroken's ranking system, as posted on the game's official site: "Since the release of beastmaster, we've seen many players enjoying the new limited job and tackling its challenges.

"That said, we have also received considerable feedback on Beastmaster's combat balance, as well as reports of issues with certain gameplay mechanics, which we are working to address. If rankings were to begin under these conditions, it would be difficult to determine whether the results reflect the intended balance of the job and its mechanics, impacting the fairness of the ranking process."

As for what the problems are, it's a little complicated: In order to get on the leaderboards for the Crucible's ranking system, you need to beat a board on the "third degree", which is, to put it plainly, really hard. But required, if you want a Tourmaline Golem Mount, which would only be given to people who land in the top few hundred players (this varies based on region size) when the season ends.

This clashes up against the scoring system itself. In order to get more points, you need to get board bonuses.

Some of these bonuses make sense—things like not failing mechanics, taking damage, and the degree bonuses themselves. Others, though, are a bit of a headscratcher: You get more points if you use only three familiars (rather than the permitted 15), don't use campsites, feed, spend coins, or get gear, and stick to a single familiar type.

If you want to place on the leaderboard to get that mount, you have to basically not engage with the systems that make the mode interesting to begin with—that is, tailor-fitting a roster to each fight. This'd be a little like, if in World of Warcraft's Mythic+ system, you got more points by not using your talent trees.

As a result, players have been trying to figure out ways to cheese stuff: Harsh conditions are known to prompt min-maxing, after all. Which, given there's a mount with a little FOMO added, is a recipe for the kind of player dissatisfaction that sinks systems. Which I think would be a great shame!

Personally, I think the Crucible could do well to take some more pages out of existing roguelike's books—like Hades's Heat system, for instance, where players get to pick and choose what modifiers they need to play under, rather than systematically mandating that players drop a bunch of interesting mechanics to chase a high score. Scrapping the reward being tied to landing on the leaderboard (something which would force players to min-max even if they don't want to) seems smart, as well.

World of Warcraft: Forever's beta arrives today, but the dataminers are way ahead of us, having ferreted out all sorts of new details. WoW Forever's still around a month and a half from launch day, so this should be considered a work in progress, but it's still interesting.

As datamined by WoWHead, Forever will be bringing all sorts of unique set bonuses to the game as an incentive to actually go out and farm. The Postmaster set, a level 56 kit, now nets owners Return to Sender, which gives you a free spell reflect after falling to 25% health. The Necropile's Raiment, meanwhile, has a chance to steal life from spellcasting, and the Bloodmail's Regalia can bleed enemies that attack you.

Even low-level armor sets have cool bonuses now, like the Defias Leather set, which, at four pieces, has a chance to make your melee attacks bleed the target on a 5% proc chance. The Embrace of the Viper five-set bonus seems wild, too, giving you a chance to just outright stun your targets for 1 second.

I think it's neat as heck and a good sign that Blizzard intends to keep up this whole horizontal development thing. The fact that even lower-level gear is being treated as more than just a stop-gap makes me more excited for the entire exercise.

The max level dungeon sets are interesting as well—like the Warlock's Dread/Deathmist raiments, which have a chance to fear attackers when they strike you on a 60 second cooldown. Raid sets, which should come from the new raids added to Forever and have bespoke set bonuses, are also cool.

For example, the feral tanking set, Grovekeeper's Rage, lets you cast Rebirth while in bear form. And a lot of these sets provide damage bonuses against certain creature types, like a rogue set that adds attack power versus humanoids, or the warlock's Demonheart Raiment, which gives spellpower against demons.

And while not all of these datamined sets are made equal, they're also not made finished, so I anticipate a few of them getting a heck of a lot more interesting when the full game comes out in November.

World of Warcraft: Forever is a new branch of the MMO that's making its debut this week in a month-long beta before the whole thing drops in November. It will be the first opportunity to experience some of the new quests, dungeons, and class abilities that Blizzard has added to a version of the MMO that will never move on past the original game.

Here's everything you need to know about the WoW: Forever beta, how to get access, and what's available in it.

When does the World of Warcraft: Forever beta start?

The WoW: Forever beta begins on Thursday, September 17 on PC. Anyone who has preordered the Skyborne Epic Pack or the Warcraft Forever Collection will have access as soon as it opens.

Blizzard says the WoW: Forever beta will go live after the live Q&A at 10:30 am PT. It's unclear how long the stream will go, but I'd expect it to last around 30 minutes.

Here are the stream times across regions on September 17:

• 10:30 am PDT (Los Angeles)
• 1:30 pm EDT (New York)
• 6:30 pm BST (London)
• 7:30 pm CEST (Berlin)
• 3:30 am August 29 AEST (Sydney)
• 5:30 am August 29 NZST (Auckland)

You'll have about a month to try the game out before the beta ends on October 21.

How to access the World of Warcraft: Forever beta

There are two ways to get into the WoW: Forever beta. The first requires purchasing one of the two premium versions of the game from Blizzard's store. Both the Skyborne Epic Pack ($59.99) and the Warcraft Forever Collection ($79.99) will grant you beta access. Alternatively, you can leave it to chance and sign up for it on the WoW: Forever website by clicking the "Beta Opt-in" button at the top of the page.

You can check if you have access to the WoW: Forever beta by opening the Battle.net launcher dropdown menu under World of Warcraft and selecting "World of Warcraft: Forever".

What is available in the World of Warcraft: Forever beta?

The WoW: Forever beta will be split into two phases. At the start, you won't be able to go past level 20. Then, after two weeks, the level cap will be raised to level 30 and will stay there until the beta ends.

Every race and class will be available to play, including the new Skyborne elves (if you preorder).

Here's how each phase will work:

Phase 1 (September 17)

• Level 20 cap
• New class abilities and talents
• New Profession items
• New dungeons: Hall of Thanes, Ruins of Lordaeron
• Legacy system

Phase 2 (~October 8)

• Level 30 cap
• New class abilities and talents
• New Profession items
• New dungeon: Excavation Site: Wetlands
• Legacy system

World of Warcraft: Forever's an interesting pitch—instead of no changes, it's an all-changes version of vanilla WoW. Updated talent trees, new quests, essentially an envisioning of the OG game where, save for the new sky elves, all of the fresh additions are horizontal. New dungeons and raids all packaged within that original level 60 cap in good ol' Azeroth.

But given Blizzard just did Season of Discovery, at least one question was brewing in my mind—would the developer add some of the wilder class designs, like healing mages and shaman tanks, as optional skill trees or playstyles?

Sadly not, says senior game designer Josh Greenfield in a recent GameSpot interview: "[Season of Discovery] was always meant to be ephemeral, and it allowed us to take some risks that we probably wouldn't really take in a 'forever' game. A lot of the changes, I think, in spirit—a lot of the lessons we learned—are carried over. But some of the more out there things that weren't originally in original WoW, we toned them back a little bit."

I already had a feeling, given a lot of the preemptively put together talent calculators—but these were assembled from a beta version of the game, gathered together in snippets at Blizzcon. By no means were its prophesied talents final. However, what I did see had me leaning in the way of playing it safe.

Aside from a few very cool additions and redesigned specs, a lot of the changes were simply bringing class design elements from modern WoW back into its vanilla age. Take combat rogues, for instance, which enjoy an equivalent of the outlaw rogue's central trick, lowering all of their cooldowns by a few seconds when they use a finishing more.

That's not to say that there's no experimentation in Forever's future, mind. Greenfield continues: "It's one of those things—it's in the name, it's forever, we can do a lot of things over years, but we wanted to start from a place where the soul of the class is very coded and original WoW-centric.

"But there's still meaningful changes and really exciting ways to play your class … But some of the Warlock tank, Shaman tank, not quite yet? But never say never, y'know." It's a bit of a shame, given Forever is sort of meant to be Blizzard's replacement for a WoW 2, but I can at least understand why the studio's starting off a little less experimental than it could've. And that's not to say the boat isn't being rocked at all.

It's been a meme for eight years—where's the sword, Blizzard? At the end of World of Warcraft: Legion, the big bad Sargeras tried to punch a big, corruptive sword into the heart of Azeroth. For years—eight years and nine months, to be exact—it's been a big, hanging question mark over the game's lore.

Especially given that, up until the Worldsoul Saga, Blizzard has been a little scattershot with its expansion ideas. The current trilogy is the company's first real, proper attempt at a multi-expansion storyline, à la Final Fantasy 14's 10-year epic that carried it from A Realm Reborn to Endwalker.

Which is why I'm a little bummed out, man. In an interview with WoWHead, associate game director Paul Kubit says that in the Midnight: What's Next recap, a screenshot of Azeroth's worldsoul with a jagged spike pointed towards it? Yeah, that's the sword. No—really, Kubit said "Yeah, yeah. That's the sword." Look:

"Yeah, yeah. That's the Sword. Eagle-eyed viewers have identified that, and yeah, we've been thinking about the Sword and it should become very apparent to people as you play through Eclipse that we haven't forgotten about the Sword. This is not something that is going away. Also, how tragically close it came to the Worldsoul is a testament to how close he came, but also maybe the power of the Worldsoul herself."

I'm bothered, somewhat, because on paper this is a super cool detail—look at that thing. It came literally feet away from punching into the centre of the world, which would've corrupted the entire planet with fel magic. Per WoW cosmology, it would've also stopped the void lords from turning it into a Dark Titan, which was kind of Sargeras' whole deal. But it also would've killed everybody, so—too many eggs for that omelette.

I'm imagining a world in which I dropped into this zone for the first time, saw that sword-tip inches away from Azeroth's soul, and went: Oh, crap. We were this close to the end of the world.

I'll keep things vague for spoiler reasons, but Final Fantasy 14—which keeps story elements under wraps before the patch or expansion they're due comes out—is really good at this. At several points in its winding 10-year story, a vista or an environment pulls double duty as part of the narrative: Like an impossible glimmering city under the ocean, or a heartachingly gorgeous faery landscape in a dying world.

But WoW doesn't do this. It tests patches for weeks on the PTR with preview cutscenes and, as mentioned above, it reveals huge overarching narrative beats during interviews and press conferences—which robs Blizzard of a pretty solid tool in its arsenal: Letting the environment show you the story.

Rather than having an "oh, shit!" moment when I saw this sword while in Midnight's final raid, and slowly piecing it together, I have instead been told in a quote by a director that I will, in a handful of months, see exactly what he said I'd see. And, listen—even though I've been impressed by some elements of Midnight's story, it's not exactly gripped my heart like FF14's did. And as long as we live in a world where big reveals like this aren't treated with much sanctity, it's probably gonna stay that way.

World of Warcraft: Forever, in case you missed the wild news that came out of BlizzCon over the weekend, is essentially Classic+. A reimagining of vanilla WoW with updated talent trees, new raids and dungeons, more horizontal progression, and some shiny, glossic graphics thrown over the top of the whole thing.

Given it's aping a more friction-filled time in history, you might be wondering if it'll be offering a Hardcore mode: The answer, per the "What's Next" panel, is a resounding yes. Production director Clayton Stone, who was the associate production director on Classic itself, took to the stage to profess his love of the hardcore mode:

"Hardcore represented a turning point for us as a team. We had tried a few things before it, and as [Ian Hazzikostas] covered, we have absolutely tried new things since. But hardcore represented the moment when Blizzard and the community came together, and showed not only why World of Warcraft is one of the greatest games ever made, but why that original adventure still holds so much promise for where we could go in the future.

"Which," he continues, "Is why I am also so proud to announce that Hardcore will be coming to WoW Forever as well."

While this isn't all too surprising on the face of it—Classic Hardcore proved to be incredibly popular—it will be interesting. One of the reasons why Hardocre mode became so popular was because, well, Classic is a "solved" game at this point. Chances are if you're going for a hardcore run, you already know every nook and cranny of Azeroth, which is 20 years old at this point. And if you don't, you can open a guide somewhere to maximise your chances.

But Forever will be adding new dungeons and raids, new quests—surprise encounters around every corner that could kill a Hardcore run deader than dirt. Which is likely why it's not coming out on the game's launch this November—instead reserved for the winter season.

That'll give more time for Hardcore aficionados to map out every inch of Forever's alternate-reality Azeroth and plan the best strats. And we know how WoW players love their min-maxing.

World of Warcraft has a long-standing tradition of datamining and min-maxing. So it should come as no surprise that, despite only just being shown at Blizzcon, World of Warcraft: Forever now already has online talent calculators available, assembled from a delightful tapestry of streams and ravenous info-gatherers.

There's the old reliable that is WoWHead, but I want to shout out Reddit user Baldwinbuilds for their version, which not only collects all of the currently-known info about the Classic revamp's talents, but also has a handy button that tells you exactly how they were changed. It's a tremendous bit of work.

I've had a skim through, and assembled a list of some of the wildest additions—now, keep in mind, WoW Forever's not coming until November, so all of these are likely to change between now and its debut. But it still gives you an idea of the sorts of design philosophies that Blizzard's gearing up to apply:

• Arms warriors get a new ability called Searing Strike, which does an 80% extra damage against Giants, Dragonkin, and mounted targets—knocking them off their steed to boot.
• Retribution paladins have an interesting talent called Holy Twist. This debuffs an enemy whenever you replace your current seal on them with an echo, which then re-triggers it on your next melee attack. Basically, you'll be cycling through your seals.
• Survival hunters seem to be dual wielders now with Predator's Edge, which increases your offhand damage by 10% per point, along with a bunch of new abilities that make your Mongoose Bite more effective.
• Combat rogues borrow some tricks from retail's outlaw with Relentless Blades, which reduces their cooldowns whenever they use a finisher. This is a pretty big change, given it changes the flow of combat rogues completely.
• Shamans get Totemic Projection, a huge quality of life buff, letting them take their totems with them on the move—as well as Call of the Elements, which lets you drop a full set of totems in one cast.

Other than that, it's a lot of popular snags from retail. Mages, for instance, get talents like Hot Streak, Arcane Blast, and Ice Lance, destruction warlocks get immolation, restoration shamans get Water Shield and druid healers get Wild Growth, and so on. Honestly, while it's early days, I'm surprised Blizzard hasn't gotten weirder.

But the Blizzcon demos only went up to level 38, and these are by no means finished. Searing Strike, in particular, feels like a stand-out to me, given how weirdly niche it is. And given how Blizzard's already bragged about Forever's unique, hyper-specific gear items, I'm looking forward to seeing how the studio experiments.

World of Warcraft: Forever looks—well, pretty interesting, all told. Rather than just being a Season of Discovery-style reimagining of Classic, Forever promises to be a full-on remake of classic-era WoW. Reimagined class trees, new raids, and $30 elves. Don't think about the $30 elves too hard.

But it does beg the question, why is Blizzard doing this rather than, say, developing WoW 2? It worked out swimmingly for ArenaNet's Guild Wars series, after all. Speaking to IGN, Forever's principal designer Kris Zierhut says: "I think one of the things that's singularly great about WoW is we have this game and this world and this design that has been continuously developed for the last 25 years.

"And we keep making it better. We made the graphics better, we made the rendering better, we made the lighting better; all that new stuff we showed on stage today."

That is, in fairness, true—and true of retail, as well. Part of the reason why Classic works as a concept is because modern WoW is almost straight-up a different game—new models, animations, completely reimagined class designs, and a visual aesthetic that still holds up. Forever looks to be taking full advantage of retail's steady march of progress.

Zierhut says as much: "We've also made the way the engine draws things move more efficiently. The way the server runs, handling players and moving them around, and all the things that handle spells and combat, all of that's been made more efficient and better over the years. We have this incredible engine and server infrastructure driving the game that is second to none. Why would you throw that away and start over?"

I maintain that a WoW 2 wouldn't be superfluous. With all of that progress comes a lot of technical debt (see: player housing getting borked by fixing an elevator in a 13-year old raid), as well as a ton of design choices. A direct sequel's a chance to start over and challenge basic assumptions about the game's design—the Guild Wars series becoming an increasingly action-focused game, for instance.

There's also a second argument—and this, I feel more torn on—that Forever is trying to re-capture an outdated design. On the one hand, the cynic in me understands that modern MMOs are a hell of a lot different for good reason. We datamine new information about new patches weeks ahead of when they come out, we optimise everything down to the last, minute detail. We hug these games so hard that we wring all mystery out of them.

On the other hand, there has been a yearning, a rumbling. Our own Lincoln Carpenter said as much in our MMO column: "It's hard to argue that the MMOs of today aren't better designed than their older iterations. And yet, it's the moments when I step off the treadmill where they still feel the most magical." If Forever offers an alt-history not just of WoW, but of modern MMO design in general? Then I'm on board.

World of Warcraft Forever might be stuck in the first year of the MMO for the foreseeable future, but it's going to draw from future iterations of it to freshen up the experience.

Blizzard held a panel at BlizzCon today where WoW Forever developers dug into the crucial design changes that will differentiate it from the WoW Classic we already have. This version of the MMO doesn't sound like it'll be as much of a grind as the OG with its revised classes, talent trees, and all-new mechanics for pulling strangers together in the open world.

Many of the changes seem to fill in the gaps of the original WoW experience so that there's several things to chase as you explore Azeroth. Developers broke down how the MMO will bring players together, how the new "Legacy" progression system works, and how new and old items will influence combat.

Here are the big takeaways from the WoW Forever panel:

• You pick a ruleset (e.g. normal, PvP, hardcore)—not a realm—to play on, which means you'll run into a lot more players on your journey than the other versions of WoW
• Changing the appearance of your gear to look like other gear (transmog) is now a global setting you can turn on or off for you and other players
• Looting most gear will grant everyone the transmog appearance automatically
• Everyone can set up a campfire where other players can craft or rest for exclusive buffs via their professions
• Each profession has over 600 new recipes across all level ranges
• New race/class combinations include: Gnome priests, Human hunters, Dwarf shamans, Orc mages, Troll warlocks, and Undead paladins—and more are coming in the future
• As you progress, you'll earn Legacy points to unlock various perks that alter how certain mechanics work, like removing the materials you need to cast major buffs, and obtain cosmetics
• Most items in the game have been reworked (or new ones have been added) so that they're useful to all classes and roles
• All bosses have better loot overall
• The unique racial abilities for every playable race have been improved, and new ones have been added as well

There are a lot more details, especially for how popular abilities will work, explained in the panel. Part of the goal, Blizzard said, was to "unsolve" the game and give players a reason to experiment again.

It won't be a long wait to see how it all comes together. WoW Forever will launch on November 4 and will be playable under the same subscription as regular WoW. A beta will go live on Thursday, September 17, which you can access by purchasing the game early.

As noted by MMORPG.com, World of Warcraft: Forever is coming with a peculiar economic proposition: Most of the new fork of the MMO is included in your normal WoW subscription (rad), but the new Skyborne Elf race (and its corresponding starter zone experience) is gated behind a separate, $30 purchase (sad).

While "$30 elf" might be a somewhat uncharitable characterization, there's not much else that really lights my fire in the $29.99 "Skyborne Hero Pack." In addition to the titular elves, it comes with a mount, cosmetics, housing decorations, and early name reservation.

Compared to the bleeding edge of Overwatch, League of Legends, and Diablo premium cosmetic pricing, this is just keeping pace. But with many of the best new games on Steam coming in at $20 or less, I'm feeling sticker shock.

$30, for my money, is the cost of an expansion pack under normal economic conditions, though WoW's most recent retailed for $50 MSRP. Speaking to my WoW consultant and on-the-ground BlizzCon contact, PCG contributor Tyler Colp, he wagered that any new classes coming down the line in Forever will likely be similarly monetized, and argued that this sort of monetization is less in the spirit of classic WoW than the rest of the Forever project.

Looking at it from the outside, getting so much of the rest of Forever with a normal WoW subscription strikes me as an excellent bargain, but it only throws the $30 elf into even sharper relief as a consequence. Personally, I'd be more amenable to a $15 elf as a matter of principle, but I've been out of the MMO/live service game for some time. Do you think this is a fair market value for an elf? Sound off in the comments.

The rumored game known to World of Warcraft fans as "Classic Plus" is real, and it has a proper name now—World of Warcraft: Forever is a new branch of the MMO that once again resets the clock to 2004, the year WoW first launched.

But unlike WoW: Classic, the goal of WoW: Forever isn't just to take a trip back to the MMO's origins to relive those heady early years. WoW: Forever will explore new parts of Azeroth, telling stories that weren't told during the MMO's original progression.

PC Gamer was briefed on the announcement before the reveal at the BlizzCon Opening Ceremony. Here are the biggest takeaways:

• WoW: Forever will be set in the first year of WoW with a level cap of 60 "for the foreseeable future"
• New stuff won't just be for max level players; it will span all levels
• Three new zones
• "Several" existing zones overhauled, "filling in the blank spaces of the vanilla map"
• Nine new dungeons
• Two new raids
• New race: Skyborne Elves
• New race/class combos: The trailer seems to show a Forsaken paladin, dwarf shaman, and orc mage

It's a strategy reminiscent of Old School RuneScape, which treats the 2006 version of the MMO as a jumping-off point rather than a specimen to be preserved. It's worked out well for Jagex: OSRS is bigger now than it was during the original run.

The existence of three different Worlds of Warcraft might risk diluting the playerbase, but if any MMO is big enough to sustain three official forks—and if any studio has the resources to support them—it's probably WoW and Blizzard.

WoW: Forever will be playable at BlizzCon this weekend, and a beta starts this Thursday. The full launch isn't far away either: Forever is set to release on November 4. World of Warcraft: Forever is covered by the pre-existing WoW subscription, but upgrade packs with features like the Skyborne race are available on Battle.net starting at $30.

Final Fantasy 14's latest job has just hit the proverbial shelves, and you know what that means: emergency maintenance to fix an extremely bizarre bug. On Sep. 8, the same day that the new beastmaster class dropped, Square Enix had to quickly patch out a bug where "if the player's character leaves the area due to a connection loss at the moment the pet uses a weapon skill that restores its master's HP, the server may crash."

Yes, this bug wasn't crashing the player's own game, but the server. While it's a pretty fringe set of circumstances that have to line up, it's easily replicated with a cheeky pull of one's ethernet cable, so it makes sense that Square Enix scrambled to address this before it became a catastrophe.

If you're unfamiliar with the beastmaster, it's one of the game's "limited jobs" along with the blue mage—basically, they are classes that can't be used to clear the main story quest or endgame dungeons, but they get a bunch of unconventional abilities to futz around with. They are broadly accessible side novelties, and with everyone piling in to check out the new one, it could have been a disaster had this bug been allowed to fester.

It's not the first time Square Enix has had to tackle a bizarre bug in the MMO. Just last year it won the coveted "Most Specific Bug Fix in a MMO" award from PC Gamer's Harvey Randall. With that one, players could get disconnected from the server if they listed an auction house item in a specific zone with an asking price set "between 44,442 gil and 49,087 gil."

It's the sort of bug that sounds like it was made up as an illustrative example of how bizarre bugs can be. But whether it's the funniest in recent memory is still up for debate, given the 'random buffs' incident from back in 2023.

I've had a little time to muck around with Final Fantasy 14's new Beastmaster limited job—for the uninitiated, a limited job is sort of like a minigame. Not an actual class you can take into current raids or dungeons, but a side-activity that uses the game's combat system to create something new.

The Beastmaster can tame and use creatures in combat. And for the first 30 levels, I was mostly just filling out my little book of monsters in a pleasant haze. I like the job's core combat mechanics, which involve pairing up axe strikes with specific monster abilities to form combos, but grinding in the overworld doesn't do much to show that off.

Where the Beastmaster really shines is in the Crucible of the Unbroken, the limited job's roguelike mode.

I was mostly expecting a straightforward list of bosses to push over via FF14 fun, but played-out combat mechanics, and there is some of that demand. But it's mixed with an overarching minigame of strategy and ability usage that has me watering at the mouth for whatever strange, eldritch things Evercold is cooking up.

For context, Evercold will be introducing "Evolved" jobs—a means to escape the game's rote, two-minute cooldown homogenization that's plagued it for years. During the look we've gotten at these, it seems Square Enix wants to reintroduce job identity to each of the existing jobs by giving them something weird.

For example, the Paladin gets defensive abilities they can essentially "parry" with, unlocking huge punishes if they time them moments before a powerful blow lands. The Dragoon will get an ultimate jump ability and, while it is still being deliberated, the developers have teased the idea of giving the Dragoon a 90% damage resistance buff while they're up in the air. The Dragoon is a DPS job. This'd be unprecedented.

But it's hard to tell, with any development studio, where the hype ends and the overpromising begins. Will Square Enix be brave enough to commit? The Crucible of the Unbroken tells me they very much might.

Granted, this is an isolated bit of content off the beaten path, but it's clear that Square's been using it to experiment with job design that's more reactive to the encounter at hand, rather than just hitting the same buttons every two minutes.

You get given 10 of your collected pets to bring with you into your run—while you can bring three into a battle at a time. Each of these critters have a "Trick" ability, which hits a certain elemental damage type (and enables your Axe combos), a "Tempered Release" ability, which is unique to that creature, and a "Borrow" ability, which is unique to that creature's type.

Doing well in crucible battles isn't about memorising your rotation by rote—or even by memorising mechanics, really, although the Crucible is punishing if you mess anything up, as any good roguelike should be. It's about bringing specific beasties to specific encounters and using them in specific phases.

For example, one boss I fought had a mid-fight phase in which four flames steadily advanced to the centre, slapping me with a debuff if I didn't kill them in time. They're weak to water, so I brought out my favourite crab bro, borrowed his "you can spam water attacks now" ability, and melted them down.

This extends to a lot of other mechanics, too. If you want to interrupt a cast, you need a specific critter for that. If you want to endure a massive tankbuster, you'll need to borrow a defensive ability from one of your animal friends.

You aren't just deciding which scissor, paper, or rock to use—the crucible forces you to be deliberate in a few ways. Firstly, these bosses constantly output damage. You can choose to have the boss either attack you or your pet, but health loss is permanent and can only be restored by items or campfires.

You don't want to die, because then you fail the run, but you also might want your pet to live for a future battle—or conversely, you might have a (literal) sacrificial lamb. Furthermore, swapping between pets has a long cooldown, so you're going to have a beastie out for a while. It's a little like the game's already-existing Bard job, wherein you have three songs that last for 45 minutes a pop.

It's extremely compelling, and I've legitimately felt like I'm putting together custom strategies for each fight—all the while juggling my own rotation and dancing between AoE danger zones. And it gives me hope that Evercold's new evolved jobs will be super weird, too.

Maybe not just as weird. Obviously, Beastmaster's occupancy as a limited job gives it a lot more room to experiment—but the Crucible does feel like a testing ground for concepts in future raids and fights. I can easily see a world in which a specific set of jobs are able to simply skip entire mechanics because of their unique abilities.

I don't want a puzzle for every old casual dungeon boss, mind—but I do want those same eureka moments where you realise you've got the perfect answer to a mechanic on your action bar, rather than just memorised as 'this particle effect means we stack up, this one means we spread'. If "evolved" combat design is half as experimental as Beastmaster, then Final Fantasy 14 will have finally shaked off the dust.

I don't envy the position of being a game developer—especially not an encounter designer in something as complicated as an MMO. You might have an idea of how a mechanic's gonna go, but there's just absolutely no way it survives contact with 40 motivated, mid-2000s era hardcore WoW players.

Former game director at Blizzard Wyatt Cheng, whose delightful TikTok channel has been giving free wisdom and anecdotes for some time now, says that exact agony happened to him around 20 years ago with the release of Ahn'Qiraj. Particularly with The Prophet Skeram boss, which splits into illusions at 75%, 50%, and 25% health.

"There's one part I never got right," says Cheng. "I really wanted the only way to tell the difference between the real Skeram and the copies to be that the copies have half the health. So under even DPS rates, the illusions would drop in health faster."

"I pictured raids spreading their DPS and calling it out on [Ventrilo]: Which two are going down quicker?" The idea being, if you didn't kill the illusions first, you'd knock the main Skeram over into his next health threshold and take on additional copies before you're ready: "Now there are five Skerams, and you wipe."

Alas, "that is not how it went. There were so many easy ways to spot the real Skeram. My first version literally had 'Pet of Skeram' written under the copies' names. Oops! In testing, we found more, like UI mods reading creature IDs, or mismatched localisation strings."

While Cheng doesn't remember the exact play-by-play, what followed was an arms race where he was "constantly trying to describe the real Skeram." However, "looking at guides online now, I see sending a hunter pet after Skeram before the split results in the pet staying locked into the real one. Or some people mana-burn him, because the copies spawn with full mana, and he doesn't! Ugh! All that work, and there was still an instant tell."

Still, he's humble about it, saying that while "if it's a real bug or an exploit, sure, we'll fix it. But players outsmarting the designer? That's just one for the history books."

Despite a cloud of doom and gloom hanging over Riot's mysterious MMO in the wake of 2XKO's closure–including well-founded concerns from our own Harvey Randall—its co-founder seems confident in its ongoing development. At least, that's what I'm parsing from his relative non-answer when pressed about it during a panel at PAX West over the weekend.

Marc Merrill dropped a mention of the MMO while answering a different question during the panel, which was immediately chased up by host Greg Miller with half-joking prompts for further morsels of information. Merrill mostly laughs it off, but does give a somewhat half-answer that at least indicates development of it is moving along at… some sort of pace. Though Merrill's description of creating an MMO makes it seem like it's giving Riot a bit of a hard time.

"We know what players' hopes and dreams are," he said. "And it's on us as a team—can we exceed in the execution, you know? But what a worthy quest. We jokingly call it 'the grail' internally because we're like 'Fuck it, you know, many a brave knight are going to die on the grail quest. But fuck it, it's the grail, so let's go.' That's the mindset that we really try to cultivate and that is incredibly hard to do at scale. But I think we're doing a reasonable job and I think the future's incredibly bright."

I mean, I've never developed an MMO but… yeah, I suppose it's probably an absolute task and a half to undertake. I don't know if I necessarily would've gone all in on the grail and dying knight terminology since, y'know, that kind of makes me think about the layoffs. But hey, Merrill at the very least seems jazzed about the direction things are going in.

As for any sort of name (even a project name, damn), progression estimate, release date, or, well, any news of substance? Unfortunately, Merrill has absolutely nothing to offer us in that department. I'm just hoping we actually see this game manifest at some point in the future. And that Riot doesn't cut and run quite as quickly as it did with 2XKO if it isn't able to find its footing from day one.

First reported by Dexerto, former Jagex employee Andrew "Mod Jed" Lakeman has been sentenced to three years in prison (suspended for two years) for using dev tools to remove items from player accounts, then selling them online. An investigation found that Lakeman had earned more than $400,000 through this activity.

Former OSRS developer Mat K elaborated on some of the saga in a 2021 episode of OSRS Podcasts. Lakeman was a content developer for OSRS hired in 2015, and he used other Jagex employee's credentials to manipulate the game's appeals system for moderation and account recovery to swipe items and gold from players' inventories.

It's unclear when Lakeman began stealing from players, but according to Dexerto, Jagex realized this was foul play and not a glitch in 2018, and set a trap for the digital bandit: The company bolstered OSRS' security measures without informing most of the dev team. Lakeman was caught out, fired from Jagex, and reported to the police, who arrested him in 2019.

"Just because it’s virtual, doesn’t mean he shouldn’t face the full force of the law," said Detective Constable Andrew McKeane in a statement for the Cambridge Constabulary. "Given the rapid growth of online and virtual worlds, the justice system is going to have to keep pace and adapt to these new and emerging crimes."

Back in 2022, Lakeman actually scored a minor procedural victory through an unfair dismissal counter-complaint, but his financial reward was significantly reduced, and he was unable to secure a requested reinstatement at Jagex. Earlier this year, we reported on presiding judge Lord Justice Popplewell's ruling that Lakeman could be sued for theft over digital assets like RuneScape gold, precipitating this sentencing.

This grim saga aside, things have been going pretty great for Jagex and Old School Runescape. The company held its biggest live event to date with the Deadman All Stars esports tournament in Chicago this June, and OSRS is bigger now than OG RuneScape ever was.

Ah, the MMO inventory. The delightful abstraction that means we don't need to actually think all that hard about where to store the hundreds of thousands of pelts, steaks, teeth, claws, trinkets, coins, crystals, and so-on that we accrue. Our bags are full of crap, it is tradition.

On the one hand, I'm grateful for it. I'm out here to grind and run dungeons, not try to Jenga-stack a briefcase Resident Evil-style. On the other hand, good lord does my head spin every time I open up my inventory and gaze upon the horrors of my own chronic lack of organisation. I despair. Please don't tell people how I live.

I could argue that it's the game's fault. Giving me an auto-sorting feature means I can endure a descent into of disorganisation without much trouble. At the very least, if I click a button, all of my junk will be organised by type. Often, these systems aren't how I'd do it. For instance, I'd love it if all the gear I'm de-synthing in FF14 could stop being in the initial inventory slots. But they're still useful.

And yet I don't represent the majority of all MMORPG players (despite my best efforts, I'm still working on the hive mind thing). And neither do you, statistically speaking—these are games frequented by millions of players, and I'm not that smug to assume this column is that popular.

However, I would like to get an idea of how tidy Terminally Online readers are. After all, we know you're fashionable, like your keybinds, and mostly healers. So please, satisfy my curiosity: Are your bags full of junk, or have you sorted your demicrystalised megalized torment orbs or whatever by both colour and patch release date?

Or, are you utterly lost in heaps of garbage like I am. And hey, maybe that's part of the charm—after all, there was a time where an MMO's inconvenience was part of the experience.

At Gamescom, I got to see a hands-off demo of Guild Wars 3 and chatted to the developers about what they have in store for us when the MMO hits beta next year. You can read about the significant changes to movement and combat in my Guild Wars 3 preview, but we also discussed how different the upcoming MMO's scale will be when compared to its predecessors.

Guild Wars 3 sits between OG Guild Wars, which was very small scale, and Guild Wars 2, where you could fight a boss with a hundred other players. It still has that multiplayer focus, but compared to Guild Wars 2, ArenaNet has significantly reduced how many people you'll be playing with at once.

"At most, out in the open world, you would probably see about 20 players in a large combat scenario," says game director Colin Johanson. "Our movement systems and our combat systems, in particular, are really high fidelity. They're designed to lend themselves to being able to see everything that's going on, and we felt like that number is where it starts to cap out. You start losing some of the visceral sense of what the gameplay is like."

Johnason adds that, at the high end of player numbers, the action starts to become "more spectacle than it is understandable and readable," and while I love big player numbers, I can't deny that this absolutely happens in Guild Wars 2. It's almost impossible to know what's going on during the massive open-world boss battles because of all the over-the-top effects, and performance tanks for similar reasons.

"This is a game that is about players working together in meaningful ways out in the open world in combat, and we want to make sure that is able to be experienced the way that we intend it to," he says. "So in the open world, you'll see fluctuation—just like other Guild Wars games you'll be playing by yourself, other people come running over the hill, and you play with other people out in the open world."

Guild Wars 3 is more seamless than Guild Wars 2, with fewer loading screens, and Johanson says that we should expect to "constantly" bump into other players. It's also worth noting that cities and towns won't have the same player cap, since there won't be any combat. So the social spaces will be a lot busier.

It'll be easier to play with your pals, too, as ArenaNet won't be building walls around players in the form of servers. Like Guild Wars 2, players will play on instances, which are more like little fences that you can hop over to go out questing with your buds.

Since ArenaNet's approach to sequels is non-traditional, I'm a bit more open to the smaller scale. Guild Wars 2 won't be going anywhere, just as the original Guild Wars is still around and being updated. If I want massive PvE fights, I can just fire up GW2 again.

That said, the party size is going to create some issues in my regular game group. Most of my time in Guild Wars 2 has been spent with four friends, but at the moment ArenaNet is planning to limit Guild Wars 3 parties to four players. One of our crew is going to be left out in the cold.

Aside from the party size, though, I've loved everything I've seen and heard about Guild Wars 3 so far. And it's a rare treat to be excited about a new MMO.

There are few things as exciting as the prospect of a new MMO. And when that new MMO is from ArenaNet, the studio that's been focused on Guild Wars for more than two decades, the excitement is even greater. Having seen Guild Wars 3 in action at Gamescom, and spoken to game director Colin Johanson and lead combat designer Kevin Stocker, my excitement has been justified.

Just as Guild Wars 2 was dramatically different from its predecessor, Guild Wars 3 is not a simple sequel. It's distinct from GW2, a very different kind of MMO, and one that even in the short space of time I spent watching it being played is full of novel ideas.

The first big change is in its setting. The clock has been turned back 1,000 years, and we're heading to Orr—a land that in GW2's era is a post-apocalyptic hellscape, but at this earlier point is a verdant wilderness teeming with spirits.

"The origins of the Guild Wars franchise originate out of Orr," says Johanson. "This is a time before the gods have left the world, very shortly after Grenth has usurped Dhuum and become the god of death. This is a time where the first guilds are starting to rise across the world, and before the very first Guild War takes place. And there is 21 years of Guild Wars history, and so much of it originates out of this timeline and this setting."

As someone who's been playing Guild Wars since I was still in university, a trip back in time to see what led up to all the events I've played through is a compelling prospect. So the choice in setting offers a lot to veterans, but ArenaNet also picked this era because it's a great starting point for new players. You don't need any foreknowledge, because nothing that happened in the previous games has come to pass in Guild Wars 3. We're all going in pretty fresh.

The joy of movement

The focus of this first hands-off demo is movement and combat, and it doesn't disappoint. Stocker takes control of a Warrior as Johanson talks me through what's happening. The Warrior jumps off a cliff, and immediately brings out her glider—a familiar mode of transport for Guild Wars 2 players. But then something new happens. Stocker spots some creatures below, so he attacks them from above, seamlessly swapping from gliding to a drop attack. This is all part of the new momentum system, and it's awesome.

"One of our big goals when we make a new game in the Guild Wars franchise is to set out and try new things, and to innovate and to push the genre forward," says Johanson. Early on, the team identified movement as one of the places where it could shake MMOs up, building on the work it did in Guild Wars 2 with gliding, jumping puzzles and mounts.

"One of the things that you constantly see [in MMOs] is that there's this really stop-start nature to movement," he continues. "You're running, then you stop and then you jump, then you stop and then you glide. Everything feels very clunky."

ArenaNet wanted to evoke action games, where there's no stopping and starting, just seamless switching between different styles of movement. Thus momentum became a "core component" to Guild Wars 3. The result is that there's now mantling, wall running, gliding in all directions, and your speed actually matters. The faster you're moving, the more force you're building up. This is how it affects combat.

"It ended up being a really natural development to bring the two systems together," Stocker tells me. "As soon as we got to the point where you could wall run into this leap and slam sequence, it was a huge hit in the studio, and so we took a step back and went through all of the combat—we're going for a much more visceral kind of action combat—and did a bunch of work to tie everything together. So everything you're doing in movement, whether it's dashing or wall running or gliding, seamlessly goes into your combat skills and actually pays off."

So the more momentum you have, the greater the impact you make when you're attacking. Doing a drop attack from a great height increases both the damage of your attack and the radius.

Knockabout

This ties nicely into combat's increased physicality. You can knock enemies around—and be knocked around yourself—netting you extra damage. Kicking a monster into a wall will do more damage than just kicking it. And you can knock enemies off cliffs, doing even more damage, or killing them outright. Guild Wars 3 also takes into account the size of your opponent. So you'll need more momentum to knock back larger enemies.

Even in a hands-off demo, it was clear how different this is going to feel compared to other MMOs. Knockbacks are a common tool in countless MMO arsenals, sure, but they are usually designed to stun or to give players breathing room. And on the rare occasion when you can knock an enemy off a ledge, like in Star Wars: The Old Republic, it often breaks the encounter. It's usually far from a combat pillar.

Guild Wars 3's classes also feature different skills that enhance these abilities—basically multiplayer combos. When Johanson and Stocker teamed up to explore a ruined temple, Johanson was able to use Stocker's shield as a springboard, increasing their momentum and allowing them to get behind the enemy to target a weak point.

While I didn't see the Ranger class, Stocker tells me it has a particularly cool ability that creates a vortex that sends all their allies up into the air, where they can comfortably pull off their aerial attacks.

We eventually get to my least favourite part of MMOs and RPGs: the spider section. Stocker is taking his warrior through an arachnid-infested den that's covered in sticky webs. My phobia flares up. "These are really difficult to kill," says Johanson. "It takes a long time because of their webs." Their webs can target players, slowing down both attacks and movement, but they can also spread across the ground, affecting everyone in the area.

But there's good news for my fellow arachnophobes—they can be handled deftly with the right build. "Customising your build and bringing the right skills to defeat enemies is another huge part of combat," says Johanson. And conveniently, Stocker has an ability that modifies his attacks, and those of his allies, by adding fire damage. This tears through webs, so you can quickly set your allies free. Spiders are particularly weak to fire damage, too, so they go down rapidly.

Feed your spirit

Earlier I mentioned that Orr is teeming with nature spirits. They weren't the focus of this first demo, but I did get ArenaNet to share a little bit about what role they'll play. Because the gods haven't yet seen fit to share magic with mortals—despite the region being rife with it—the denizens of Orr have needed to find other ways to take advantage of it. The Vaelwardens have access to crafted signets that give them access to magic, but much of the magic in Guild Wars 3 comes from befriending spirits.

Back in the ruined temple, Stocker uses a spirit to illuminate the darkness. "You can actually befriend it and eventually summon it so that you can see in dark places," says Johanson. And your mounts, both flying and ground-based, will be spirits as well, which you'll need to befriend before you can take advantage of their movement capabilities.

Your enemies can use spirits as well. We meet a fire-spewing foe in the temple who has captured a spirit and stuck it in a backpack—this is what's fuelling their fire attacks. What's cool, though, is this makes them vulnerable. So you can use momentum to get behind them, damage the backpack, free the spirit, and then easily take out the defanged enemy.

In a relatively short space of time I got to see so many things that Guild Wars 3 is doing differently, and it's properly exciting to see an upcoming MMO that isn't content with just doing the same thing over and over again, or trying to drum up nostalgia for old sandbox MMOs. Guild Wars 3 seems to be confidently charting its own course—which in turn has given me a lot more confidence in its ability to have some real staying power.

Of course, there's still a lot of questions. How is it handling PvP, for instance? PvP has always been central to the series, so expectations are high. Magic, spirits, mounts, dungeons, character progression, character customisation—there's a lot to dig into between now and its beta, due in autumn 2027.

Picture this: I am emerging from a pile of paper, red string, and thumbtacks, hair (I have hair in this scenario) dishevelled, breathless, yelling like I've well and truly lost it: I knew it! I knew we were getting a crossbow in Final Fantasy 14! I am then carted away by people in white coats and dispensed in an abandoned warehouse, where Naoki Yoshida emerges with a loaded pistol. I know too much.

Alright, I'm probably not that conspiratorially out of lockstep with the FF14 community about the new job, especially given this latest piece of evidence, but I do feel vindicated. Back during the latest fanfest, some more details emerged about the as-yet-unannounced physical ranged job. Namely, a couple of soundbytes and some trailer snippets.

You can read my full conspiracy board I just linked, which also includes trying to analyse the shape of a catgirl's wand to prove that it was, in fact, a crossbow bolt. And here I am, completely vindicated, because the patch 7.5 site's just been updated with a new image.

Look at what's on her back. That's a crossbow. She's using a crossbow! I knew it! (I proceed to collapse into maniacal, unsettling laughter).

In my mind, this pretty much clinches it: It's almost certain that the physical ranged job in FF14 will be some kind of crossbow-wielding falconer. Square Enix wouldn't just create a new crossbow model (and presumably a ton of bespoke animations) for a job that doesn't exist in-game. Creative Studio 3's a frugal one, sometimes to its own detriment.

Couple this piece of evidence with the soundbytes shared by sound director Masayoshi Soken, the actual Evercold trailer, the job symbol we were shown, the fact we know it's a physical ranged job, that weird lalafell animation glitch—and I admit this is a stretch, but the fact it's a norse themed expansion, and norse mythology loves its birds? I am vindicated. Now and forever.

World of Warcraft housing has become an amazing spectator sport, with dozens of streamers and creators entrancing players and viewers with their amazing works of art.

With WoW's new patch 12.1 adding piles of new housing decor items, rooms, house exteriors, and tools to use them with, it felt like the perfect time to ask those artisans for a little help. Without further ado, here are five top tips from those pros about how to get started in WoW housing.

(For suggestions from World of Warcraft's own lead design and principal artist in housing, Jay Huang, see this companion story.)

1. Don't forget to turn on the lights

(From Megan James, aka MeggoArt, streamer and host of the WoWKEA Discord server)

Megan James is the creator of one of the classic tutorials for WoW Housing, and she says one of the things new players tend to overlook is lighting.

"If it seems really dark in your house, that's because it is!" she says. "WoW houses default to being unlit, so if you place some lighting decor around it can really help you see what you're building."

2. Add clutter

(From BuildingMouse, video creator and maker of housing masterworks including her kitchen tutorials playlist)

A mathematician in real life, BuildingMouse is one of the most popular housing video creators, bringing with her an audience from her award-winning days in Elder Scrolls Online housing. She's the author of the Van Gogh painting in WoW housing that Blizzard's Jay Huang refers to in our companion story.

Her builds are particularly well-known for feeling lifelike. The secret, she says, is clutter.

"Scatter books on tables, dishes left out in the kitchen, magnets on the fridge, or pictures on the walls—it instantly makes the space feel lived-in," she says.

3. Explore the housing controls in detail before you get started

(From Cottage Wizard, streamer and creator of wonderful style sheets to get new players started making houses in the styles of different WoW cultures)

Cottage Wizard's background is in 3D art and digital illustration, and it shows in her cozy, detailed creations. It's much easier to build when you know all the tools you have at your disposal, she says.

"Take your time going through every nook of the housing UI. Some features may be easy to miss, such as the small button for Placed Decor that appears only in the Advanced Mode," Cottage Wizard says. "There, you can select and remove placed items from a list, which is super handy if you clipped something behind a wall or ceiling and it becomes untargetable!"

4. Give your build a storyline

(From GP@Home, streamer and creator of huge spectacle pieces, which he gives away to all players via the 12.1 patch's new blueprints feature)

GP is the creator of some of the biggest spectacles in WoW housing. He's recreated the city of Nazjatar in miniature, made a the Blizzard World theme park, and put Cyberpunk in WoW. His suggestion is to do what he does so well in his builds: Make sure they have a narrative.

"Make sure to tell a story, to support your build's immersion," he suggests. That will also help drive a focal point for your set pieces. "Builds feel confusing with nothing guides the viewer's eye."

5. Build the big lines before starting in on the details

(From Synthex, a professional games environmental artist and level designer, whose builds have been featured in official Blizzard videos, including his rocket house.)

Synthex is a pro as well as a creator, so he brings his professional knowledge to his passion for building. It's important to get the big stuff right in a build before you start adding details, he says, and you shouldn't be afraid to delete things and start over—he does, even with his years of experience.

"Start with the big strokes, by blocking out the core shapes of a room," he says. "Try to get the overall vibe and feel established. It's really easy, and fun, to get carried away with minute details in your house that can really suck up hours. While those details are important, do them last."

Blizzard is scrubbing through its new World of Warcraft Mythic Plus Dungeon top-1% rankings for people who paid for carries, World of Warcraft game director Ion Hazzikostas says.

The timed dungeon mode offered its first-ever rewards at that level this past season in the Midnight expansion, which ended August 11. Unlike similar high-end rewards in PvP combat, this ranking level in Mythic Plus dungeons was a flat percentage of players, rather than a set score they had to achieve.

Some players paid for the privilege, and the glowy red-and-black bird mount that came with the title. These boosts were particularly controversial, as the percentage cutoff meant that every successful carry removed a player that legitimately earned the score.

"The team is doing a thorough scrub of this for Season 1 and will share more with the community soon about how we approached that review, as well as the final results," Hazzikostas said.

A constant grind to keep a reward in sight

"I hit 1% M+ rating yesterday and it lasted for 5 minutes," wrote one typical person on Reddit just before the end of the season. "The 1% cutoff is going up by about 2 points every day. Ninety percent of +21 [level] groups in the group finder are 'note' keys where you need to pay the keyholder to be invited. People are also buying actual boosts en masse because of the new 1% title and resilient keystones making it possible. Playing organically is no longer possible."

The 1% rewards have not yet been awarded in game. Hazzikostas and associate game director Paul Kubit said they are popular and will continue.

Blizzard recently removed the Mythic raiding mount from the accounts of players determined to have paid for them in the game's large-group content, primarily with real-money transactions, which are forbidden by WoW's terms of service.

Carries paid only in gold to specific guilds or individuals appear to be legitimate, based on past Blizzard posts and enforcement actions, but some players caught by the corrective wave in raids say they paid in gold and had their mounts removed anyway. (That's happened in the past when the sellers who got people a ranking or reward took in-game gold in some cases and real money in others, or when cross-server boosting communities were involved.)

Sales are not the only part of the new Mythic Plus rewards that players are heatedly discussing. The decision to make the cutoff a percentage rather than a fixed rating means that people near the cutoff had to play nearly continuously at the end of their season to keep their ranking.

A percentage cutoff to keep things exciting—but did it work?

Kubit, who is in charge of the Midnight expansion, said making the cutoff percentage-based keeps people playing even as their numbers increase over the course of a season.

"This is aimed at the 1%, which is by definition pretty elite, one of those people who really like to push the upper end of what mythic plus gameplay is all about," he says. "We want to make sure that you do truly feel like you can do that, as opposed to laying off the gas."

Numbers suggest that goal may not have entirely played out as expected, however. Raider.io, which tracks Mythic Plus Dungeon statistics, shows that more people played Mythic Plus dungeons at the start and end of Midnight's first season than did the first season in The War Within expansion (about 5.2 million, compared to about 2.5 million), but the drop-off at the end of the season was actually steeper in Midnight than it was in War Within.

Just 12.3% of players were still doing the dungeons at the end of Midnight Season 1, versus 16.8% in War Within. Those numbers of players remained fairly static for the six weeks at the end of both seasons.

Players enthusiastic about a new reward, but mixed on how it was awarded

Players' reactions were decidedly mixed.

"That uncertainty makes the end of the season feel more stressful than exciting," said one typical poster on Reddit.

"The reason a percentile is used is because it correlates with season difficulty. In this particular case 3900 is feasible this season but may not be feasible in others," countered another in the same post.

The addition of "resilient" keys, which don't drop in level once you've completed that difficulty in all available dungeons, has made pushing ever-higher levels—and selling those timed dungeons—easier.

Player versus player rewards were initially based on percentage, as well, near when World of Warcraft first launched. In the Burning Crusade, the top .5% of PvP arena players were awarded Elite mounts. After players complaints about the grind and rampant sales, that was changed to a fixed rating in the Mists of Pandaria expansion, then eventually to the modern system, which requires a fixed rating plus a number of wins above that rating, to help keep the number of sales down.

Class balance makes earning the bird tougher for some players

The composition of groups that are successfully timing Mythic Plus dungeons has also become more homogenized than ever before. While Raider.io charts show a broad variety of the 40 possible character classes and specializations, the vast majority of Mythic Plus keys over level 20 (required for the 1% title) contain some combination of the same seven "meta" specs in each five-player group: guardian druid, unholy death knight, devourer demon hunter, mistweaver monk, augmentation evoker, restoration shaman and retribution paladin.

The top tank specialization, guardian druid, was seen 518,467 times in dungeons recorded on Raider.io at that level over the course of the season. The bottom tank, blood death knight, was seen 7,635. Since many keys are run over and over again by the same players, that boils down to an even tinier number of players who actually completed dungeons at this level.

"When we're thinking about world record folks, then some of the fun of that gameplay is identifying, 'What if I switch to this character in this particular spec, and solve the puzzle that way?' But when you get closer to the 1%, ideally for anyone there, we want you to play the classes and specs that you like playing, that you feel like you're good at," Kubit says. "You shouldn't feel forced into any particular meta spec."

"Obviously players are going to gravitate toward certain specs when we're talking about the 1%," says Andrew De Souza, lead encounter designer. "Ninety-nine percent of players are able to get to Keystone Myth [3400 rating, compared to about 4000 for the top 1%] with any given comp."

Dungeons are designed for all classes to play, but 1% mounts may get more specific

They do watch dungeons to make sure they don't require a specific class, he says.

"In some cases that's going to naturally fit—poisons and curses in Altar of Fangs [dungeon], that's probably going to lean towards [having] a shaman," he says. "We are saying okay, but what if there's not a shaman? What does this pack look like? So we're absolutely making those considerations. It's okay if this class dunks on this trash mob. They're allowed to be awesome here—just within reason. We are trying to serve the largest audience possible."

Blizzard is now figuring out how to implement specialization-specific 1% cutoffs, Hazzikostas says, though it won't be this season—Season 2 just began—and the details remain to be hammered out (including, for example, whether it would still be the top 1% in that scenario). He mentioned the possibility in an interview with PsyBear that ran earlier this week, then kept an eye on the discussion.

"While the spec-specific title reward is something we're excited to explore," he tells us, "there are still a number of logistics, factors, and scenarios we'll need to account for as we build out that capability, to ensure fairness across the board. But it seems from our initial discussion of this idea that this is something the community is equally excited about, so we'll share more when we can."

World of Warcraft's developers are making some subtle shifts in dungeons and raids to help players with its more-difficult content, in the hopes that a variety of knock-on effects result, including increased participation in the game overall and a better balance of tanks, healers and damage dealers.

In the case of WoW's timed-dungeon Mythic Plus mode, it was a matter of making it just a bit easier to get to the mythic-level rewards of the weekly vault, says Paul Kubit, associate game director in charge of the Midnight expansion. The team tested it out in the first season of Mythic Plus, which just wrapped up.

Reducing Mythic Plus difficulty to entice support players

Players are often less-willing to queue for dungeons as tanks or healers because the level of responsibility is much higher—taking the big hits, keeping the group alive, directing where the party should go—and other players can be swift to judge when things go wrong.

Hopefully the reduced difficulty for the weekly "vault filler" keys, where players are typically looking to complete the minimum level of Mythic Plus dungeons that will get them the maximum level of gear available, helps with those stressors, Kubit says.

"We saw a lot of success in season one making it just a little bit easier for you to get into higher difficulties of Mythic Plus, and get the loot which comes from it," he says. "People are a little bit more willing now to say, 'Well I'd like to try out tanking. I'd like to try out healing.' Some of the inherent stresses are cut by the approachability of the mode itself."

Giving players easier, and more flexible, Mythic raids

In the case of raiding, Blizzard is giving players another one-boss instance where they can get their feet wet in Mythic difficulty in a variably-sized group that can even be done with strangers. Midnight's first season was the first in a long time to offer not one, but two different one-boss raids that many players successfully did in pick-up groups even on the highest Mythic difficulty. One of them offered variable raid sizes, allowing groups of 15-25 characters to enter the fight.

As part of this month's 12.1 patch, developers introduced a new raid instance type, called a Lair. Lairs take the place of world bosses, which were simple to kill and could absolutely annihilate the frame rate in the zone where they were being fought as full 40-man raids of players jumped randomly from layer to layer depending on where their members were located.

Lairs are in instances, to solve that problem.

"A giant dragon, or bird, or Ettin just wrecking the side of your zone has always been really cool," Kubit says. "But as gameplay has evolved, world bosses haven't as much. World bosses can fight a lot of players, an uncapped number of players in a lot of cases, and that can cause lag."

Lairs may branch into more difficult territory in the future

Lairs are also available on world difficulty—the same difficulty level as world bosses—plus the typical raid Normal, Heroic, and Mythic Difficulties. Like the Sporefall raid in the first Midnight season, this season's Tidebound Grotto Lair offers flexible sizes that make it easier for guilds that can't field a full 20-man Mythic team (or pick-up groups looking to tackle the content).

"You'll often see us, in .7 patches looking at where we have some ideas, but we'd like to get a little more data, test players' appetites before we commit fully," Kubit said. "Sporefall was a great example, where we were able to test flex Mythic and say, 'How is this going to work out?'

"It's been a good response from players. This has allowed more flexibility for folks to be able to get into that Mythic level of difficulty, without that strict restriction. That's something that we're happy to carry forward into Lairs."

The Tidebound Grotto is about as hard as the early bosses in the Venomous Abyss, which is this patch's traditional eight-boss raid, requiring a full group of 20 to tackle on Mythic difficulty. (Normal and Heroic difficulties remain flexible for any group size from 10-30.)

"It's on the more-approachable side. But who knows? If more Lairs show up in the future, we may find the Encounters team wants to explore a bit more, with more difficult Lairs as well," he says. "I'm really curious to see where we go on this journey with players."

Star Wars Galaxies Legends, one of many community servers offering a version of the defunct MMO with custom additions, reportedly had its assets decrypted by a hacker with the username levarrishawk (via Massively OP). In a post on the Star Wars Galaxies subreddit, Levarris confirmed the details of a Discord post shared by the server's development team.

"[W]e’ve confirmed that Levarris, aka levarrishawk from r/swg, used AI tools to decrypt our client side game asset files," the Discord post reads. "This gave him access to assets from all of our custom content: items, questlines … We do know that he’s actively offered these files to other servers, and while we can’t confirm that he’s had any takers yet, if you start seeing Legends‑exclusive content out in other worlds it was likely taken from us.

"We’re obviously bothered by this, but there isn’t much we can do outside of being upfront with all of you and staying focused on what makes Legends great."

Notably, no player data or personal info was accessed. The response from Levarris, who is a moderator for the Star Wars Galaxies subreddit, reveals the motivation behind this hack: some drama that goes back "roughly fourteen years ago."

Levarris claims that some folks who'd eventually work on Legends used a "honeypot" scheme to acquire dev tools that Sony Online Entertainment used when working on the live game, and then didn't share those tools with other community devs trying to revive it. "You don't get to protect and hoard from the greater community things built on stolen goods," Levarris wrote.

The subreddit didn't seem impressed with the stunt nor the rationale behind it. "I’m just trying to play around with a lightsaber after working 60 hours in a week," commented iceman2kx. "A moderator of the Star Wars Galaxies subreddit has decided to actively harm the Star Wars Galaxies community at large. Cool. Cool and good," BroReesta wrote on the same thread.

After completing the initial tutorial on Star Wars Galaxies Restoration—a private server revival project for the Star Wars-themed MMO that launched in 2003, was updated until 2005, and was shuttered in 2011—I was dumped out of a shuttle in Mos Eisley and into a warzone. Squads of rebel and imperial players were exchanging blaster fire and lobbing thermal detonators. When I asked the passing combatants why Tatooine was worth fighting over, a man in stormtrooper armor said I was lucky I wasn't PvP-flagged.

Despite the early-2000s assets and stiff animations, it was the most dynamic that an MMO had felt for me in years. But in the week I've spent revisiting Star Wars Galaxies, I've seen very little other excitement. I've killed no impressive enemies. I've done barely any quests. It's an MMO that's content to let me log in and do little of note whatsoever—and that's exactly what I've been missing.

In comparison, whenever the WoW itch gets strong enough for me to reup my subscription, I end up doing nothing but doing. Logging into WoW in 2026 means enduring a bombardment of refreshed weekly prompts and directives urging me to get on my flying mount and accelerate at breakneck speed towards whatever prescribed activity with prerequisite player count will provide my next predictable gear score increase.

A more civilized age

WoW has become a relentlessly efficient machine, ensuring players waste the least possible time while being propelled through seasonal ranks and escalating difficulty tiers. In terms of providing their users with those quantifiable successes, it's hard to argue that the MMOs of today aren't better designed than their older iterations. And yet, it's the moments when I step off the treadmill where they still feel the most magical.

When I can still find joy in WoW, it's not through the weekly content blitz. It's when I take the scenic route through an old leveling zone, and wonder what quest that dwarf running in the distance is doing. It's when I earn a grateful emote from a player of the opposite faction who can't otherwise thank me for helping them with a dicey fight. It's during the pinnacle of incidental MMO encounters: Receiving a sorely needed heal from a passing player who could've just as easily left me to die.

It's in those moments where it feels like the MMO rediscovers itself—where it recaptures the ways that multiplayer in a shared, persistent world can be a source of wonder, and not just a rote feature of the form. It's that wonder that motivated Star Wars Galaxies in 2003, and it's what its private server maintainers have worked to keep in suspended animation ever since.

Outer Rim living

My hours in Galaxies have been aimless ones. I've been casually puttering across the Tatooine wastelands, learning how to survey for minerals and water, how to harvest womp rat corpses for bones and how to use them to flavor what must be the world's worst tea—slowly gaining an understanding of its skill systems and crafting mechanics, but having no real idea whether I'm accomplishing anything another player would consider worthwhile.

I haven't used my blaster on anything more threatening than a nameless smuggler, and I'm not sure where I'd get a better shooting iron even if I wanted one. I could be answering the call to adventure as one of the galaxy's heroes, but the game's been content to let me ignore it.

And I've been content to go on ignoring. Because all that time I'm wasting out in the sands is time I've spent watching a bounty hunter tear by on a speeder bike and wondering what grim business he's on, or exchanging greetings with a Zabrak who's working on his carbine marksmanship. The hour I spent surveying eahiate iron deposits was one that led me through a sprawling, player-made city out in the dunes, its vacant tents and droid stalls and derelict cruisers parked in hand-built plazas proof that other players once shared that same space.

When I drift back through Mos Eisley, its scant environmental details and featureless wall textures feel vibrant, because the aliens, smugglers, and imperial agents I'll bump elbows with want nothing more than the pleasure of lingering there together.

Star Wars Galaxies has been dead for years—but it's a dead game that still remembers how to feel like a living world better than the market-leading MMOs that survived it.

EverQuest Legends, the EverQuest spinoff that remixes an old-school version of the early MMORPG into a multiclassing, froglok-murdering ARPG minmaxer's paradise, has a lot on the way. In a recent Twitch stream, developers from Daybreak Games and Game Jawn floated some pretty big ideas for the future: perhaps most notably, all-new classes that weren't in the original EverQuest at all.

"Definitely, I think, long-term we have discussed additional races, additional classes. Is it realistic to have another class by [the upcoming expansion] Kunark? I don't think so," said Daybreak executive producer David Youssefi. "But definitely would not rule it out for the longer-term vision of the game. In fact, I'm sure we would." Game Jawn CEO and technical director Eda Spause chimed in, "Yeah, absolutely."

Granted, they were careful to temper expectations. Before Youssefi said that, lead content designer Eric Wellman addressed the topic by saying it's "a matter of how much work, and is it worth the work." Spause replied, "I'm of the opinion it would be, however, that opinion is also at odds with the reality of how much we have to do." In other words, this is less a guarantee and more an optimistic plan for the future.

While, for the most part, Legends is just a casual-friendly remix of an old game, this particular long-term ambition calls to mind Old School RuneScape and the oft-rumored 'Classic+' version of World of Warcraft taking after the game's private server scene. Every class playable in even the modern version of the original EverQuest is already represented, so the addition of new classes would see Legends join the chorus of MMOs and live service games building new stuff using an old version as scaffolding.

And while Legends already has an original playable race in the catlike kerran and revamped zones here and there, I'd argue new playstyles are the bigger deal in a game all about concocting builds and farming phat loots. As for what those classes would even be, it's hard to say.

EverQuest has so many classic D&D-style fantasies represented that it started splitting hairs between wizards and magicians—pretty thematically narrow things like beastlords and berserkers made it in eventually. I'm sure EverQuest 2 can provide some inspiration, what with its coercers, defilers, and other sub-classes with oddly vague names.

In the meantime, check out PC Gamer news writer Joshua Wolens' impressions on EverQuest Legends, where he called the game "an MMO for MUD enjoyers and Morrowind perverts—no longer hard, but still authentically idiosyncratic … the Linux of MMOs."

Full disclosure, here—Stars Reach is, in my humble opinion, a bit of a mess. It's an MMO headed up by Raph Koster, who knows what he's doing on account of his involvement in Ultima Online and, more relevant to the game at hand, Star Wars: Galaxies, and it released into early access this week to the price point of almost $30 (£28).

Stars Reach tries to follow in SWG's vein of being a socially-driven MMO with a huge array of skills you can train. The vision is a galactic society where being a dancer or a journalist is just as viable a playstyle as, say, going outdoors and gunning some beasties down.

I say the "vision", because Stars Reach isn't quite there yet. In fact, it makes a god-awful first impression, starting with a brief stint in a tutorial zone to get you accustomed to your tools—a terraformer, a scanner, a harvester, a gun, and a deeply janky grappling hook.

By far, the most interesting part of these mechanics is the terraformer—which lets you dig into the fully malleable earth and spit out the terrain you've mined. Everything else is deeply so-so. The scanner's a hot/cold beeping system to help build out your map, and the gunplay is… ah, you shoot things and they die. None of it feels particularly good.

The issue—aside from the raft of crusty UI issues and unfinished icons—is what the game does to you next. You're plonked on a rather bland-looking space station and encouraged to go and grab a few missions, of which you can only snap up a handful. These are randomly-generated and dull as driftwood, but they at least get you used to the core mechanics and how you could feasibly use them.

It's during one of these that I'm given a perfect encapsulation of why Stars Reach and its unfinished state is a problem. The first mission I took to dig my way to a drone was cut short, because I discovered that the ground I was mining was sandy, meaning that any hole I dug was immediately filled in by the small hill next to the area I was mining. To be clear, the terrain simulation going on here is actually really neat—if I was digging harder materials, I wouldn't be having the same problem.

'Cool!' I thought, and then I wondered if I could maybe work on some digging XP to outpace the landslides I was causing—only to find out that entire chunks of the mining tree, including mining speed upgrades, were slapped with a big "WIP" sticker.

This is a major problem for Stars Reach, because a lot of the more interesting skill trees (such as acting, dancing, politics, and journalism—yes, really) are still works in progress. That's not to say the systems underpinning them are absent entirely (more on that later), but in terms of first impressions, having only the brass tacks available for players to explore is a serious problem.

Then there's the way navigation works. If you want to explore other planets—which pop up and are culled based on whether or not anyone's maintaining them—you need to slowly float your space-suited self through a dull void to get there, as spaceships aren't in the game yet. And chances are (especially this early) that there won't be anything on said planets to begin with.

Meet with the Mayor

I was, legitimately, ready to turn up my nose and simply drop Stars Reach with the summation that it was released still in the cradle—and I almost did, were it not for vague recollections of Raph Koster telling me about the societies players had built during playtesting.

I hit up Discord, and eventually found this website from the in-game coalition Galactic Union of Natural Conservation, or GUNC. It pointed me in the direction of their chosen planet, and upon arriving, the actual juice behind Stars Reach unfolded in front of me.

I saw about a dozen players milling around a stack of crates, and—doing something very scary, I decided to walk up and start asking questions. It was then I had discovered that, eager to rebuild their society from earlier playtests, GUNC was laying the groundwork to do just that—ferrying a huge heap of supplies from other planets and allocating tasks to their little community.

This involved zoning a section of the planet and, moreover, organising the work needed to actually do its namesake mission of conserving creatures by electing its mayor—something you can already do in-game with something called a GovBot, despite the politics tree being under construction.

GUNC has to have trained xenobiologists go out and find Makers (which are typically-invisible servitors that spawn wildlife) and then lay claim to the land around them to protect them with the raw power of planet-side bureaucracy. As I needled the duly-elected mayor of planet GUNC with questions, I also noticed an emerging fashion trend of something called hive glasses, which the local tailor (also a player) was supplying them with.

This is where the friction in my heart comes in: Stars Reach is a deeply unfinished game that is, in my humble opinion, charging way too much for the janky first impression it makes—but the unfinished (yet intricate) web of systems that underpins it is clearly compelling, because otherwise GUNC wouldn't be there.

I genuinely felt like I'd played two separate games—one of them was an eerily lonely, aimless random mission generator, and the other was a jolly cooperative builder that did legitimately charm me, as the good mayor fielded my questions alongside someone roleplaying an ex-anarchist who just wanted to make friends, and a big, fluffy man in a silly hat who was politely asking where he could set up camp so he didn't interfere with GUNC's zoning plans.

The major issue? I had to go out of my way to find these people doing cool things—rifling through a Discord, going on a fanmade site—rather than organically being directed to these UGC zones through a better overworld system. If anything, the mission boards feel like a flat misstep that give players the wrong idea about what the game is trying to do.

Stars Reach should be doing everything in its power to bring you into contact with other players from the get-go—because that's clearly where its passionate and invested community finds its fun. What it's doing right now is asking you 30 whole bucks for access and punting you towards its least flattering, least finished parts.

I dearly hope it can manage a turnaround, because I want the idealised version of Stars Reach to exist—for the sake of its most invested players, more than anything. But it absolutely needs a ton of work before it gets there. And while there's a detailed and active roadmap on the game's site, right now? It's got too much space to grow.

I find myself pretty gloomy about the shutdown of 2XKO—but not because I'll miss it on a personal level. I don't have the mental bandwidth to training-montage myself into a serious fighting game player other than a few stints with Guilty Gear: Strive, but I did have a reasonable time messing around with 2XKO during its beta. And while I'm aware my lack of continued playing makes me part of the problem, I genuinely felt a little sad to see it sink into the waves as Riot announced it was winding down development.

But I'm also feeling blue for another reason. While I don't necessarily blame Riot for not wasting money in this quarterly-results-driven culture of ours, I also really don't think this sort of attitude helps me believe in the vision of its upcoming MMO, whose details are wrapped in the mists of a development mirage.

Riot laid off most of its developers less than three weeks after 2XKO's release—roughly 80 people. People like Patrick Miller, an amazing steward of fighting games who's written a book on the genre. The fact it's shutting down the game less than a year after that "inspired" (these air quotes are so heavy) move speaks to me of a corporate impatience that MMOs seriously struggle to survive. As Raph Koster told me this year in our Terminally Online column, MMOs have become incredibly expensive.

MMOs are costly to run and take a long time to get cooking. The continued success of everything that isn't WoW (which found major success right away and sat fat and glad for years) isn't due to some goldrush mentality, but because they've been steadily sustained for over a decade—once you get a solid playerbase, an MMO will keep breadwinning for you for years to come. But they're a commitment.

And commitments are something Riot seems flighty about making. I couldn't tell you about the numbers behind the screen—we know that 2XKO was making "only a fraction of what it would take to trend toward sustainability"—but might that have had something to do with the 80 people punted from the project less than a month after launch?

Is there a world in which Riot Games didn't do that, and instead gave it a chance to grow its playerbase with a more active development team? Is there a world in which Riot—who let's not forget, was able to throw $250 million at Arcane—could have comfortably tanked those losses to give it a chance at success?

More importantly, is there a world in which an MMO survives without that patience? There's every chance I'm calling a shot long before it's made, mind. Fighting games are a bit of a niche genre due to their high skill floor and astronomical skill cieling—even my game of choice, Strive, has a 24-hour peak of 1,700 players on Steam, as does Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls, a game that's ostensibly new.

Which for the most part isn't a problem if you're building for it. Fighting games don't need high populations to stay "active" because they're 1v1 experiences—I've literally never had an issue finding ranked matches in Strive, for instance. But if you're Riot, and you're comparing every videogame you have to your League of Legends moonshot, I can imagine any number without several commas in it won't satisfy you.

Who knows. Riot's currently-unknown tolerance for mid-range hits might be perfectly comfortable if its MMO pulls in, say, a few hundred thousand players. The studio might also be betting far more money on its MMO's success, and thus be less likely to cut and run—but it's not as if MMOs are any less of a competitive or brutal market, with very few new entries in the past few years having the staying powers of their predecessors.

Even if Riot finds success, that's not an indicator it'll survive—take New World, which Amazon somehow managed to mess up despite having 10,000 concurrent players at the end of 2025. By live service standards, that's perfectly sustainable, but by MMO standards it clearly wasn't enough—which bodes ill. Consider me biting my nails.

I roleplay in MMORPGs because I am a big, stinking nerd—I've written about the joy of such activities on this website before. But in case you're uninitiated, here's how it works: You and a group of your mates spend time "in character", roleplaying as one might at your average D&D table. Just swap out a defined ruleset for the background dressing of an MMO, and you get the general jist.

In Final Fantasy 14, I've easily spent several hundred of my 5,000 hours (don't look at me) milling about and telling stories with my friends—as do many others. This is a game bumping at all points with activity, everything from high-stakes plots to cosy cafes and… yes, nightclubs. But that's like its own subculture.

It's been a creative joy. A joy that I will now get to measurably feel self-conscious about, because one curious player has assembled a census specifically for giga-nerd writers like myself. The Crystal RP Census, put together by Reddit user CevicheLemon, is genuinely really fascinating.

It collects the information of over 10,000 roleplayers, painstakingly collated over the period of two months, and then scrambled for anonymity, and the findings are legitimately interesting—but before I put my analysis hat on, here's how basic I am.

My character, a male hyur born in Ul'dah that identifies with Limsa Lominsa more these days due to backstory reasons, is approximately the 2nd (most common) in terms of gender, 4th in terms of race, 11th in terms of origin, and 8th in terms of current faction association. Hey, not bad! I'm sorta kinda unique, maybe!

The most popular backstory for Warriors of Light is, if we smush all this data together, a female miqo'te from Ishgard who hasn't really gone elsewhere. The least popular Warrior of Light is a non-binary lalafell from the long-extinct magical empire of Mhach that's now slumming it with the Omicrons (I omitted the Omicron planet because it would've been impossible for a lalafell to get there).

These pictures aren't actually likely to bare out, though. Behold, my lore knowledge: miqo'te aren't all that common in Ishgard. They do, however, have tribes located all around the place. I'd take a guess that the 21.8% of miqo'te players are scattered all over the place in terms of origin, whereas Ishgard is instead over-represented by the elezen and hyur population.

This is in direct contrast to the Azim Steppe, which, lore-wise, would have to be the origin almost entirely taken up by the next-most popular race, Au Ra.

I'm genuinely fascinated that two people are just roleplaying Omicrons, a basically-extinct robot race from another planet—and that ten characters seem to be invested in them. I have basically never seen anyone doing this and I would like to know who they are so I can needle them with questions about their creations.

Keeping track of Star Citizen's development is a little like watching the same, tired old guy in the back of a very expensive car, turning the key while the engine stalls, whispering, quietly, like a prayer: "This car will start soon. We promise."

Originally having a planned release date for 2014, the game's been stuck in crowdfunding limbo for over a decade—only releasing in early access back in 2017. You will observe that it is now 2026.

The latest domino to fall is this disastrous live stream, which is still miraculously up on the game's official YouTube channel. It was broadcast at the start of August, but has only breached containment recently, and—oh man, where to start.

The stream, intending to show off the currently-awaited Siege of Orison event (which was delayed), is a complete trainwreck. Sluggish-looking first person shooter gameplay and worrying desync issues plague the whole ordeal, despite being an internal build on a private server. At one point, a dev says: "Just close your eyes!" while their hand glitches through a lever.

Oliver Hull, a recently-added content manager for the game who joined as early as June this year, makes a valiant effort—one hour and four minutes into the stream—to drum up some community engagement, asking Twitch chat to share their own Siege of Orison completion times. Immediately, a fellow developer takes a punt at him, saying: "Oli, you've just fully opened up to them being like 'oh I can't time it, because it doesn't work!'"

It also winds up being foreshadowing, because despite their best attempts, the devs themselves can't make their way through the event successfully, leading to a deeply uncomfortable moment where Jared Huckaby, content director on the game, leans behind Hull and says: "We're at time—it's your show, wrap it up."

You can't help but feel for Hull, here, who—I must reiterate—only joined the team a couple of months ago. There are a several points where he looks extremely uncomfortable, the "wrap it up" moment included, but it does feel as though he was getting sniped at throughout the stream by everyone except for the enemies they were shooting at.

Take, for instance, 41:40, wherein he seems genuinely distressed, and a developer jokes that he should get them a can while he's dead: "You being down, you being up, there's no difference." The vibes are horrendous.

Community response has been appropriately sullen, take, for instance, this very much appropriate "this is fine" meme in immediate response to the debacle on the game's subreddit: "They’ve turned it into this huge deal now," writes one player, "With its own convention and regular YouTube videos promising the world, releasing ships that cost real world fortunes and making bank, all the while the most basic of functions don’t work in the game at all."

In another thread, another commenter writes: "In my opinion, some team members behaved extremely immaturely and unprofessionally during the livestream. If that reflects the company culture at CIG, then it’s hardly surprising that the company keeps running into such serious problems."

I'm sure this all bodes well for a game that has over $1 billion in cumulative funding and $5,000 ships that aren't ready to fly at the point of sale.

Blizzard principal artist and lead designer Jay Huang used to make his living creating the "props" that make up World of Warcraft's living spaces. Now he designs the systems that allow players to do the same thing with WoW's new player housing feature.

The game's recent patch 12.1, The Curse of Ula'tek, added a huge pile of new housing decor and features for players to create with. For example, it added the ability to use "blueprints," saved rooms or house interiors or exteriors, to allow novices to copy the work of player designers to use in their own spaces.

But getting started as a new creator can be intimidating when people are making literal works of art in WoW housing. Below, Huang offers his best tips for getting started as a newbie.

1. Start by finding a reference image

"Even artists like to know what something looks like," Huang says. "What exactly do you want to make? Find an example of it. Even spaceships have structures, and reasons why they're built that way." The image will help you figure out what pieces of decor you might be able to use to replicate what you see.

2. Don't judge yourself based on others' work

Blizzard's housing team has an internal sharing channel where they pass around people's amazing work, he says.

"Daily, minute-ly, people are just dropping, 'Did you see this??' We see tutorials. We see posts we can't even read, because they're in a different language. It's just awesome, and we love it," he says. It's also sometimes intimidating.

"I see a lot of TikToks where it's like, 'I liked my own build, until I saw this build. Now I feel like I want to throw my build out.' Or people are saying, 'I don't even know where to start.' Just look at a building or something that you like the vibe of, then just start trying to copy, then add your own flair to it."

Some of the rooms provided in housing are enormous, Huang says.

"Break up the space. Don't just go, 'It's a square, thusly, I need to decorate it as a square.' That's not necessarily true," he says. "Decorating an empty concept is harder than a room that's already got all these nooks and crannies that you can just put something in. It doesn't feel like you're starting from square one, a blank slate."

Some of the new artisan rooms for sale for neighborhood endeavor-task coupons in patch 12.1 help that problem by providing rooms with smaller niches to decorate. Creators have also been sharing blueprint codes usable by other players, which launched as a feature in 12.1, to create the bare bones of rooms that are already divided up or styled in a particular way.

3. Pick smaller rooms to start, and break bigger ones into smaller spaces

"Use partitions and pillars and platforms," he says. "It's thinking like Lincoln Logs or Legos—how do I use these things to break up that open-concept space? There's no wrong way to decorate, but I think sometimes it makes it harder if you go straight to the details right off the bat."

Picking smaller rooms definitely helps. "It's hard to slap in a big room and go, 'It just feels empty.' Well yeah, because you put in an auditorium, and you put one bed in there," he says.

4. Look at your reference image and figure out proportions

"If you're building a gnome house, things shouldn't feel all crazy, bulky and huge, with large open spaces. It should feel like it fits a gnome." Your image and those proportions can also help you figure out the right lighting, he says.

5. Add layers easily with repetition

"Repeating elements are a really quick way to add detail without overthinking," Huang says. "When you think of cathedrals, is it a giant empty space? No, they have pillars, and those pillars repeat, and repeat, and repeat. Where are the patterns, what are the proportions, how is it lit to get that vibe, and then what are the general colors?"

6. Limit your color palette

Speaking of colors, Huang recommends 2-4 colors maximum.

"It's really easy to just rainbow vomit all over the place, and then be like, 'Hey, why doesn't it feel cohesive?' It's because you're probably using too many colors at first. It's better to get two or three or four colors working. Then you kind of sprinkle in some of the other rainbow colors to add in that variety."

7. Even as you limit the colors, don't be scared of variety in style

"When you decorate your own house, you're not buying all your furniture from Crate and Barrel. Something's from IKEA, and it's not all the same style," he says. "They don't need to be. When you're building, they don't need to be all of the same culture. When you're decorating a Kobold space, throw a Naga thing in that Kobold thing."

8. Turn your decor upside-down

One way advanced housing players create their masterworks is by kitbashing, or combining different pieces of decor together to make new things. In Advanced Mode, you can embed objects within objects to use just the bits you need. Huang uses a statue he once created as a prop designer, now available as decor, as an example. It's a statue of a pandaren on a turtle, with a fountain.

"Somebody might go, 'Okay, this is what it is,' and they'll just slap it down as a statue," he says. "But somebody might scale it or shrink it, flip it upside down to just use the water. Look at every prop for not what it is, but what it could be. You can clip things. We gave that to you on purpose. Something clipped into something else, looks like something else."

The easiest way to start seeing what the possibilities might be are to turn decor items over and look at them from all angles.

"Use the backs of things, the bottoms, flip things upside down," Huang says. Kitbashing gives player-creators more freedom than even the game's own designers have. If designers smash things together, it's considered an "art crime"—something that takes away from the intended vibe of an object, he says.

"But our players, they can do whatever they want, because honestly—I mean, just look at the stuff they've made! It speaks for itself," Huang says.

Sneak peek: He says that developers have seen how often players like to use water effects in their creations, and they're looking for ways to make that easier.

9. Use dyes

Using the dye system lets you change the color of objects, and as a bonus, they mostly work on cheaper neighborhood-vendor items.

"Dying adds an extra element to the props, changing how they look," he says. "I've seen people take doors, mass dye them all the same color, and they turn them into wall panels or stoves."

Sneak peek: Huang says developers are looking into a way for players to turn off the interactable qualities of items like doors, so that people can make them static for uses like these.

10. When you're ready, think about turning housing into an art medium

Huang says he's incredibly impressed by the mural work that creators have made, turning WoW housing into a literal canvas featuring everything from South Park to KPop Demon Hunters, Michael Jordan to villain Xal'atath's feet.

"They're literally using it to paint things. I saw a Van Gogh. I saw the Mona Lisa. Very awesome," he says, and he encourages people to break things. Past bugs that players have exploited went on to become housing features. "We're lucky enough that this feature is not player-power driven, so we don't have to be the fun police. We're trying to always remain open."

One last sneak peek: More holiday decor is coming, he says. "We know that it is awesome to see you guys make the Christmas trees, but we have one. It's coming."

Here are my memories of EverQuest in the year 1999. Me, six years old, pondering race and class options as my father offered guidance over my shoulder. His character was a gnome magician; I did not like the idea of being short. I settled on a half-elf, possibly because they looked the most like me, and named him Karokan. Dad, perhaps, chose my class and god for me, as I remember neither.

Then West Freeport. Then paralysing, all-consuming fear. The videogame worlds I had experienced before all felt finite. EverQuest, by contrast, felt incomprehensibly vast. I was scared of dying, sure—of the dreaded corpse run—but I was more scared of simply getting lost. I felt certain that if I strayed far from the city I would plunge into a fathomless ocean of map and never return. So I spent hours fighting rats and orc centurions outside the gates, dad's efforts to coax me out further than the East Commonlands confounded. I stayed home. I loved every second (hey, I was six).

The promise of EverQuest Legends, which released late last month, is simple: you can go home again. EverQuest in its infancy has been lovingly reconstructed. Its graphics are bright and rigid, its mechanics slow-going. Its UI does not feel contiguous or, really, designed. It sits scattered across your monitor as if surprised by a gust of wind. It's EverQuest (mostly) as the old-heads remember it, not as it endures, heroically, in the year 2026.

I used to live here

The weird thing is that this has already been done. In fact, it's still being done. Project 1999 is a fantastic free-to-play version of classic EverQuest that operates with Daybreak's explicit permission. If you want to nose around the game as it was back in the day, you can do it for free. Why fork out the $20 and recurring $10 sub for Legends?

Because for most people, these are fundamentally different propositions. Project 1999 has its check-in-daily stalwarts, no doubt, but for most people it is something you sign into once, get your shot of nostalgia, and stop thinking about until you want another one about five to seven years later. For those who never touched OG EverQuest, it's a historical curiosity. You can visit home, but you probably won't stay.

Legends, meanwhile, aims to keep you there. It's original EverQuest, yes, but only mostly as you know it. No more corpse runs, a tweaked and soloable MMO experience, in-game maps(!?)—all these things and more exist to fan your nostalgic curiosity into a full-blown dedication to this revitalized 27-year-old game.

Does it work? I think so. Make no mistake: the list of people for whom EverQuest Legends is not will forever be longer than the list of people for whom it is, but Game Jawn, a new studio comprised of EverQuest fans-turned-developers, has been smart in what cruft it's cut out and what it's left in place. This EverQuest has grown kinder in its dotage—it is more prone to hand out the candy pellet of a level up and forgive your mistakes in combat.

It's a game I've found myself dipping into at lunchtimes and on idle evenings. I can take a wander, marvel at some places, think 'hey I remember that,' and slaughter enough helpless creatures to net myself a level up. It is a satisfying, undemanding loop, despite the classic MMO trappings.

At the same time, it's still crusty as hell in ways that will charm you, if you're a certain sort of person. Your walk speed is glacial, you have approximately 4,600 distinct equipment slots on your body, and the game's MUD roots are still visible right there on its face—in the way you CONSIDER potential enemies, run WHO commands to check if pals are online, and play the entire game with one eye on the chat window. It feels sometimes inscrutable but never, at least in my time with it, cruel, where the rigorously old-school experience of Project 1999 is perfectly happy to send you scuttling off naked on a corpse run.

It is an MMO for MUD enjoyers and Morrowind perverts—no longer hard, but still authentically idiosyncratic. It is for people who can't truly enjoy something that doesn't demand you wrap your mind around it first. It is a charming struggle. It is the Linux of MMOs.

There are people for whom that paragraph is practically engineered in a lab to repulse them. We call those people 'most people'. But for the rest of us? For me? Legends is probably the only kind of MMO that stands a chance of hooking me in 2026. My six-year-old self would be delighted.

I don't know if Stars Wars: The Old Republic is the best MMO around—or even the best Star Wars MMO around—but there's something to be said for keeping the party alive for nearly 15 years at this point, even as developer Broadsword took the reins from BioWare in 2023. If you miss those halcyon days when the game had just dropped, well, you might want to give the imminent 8.0 update a look.

It was revealed in a blog post that went up Thursday, and it promises a pretty standard lineup of big MMO update features: a raised level cap, more spells and phat loots to futz with, and new zones to explore in the Twi'lek homeworld Ryloth. But there's also two new systems both tackling the MMO's prickliest design conundrum: difficulty.

The first of those is a difficulty slider, which lets you pick your poison between "a cinematic story-driven journey, a more demanding combat experience, or the ultimate challenge." Notably, you can group up with friends regardless of what you've all chosen, so it'll be interesting to observe how the scaling works out there.

There's also the new "venture" characters, which operate on their own difficulty system split between classic and expert options. These characters have to start a new story from the beginning, but they'll get special rewards for completing extra objectives as they play through the game normally. It's not clear what those rewards are, but the whole thing is apparently meant to "evoke the feel of the classic SWTOR experience" back when it was slightly less easy to roll over a dozen mobs at once.

It's a neat idea, assuming it doesn't morph into some battle pass-inspired FOMO nightmare. SWTOR probably isn't so different from its old self that fans are desperate for an OSRS-style revival, but it does still have a best-in-class leveling journey let down by the fact that you can faceroll your way through a great deal of it. If the rewards are fun to pursue and objectives non-tedious, it could brush the dust off those zones and get people grouping in them again.

Disconnects are an unpleasant fact of life in an MMO, and if you play WoW long enough you'll start to recognize the telltale signs indicating one of your adventurer colleagues has fallen afoul of a network hiccup: They might simply halt in place mid-combat. If they were moving when the connection dropped, their character might proceed to run directly into a wall, or get caught in a brief loop of stuttery motion until the server has enough and logs them out.

Since WoW: Midnight's 12.1 patch dropped, however, players have started reporting some uncanny behavior from their disconnected fellows (via Kotaku). Rather than the expected unresponsiveness, disconnected characters have seemingly started to move and fight on their own.

The best available look at the phenomenon comes courtesy of redditor Stuperstrong, who shared a YouTube video on the WoW subreddit that they'd recorded of their Evoker friend disconnecting and continuing to participate in combat. In the clip, embedded above, you can see the dragon-winged Evoker exhibit the typical signs of a mid-encounter connection drop on the left side of the screen at around 39 seconds—and then they start fighting again.

The video is surprisingly unnerving: Speaking as someone who's played WoW on and off for over 20 years, there's something instinctively unsettling about seeing a player character performing actions when you've received all the visual signals that they absolutely shouldn't be. It feels wrong—and the stiff, robotic cadence of their inputs doesn't help.

Stuperstrong isn't the only one who's witnessed it. Other players responded to the thread with their own eyewitness accounts, like the brother of a warrior player whose game crashed while they were in a Discord call:

"He hung there through almost the entire boss fight we were on and then like 30 seconds into his [disconnect], his warrior charges the boss and starts hitting it," says redditor shlomo_baggins. "My brother was actively narrating his re-login. According to him his game hard locked, froze, and he ALT+F4'd and relogged in. Suuuper weird."

So who's playing when the player isn't? While this could all be an elaborate hoax, the best theory so far is that we're seeing an early manifestation of some sort of unannounced disconnect protection feature.

For a few years now, WoW has used NPC dungeon follower tech to let players run through casual content with a party of AI-controlled player characters who are—in most cases, anyway—surprisingly capable in combat. If disconnected characters are indeed starting to fight on their own, it's not unthinkable that Blizzard might have reworked that tech to keep a dropped connection from ruining a dungeon run or raid attempt for the whole group.

Either that or WoW's haunted. Blizzard hasn't yet acknowledged the phenomenon; until there's some sort of official explanation, all theories are on the table.

Back in June, RuneScape studio Jagex held its first live event outside the UK (and its biggest to date): Deadman All Stars, an Old School RuneScape PvP tournament. I had the chance to talk to OSRS creative director Kieren Charles at the event, and he explained his philosophy on running the 13 year-old fork of the 25 year-old MMO amid its new lease on life.

"The game's bigger now than it was in 2007," Charles said of RuneScape's overall health, while OSRS is now older than RuneScape was when Old School began in 2013. Last August, Old School hit an all-time player count record eclipsing any era or version of the game, and Charles estimated upwards of one million active subscribers just for Old School.

Charles himself was part of the original RuneScape phenomenon, but as a player, one of the core mid-to-late millennial cohort that made the game ubiquitous in middle schools during the golden age of MMOs. "I grew up with the game," Charles told me. "I was 14 in the school library playing RuneScape. I was just the one who never quit."

But why choose the 2007 iteration of RuneScape as a starting point? The game first launched in 2001, and had already undergone major revisions like the "RuneScape 2" update in 2004. Charles joined the OSRS team a few years after it started, but looking back, he characterized the choice as "kind of arbitrary, but based on what players deemed the sort of golden [age]."

"Players actually wanted the 2006 version, but we didn't have a copy of that version of the game," revealed Jagex senior communications manager Danni Amos. "A [Jagex employee] found the 2007 server in their desk drawer, and we had to boot it up, see if it works."

Wisdom of the crowd

Old School is, as best as I can tell, the first instance of officially-supported 'classic' servers for an MMO. The first fan servers running preserved versions of transformed or discontinued MMOs preceded it, but the likes of WoW Classic were following Jagex's lead. Charles believes that Old School's community engagement leaves it the best of both worlds when it comes to fan-managed versus official throwback MMOs.

OSRS regularly gets new content, including full-scale expansions like 2024's Varlamore. Those udpates need to match the Old School vibe, and Charles said one of the best compliments he gets is that the new stuff feels like it could have come out in '06 or '07. But all potential new additions are also put to a community vote before getting implemented, and if a feature or addition doesn't meet the 70% approval minimum, it gets scrapped.

"We are already running an MMO that's entirely decided by fans, but it's backed by a huge development team who could still do things that are at scale," said Charles. "With fan server versions, it's never going to be at the same scale. It's hard to imagine it having the number of players like you can have with an official version, nor the development support."

It's an approach he doesn't necessarily recommend to every MMO developer, and the team has had stuff rejected which "really does suck in the moment," according to Charles.

But they've reached a point where they don't bring a feature to vote unless they're confident players will dig it. Besides, Charles said he'd still rather have a proposed addition get rejected than "spend six months or a year of development time to then launch it and find out people hate it."

While many great games come about from singular, forceful artistic visions, Charles described himself and his colleagues more as caretakers. "With Old School RuneScape, it's what the community wants. We're making it for them and looking after it for them," he told me.

"I'm fortunate as a creative director to be able to inherit such a good foundation for what we do going forward. I was part of the community directly before I joined the studio. I know what that feeling is, and I want to make sure that we look after that and keep it going."

Amazon's big MMO era has taken its last gasp, as the company is ending its publishing deals for both Throne and Liberty and Lost Ark. The games themselves will continue, however: NC will take over Throne and Liberty for Western markets near the end of 2026, while Smilegate will do the same for Lost Ark in early 2027.

Little should change for players as a result of the handoffs, although a small number of details on the Throne and Liberty changeover are still being hammered out and will be announced closer to the actual transition. On the Lost Ark side, some user data will not make the transfer, including in-game mail, friends list memos and group names, guild member nicknames and memos, and chat messages and history.

The games themselves will continue to operate as they always have and will receive regular content updates leading up to the changeover, although Throne and Liberty developer FirstSpark Games warned that major updates may be held back until the transition is complete.

Swinging the axe on Lost Ark and Throne and Liberty is pretty much the final nail in the coffin containing Amazon's once-lofty gaming ambitions. The company put a pin in its home-grown MMO New World in 2025 as part of a shift away from big-budget gaming (which of course also saw major layoffs), but it continued to serve as publisher of those externally developed MMOs in the West.

Lost Ark fans started to get nervous about that arrangement earlier this year, though, as a new round of layoffs in March impacted Amazon's Lost Ark team. In light of that, this outcome is probably good news.

This is normally where I'd embed the Courtroom Chaos Starring Snoop Dogg trailer to remind everyone what Amazon Games is now focusing its efforts on. But while poking around for more information on these MMO handovers, I came across something new, and possibly worse, and I now inflict it upon you:

Across the ages, theorists and theologians have wrestled with an irreconcilable question: Is free will an inherent capacity of the human soul, or a misapprehension of things predetermined and divine? Is it a unique function of the human animal, or an illusory quirk of cognition bound by circumstance and necessity?

If free will is indeed a figment of our moral imagination, how then do we account for the rare and heroic few who—by wielding their own agency—ascend to heights that shame those of us left toiling in mundanity and mediocrity? How do we answer for the likes of Old School RuneScape player Bosby, who this week entered the annals of history after successfully maxing out his fishing skill using the least efficient possible method in a grind that took over two years?

Bosby first reported his achievement three days ago on the /r/2007scape subreddit. There, he presented a screenshot of the moment when, after 27 months of grinding skill experience, his account OnlyShrimp99 attained level 99 in the fishing skill by exclusively fishing at the lowest-level, least-rewarding fishing spots in the game.

In his Reddit post, Bosby said he "started out thinking it would just be something funny to do and ended up having the dedication to see it through." After Bosby took up the task on May 11, 2024, the grind demanded a total of 4,304 hours, during which he caught 275,196 raw shrimp and 257,064 raw anchovies—collectively worth approximately 9.5 million gold using current OSRS market prices.

To be clear, there is absolutely no reason for Bosby, or anyone else, to do this. It's just, you know, a lot of clicking, with being able to say you did it the only reward. But Bosby says he gained plenty along the way: During the grind, he "started a new job, got married, and made lots of friends"—including "a lot of cool people at the Al Kharid fishing spot."

Once rumor of his triumph started circulating on social media, RuneScape developer Jagex offered Bosby its own congratulations: "Congrats on the only small net 99 Fishing, Bosby," Jagex wrote on X. "Our data team has verified your accomplishment." The studio also commemorated the historic feat by posting a little picture of a shrimp on a computer, which is cute.

Bosby, meanwhile, has received his newly-won folk hero status with humility. "This is getting entirely too much attention lol," he wrote on X. "It's tiring."

Glory is a heavy burden. We at PC Gamer send Bosby our own congratulations, and hope that he can soon return to carefree days of posting about cool bug Pokémon and the restorative magic of a good burger.

Given the current state of the industry elsewhere—it's, uh, dire—I'm pleased to report that Square Enix, creator of the Final Fantasy series among other games, is doing pretty alright, all things considered. The news comes as a result of a financial results report, shared here by Gamebiz.jp (and translated by Automaton).

In the fiscal year ending 2027, ol' Square saw a major 88.6% operating profit increase year-on-year, mostly thanks to its videogame business—which itself saw its operating profit increase by 91.8% and its revenue by 51.8%. That's mainly due to Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth, which is finally meeting some expectations, one would surmise.

What's interesting to me is the footnote that Final Fantasy 14—a game whose popularity had been struggling with the somewhat-stagnant formula of Dawntrail, with an unofficial (but consistent and long-standing) census reporting a significant downturn back in June 2025— experienced an uptick in players in that same census earlier this year.

As a player of the game myself, I'm willing to call the shots on a few reasons why this is happening—first up, the actual content that Creative Studio 3's putting out has been markedly improved, with lessons learnt from the disaster of Forked Tower.

The developer has shifted from an outdated casual/hardcore divide to a more modern, scaling approach to difficulty—with the deep dungeon Pilgrim's Traverse having a scalable endgame fight, the expansion's one (and only) variant dungeon having a midcore "advanced" version, and the North Horn's version of the Forked Tower being more accessible, with an extreme version to boot.

Basically, Square's using more of the buffalo, which leads to far fewer perceived dips in patch cadence, even if the amount of stuff to do is still the same by volume. Then there's the Evercold announcements—revamped "evolved" jobs, a similarly midcore difficulty for its raid series, a complete rethinking of the tomestone system for a more seasonal structure.

Whether or not that all sounds appealing to you, change is vital for keeping an old girl like FF14 chugging along. Square Enix seems to think so, too—as the report mentions that, despite this uptick in players, FF14 actually only saw a slight profit increase because of the money the developer's actually spending on it to get Evercold ready for 2027.

Which makes me genuinely hopeful, given the sensation I've felt that FF14's development team has been on a shoestring budget for years—despite being Square's very own cash generator. It's understandable to siphon off a little bit of money from the consistent projects so you can experiment, don't get me wrong, but I couldn't help feeling a little miserly in recent years when "cost" was cited as a factor in certain missteps.