World bosses have been a part of the World of Warcraft player's diet since classic—in case you haven't played the game, what separates a world boss from any other raid encounter is the fact that it's (self-explanatorily) out in the world, something you need to party up to defeat without going into a cave somewhere.

That's changing with WoW's next patch, Curse of Ula'tek, as world bosses are shifting to a "lair" format. Essentially, they'll function like one-boss delves with larger groups—that also gives them the benefit of having scaling difficulties, all the way up to 15-25 man Mythic. You can queue up for them like you would any other dungeon.

I got to speak with lead encounter designer Taylor Sanders about plans for patch 12.1 about why Blizzard's chosen to experiment with world bosses in particular: "So historically, world bosses go all the way back, right, to like the green dragons and the Lord Kazzaks and stuff that many players know and love from Classic and beyond.

"Lately, we found in recent updates and recent expansions that these experiences have really been a little bit lackluster… A lot of players just cluster into a boss. It drops in a few moments. In the worst case, you might have to hop between servers to find a group where maybe the boss is up or the boss is attackable."

I can't say I disagree with Sanders, here—while there's a simple joy in joining an ongoing zerg rush, it's not as though I'm engaging with the games' systems beyond just pushing my buttons when I'm whacking one of these things. There might, on occasion, be an AoE I need to dodge or something, but I couldn't tell you one modern world bosses' mechanics from another.

That's mostly because of changing assumptions about difficulty. Some of those classic world bosses are iconic because they were allowed to be tough, or have punishing mechanics that required coordination to avoid—but because world content in WoW has now become part of casual play, those mechanics just wouldn't work for folks trying to get their dailies.

Imagine if, for instance, a world boss in retail had Lord Kazzak's "Capture Soul" ability, wherein if he kills anybody he heals for 70,000 HP—around 10% of his health. You'd never kill the dang thing.

"Going into the Curse of Ula'tek update," Sanders adds, "We really wanted to reimagine what a world boss could really be and try to make sure that if you are engaging with a world boss, you're having—not only an accessible experience, but you're also having a reasonable combat experience and you have a fun time fighting a boss."

The experience of finding a group itself has changed, too—again, back in the day, you'd meticulously recruit folks from either your guild or general chat. Your average non-Classic MMO player doesn't have the appetite for that sort of thing anymore, so modern WoW uses a streamlined looking for group interface where you can register for groups.

Only, the depersonalisation of that means, as Sanders points out, you can join just as a world boss is dying, or when it's at 5% HP, or something—it does, admittedly, feel janky: "We're hoping that this can get players out of the interface of trying to find a different group … To help players through that process, so they can just get in and get fighting the creature and get their loot faster."

Not that it doesn't have trade-offs. Again, there's something pleasingly chaotic and distinctly MMO about joining a mess of particle effects, or stumbling across a group already doing a raid boss—and that'll be lost if lairs become the way of doing things: "It's very rare that when you're designing something new, or trying to create a new experience for players, that you don't have trade-offs. One of the trade-offs is that sense of coming upon something where you're in the midst of the action, right? Or you're coming upon an event that is in progress.

"But we really felt like that was a good trade-off for us to make, to lose that aspect of it, if players are going to have a better combat experience against the encounter."

It's always a fascinating bit of tension, to me—MMOs are in their nature an evolving genre, mostly in how their playerbases evolve with them. The rigid hardcore/casual divide is a thing of the past, and it seems to me that the state of WoW's world bosses were a symptom of that—an attempt to make something that was for ambitious raiders part of casual content. Now it's all on a sliding scale.

World of Warcraft calling curtains on combat-based UI mods (AddOns) has been a bit of a mixed bag—while I'm personally more than fine having a class I don't need constant auditory pings and klaxons to play, there have been some missing functionalities and hiccups along the way.

One element of this is, at least, somewhat understandable: Blizzard isn't able to pre-empt every customization desire of its playerbase with nearly the same rapidity that an enthusiastic modding community will, which was one of my fears back when Blizzard first announced it.

The tuning-down has been twofold: Firstly, Blizzard's been gradually adding extra utilities to its new base UI offerings—for example, the upcoming Patch 12.1 will let you keep track of potions and trinkets with its cooldown tracker. But other changes create a lot more leniency with what mod authors can do.

As explained here by WoWHead, Blizzard's API—the set of functions the studio purposefully provides to mod authors in the client itself—will be allowing AddOns to "read" buffs and debuffs. This means that WeakAuras—a widespread AddOn that was discontinued after Midnight took the axe to it—is back. Well, in spirit.

The mod allowed players to create a set of custom alerts that could trigger on a programmable set of "if > then" statements. For instance, my Outlaw Rogue's "Roll the Bones" ability had a bunch of optimisations that a WeakAura automated for me, making a loud bleep whenever it was time to push the button again.

It'll be much diminished from its former glory days, though. Players will only be able to track debuffs on enemies, and buffs on allies—as opposed to the pre-Midnight state of affairs where you could track buffs and debuffs on anybody. This should, in theory, prevent WeakAura-style mods being developed to solve boss encounters.

Still, it's a major jump in power for what post-Midnight combat AddOns can do, and it's one of Blizzard's biggest concessions yet. Now, that could just be based on Blizzard's own objectives with its UI shifting—a hint that we might be getting more powerful Cooldown Manager options natively that simply didn't make it in time for this patch.

But it does grind up a little against the mission statement of these changes. That being, not giving AddOn users explicit advantages over players using the vanilla UI. Like it or not, what'll now be offered by WeakAura-lite addons, such as Northern Sky Raid Tools, will give you finer control over the alerts displayed on your screen—which could make the management of a lot of classes a lot easier.

I'm about to say something controversial—I don't actually think grinds in MMOs are all that bad. There's a bit of a wider resistance to the idea of having to grind for anything in a modern online game, a resistance to the very concept, even. We've all certainly got less time than in the days of attunement questlines.

But that doesn't mean an MMO can be entirely grindless, right? Depending on how you define the term, after all. They're, typically speaking, RPGs—RPGs have levels, slow-burn goals to achieve, and so on. For the sake of ease, let's just define a grind as a repetitive activity you need to do many times in a role to achieve a goal.

Even then, has that sort of thing been entirely stamped out? Not exactly. We aren't quite at EverQuest levels of quests being rare breaks from the eternal mobbing, but those archetypal grinds have morphed into new forms. Battle-pass like reward tracks, seasons, world quests, or, in the case of Final Fantasy 14, relic weapons.

I recently had to sprint to catch up on my relic weapon step, which required me to gather a bunch of crystal paste from dungeons. If you're unfamiliar with FF14—basically, I had to get 600 of a thing to get a cool weapon, if you've played an MMO you recognise the kind of activity I'm describing. You've been there.

Given I wanted to hop into the patches' new content and start working towards my next step right away, I looked up the easiest way to get it, and it turned out to be grinding low-level dungeons. I settled in with some snacks, put on a playlist, and you know what? I had a lovely time.

It was completely mindless, sure. Absolutely none of my technical skills were challenged at any point. But as I bobbed my head to some tunes and pressed my 1-2-3 rotations, I felt a familiar zen wash over me, a kind of mindless fog that left me feeling rejuvenated. More to the point, I wondered if I actually minded grinding at all. Maybe I just had to get into the right grindset—sorry, mindset.

That's not to say I have a newfound tolerance, or anything. I don't think I could go back to the days where the only way to level involved copious amounts of mob-whacking in the same open fields. But I have to wonder if some grinding in an MMO can be good for it. Like getting enough fibre in your diet.

But what do you think? Do you like zoning out and making some (in the greater scheme of things) meaningless numbers go up for a few hours? Or does the very concept of busywork in your MMO fill you with apoplectic gamer rage? You can answer via the poll below, but I'd also be keen to hear your opinions in the comments, as well.

In its 22 years since launch, WoW has gradually accumulated an elaborate ecosystem of metrics and simulation tools allowing players to analyze and optimize their combat performance. That ecosystem grew so elaborate, in fact, that Blizzard ultimately opted—with somewhat mixed results—to restrict how much combat data community developers could access so the studio can design encounters around the capabilities of its players and not their addons.

But according to former WoW designer Wyatt Cheng, not even Blizzard had a good way to know what peak player performance data looked like in the MMO's early days. In a YouTube short, Cheng said designing vanilla WoW raid bosses in the absence of comprehensive player combat data required the tried-and-true method of manually grinding training dummies. And then rounding up. Just to be safe.

Cheng outlined the design process for Patchwerk, the flesh golem boss added as part of the Naxxramas raid in June 2006. Patchwerk, Cheng said, was inspired by ex-Blizzard director Jeff Kaplan's fondness for the Avatar of War raid boss in Everquest—an encounter that was, essentially, just a test of fundamentals.

"As Jeff remembered it, [Avatar of War] wasn't too fancy. It just hit you really hard," Cheng said. "Tanks tanking, healers healing, DPS doing their thing—all the excitement of the Avatar of War was based on how tightly it was tuned. And he had a theory that a boss like that in World of Warcraft could be really exciting, too."

Cheng added a little bit of variety to that core concept, designing Patchwerk to alternate his attacks between main tanks and off tanks to keep healers on their toes. Unfortunately, that produced an issue: It incentivized raid groups to trivialize the fight by stacking as many healers as possible and slowly whittling away Patchwerk's health bar.

Thus, the Enrage timer was born. Patchwerk, Cheng said, "was the first time we used an Enrage timer as an explicit DPS check." Players had to take Patchwerk down before a fixed amount of time passed or he'd start pumping out lethal damage and wipe the group—a mechanic that's now a fixture of WoW boss design.

The Enrage mechanic, however, introduced another complication: To know how much boss-killing time to give players, you have to know how much damage they're capable of. And Blizzard, well, didn't.

"Back in those days, there just wasn't robust data on how much DPS a player could realistically put out. This was before World of Logs," Cheng said, referencing an early, now-defunct destination for WoW analytics that's been followed by generations of successors.

Without a corpus of player combat data, Blizzard worked out its DPS threshold with some manual number collection and a bit of napkin math.

"We had top players in the company test every single class against target dummies to try and put out as much damage as possible," Cheng said. "And then, because we knew that serious raiders always find clever ways to push the game to its limits, we padded Patchwerk's health by an extra 30%, just for good measure."

Evidently, Blizzard's estimate was on the mark. Surviving threads from 2006 have raiders describing Patchwerk as "a pure mathematical gearcheck": punishing if your raid group's gear or DPS was lacking, but straightforward if you could keep the pace.

2006 was a simpler time—but I'm sure Blizzard has built their own tools for simulating the necessary metrics in the years since. For their sake, if not ours.

Dungeons & Dragons has been publishing rules for other settings going way back, with Conan adventures in 1984 and Lankhmar – City of Adventure in 1985. Even further back in 1980, the first printing of Deities & Demigods included stats for gods from Michael Moorcock's Elric stories and H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos. It's even collaborated with Blizzard on a line of Diablo supplements to tie in with the release of Diablo 2.

So it's not too shocking that the first official Dungeons & Dragons crossover book released as part of its Universes Beyond line (borrowing the name from Magic: The Gathering, where crossovers have been big earners) will be about World of Warcraft. Especially since the news already leaked over the weekend.

The announcement was formalized at this year's Gen Con, where Wizards of the Coast put on a D&D Vision Keynote 2027 presented by Theo Solomon (who played Wyll in Baldur's Gate 3). We'll be getting a 256-page hardcover book with rules for 11 new species, 9 subclasses (6 of them new, 3 updated versions of existing characters), 50+ new monsters, 60+ new spells, 23 factions, 7 dungeons, 26 magic items including artifacts, and stat blocks for various popular characters from across Azeroth.

Which sounds like everything you need to play World of Warcraft with your friends in the absence of an internet connection. Preorders for the book open on July 30, and it'll be available in early access from November 3 and in wide release on November 17.

Old School RuneScape's had a content update this week—Wyrmscraig, an island designed by a player that has a new quest, a repeatable boss, a cool sword, and so on. All the neat little additions you'd expect out of a patch. But some players have been running into an obstacle. Or rather, getting stuck between two obstacles. And by obstacles I mean shorelines.

See, there's a dungeon called Wyrmscraig Cavern that can be entered by sea via the game's sailing skill—but the river leading up to it is pretty narrow. And given sailing in OSRS actually simulates the turning time required for steering (in that you need to actually be moving forward to steer your boat), it's very possible to get stuck.

"My friend got legit stuck in this spot unable to move and then 20+ people gathered around to watch and crack jokes," writes user Joseei on the game's subreddit. That same thread is filled with other examples of players getting their sloops wedged between the shorelines while dozens of players jeer from the beach.

Though my favourite is by far the one shown above, where some poor sod writes "helmp mee." I've been there, buddy. Not literally, but spiritually? I've been there.

The hilarious thing is, an NPC actually warns players about this possibility. During the island's questline, Fallen From Grace, an NPC named Cormac warns: "don't make the same mistake they did. Make sure t' use something on the smaller side, else you'll get into trouble on the rocks."

As a matter of fact, the OSRS wiki page for Wyrmscraig Cavern also notes: "The cave leading to it is too small for a sloop to be navigated here, though a sloop can still be docked via the Summon Boat spell in order to utilise Teleport to Boat."

That clearly hasn't stopped these poor individuals from trying, though. And it's nice to see the first skill OSRS has added in yonks contribute to the game in an aptly hilarious way. There's just something about Old School RuneScape screenshots that tickles me pink. They're the perfect vessel for antics.

If you're a WoW Classic player, you might want to tread carefully if you're leveling in certain parts of Kalimdor. As reported by players over on Reddit (via WoWHead), the latest patch seems to have caused piles of bugged enemies to spawn beneath the ground in a specific spot in the Stonetalon Mountains, posing a lethal threat to unsuspecting players.

It's particularly dangerous for unaware hardcore players like redditor Party-Signature-8700, who uploaded a video of their undead warrior nearly meeting a permanent end by straying too close to the hidden pileup of bugged assailants and escaping with just a sliver of health. While the bug might be threatening players in 2026, we can probably blame it on a quirk of WoW's programming that's over 20 years old.

If we look closely, we can find some details that indicate there's more going on here than a mundane case of a few mobs inadvertently clipping through the geometry. In the cluster of nameplates captured in the redditors' videos and screenshots linked above, you'll see mobs that you typically wouldn't find in the Stonetalon Mountains—mobs like Drywallow Daggermaws and Muckshell Clackers, which spawn in the higher level Dustwallow Marsh region.

So how did they end up underground in Stonetalon? For some WoW veterans, the location of the bug might serve as a tip-off. For the rest of us, understanding what's likely happening will require a brief lesson in WoW's design history.

While later iterations introduced all sorts of server sharding architecture, each server in WoW's early incarnations operated one large, shared instance for each of its continental landmasses. That's why, once you logged in, you could walk from one end of Kalimdor to the other without hitting a loading screen.

For the game to function, the server had to know where each of its NPCs were at any given moment, tracking their position on a massive, continent-wide coordinate plane. But what if there's a hiccup? What if the server loses track of where an enemy or entity is meant to be? In WoW's case, it would simply dump that entity at the region's point of origin at coordinate (0, 0, 0).

Before it was blown up, spliced back together, and revised across expansions, Kalimdor's point of origin happened to be just below the ground in Stonetalon Mountains.

That's why there are plenty of surviving posts online from players who inexplicably found their characters placed near a Stonetalon Mountains graveyard after suffering a disconnect during a zeppelin flight over Kalimdor—a familiar memory for those of us who played with less-than-stellar internet service doing WoW's early years. Because the character was in motion and airborne during the network hiccup, the server wouldn't gamble with trying to guess where they're meant to be, and instead shoved them to a safe spot near (0, 0, 0) on the coordinate plane.

On WoW Classic servers today, the latest patch is likely creating some sort of fumbled positioning logic or networking errors, causing its servers to lose track of where mobs across Kalimdor are meant to be and punting them to Stonetalon as a fallback. And when that keeps happening, you end up with an underground pile of angry crocodiles and lobster men waiting to ambush unwary characters.

A hotfix and server reset will likely clear the whole thing up soon. Until then, if you're passing through Boulderslide Ravine, make sure you've got a defensive cooldown ready.

Final Fantasy 14's latest patch has dropped, and it's introduced the North Horn—the next and final step in this expansion's "exploration zone", which has been a much-needed boon to the feeling of jolly cooperation I'm trying to get out of an MMO. This expansion is an entirely new map, filled with new Phantom Jobs to level up, critical engagements to grind, and carrots to discover.

It's also got a horrifying milk dimension tucked under it. You know. A normal thing that FF14 zones usually have.

Tucked away in the center of the map, and only accessible through a series of winding, sloped tunnels guarded by high-level mobs (I had to use my Ninja's sneak ability to get in), the aptly-named "dark territory" is flush with enemies I'm nowhere near enough of a grinding freak to solo yet.

I was, however, able to get a few screenshots before I forgot I didn't have sneak on and was subsequently merked—and in the murky depths we can clearly see horrifying, arm-swarmed structures reaching out into the inky blackness.

The actual lore of the zone, shared here courtesy of ffxivcollect, is neat as heck, too: "Far beneath the unhallowed hamlet lies a space steeped in Darkness. Claimed as a domain by vicious voidsent, the area suffers from the corrupting influence of another realm, its structures and even the very ground eroded into an unknown substance.

"It should be noted that, for voidsent, the term 'domain' holds two meanings: either a tract of existing land treated as territory, or—in the case of more powerful entities—a dimension entirely of their own making. The latter is believed to share fundamental characteristics with magical barriers, yet despite years of extensive research, their inner workings remain a mystery."

As some on the game's subreddit have noted, the zone bares a striking resemblance to Promyvion, a zone from Final Fantasy 11 that has a similar aesthetic of inky-black nothingness grounded only by ruined, dilapidated structures clinging to a lonely few rocks in the void.

It's a strikingly creepy little secret, and something I'd love to see more of from Square Enix going forward—while Dawntrail's improved outdoor zones' sense of scope and scale, especially thanks to the shiny new graphical update, Square hasn't always done the best job encouraging people to go out and explore it. But if there are cool little secrets like this tucked away, I might be more inclined to hoof it and see what's out there.

Call me delusional, but I think I—well, a collection of sharp eyes from the Final Fantasy 14 community—have cracked what Final Fantasy 14: Evercold's next job is going to be. We were introduced to the Bastion during the latest fanfest, but we've still got one more job to go—a job we happen to know is a ranged physical dps.

Pardon me while I gather my corkboard and red string—I'll be starting off with the strongest evidence to the weaker stuff, but I think you can make a compelling case that the job will be some sort of bird tamer with a crossbow. Firstly, because of lead composer and sound director Masayoshi Soken's tease at the fanfest, clipped here by Reddit user ParvatiLikeaRockstar.

In the first clip, we hear a magical charge-up, a click—like a crossbow string latching or being fired—and then an explosion. In the second, we very clearly hear a bird assailing an enemy, and more sounds akin to something being fired.

In the recently-extended trailer itself, we see a miqo'te named Visna being harassed by her pet bird while checking a wand-like object for flaws. She flinches, touches the tip of the wand, and it explodes into a rune—a rune that looks suspiciously like a job stone symbol and, if you squint at it right, bears a resemblance to a crossbow.

Then there's the "wand" itself—which I think is more likely to actually be a magic crossbow bolt. It has a sharp tip, and it activates when Visna touches it—which would make sense for something that's meant to be fired into an enemy and detonate on impact.

While Visna's connection to the noises Soken shared is pretty obvious in case of the bird, have a careful listen to the explosion that happens at 2:59, then the explosion from the first sound clip from Soken—they sound very familiar.

The crossbow link's also tied to the potential job itself. It's a ranged physical dps, which means it'll need a physical weapon of some kind—and while it's not out of pocket to suggest that you could have a job entirely built around hucking a bird at people, it's a FF14 job, which means it'll need a physical weapon that can be crafted and found, and I somehow don't think blacksmiths will be synthesising full birds anytime soon.

It also makes further sense that a bird will be included because of Evercold's ties to Norse mythology—in which birds are pretty dang prevalent. There's Veðrfölnir, a hawk that sits between the eyes of an unnamed eagle at the top of the world tree—and Visna's bird has a hooked beak, sharing that in common with both hawks and eagles.

And now the most conspiratorial of evidence—told you I was saving the weakest for last. A few months ago, there was a bugged lalafell jump animation, which you can see in action below courtesy of Reddit user BruohWK.

This video on X also shows the lalafell seemingly holding something from beneath in one hand, while having a hand on the trigger in the other. And given there aren't any existing jobs in the game that use, say, a rifle, there could be a shadow of a chance that this is an animation from the new job that got mixed up in the files somewhere. Maybe.

Throw all that evidence together, and it's looking incredibly likely that the new job will be a falconer with some kind of crossbow—there is also the off-chance they might use a boomerang, based on director Naoki Yoshida's traditional t-shirt hint of "guess who's back?" Though that could just as easily be referring to the eagle/hawk/falcon returning to the user. Avian mysteries abound.

This year's Gen Con event is one Wizards of the Coast has said it's "pulling out all the stops for", with a keynote to be hosted by Theo Solomon (who played Wyll in Baldur's Gate 3) including a bunch of announcements about what's coming up for Dungeons & Dragons. One release seems to have been leaked early: a crossover with World of Warcraft.

According to a news post on virtual tabletop Roll20 that has since been removed (you can find it on RPG site EN World), we can expect Warcraft to get at least a setting book for D&D 5th edition, as a couple of Magic: The Gathering worlds have previously.

This wouldn't be the first collaboration between Blizzard and D&D. Around the time of Diablo 2 there were several official books by Wizards of the Coast adapting the world of Sanctuary to D&D's rules. Later there was a World of Warcraft RPG using D&D's 3rd edition, though that was published under the terms of the Open Gaming Licence by White Wolf, the publisher responsible for Vampire: The Masquerade (which also has a D&D crossover in the works).

I can see why die-hard WoW fans might enjoy having a version of D&D with rules for playing a tauren or whatever, but Warcraft has always been so close to D&D I'm not sure I need a whole rulebook explaining its slightly different version of elves and whatnot. At least Diablo's heavy metal vibes made for a different-feeling kind of fantasy, but Warcraft is as generic as they come.

Gen Con runs from July 30 to August 2, and I'm sure it'll include some announcements more interesting than this. Maybe this will be the year they finally pull the trigger on bringing back Dark Sun or Birthright, or even give us an Al-Qadim book?

Fantasy RPGs have become too comfortable with delivering the expected gaggle of familiar character concepts. Archers, monks, paladins, you know the drill. I've seen it all before! Give me, I don't know, a Viking that shoots triple-barreled laser guns out of its dual shields, which also have metal claws, you know? Final Fantasy 14 knows what I'm talking about—down to the last detail, in fact.

Indeed, the first new job to be introduced as part of the Evercold is just that: the bastion, a main tank that blocks, shoots, and stabs all with the same instrument. Those dual weapons, "known as skyltborg," seem to be entirely new to the Final Fantasy setting, though they are reminiscent of Rhitahtyn Arvina's supersized gunshields. Granted, most of my experience with that setting is through Kingdom Hearts, but I know I would have remembered if Mickey Mouse picked a pair of these up at any point.

The teaser trailer shows off some of its combat animations, and as is FF14 tradition, they're extravagant and accompanied by some badass electronic rock. The roegadyn in the trailer lifts himself into the air to fire laser blasts and uppercut his foe—it looks cool when he does it, but I'm reserving judgment until I've seen how ridiculous a lalafell looks doing all these same animations. Game director Yoshi-P certainly pulled the look off, showing up to the Berlin Fan Festival in full bastion cosplay, as players shared on X.

Notably, the bastion will only be playable in evolved mode, the pruned battle system coming as part of Evercold. More expansion details will come later this year during the Tokyo Fan Festival, and the full thing is set to launch January 2027.

As someone who writes guides for a living, I'm always hopping between different games, riding the ever-rolling wave of live service updates, DLC, and new releases that define our industry. I've dipped my toes into all sorts of MMOs over the years, but amidst the constant barrage of games, only one ended up sticking around for me, and that was Destiny 2.

I loved its gunplay, seasonal structure, and over the years I came to adore its dungeons and raids, sinking over 3,000 hours into grinding and playing with clan-mates. But then, it came to an end. It wasn't a particularly graceful end—it hadn't been in a good place for a while and it stopped midway through a narrative arc that was supposed to sustain the game for years.

At least stripped of its live service shackles, Destiny 2 retains its charm, and most of all, it is still playable. But there's a sense that, beyond the new content added in the final update, that's all she wrote.

So this week I'm asking: Have you ever said goodbye to an MMO you've played for a huge chunk of time? The commitment that this genre necessitates fosters a special kind of investment, both in material terms and in experiences raiding and dungeoneering with clan mates. It's well documented that people make lifelong friends (and often enemies) in MMOs and even meet marital partners—something that was definitely the case with Destiny.

How do you say farewell to a game that can mean so much? Maybe you've played MMOs so long that you've become inured to the idea of their end. Is it easy for you to find another MMO to take part in and start anew? Or is it never quite the same?

I'm partly asking out of curiosity, but also as someone who's invested a vast quantity of time in a single MMO that doesn't really have any truly comparable competitors. Maybe your favorite MMO ending can be a good thing? I certainly have a lot more time for other stuff now I'm not grinding power or gear I want.

For my part, at least, I'm planning to take a break and then check out Guild Wars 3 when it rolls around. We've got a fair few GW2 players on-site who rave about it, but the idea of being on the ground floor for a new MMO is a lot more appealing to me.

Still, a small part of me actually felt a sense of relief when Destiny 2 ended. Not all MMO partings are to do with the game ending, after all, but must also sometimes be about realising you can no longer justify the time you're sinking into them. Either way, share your thoughts and solidarity with MMO bereavement in the comments.

The Blizzard developer who was caught using World of Warcraft game master (GM) abilities to insta-kill two bosses for some friends has been fired from the studio.

Earlier this week, a Reddit user posted combat logs of a Mythic+ dungeon where a boss with almost full health died instantly to a GM ability. Not long after, another Reddit user found evidence that the GM did the same thing to a boss earlier in the run.

One of the players who was present for the unauthorized intervention then went onto a Twitch stream and admitted to asking their GM friend to cheat so they wouldn't have to redo the dungeon: "I go to my GM friend and I'm like bro please can you do me a solid? This thing has 20 million [health] bro, can you please just one-shot it?"

The only way for the GM to kill the bosses on command would've been if they were spectating the run, which is pretty uncommon these days, to the point that most people were surprised GMs still existed when they heard the story. Most customer service problems are solved on Blizzard's website instead of in-game. The only times GMs need to be on-call like this is when players are testing raid fights on PTR or competing in the world first raid races.

Because of this, many people were speculating that this wasn't an isolated incident and worried that GM friends could've been secretly assisting with other Mythic+ runs. According to Blizzard, that's not the case. "We can confirm that this was the action of a single Blizzard employee, in violation of our Code of Conduct," community manager Randy "Kaivax" Jordan wrote in a forum post today.

Blizzard says it will also be "taking action against the player accounts that were complicit in this violation." There's been a lot of speculation from the community, but it is not clear how many people were aware of the GM in the group.

"It has always been the case that a small number of Blizzard employees can use developer tools and spells on live servers: this lets us test and make urgent fixes to the live game when they’re needed," Kaivax says. "Every use of these internal spells and commands on live realms is logged and shared with our Platform Security team to help ensure that the occasional use of this access is warranted. The use of development tools for anything other than development work is against company policy. It's because of the process we have in place around use of these tools that we're confident this incident was isolated to one individual."

Even though the Mythic+ dungeon wasn't a particularly notable one—the players just wanted to finish it for a title—the record of it has been disqualified by ranking site Raider.io. You can, however, still go and look at what went down.

A cheating scandal has erupted in the World of Warcraft community after a Blizzard developer was caught using special game master (GM) abilities to kill two bosses for some friends. The GM seemingly didn't realize that one of the players was recording combat logs of the whole thing.

Late on Tuesday, Reddit user Acrobatic_Pianist688 posted evidence of the GM's meddling on the WoW subreddit. Their post links to a combat log that shows a non-player ability called "Area Death (TEST)" being used to instantly kill a boss with nearly 90% of its health left. Not long after, a commenter on the thread found the GM using a separate insta-kill ability on a boss earlier in the run, too.

Surprisingly, one of the players from the accused group went onto a Twitch stream to talk about what happened. When streamer Yumytv asked them to explain, they said they were just short of finishing the Mythic+ dungeon in time to get a seasonal title when they called for help from their GM friend: "I go to my GM friend and I'm like bro please can you do me a solid? This thing has 20 million [health] bro, can you please just one-shot it?"

The player went on to say that they don't care if Blizzard disqualifies the Mythic+ run and revokes their title because they believe "it was harmless."

"I didn't expect him to do it," they said. "In hindsight, he shouldn't have done it. He was just doing me a solid."

World of Warcraft community manager Randy "Kaivax" Jordan acknowledged the situation in the original Reddit thread, saying Blizzard is looking into it. "Thank you to those who flagged this," he wrote. "We are reviewing and will take action as appropriate."

The dungeon run has been disqualified on Mythic+ dungeon ranking site Raider.io, but can still be viewed for posterity.

Part of the reason the player thought it wasn't a big deal is that it's a relatively low-level Mythic+ run, which they referred to as a "homework key". They seemingly thought it would go unnoticed, but didn't account for the fact that many Mythic+ players regularly record runs to compare them online.

Many WoW players are skeptical that the full story has been told. The WoW GM had to have been spectating the run using special tools to be able to kill the boss on command. WoW GMs aren't supposed to watch runs casually; it's normally reserved for PTR raid testing and world first races, where Blizzard developers can fix bugs directly to keep things moving.

I've asked Blizzard if it's made any progress on its investigation and will update this post if it responds.

Earlier this month, Microsoft gutted The Elder Scrolls Online, with 379 staff across ZeniMax gone. And this is the second time it's happened in two years. As Harvey and I put it a few weeks ago, ESO's developers deserved better. The developer, now claiming to be the same size it was 10 years ago (similar to id Software), has just debuted ESO's new seasonal structure but will have to continue carving that path with reduced capabilities.

Mere weeks after these layoffs, and we're already seeing their effects. Community manager Kevin Gbolie posted an update on the ESO forums outlining updates to the Crown Store, the game's premium cash shop.

"To help manage workload, we have decided to remove the Web Crown Store from the official elderscrollsonline.com website on Wednesday, July 22," Gbolie explains. "The ability to acquire crowns via the website will remain and, of course, this does not affect the items that will be offered on the Crown Store in The Elder Scrolls Online, you will just need to login into the game to view and purchase the latest offerings."

"Furthermore, for the same reason, the monthly Crown Store Showcase blog will also change."

It's ironic that, to combat the increased workload with fewer staff, ZeniMax has been forced to close the web version of the cash shop (forcing you to log into the game instead) and downsize the monthly promotional blog. It's unclear how the blog specifically will change going forward, but Gbolie notes that "due to team bandwidth … [the blog will] be more list-like than anything else."

In the comments, Gbolie discussed how these blogs were key to building the community Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages wiki for the game, since they included high-resolution screenshots of items.

"The goal is to provide what we can. Especially because we know folks like UESP do use those shots," Gbolie says. "But to be blunt, the team responsible for the blog and those screenshots doesn't have the capacity to provide those at the scale we could before. But we will provide what we can for now and adjust from there."

It's sad to see Xbox's heavy-handed layoffs not just see ZeniMax's promising Project Blackbird MMO cancelled, but its current game—my most played game of all time—struggling under the pressure too.

If hell is other people, heaven might just be Erenshor—assuming you like old-school MMOs in the style of EverQuest, anyway. It's very much that style of game, but in a simulated solo world where other 'players' are just computer-controlled NPCs called simplayers. You can even party up and form a guild with them, which will come in handy now that raids are live.

They arrived last Monday in the Planar March patch, and solo developer Brian of Burgee Media called it "the biggest day for Erenshor since its launch" in the Steam community release blog.

"When I promised raids I had no idea how the heck I was going to implement it. It sort of hung over my head like an intimidating shadow until I finally dove into it," he wrote. "With the help of the amazing community of testers, all of your feedback, and a few really late nights, it's here!"

There are four raid zones, as well as 21 new bosses to kill in exchange for fat loots. You can create raid teams in the guild menu and they'll automatically join when you start the instance—no stopping to wait for someone to pay the pizza guy or head back to a capital city so they can repair all their broken gear, I imagine.

As a lifelong MMO casual who struggles to make time for raid night, this sounds like a dream come true simply for the convenience factor. I do wonder how Erenshor will retain the difficulty and sense of scale you get in an online raid without making you wrangle several dozen real people's schedules and manually ensure they all know what their class does, but considering this is based on the pre-World of Warcraft world of MMOs, I'm sure there's plenty of glorious grinding and dying in store anyway.

It seems like Erenshor has found a hungry audience for its simulated world. You can buy it on Steam, where it sits at a "very positive" rating with 94% of user reviews recommending the game.

One prevailing bit of industry wisdom about MMOs is the idea that they're a little grey in the beard—and so are their players, too. We can see a little of that in design philosophies for the modern MMORPG, which have leant more towards seasonal structures over long-term grinds, alongside more stuff to do for "midcore" players, who might be decently competent, but lack the time for organised play.

There's also the point that most popular MMOs themselves are old—World of Warcraft's past its 20th year, FF14 is past its 10th. Newer games, like Amazon's New World, don't last long. Even Guild Wars 2, which I could've sworn was spritely, came out in 2012. Where the hell does the time even go?

But I'm curious as to how that translates to you, dear reader. I myself have been playing MMOs since middle school—and while I did indeed beg my parents for a World of Warcraft subscription back in vanilla, I was playing RuneScape and bragging about my Granite Maul long before that.

Which does put me in the category of "I've got a 9/5 now and bills to pay". No longer shall I stay up until three in the morning, questing in the barrens—my CPAP calls to me and my eyes grow heavy if I stay up past midnight. Truly tragic scenes.

Thus it's incumbent upon me to discover if I am indeed preaching to the choir when I talk about the good old days, or whether I need to try and fit in with the youth of today a little more. Perhaps I shall purloin a skateboard and a backwards cap to become 'cool' and 'relatable'.

Or perhaps you're all decade+ veterans like me. Either way, go and have a gander at the poll below, and if you feel like sharing some war stories from your MMO heyday (or just want to call the rest of us… chopped? Is that the word for old? I can't keep up), feel free to drop a comment below, as well.

Original story: I'm pretty neutral on World of Warcraft's current in-between patch content—this sort of thing isn't necessarily Blizzard's strong suit, and you get losers and winners. I'm already deeply ambivalent to the Omnium Folio, but I've been having an acceptable time in its void invasion zones. Sometimes it's nice to just turn your brain off for a few quests and scrape some hyper-specific currency together.

Well, except for one feature—the Lighthook Grapple. Being an MMO, my action bars are already flooded with mounts, transmog outfits, potions, and my actual abilities. So imagine my surprise when I zone out of Naigtal, and the big, obstructive "put this on your action bar" button for the Lighthook Grapple is still staring at me.

If you put it on your action bar, the button vanishes. If you dare remove it from your action bar, however, it returns like a scorned spectre from beyond the grave. This is the first time I've ever felt "Just Monika"-'d by a user interface.

I should note, for the uninitiated, that this ability is pretty much useless anywhere that isn't Naigtal, a middle-of-the-patch cycle, optional quest zone with zero bearing on the rest of the game. There's basically no reason for this thing to be on your UI if you aren't in Naigtal, it can't be used anywhere else.

And yet, it insists—as has Blizzard on the game's forums, with one developer writing: "After investigation by the development team, this is apparently and technically working as intended, and we do not plan on changing how this works at the moment."

Which is a little baffling. Nothing game-ruining, mind. I can deal with it—but it raises a few questions. If these void invasion zones aren't time-limited (and it's likely they won't be) will the Lighthook Grapple go away, or will it be in my spellbook, and my action bar, forever? And if so, uh, why. Why are we doing that?

Salvation for your action bar real estate might be in the future, though, as a follow-up post by another dev in the very same thread reads: "While we have no specific details or ETA to share, I’d like to inform y’all that the team is still looking into this situation and possible changes/fixes to the Lighthook Grapple action.

"So while what Yryadorne mentioned above still applies, please rest assured that your feedback is heard and options are being evaluated to address your concerns and reports." As to how this happened, I've got some theories. The first is that a developer did indeed look at this and go 'yes, this is good', which I honestly think is unlikely.

My money's on the idea that this is a band-aid solution because for some archaic reason, having it work the other way messed something up. Like that time a fixed elevator from a 13-year-old raid broke Player Housing. And, at some point in the process, a developer went 'this is good enough, we've got a patch to ship' and put a more reasonable grappling hook on their to-do list.

On Saturday, June 20, something weird happened here in Chicago: 4,000 people gathered in person (and over one million tuned in to the stream) to watch Deadman All Stars, a PvP tournament of Old School RuneScape. Even with my only RuneScape experience having been getting cyberbullied in it by half of a pair of evil blonde twins at my middle school circa 2006, the good vibes were infectious.

Old School is hot and, by almost any metric, in a new golden age surpassing its original run in the aughts. But MMO PvP as a live esports event? It shouldn't work, but it did, and I got to talk to Old School RuneScape creative director Kieren Charles about how Deadman All Stars came together, as well as the logistical challenges of bashing a 25-year-old MMO into shape for it.

But first, glory to the victors, Team Dino Nuggets, consisting of the eponymous Dino, as well as B0aty, 61M, Sick Nerd, and MMORPG. Well played to runners up the Odablock Warriors, Framed Friends, Westham Weasels, Rhys Rhinos, and Purpp Rebels. My personal favorite player handle at the tournament belonged to Skiddler on the Rebels.

Tourney Hero

RuneScape has a rock-paper-scissors sort of combat system, where every method of attack has strengths and vulnerabilities. So high-level RuneScape PvP involves a lot of item switching, inventory management, and fast inputs. Combat is based around classic RPG dice rolls, and two players in end game gear will tend to miss most of their attacks, furiously swapping armor and weapons until one slips up or the RNG delivers a hit.

Jagex senior communications manager Danni Amos told me that the players mostly brought their own kit⁠—mice, keyboards, etc.—to ensure maximum comfort and that their muscle memory was on point. Much like how high-level Counter-Strike players sometimes opt for a low-res, 4:3 view to maximize performance and focus their aim, I was delighted to see the tournament players were all rocking with a tiny, 640x480 window on their massive, curved gaming monitors.

Amos told me that serves to limit the distance their mouse has to travel between the inventory menu and the play field, but I also find it rhymes with how you might have illicitly played RuneScape in a school computer lab or on the family computer back in the day.

"We actually started experimenting in competitive e-sports over 10 years ago now," said creative director Charles. "We've done mini events like this in the past in the UK, but it was 50 people." He attributed the Deadman format to prominent Old School RuneScape video maker and official Jagex collaborator, Solo Mission.

Matches are set up like a fighting game crew battle, or maybe a Pokémon fight with no substitutions. Each team's first guy goes out to duel: Team A's first player wins, so he stays out and keeps fighting until he runs out of health and healing items as Team B's second member tries to take him down, repeat until one team's roster is depleted. It's a great format, pairing the purity of 1v1 with a layer of strategy and teamwork. There were a lot of hero moments, players sticking it out way longer than they had any right, or managing stunning upsets.

There's also an added wrinkle with Deadman's prep stage: All the players had to start from scratch with fresh accounts, with a 120-hour playtime limit over nine days to level and gear up. But the tournament itself did not occur in OSRS' live game: Jagex had a special instance of the MMO running right there at the theater.

Logistics win wars

"RuneScape was definitely not built to have a LAN setup at all, so it's actually been a really interesting challenge for the tech team to work out how we make it a LAN event," Charles told me. "It was no small undertaking. We were doubting at times whether we actually can pull it off, because [with] a lot of the setup, the code expects to communicate with this server, speak to that server, and all of a sudden it's not really a thing."

After everyone was geared up and ready to go, they sent their save files to Jagex to load onto this special, instanced version of the game, with the offline Old School RuneScape server whirring away in a back room of the Rosemont Theater.

"There's so many advantages to doing it. A lot of these online events, they have the risk of DDoS and network attacks⁠—you've got to mitigate that," said Charles. "But also it's ping, it's reaction [time] for the players. The smaller the ping, the better they will play.

"So the fact the server is right there next to where they're playing, they're playing in perfect conditions in a way they've never played before. But now that we've done it, I imagine this is the sort of thing we could do when we do similar events in future."

And there seems to be a high likelihood of that: Deadman All Stars was Jagex's first time hosting an event in North America, yet it was also its biggest, surpassing even RuneFest in the UK. And at a time when much of the games industry is struggling, it's heartening to see a game and community thrive like this.

As reported by Massively OP, senior developers at ZeniMax Online Studios said that the company has returned to its circa 2015-2018 headcount, before it staffed up for the development of canceled MMO Blackbird. The estimate is similar to one recently proffered by id Software in a statement on X, "The Everything App."

Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages (UESP) Discord moderator Baratron relayed the statement from the Elder Scrolls Online Tavern event in Hesse, Germany, where a number of devs are interacting with fans.

"According to both Jason Barnes (Associate Design Director) and Jessica Folsom (Associate Director of Community Management), ZeniMax Online Studios is now at the same size as it was when they made both Wrothgar and Summerset,” Baratron told the UESP Discord. "Which, as we know, are both highly acclaimed DLCs.

"So while the layoffs are extremely upsetting for everyone involved (of course including players), this is not necessarily the end of new content or the game going into maintenance mode."

For context, ESO's Orsinium (containing the region of Wrothgar) and Summerset DLCs were released in 2015 and 2018 respectively. In id Software's statement last week, it wrote that "The team today is about the size we were when making Doom (2016)." According to WARN Act filings, ZeniMax Online and id Software laid off 213 and 136 employees respectively. ZeniMax also laid off 62 people in 2025 immediately following the cancellation of Blackbird.

I have some sympathy to members of these studios wanting to counter narratives of their decline⁠—see also Outer Worlds 2 director Brandon Adler's harsh words for outsiders who flippantly claim the studio no longer has the same developers who made classics like KotOR 2 or New Vegas. It is also not inherently sinister for two studios with the same parent company to adopt a similar PR line.

At the same time, it doesn't sit right with me. It is an admission of undoing a decade of growth and development at these studios. Even if the headcount is the same on paper, a studio on the upswing is a vastly different environment from one that's just been gutted. The 136 people fired from id and 213 from ZeniMax were brought in for a reason. Game development has changed in the span of 10 years.

Bungie and BioWare probably hit similar headcounts as in their golden ages amid wave after wave of layoffs in the 2020s, and it did not improve their output or efficiency. It did not bring back Halo: Reach or Mass Effect 2.

If this is a PR justification Microsoft would like to exploit in the coming days, I have no interest in indulging it. It carries the tacit implication that those who were laid off did not matter, and beckons to that nasty "lazy devs" rhetoric.

It's a line of thinking that, at its heart, allows for this wanton misery and mismanagement to have been a necessary course correction by the adults in the room. I have no patience for it.

I'm somewhat prone to pessimism in this column, though that's not without cause. MMOs aren't exactly a dying breed, per se—we've got Guild Wars 3 to look forward to, and most of the old guard, while a little grey in the beard, have respectable playerbases and are thrumming with things to do.

But it's hard not to feel my blood pressure notch up a few numbers at this week's Xbox layoff news for… well, a number of reasons, really. I'm irate in particular, however, at the current state of Zenimax Online Studios (ZOS), developers of The Elder Scrolls Online, who seem to have become Microsoft's punching bag.

Left hook

I'm hard-pressed to think of a more depressing set of facts than Zenimax's past couple of years—back in July of 2025, Microsoft put thousands of people out of work, including those at ZOS and, more to the point, the cancelled Project Blackbird.

Blackbird was Zenimax's next major project, and while I can't say for certain it would've revitalised the MMO market or anything, we sure as hell need more new MMOs. It was in development for over half a decade, something the then-founder Matt Firor had described as, admittedly, a bit of a "large bet."

Still, the odds weren't bad. The then-CEO of Microsoft Gaming Phil Spencer reportedly had to be torn away from it, and it was slated for a tentative 2028 release. And listen, even if you've got a cynical heart—five years of work from a development team of around 300 people getting flushed right down the toilet, along with 62 jobs (per a WARN notice), is a damn shame.

It was something that shook Zenimax to its core—but the studio did manage to pull through. I actually spoke to some of them back in January, speaking with executive producer Susan Kath who said that "the team has very much rallied … I see a lot of enthusiasm from the team as we're going forward. Folks are excited about their work. I'm excited for them to be doing this. We're looking forward."

Game director Nick Giacomini also echoed: "We are excited by what we're doing. We're excited by this transformation, this change, this evolution. It's like a second wind, and we've definitely got our eyes on the future, because this is our home. We are determined to make it continue to be so for us, for our players, for as long as we possibly can."

Indeed, things were looking up for ESO. It had found itself in a bit of a rut, as most MMOs do from time to time—but a new commitment to a seasonal model and a whole heap of reworks seemed dedicated to addressing long-held quality-of-life complaints and shaking things up.

The air, to me, felt like a smaller-scale version of the turnaround that World of Warcraft had after the disasters of Shadowlands, commitment to roadmaps and all.

Right hook

Fast-forward less than half a year later—an unconscionable amount of time in shareholder land, I have to imagine—and Zenimax Online Studios has been all but gutted. As PC Gamer's own Ted Litchfield figured out earlier in the week, an estimated 60% of the studio has been laid off between 2025 and 2026, with 213 of those layoffs happening this week.

That's a reduction of 275 developers at the studio in a year and a half, and, look—I don't want to cry that the sky is falling for ESO. Quite the opposite, I am hoping against hope that it'll manage to find a second wind somewhere down the line—but you simply cannot lose the contributions of 275 people without a massive dip in quality.

It's a response echoed by employees at the studio itself. Andrew Young, who left it in 2024, wrote: "There’s really no one left and no changing it now". Other employees were sent reeling, stunned at the absence of teams they'd been working with for years and forced to pick up the pieces.

I want to point out that Xbox saw fit to lay these people off literally as its first season launched—with layoffs occurring on Monday July 6, and the season launching on July 8.

Just imagine it—you work on ESO, the layoffs from last year hit you hard, but you're determined to turn things around. You're using words like "rallied" in interviews, you're finally getting to sort out complaints players have been having for years, you're trying new things. And after a year of work, your first season of the new era of your game is coming out. Two days before it arrives, Microsoft lays off 213 of your team. That, or you're shown the door yourself.

This is despite the fact that your game has brought in over $2 billion in revenue over its lifetime. That figure, posited in 2024, was touted 10 years after the game's launch. That means that ESO was raking in an average of $166 million a year.

Now obviously, that figure's going to have dips and peaks, that's just the nature of doing business—but the sheer boneheaded, next-quarter blinders you have to have on to believe that a game that historically brings you in $166 million annually somehow isn't profitable seems absolutely absurd to me.

And sure, maybe this reaction holds water if the fanbase wasn't liking your new changes—except they did! Here's just a few quotes from the Elder Scrolls Online subreddit:

• "What the fuck man. ESO was really getting a second wind," says u/PompeiiSketches.
• "The game seemed to be on the up and up, what happened?" says u/Crimsonmaddog44.
• "Absolute insane behavior to make cuts to the team that has gotten tons of players (myself included!) back into engaging with the game" says u/Ion_bound.

In a post on the game's forums, understandably stating that Zenimax'll have to be shifting its schedule around a bit, support is present, too:

"I just came back because of your roadmap for the future, and knowing now the people working on it are getting cut by a company that's billions in the green is really heartbreaking," writes one user, "know we haven’t always been happy with you all but those affected, whether they remain or not, did not deserve this. Especially in an era where things were finally looking up again. I am horrified," writes another.

This really does paint a picture of an MMO that was finally getting its sea legs back, just for Xbox to sweep in and knock it right off its feet again.

Holding shares

I will state it plainly: I think the way that Zenimax Online Studios has been treated is cruel, senseless, and short-sighted. There's no capitalist argument to be made about shareholders or prices or changing industries that's going to reach my ears on this one—it's downright unconscionable.

This is a studio that was making a profitable MMO with big dreams for the future, one that had somehow, miraculously, recovered from having a massive project that'd been in development for half a decade shuttered overnight. One that was just about to release the first proper season of its new imagined identity for the game that earned Microsoft over $160 million a year for the past decade.

It has been sacrificed almost wholesale on the altar of growth, by a company that spent over $68 billion on Blizzard, with Microsoft itself spending over $80 billion in 2025 on AI pipedreams. Its developers have been laid off to support a fantasy of getting 1 billion daily players, somehow, in a portfolio that's down 1,600 working roles and will be down 1,600 more by 2027.

More than that, this is an MMO we're talking about. If ESO takes a nosedive from here on out (and god, I am hoping it doesn't), that'll be one less game in an already-dwindling genre that's struggling to put up a fight amongst the unhealthy ambitions of the current industry's gluttony. ZOS deserved better.

Star Citizen received a major update back in May, one which implemented a "full reset" of its sci-fi universe while also adding a bunch of new features. Unfortunately, Alpha 4.8 also added a lot of bugs to CIG's space MMO. So many, in fact, that the studio has been forced to change course on its next update, postponing plans for several new features and turning it into a gigantic bug-squashing exercise.

CIG announced the new plans in its latest roadmap roundup (via MassivelyOP), stating that the studio has "reassessed our bug prioritization process following the release on Alpha 4.8.0" and that "based on reports from the Issue Council, Spectrum, Reddit, direct player feedback and other sources, we have identified nearly 100 issues that significantly impact core gameplay systems and quality of life."

Alongside this, CIG is also looking at fixing "broader quality of life issues reported by new players" as "while many veteran players have learned workarounds for common problems, they shouldn't have to." This includes addressing "many of the issues that commonly affect the first hour of gameplay." I'm sorry, the first hour? I feel obliged to point out here that Star Citizen recently surpassed $1 billion in player funding.

CIG says that "roughly 20%" of these issues have already been addressed so far. But the task ahead remains substantial, requiring CIG to pull developers away from building new stuff to address the issues. "As a result, we've temporarily paused work on a small number of features while we focus on improving the stability of these foundational systems."

The main casualty is Siege of Orison, a dynamic event that originally appeared in Star Citizen several years back. But it is seemingly returning with newly introduced instancing for FPS play, giving players more control over these mission spaces. However, players will now have to wait a few more weeks to play it. "We're moving all Siege of Orison and all instance-related content out of alpha 4.9.0 and into a new 4.10 scheduled for mid-August."

This doesn't mean alpha 4.9 will be wholly devoid of new features. The patch will introduce a series of repeatable "support the miners" missions, some new combat clothing, improvements to ship combat UI, a new gun, and two new hairstyles. Alpha 4.10.0 meanwhile, will add a new mission giver, a heavy machinegun, a rebalance to fuel consumption alongside the instancing system and Siege of Orison.

Since hitting the big $1 billion milestone in May, Star Citizen has raised a further $26 million from its spaceship-loving player-base. While development rumbles on, the full release of the MMO remains years away. Its single-player component, Squadron 42, is scheduled to release in 2026, though with less than half of the year remaining, a specific release date is yet to be confirmed.

For the first time ever, seasonal content is here for The Elder Scrolls Online. Return of the Thieves Guild, its inaugural season, has launched for the long-running MMO, something you'd expect fans would be all abuzz for—if not for the fact that ZeniMax Online Studios has been gutted as part of the mass layoffs at Xbox this week.

Yeah, the timing on this one ain't great. The developer of the MMO, which has reportedly generated over $2 billion in its lifetime, has been hit especially hard. We learned this week that ZeniMax Online lost 213 employees this week, which when combined with more layoffs over the past 12 months, means the studio has lost more than half of the development team of TESO.

So, it's not surprising that this massive content drop has been met with little discussion of the season itself. Instead, players have mostly been sending well-wishes to the affected development team members—occasionally with a bit of ire for Microsoft.

"Surprised there was anyone left to post this," one commenter said in response to the Steam announcement of the season's launch. "So sorry for you guys. Hope you can keep the game going. Or better yet, find independence from MS."

"Heartbroken for all the developers who were laid off," said another. "Wishing the best for everyone. ♥️Hopefully this vicious cycle will end one day"

"ESO has wonderful, passionate developers behind it and to lose them breaks my heart!" another commenter wrote.

"To all those who got laid off, thanks for all the content you gave us, 5000 hours and counting," said another.

Not everyone was quite as polite. "May whoever fires talented people like you BURN IN HELL along with all of Microsoft," one commenter said. "I hope those who lost their jobs find companies more worthy of your talent."

The Return of the Thieves Guild trailer on YouTube got a similar reaction: not many people talking about the trailer itself, but mostly expressing warm sentiments to the developers.

"Like everyone else at Bethesda, you guys don't deserve what has happened to you, and I am very sorry," one commenter said. "Stay strong and keep up the good work."

Even non-fans were sympathetic: "I'm sorry, even though I wasn't that into ESO you guys deserved better," said another commenter. "I hope everyone affected by the layoffs lands on their feet."

And yes, there was a bit of chatter about the new season and how it looks—yet even those sentiments were still typically focused on the people who make the game.

"This game and all the work you've put into creating such engaging and beautiful art, content, and stories has brought my friends and I a lot of joy over the years," a YouTube commenter said. "I always look forward to hopping on and seeing what's new—there is literally something for everyone in this game. Can't wait to see what you all come up with next, I'm happy to keep supporting and I hope everyone that was cruelly and needlessly laid off finds great opportunities in their future."

And of course, a few in the YouTube comments were a little snarkier about the mass-layoffs from Microsoft, particularly in regard to the poorly-timed launch of Return of the Thieves Guild.

"Media guy must have scheduled this before he was banished to the shadow realm," the top comment reads.

"You can tell there's meant to be a voice-over here," a commenter said, "but bro got fired before he had the chance."

"I would say Microsoft is out there being the real thieves guild," another said, "but the thieves guild still values people's lives over profit."

It's the 16th anniversary of Star Trek Online this year, and the 60th anniversary of Star Trek itself. That's an absurdly long time for both MMOs and TV shows. For fans of the shows, though, it's bittersweet, as the two remaining ones are now rushing towards their post-cancellation conclusions. Star Trek Online, on the other hand, feels like it's entering a new era.

OK, I might be getting a wee bit ahead of myself, but things are definitely changing. Earlier this year, Cryptic Studios' former CEO, MMO heavyweight Jack Emmert, returned, taking up the CEO mantle once more. And just as critically, Cryptic and publisher Arc Games were able to extricate themselves from owner Embracer—a company that's mostly known for buying studios and killing them.

It's going to take time to really see the impact of these changes, but STO's new Undiscovered update does feel different—for numerous reasons. The ongoing storyline has been temporarily paused, one of STO's oldest arcs has been completely remade, with two Voyager veterans returning to voice their characters, and there's a big push to make sector space a bit more interesting—namely by revamping Deep Space Encounters.

Executive producer Thomas Marrone tells me that he's "really grateful to have Jack back", and that the returning CEO has been interested in Cryptic's STO team "trying new things and asking a lot of questions".

Marrone doesn't want to call it a "rut", but prior to the changes, the team found itself in a comfortable rhythm.

"We had a rhythm of here's an episode, here's a TFO [Task Force Operations are the dungeons and raids of STO], here's a couple patrols, here's an episode, here's a TFO, here's a couple patrols. And that was great, and I know people enjoyed it, because we have all the metrics. That's just what you do as a live service company, but with Jack back, we do have a mandate to try new things, and to look at, are there ways to give people something new every update. Undiscovered is one of the first examples of this."

Undiscovered's remade storyline and Deep Space Encounters still tick all the traditional STO boxes. They're extremely replayable and won't take a million hours to finish. Episodes are brisk (though not rushed) and the sector space encounters aim to be 15-minute adventures. With both comes new rewards, new and returning characters, and more voice acting. And the update launched with an event that will see players rewarded with a gigantic Bird of Prey.

It's not entirely unfamiliar, then, but as Marrone says, it's a "different flavour". And instead of adding, say, a new storyline or multiplayer diversion onto a creaky frame, the update is attempting to patch up the frame itself. "It's really geared at making the game feel alive and feel like it's worth flying around and exploring sector space in a way that I don't think we had before."

Emmert has enabled this, says Marrone. "Jack has encouraged us to think about new ways of building content for the game that isn't just the same thing over and over again."

Senior narrative designer Flo McQuibban says the team is "trying to push the boundaries" of what they can achieve both narratively and mechanically—"within the limit of what's possible with our development timeframe of our resources".

That last part is important. After Embracer acquired Cryptic, it gutted the team and put a mobile studio in charge of Cryptic's MMOs. And while the Embracer days are behind it, Cryptic's still having to run multiple MMOs without the resources that, say, Blizzard or Square Enix have available to them. So when it wants to do something new, like remake an arc, that needs to be the focus.

So don't expect Cryptic to immediately jump right into another old arc to remake it.

"I mean, we'd love to," says Marrone. "There are so many other arcs that are really cool and have good bones. The Iconian War is another great example of something that could really use some help, at least with the cutscenes. Unfortunately, game development is a zero sum game, in that we have this much time to make this much stuff."

But that certainly doesn't mean it won't happen. STO has a legacy of tweaking old stories. Indeed, the story that was just remade had been given a glow up a few years before it was put in the vault—though it wasn't even close to the extent of the Undiscovered changes. But Cryptic has to balance out any trips back in time with producing brand new storylines and activities.

So how does STO keep going for another 16 years? McQuibban thinks maintaining a good relationship with the community is the trick.

"We're a very communicative development team," she says. "And I feel like the playerbase has a lot of empathy back towards us, and grace and patience for when we are transparent and in regular discussion with them … I think that's going to be key, and it's part of like empathy towards the players. We hear you, and we see you, and your feedback; maybe it'll take a while to fix, but we've seen it, and we've logged it, and we're gonna consider it and figure it out together."

It can be challenging, though, "as the game gets older, technologies advance, expectations change about what's in a game," says Marrone. But it helps that "STO is blessed with a very, very high rate of retention". I've been playing STO since 2010, and somehow have managed to keep playing despite the nature of my job, meaning I'm constantly bouncing between games. And it's backed up by the concurrents, too, which are not incredibly high, but have been remarkably stable over the last decade.

So while the team has this mandate to experiment, one of the other things Emmert has been encouraging is, as McQuibban mentioned, empathy. "Jack said right when he got back that he wants us to have empathy for the player," says Marrone. "So that means that we play the games ourselves, that we understand the experience of playing the game, and that we understand, hey, this isn't so great, this is really cool, we should do more of this, we should do less of this, we should fix that."

As long as the team maintains this relationship with STO's players and understands what they want, reckons Marrone, "that is, I think, going to carry us; it's the relationship that's carried us this far".

With Paramount's plans for Star Trek still up in the air, and the last two shows going into their final seasons, Star Trek Online is going to need to keep the flame burning. I'm pretty confident it's up to the task.

One of the most controversial bits of World of Warcraft: Midnight was Blizzard taking aim at UI mods (addons) that impacted combat, with the idea that you probably shouldn't have to make your game look like an airplane dashboard designed by a drunk person just to play a videogame. Something that I've come around to, for the most part.

In a recent interview with PCGamesN, game director Ion Hazzikostas has affirmed Blizzard's choice to revoke addon author's access to combat information (with a few exceptions): "I know this may be a controversial statement, but I will say that, overall, [the new UI] has been successful so far. It's not done, it's not perfect; there's more work to go, and we are continuing to undertake that work."

"Controversial" is somewhat correct, mind. While I've been handling the shift absolutely fine, I'm also primarily a DPS guy—during the last raid tier, healers were suffering due to a complete mismatch between Blizzard's encounter design and their UI's ability to track dispellable debuffs.

Essentially, while Blizzard has touted that it's designing its encounters with an addonless world in mind, a raid encounter in Midnight's first season, Crown of the Cosmos, had a debuff called Null Corona that needed to be dispelled. However, because the studio's changes made it impossible to track dispels, healers were forced to squint at their party member's health bars to find a tiny purple jpeg.

This was eventually hotfixed, but that's far from the only issue. The homegrown DPS meter could, er, be better. It's missing a huge amount of functionality that was there with meter addons before, a step back by pretty much every metric. And it's not like Blizzard isn't working on it, but it's easy to feel salty about a sweeping lack of convenience—the rapidfire development cycle of hobbyist mod builders absolutely beats the often-complicated and difficult tasks of a major development studio.

"I think that, by and large, the vast majority of people are completing the same level of content that they were before, and far more are doing it without feeling like they need to seek out external tools. There have been some exceptions to that where the community has figured out ways of making some computational logic work, and we didn't want to keep breaking things in the middle of a patch."

That's another asterisk to the whole thing—many high-end raiders have figured out ways to gain the same functionality they'd lost before, but because of both the new rules around addons and the usability lost from the death of something like WeakAuras, these addons mostly aren't accessible to the general public.

Hazzikostas says that patch 12.1 should iron out a lot of those kinks, though: "The 12.1 update has what we think is a more comprehensive overhaul of the security backend of our addon interface, which should make it a little easier for addon authors to write addons, but also close some of the loopholes we've seen pop up here and there. Alongside that, we're continuing to improve our base user interface."

Ultimately, Hazzikostas says that "I think, while it's certainly been a transition with its challenges, we're excited to have this new baseline and foundation, and things will only continue to get better from here, both as we continue to add functionality to the base UI, and we continue to empower addon authors to add customization options.

"And as we, frankly, internally relearn some aspects of how we can build encounters in this new world. I think that's going to open up new doors and possibilities for players in raids, dungeons, Delves, and everything in between."

No matter how good at questing in World of Warcraft Classic you think you are, I'm pretty sure we've found someone better—a singularly determined madlad has hit level 60 on every single class in the game's hardcore self-found mode.

For the uninitiated, that means that they've gotten to level 60 without dying and without any outside help, as self-found players can't trade with anybody, send or receive mail, or use the auction house. Essentially, any gear or materials have to be found or plucked from the earth with your own bare hands.

But user Foxdog175 on the r/classicwow subreddit has done it. As a matter of fact, they've done it 11 times (thanks, WoWHead): "If I'm being brutally honest, only three of my toons should have made it to 60. I've had razor-close calls on just about every class to 60," they write.

For instance, their Warlock nearly died in the ocean to Stranglethorn Vale boat captains on a HP so low they couldn't see their health bar, their rogue barely survived a disconnect in Tanaris, and their paladin was saved from a pack of bloodthirsty elites by an aggro reset bug.

This is my favourite anecdote, though: "On my paladin, I told a hunter I was with in Searing Gorge that we could jump down the hole as long as I BoP'd him, to quest in the caves below. Before I could even say 'GO', he immediately jumped. I jumped in after him, got the BoP off mid-air, and was able to bubble myself milliseconds before I hit the ground." I think we should all aspire to this level of heroism in our day-to-day lives.

Foxdog achieved this feat by seemingly following the adage 'slow is smooth, smooth is fast'—for example, they start their characters off by levelling in two 1-4 starter zones, hoofing it on foot to another race's spawning area: "This step sounds silly to some; it's not. Every level you gain on mobs compounds from the first level. Remember, every level you are above a mob, you gain hit, crit, and dodge and they lose that amount on their end."

And, hey, you can't argue with the results—Foxdog hasn't just levelled every class to 60, but has done a naked fire mage run as well: "Naked fire mage had a TON of close calls. Near-deaths in Ashenvale aoe'ing furbolgs with another mage, in Southern Arathi under water getting netted and beaten on near the boat quests while collecting those crystals (was saved by my group member who just happened to be close enough to get to me in time).

"Had an elite rock-giant beating on me when I ported down in Azshara using the NPC teleport, had a near-death helping a warrior kill furbolgs in Northern Felwood when the denwatcher called about half a dozen other furbolgs at low hp. Warrior bailed and I was on my own. Barely escaped. Naked fire mage was a damn cat with nine lives."

Godspeed to everyone attempting this challenge, whether via a completionist, all-classes route or by doing it on a DDR mat. That annoying minimap orb in retail (that I hate) doesn't seem anywhere near as bad, now.

Yesterday's layoffs at Xbox took, and will continue to take, a terrible toll. Some trumpeted the fact that no studios were closed, although the practical impact of spinning them out to independence or new ownership remains to be seen, but that has no bearing on the blow to morale caused by such deep cuts to long-standing dev teams.

One former Elder Scrolls Online developer put words to those feelings in a short, poignant thread on X, lamenting the state of the game and developer ZeniMax Online Studios, which was reportedly purged of half its employees in the layoffs.

"I’m just so angry today," wrote Andrew Young, a content designer on Elder Scrolls Online who worked at ZeniMax Online Studios from 2012-2024. "People will never know the blood, sweat, and tears that went into making ESO or how we basically funded other failing projects while never getting enough resources to really keep up with our release cadence. The team deserved much better."

The Elder Scrolls Online has had a tough go of it over the years. Its launch in 2014 did not make a great impression, and while the shift to Tamriel Unlimited a year later turned things around, it always felt to me a bit like an afterthought MMO: The second cousin to World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy 14 whose face you recognize in photos, but whose name you can't quite put your finger on.

But things seemed to take a darker turn in 2025. Just a year after a GDC talk extolling the actually-quite-remarkable success of TESO, game director Matt Firor—also the president of ZeniMax Online Studios—suddenly left the studio, a move he later said was the direct result of Microsoft's 2025 bloodbath layoffs that also saw the cancellation of a new ZeniMax Online MMO known as Project Blackbird.

That Microsoft saw fit to cut even deeper into the studio just a year after that has some concerned about its future. Following the layoff announcement, TESO community manager Jessica Folsom reaffirmed the dev team's commitment to the game but added that previously announced roadmaps for the new seasonal structure "will be shifting." There's no indication of anything more serious in the offing but I can't help thinking of Amazon's New World, a moderately successful MMO that was nonetheless canned when Amazon decided that its own "go big" strategy for gaming wasn't working.

"I've been gone for a while, but talking to people today and realizing there's really no one left and no changing it now makes my heart ache," Young concluded. "For the people, our game, who we were as a team and a studio. This is a serious loss, and I don’t think people know how much."

In 2010, at the launch of Star Trek Online, the spacefaring MMO opened on the Klingon War. In typical fashion, the Federation was desperately trying to sue for peace, while a klingon ambassador was doing everything he could to thwart it.

STO has always been a massive theme park full of nods to the classic shows, so naturally this arc was rooted in Star Trek's legacy. At the centre of the story was Miral Paris, daughter of Voyager's Tom Paris and B'Elanna Torres—a Federation officer who also happened to be the Kuvah'magh, a prophesied holy figure who was meant to bring the Klingon Empire back to its glory days.

If you've played through the arc since 2018, though, you'll have noticed Miral's absence. She was a victim of updates. The tutorial had been remade, and new seasons were going hard, which left this old storyline feeling a bit creaky—resulting in half of the episodes being cut.

That's going to change today. After many years away, the Kuvah'magh is returning to the Klingon War, with a completely remade story that also features another Voyager throwback: the Doctor.

"We felt like it really wasn't as representative of where the game was, as it needed to be," says executive producer Thomas Marrone. "Because people were still playing through that content, even after adding the Discovery-themed Federation stuff, people were still, by and large, making what we call 'normal Starfleet', like 25th century Starfleet characters."

Star Trek Online lets you create a captain from the Klingon Empire, Dominion, Romulan Republic and three eras of the Federation, but the TNG era start remains the most popular—unsurprisingly. This meant, post-tutorial, most players were jumping into ancient missions.

With today's Undiscovered update, Star Trek Online is pausing its new storyline to dive back into this ancient one—but we're not talking about some tweaked cutscenes and new VO. This is a full remake, with new dialogue, new maps and new rewards—including "some really advanced technology that allows the player to pick up a rock and throw it," Marrone jokes. This is a nod to the classic Kirk vs Gorn fight in TOS, which you'll soon be able to recreate.

But the Kuvah'magh storyline is still firmly rooted in classic Trek, in this idea of a character with a foot in two worlds, something that crops up time and time again, starting with Spock, and continuing with Data, Worf and Seven of Nine.

"I think the best examples of Star Trek are when we see characters wrestling with parts of themselves," says Marrone, "and then finding the better angel of their nature, and moving in that direction."

Marrone's favourite Star Trek film is Undiscovered Country (obviously the Undiscovered update is a nod to that), where we see how Kirk is "so flatly racist against the klingons", but he's still able to find the root of that prejudice and overcome it. Like so much of Trek, there's this potent thread of optimism. And that's an important facet of Miral's storyline: as the Kuvah'magh she could plunge the galaxy into war, but instead she's using her klingon and human legacy to bring these warring factions together.

"It just feels very quintessentially Trek," says senior narrative designer Flo McQuibban. "For me, when I got into it, I was baffled at how much it's about first contact, diplomacy, empathy. It really set itself aside from lots of other things out there in that it always provided a moral of the story. It got into topics like ethics and the other, and you need understanding and empathy, and things like that. And I think you definitely have a head start if you're multicultural or bridging gaps between two worlds or societies."

Marrone accepts that there's a bit of "ludonarrative dissonance" in this, since Star Trek Online's primary method of interaction is blowing stuff up in space and on the ground. The action needs to persist. Ultimately, though, at least if you're a Federation character, the end goal is still peace. "Ultimately, the thing that solves the problem is not violence."

As a Star Trek fan who's been devouring the shows and movies for nearly four decades, part of the appeal of Star Trek Online is getting to see Star Trek actors reprise their roles. In Undiscovered, Miral is once again voiced by Lisa Locicero, who played Miral in both Voyager and STO. This time she's joined by her godfather, Voyager's Doctor, which sees Robert Picardo return to his most iconic role.

"He just went right back into it," says McQuibban. "Robert Picardo is very cool and he just is and embodies the Doctor—it was an awesome experience."

Getting to see these actors jump back into their beloved characters is one of the perks of working on STO, which Marrone calls a "privilege". And there have been so many. Leonard Nimoy provided a ton of narration back in 2010, and since then the game has brought back Kate Mulgrew, Wil Wheaton, Gates McFadden and so many others.

The deep cuts feel just as special. Lisa Locicero played Miral for a single episode of Voyager, Endgame, when we got to meet a grown-up Miral from an alternate universe. That was almost a decade before STO launched. 25 years later, she's playing Miral again.

"Man, Lisa Locicero knocked it out of the park," says Marrone. "She did such a great job. This episode, I'm really excited for people to see more of her, and I'm happy to say that we'll be having her back in the future as well. It's a lot of great stuff to look forward to, but just also a lot to be proud of."

Miral's role on Voyager had a lot of implications, but because she was a baby, with the exception of one episode, there's so much room to develop the character. "It gives us room to work together with Lia to understand how we want her character to be, and if this story had continued, what does that look like," says McQuibban. "The kind of path I took is trying to do justice to the existing material and work with the talent who embodied that character to make sure we really deliver on what already exists and make everything that comes after feel natural, natural and seamless, like it could fit into the IP."

Undiscovered introduces another deep cut, too: a very large Bird of Prey known as the K'vort. Players will be able to earn this ship by participating in an event for 20 days. It was originally introduced in TNG as a klingon ship that could realistically go toe-to-toe with the beefy Enterprise D. It's basically a massive Bird of Prey that has a hangar with regular-sized Birds of Prey chilling inside it. It's a momma bird.

It's cropped up a few times since, including in an episode of Lower Decks, but the design was tweaked a lot over the years. The good news is Cryptic is providing variants. My klingon captain is going to be so pleased.

The Lower Decks version wasn't actually given a designation, but because of its size it definitely seemed like a K'vort to Marrone. "So when I saw that, I was like, 'Finally, here's our shot to get the K'vort in the game', because we're just going to take this shit from Lower Decks and we're going to call it the K'vort, because it is a giant Bird of Prey. And then, and we'll bring that, we'll make it a player ship in Star Trek Online. And so that's exactly what we did, and that became the event reward for Undiscovered."

So the update has something for people keen to play more classic episodes, and for the ship fiends, but what about captains who just want to have some fast-paced fun making things explode in space? That's what the revamped Deep Space Encounters are for.

McQuibban says these escapades are "narrative light", though Cryptic is introducing mission givers for both the Federation and KDF, new characters created just for this purpose, who you'll get to know as you jump into new space adventures. Primarily, though, these are short, repeatable missions that represent the day-to-day activities of a captain.

"As a kid, you want to be Captain Kirk, my hero, but sometimes I just want to live on the Enterprise and hang out," says Marrone. "That's kind of what I see the Deep Space Encounters like, fulfilling that part of the fantasy of, 'I'm just like a Starfleet captain, and it's time to go on my patrol, what's going to happen?'"

Cryptic has tinkered with old episodes before, and over the course of the last 16 years it's changed, shelved and introduced all sorts of systems. Undiscovered is not a novelty in that regard. But at the same time, it does feel like part of this new chapter of Star Trek Online. The studio is no longer part of Embracer, former CEO and MMO veteran Jack Emmert has returned, and there's just a feeling of optimism about the game's future—something I'll be digging into more in another article.

In the meantime, though, the Klingon War is beckoning once again.

Two of the most interesting aspects of early access space survival MMO EVE Frontier always seemed to exist in opposition to me: Its striking, deliberately crafted vision of a dark future, and its uniquely freeform modding ecosystem. How are you supposed to get in the mood of the former if you're at risk of stumbling across somebody's particularly anarchic or memey mod?

When I spoke to some of Frontier's dev team at this year's EVE Fanfest, they had a surprising answer: It's no big thing, that's just what the inhabitants of Frontier's galaxy are getting up to, god help them.

"I don't want to say this is a problem, but this is an evergreen challenge, an evergreen balance to maintain," said Frontier creative director Pavlo Savchuk. "We're really careful about balancing how much we're revealing to them, so that they have enough for role playing, for third party development, and so that they have strong anchors to art direct themselves, which is working surprisingly well."

According to Savchuk, many modders have already gravitated toward Frontier's design language of their own accord, picking fonts, colors, and UI elements that compliment the ones already in the game. And when push comes to shove, the team's priority is making sure Frontier's fiction encourages player expression, rather than disciplining that player base to fall in line with a set tone or aesthetic.

"I think we are striking that balance right now, between building out something intentional, but also leaving enough negative space for the players to step in and build out their own stuff," said Savchuk. "The invisible part of this iceberg is structured in a way that, if worse comes to worse, it allows us to build it a little bit and adjust to evolve the world in a direction that the players are evolving, because eventually it's going to be just on them. It's an evergreen balance to be fighting for, but we're very conscious about it."

But what about that goofiness factor? EVE Frontier community developer Ben Sisson explained to me that it's baked into the fiction of the game. Even more than OG EVE Online, Frontier is embracing themes of transhumanism and a sort of mind-body duality. Your consciousness haunts cloned bodies or "shells" that pilot your ships, and the shells are a piece of equipment to be traded, upgraded, or sacrificed as needed.

The origins of the inhabiting consciousnesses, though, are a key mystery of Frontier's worldbuilding. Wherever they came from, Sisson posited, they had access to some corpus of human art and experience, the equivalent of a cached, offline copy of Wikipedia for the post-post-human set.

"There's no life there, and yet the [modders] have created apps for their structures that have cats in them," said Sisson. "Now, where in the world did that come from? Is that a memory that was left in there somewhere? Every bit of that comes from the question of where these souls come from before they got put into these bodies and woken up.

"It is an easy thing to do when you build the answer to the question into the lore of the game. All of that stuff exists because it came from the people inside the game."

As we spoke, I was also struck by the parallel with EVE Online. It often gets left by the wayside in discussions of EVE's impact, but its emergent player sagas are undergirded by a visually striking and well-fleshed out sci-fi fiction. EVE Online never had Frontier's modding permissiveness, but it's been balancing serious lore with players getting goofy for over 20 years.

"The game that we're trying to build is one where we're saying, 'That all exists,'" said Frontier development director David Bowman. "Everything's canon. If it exists in the game, it's because somebody in that universe came up with it. Now, where they got those ideas, who knows?

"There probably aren't any cats in the Frontier, if I was going to guess. And yet…"

EVE Frontier's latest cycle went live on June 25, commencing an ambitious move toward fully modular ship building, rather than the set models of EVE Online. Cycle 6 also introduces an updated new player experience alongside a five-day free trial. Coupled with game-changing gamepad controls, it's one of the best times yet to check out the in-progress survival MMO.

The axe has finally fallen from Xbox's latest round of layoffs and studio sloughing—characterised as a "reset" by its current CEO, Asha Sharma, who paradoxically wants the company to have 1 billion daily players somehow. ZeniMax Online Studios, which currently develops Elder Scrolls Online, has reportedly been hit quite hard.

That's per senior content designer Katherine Souza, who posted to her Bluesky that half the team had been axed—she's since deleted the post due to the wording, but Souza has clarified that by "'half of its team' I'm referring to is active developers working on content, events, and dungeons. I can't speak to the studio at large because I don't have those numbers".

Souza's not the only one effected, though—the platform is awash of ZeniMax Online employees announcing their layoffs, including senior QA tester Page Branson, senior user researcher Elisabeth Whyte, associate design director Mike Finnigan, senior software engineer Dustin Thurston, senior community engagement manager Gina Bruno, the list goes on.

"For nearly 15 years ZOS has been my home. I have had a hand in every dungeon/arena/trial/event zone/challenge difficulty/etc," writes Finnigan. Other members in that list have similarly extensive, institutional experience at the studio that'll now be tossed out—Gina Bruno, for instance, was with ZeniMax for 19 years.

It's legitimately heartbreaking news, especially given the rough go that ZeniMax Online has endured—in 2025, Xbox cancelled Project Blackbird, a game that then-director Matt Frior had been working on for close to a decade. That was part of a corporate massacre to the tune of 9000 job losses, and it's horrifying to see the studio struck by them again.

Especially given the corner it seemed ESO was turning. In January, I spoke with executive producer Susan Kath and game director Nick Giacomini, who seemed resolute and hopeful despite a difficult 2025, describing a development team that had "rallied". A new seasonal structure and multiple refreshes have been in the works.

Now that's all up in the air, per an update from the team itself on the game's forums: "Looking beyond Season One, the roadmaps we previously shared will be shifting. We want to take the time to evaluate the work in front of us and then lock down an updated schedule. While we'd love to share a concrete details today, stepping back to get our plans straight will let us come back to you with a clear timeline."

While I'm hopeful that it still might achieve the goals it was clearly striving for, if ESO does find its groove again, it'll do so after being utterly hamstrung for reasons of corporate acquisition and AI overspending that none of these developers had any say in—in spite of Xbox, rather than because of it.

World of Warcraft's had another brush with a digital plague—on the Moon Guard US server, capital cities were overcome with waves of toxic activity that saw vitriol line the streets. But enough about trade chat—there was also a debuff spreading around and killing people.

The incident occurred late last week, when Stormwind was suddenly assailed by AoE markers and explosions of green slime—captured here by meggoart on Bluesky, you can cleanly see the debuff melting the faces off innocent players by the Trader's Post (thanks, WoWHead).

uhhh corrupted blood 2.0 is happening on Moon Guard right nowwww.reddit.com/r/wow/commen...

— @meggoart.bsky.social (@meggoart.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-07-06T12:39:44.900Z

The culprit? Withering Contagion, which occurs in the Brackenhide Hollow dungeon from Dragonflight. The debuff is a DoT that can spread to players within five yards of the victim. How exactly it escaped the dungeon seems unclear, though I'm sure the discovery of the glitch has something to do with the current timewalking event, which is encouraging players to run Dragonflight dungeons.

Regardless, it swept through popular social hubs—including the, er, rather infamous inn Goldshire, which you can see exploding in a splatter of goo (and not the usual kind) in this video by ParallelGTA on YouTube. Here's a longer video by Starry where you can see a tide of pus nearly drowning Stormwind's Cathedral Square.

Blizzard's swiftly hotfixed the bug, and while that means I've missed out on the fun, though, I can't help but get flashbacks to a plague I actually was there for—the Corrupted Blood incident of 2005. Almost 21 years old at this point, the plague (obtained from Hakkar the Blood God) swept across the game in such a widespread and persistent way that it was actually studied by researchers, who would then go on to fight Covid-19.

No, seriously. Speaking to our own Wes Fenlon back in 2020, Eric Lofgren said: "It was a good illustration of how important it is to understand people's behaviours … And also that these things are very chaotic. You can't really predict 'oh yeah, everyone will quarantine. It'll be fine.' No, they won't."

As it turns out, noncompliance and laissez faire attitudes to quarantining and disease spreading is somewhat analogous to the kind of griefing that goes on in MMOs—after all, both this buff and the corrupted blood incident were continued by people deliberately spreading it for a jolly.

If anything, I'm just sort of sad that modern MMO hotfix cycles mean the Withering Contagion debuff didn't get a chance to really thrive. Not because I'm some kind of plague-obsessed Nurgle-worshipping scientist (I am, but it's entirely a coincidence), but because these sorts of emergent sandbox events are pretty lacking in today's seasonal MMO structure.

World of Warcraft's no stranger to borrowed power—after Blizzard learnt its lesson making borrowed power features the entire focus of an expansion's progression, it instead started to weave them in as seasonal patch incentives. Broadly optional mini-grinds that were good if you wanted a cheap boost and something to do, or were hankering for best-in-slot gear, but nothing that'd hoover up all of your time.

I've been middling on these—the Reshii Wraps, the DISC belt—but I at least think they've been broadly interesting so far. For instance, the Reshii Wraps gave you some extra bonuses while you were phase-diving. And, for the most part, getting a new shiny bit of gear's cool.

But the latest one, the Omnium Folio, is kind of baffling—to put it bluntly, I kinda don't really get why it's there.

For the uninitiated, the Folio is a borrowed power system that sees you jaunting to the arse-end of Silvermoon every week to complete a quest chain that, so far, has been mostly filled with the same weekly activities I was doing anyway.

Most features like the Folio have had some degree of interactivity—take the Onyx Annulet ring from Dragonflight, which had a bunch of gems you could find in the Forbidden Reach. And yet the Omnium Folio is just sort of… there. Take a look at this talent tree.

A single lonely line, a linear path, filled with abilities such as "sometimes, you do more damage" and "sometimes, you do more healing". Three weeks in, I cannot say I've felt a single one of these abilities impact my time hitting stuff in WoW one bit—beyond a flat numerical increase. If there are fiery explosions happening, they're blending into the overstimulated machine of gunshots and big smoke clouds.

It's not interacting with any of the weekly activities beyond a quest to go and do them, sometimes. It's not making the routine of hitting enemies feel any different. It's not impacting my rotation in any way. And it's not interacting with any patch-specific mechanics. It pretty much just makes me hit slightly harder, and if I don't do my weekly quest, I miss out on a power boost until I get around to handling it.

You can make the argument that patch 12.0.5 has been—to a detriment, one might argue—rammed with so many optional activities that the Omnium Folio is just a way for Blizzard to get you to try them all.

There's (deep breath) ritual sites, abyss anglers, decor duels, the voidforge, void assaults, void invasion zones—along with the usual weekly activities of prey, delves, dungeons, raids, so on and so forth. The Omnium Folio forces you to interact with some of this stuff—ritual sites, void assaults, and void invasion zones—but only for a little bit, once per week.

Which means that whenever I log in, I'm staring at this great big orb Blizzard's stuck on my minimap and thinking: Man, what's the point?

It's true that I'm being the kind of overly cynical that comes with sticking with an MMO for a long time—the Folio is inoffensive and basically does its job, but it does its job in such an archetypal, bland way that it invariably represents the worst aspects of itself. I think these sorts of optional grinds can be a great time—and I'm broadly in favour of patch-specific mechanics (I loved drifting in my car in Undermine).

But the Folio feels like the most boiled-down, reduced-to-formula version of a borrowed power mechanic imaginable. It is ostensibly just there, it gives you incremental increases just powerful enough to make participation mandatory, while not being visible enough or interactable enough to feel satisfying to get. It's not a gear piece, so it's not even part of the core item level dopamine grind. It hangs on your navigation tool like a limpet, saying "hey, remember when you had to do some ritual sites to fill me out? Wasn't that neat?"

This lonely-looking talent tree will just sit on my minimap for the next two patches, a reminder of the set-and-forget nodes giving me a 2-4% damage boost—and while Blizzard might expand on it in the future, I don't really get why it's there now. Especially in a patch filled with so many little checklists to tick off? It's making me resent my weekly marching orders from Umbric. And I don't want to resent Umbric. That's my guy.

On July 1, Fenris Creations (formerly CCP) completed the full open source release of its in-house Carbon Engine, the tech behind long-running MMO EVE Online and early access space survival game EVE Frontier. The Carbon Engine's repositories are available now on GitHub.

It's an impressive, surprising move in a time when proprietary game engines are increasingly rare. Even studios that were once defined by their in-house tech, like CD Projekt and its Red Engine, have abandoned it in favor of the ascendent Unreal Engine, which recently unveiled the first details of its sixth iteration. Notably, while Space MMOs EVE Online and Frontier are built on Carbon, Fenris' FPS project Vanguard is being built with Unreal.

Something that really struck me here is that Fenris has repeatedly shown a capability and consistency in following through on its promises. When I first visited the studio at the end of 2024 for an early look at EVE Frontier in the PC Gaming Show, Fenris outlined an exciting, ambitious vision for its survival game. That vision included more action-oriented gameplay than EVE Online, one-of-a-kind server-side modding support, and open-sourcing the Carbon Engine.

Less than two years later, Fenris has made good on all three promises: Frontier has dogfighting now, the mod scene is active and intriguing, and now Carbon is open source. That last development particularly buoys my spirits at a time when tech and computing are becoming increasingly closed and proprietary.

Aftermath recently called the Steam Machine an "iconoclastic" device for its commitment to open, customizable computing in contrast with the wider drift of tech, and I feel much the same way about the direction Fenris is moving in.

While development continues on Frontier, Fenris is also working on the ambitious MMO-extraction FPS EVE Vanguard, and EVE Online continues to be one of the great homes of MMO shenanigans online. Recently, one newbie player was set for life thanks to an almost unheard of one-in-a-million drop.

World of Warcraft's ramping up to its first major "big number" patch, Curse of Ula'tek—in addition to some interesting changes to how world bosses work, Blizzard's also taking aim at some quality-of-life features. And while these updates haven't all exactly been frictionless, I've gotta tip my hat to Blizzard, here—a lot of these are major plusses.

A recent blog details what Blizzard's already implemented, as well as what's to come. The most notable items here are fixes to auto-looting and area looting, but there's also been performance upgrades to the very-pretty Silvermoon City, faster Prey hunts, EXP buffs, and—in a move that's genuinely really important for the hardcore raiding scene—reduced repair costs.

But Curse of Ula'tek's got a few big upgrades to come, too. Profession knowledge points can now be reset once per profession, crafted housing decor should be cheaper, and the Voidforge will be accessible from Silvermoon City.

There's also UI improvements—and while I'm excited about certain bumps to the experience, like finally being able to see map coordinates without an addon, the most vital by far is the auto-loot setting, which no longer resets when you make a new character.

For those of you who've never had to experience the utter existential horror that is figuring out where a setting in an options menu is more than once, it was genuinely kind of annoying—WoW has a setting that lets you automatically loot everything from a monster with one click, instead of shift-clicking like some sort of peasant.

However, this option was character-specific for some arcane and unknowable reason, meaning any time you made an alt, you'd have the experience of looting your first monster, wondering if you were having a lagspike, remembering that you don't have auto-loot on, and then spending five unreclaimable minutes of your life finding and enabling the option again. No more.

There are also some bug fixes, the one I'm most excited for being: "a number of recurring patterns that could cause players to become stuck in outdoor world combat far longer than expected. This will not address all of these situations, but it should be far less common in Curse of Ula’tek."

I am not kidding when I say that 90% of the reason I play a rogue is to be able to Vanish my way out of combat without having to wait for whatever's chasing me to stop locking me out of my mount. That, and the big annoying smoke cloud I can ruin people's day with as part of my rotation.

World of Warcraft caught some heat earlier this year for a messy patch that broke a whole lot of stuff. Patch 12.0.5 was a bit of a disaster, taking an accidental wrecking ball to multiple systems and allowing some long-flagged issues to sneak their way into the game.

The takeaway that I—and many other players—had was that Blizzard's rapid patch cadence was impacting its QA, and while I still do partially wonder if that's to blame, at least in the case of problems that were long-flagged, Ion Hazzikostas has peskily introduced some nuance to my grand narrative. Gee darnit.

That's per an interview with YouTube channel Psybear_tv, where the director speaks on what went wrong with Patch 12.0.5: "If it ever feels like something is rushed, or half-baked, that's not something that we're gonna take lightly—I think we wanna understand what more players were hoping for from a given system or a given feature, take that to heart, and do better the next time."

Hazzikostas is proud of the "faster patch cadence from Dragonflight onwards," one that he says lets the team get out a wider spread of content for folks with different tastes. However, he emphasises that "just because we move faster doesn't mean that we are sacrificing quality—we are never going to put something in a patch if it's not ready."

Which might come as a bitter draught to players who were impacted by 12.0.5, though Hazzikostas says "It's obviously not lost on me that—pretty recent was 12.05's release, and a lot of understandable consternation among players about like: 'Wow, this seems really buggy, is Blizzard moving too quickly, are they sacrificing quality for speed, for quantity?'"

Speed isn't the problem, says Hazzikostas, but a hiccup in logistics: "If anything it was actually us being a bit too aggressive in trying to fix bugs very close to the patch release time."

One example he uses is the fact that player housing got disabled for a whole day: "Not a good look, right? … What happened was, what we discovered during our internal checks that day, the day the patch deployed, was that people who zoned into their houses [who] had any decor that was off the ground in any way? It snapped to the ground, and did so in a way that permanently changed their placement in their house, destroying a lot of people's setups."

The culprit? An elevator from 2013. No, seriously: "This is going to inspire some spaghetti code memes, but … There was a last-minute bug that we found with the Siege of Orgrimmar elevator, where players would fall through the elevator. It was like 'well, okay, we should fix this bug, it's legacy content but there's people still mount farming and stuff.'

"That bug fix went in just a few days before 12.05. Because of the complex interdependent nature of 20-25 years' worth of code, aspects of what controls how a player attaches to an elevator object also touched on some aspects of how different objects can be parented to each other or stacked in housing placement."

Ultimately, Hazzikostas cops to the fact that "We did not go back and check housing during that final day and a half before the patch went live. Until, of course, it blew up."

Hindsight is 20/20, though Hazzikostas admits that "we should've gone ahead with the stable build, released it, and then rolled that out as a hotfix later on with not the same immediate short-term risk. It's that sort of thing—it's lots of moving pieces."

While I'm still not certain the developer equivalent of putting 'I work too hard' as a flaw on your CV is entirely the truth, it does explain some of the more baffling glitches that came with the wonky patch in April—and why some of them might slip the net, despite being so completely major.

Hopefully, Blizzard's been able to sort out its bug-fixing engine to dodge most future snafus, especially given patch 12.1 has some interesting new challenges I'm keen to tackle, hopefully without my character's head popping off because somebody messed with the ground geometry of Molten Core, or something.

The sandbox MMO DreamWorld raised almost $65,000 on Kickstarter in 2021—not nearly enough to fund much of anything in the way of a videogame, let alone an "infinite open world MMO" that promised to host millions of players and thousands of biomes on a single shared world. But it had the backing of startup investor Y Combinator, and development did move ahead, culminating in an early access release on Steam in March, five years after its crowdfunding campaign. And now, it's closing.

There was trouble with DreamWorld right from the start. In a deep dive into the game shortly after the beginning of post-Kickstarter alpha testing, we wrote that it had immediately turned into a giant fiasco. The developers had no real experience in making games, the project allegedly made use of stolen or improperly credited assets, servers were poorly secured and easily hackable, and the whole thing was impossibly ambitious, to the point that some accused it of being a scam.

It all became academic when DreamWorld touched down on Steam on March 10. As recorded by SteamDB, it launched to an all-time peak concurrent player count of 56 and quickly tailed off from there to, at this particular moment, a flat zero. User reviews—36 of them as I write this—are "mixed," and while even some of the negative reviews say DreamWorld shows occasional glimmers of promise, I think this one, from Steam user Dekawar, cuts closest to the overall vibe: "I do not think this is a scam but it has a ways to go before i would call it a game."

At this point, it doesn't look like that's going to happen, as a brief Steam update posted over the weekend (via Delisted Games) says it's going away. "DreamWorld is being retired from Steam Early Access and removed from sale," the update states. "The game relies on hosted online services, and those services are being shut down. As a result, online and server-dependent functionality will no longer be available.

"There are no in-game purchases, premium currency, or paid in-game items that require additional action from players."

DreamWorld is a premium-priced game, selling for $30/£25/€29, so refunds on that front will presumably be dependent on whether or not you're within Steam's guidelines. If you ponied up on Kickstarter—and some people plowed a lot of money into it—you're just out of luck.

There's no indication of when the shutdown will happen, but it might have already happened—or may even be in the process of happening. Rather like the launch, the closure is turning into a mess too: Users in the DreamWorld Discord reported that the account servers had gone down last week; the game itself is (or at least was) still up and playable, but accounts couldn't be created, changed, or recovered. According to one of the Discord mods, at least some of the DreamWorld leadership were also unaware of the shutdown message until they were notified about it earlier today.

So it's possible that DreamWorld isn't actually going to be shuttered imminently, although functionally I'm not sure that makes much difference given that literally nobody is playing it right now. Also notable, I think, is that, aside from a small patch a few days after it went live, the shutdown message is the first update to DreamWorld on Steam since it launched. I'm keeping my eyes open for further updates but at this point, I think it's fair to say the curtain has indeed fallen on DreamWorld.

One interesting trend of the MMO genre is its slow drift towards a seasonal structure. Final Fantasy 14's getting properly-named seasons with Evercold, World of Warcraft's got its Mythic+ and Delve seasons, The Elder Scrolls Online's gotten them, and so on.

And there are plenty of advantages to this. Borrowed power grinds that span an entire expansion are obnoxious, and were thoroughly trashed back in Shadowlands: It doesn't feel great to fall behind on the treadmill, and having a routine reset to put everyone back on a level playing field is smart.

It also means that there's an easy excuse to come back. I, for one, don't play World of Warcraft full-time (I have too many games to keep up with, alas) but I will always come back and sink a few dozen hours into every major patch. MMOs that've adopted this model also tend to have fewer content droughts, the death knell of any game that requires (or encourages) you to pump out a monthly subscription.

But there are plenty of downsides. WoW's been struggling with its seasonal cadence lately, bogged down by bugs and balancing issues. There's also the seasonal weariness, too—unlike a sandbox MMO, these seasonal games don't offer much in the way of permanent progression.

If you get your BIS, it'll be replaced 3-4 months later. If you miss a reward, it'll likely be gone or harder to get as things are depreciated.

Most of all, seasonal zones drop off pretty quickly. Studios put all this work into an area that'll only stay relevant to the expansion in question for… well, a season. And while most of these games'll let you come back and still play through their storylines or snag the gear attached to them, there's precious little reason to do so for the gear-motivated.

More to the point, doing so makes you fall behind the current seasonal grind, kicking your can further down the road.

Contrast this to other ways of building MMOs: "Sandbox" games (air-quoted here because I might be stretching that definition here) like Old School RuneScape, EVE online, or Project Gorgon are all less concerned with some seasonal play metric and more concerned with offering you a broad ocean with things to do.

And more to the point, your progress is more permanent. No resets, no moving the gear goalposts—you can set your own objectives, and your progress'll still be there when you come back to them.

Others, like Guild Wars 2, take a more hybrid approach, still offering big zones in major patches, but keeping all progression horizontal so there's no real reason to do the new stuff aside from the fact it's, well, newer.

Which makes me curious: You, my smart, tasteful, and dare I say sensual Terminally Online reader. What's your preference? Do you think the seasonal treadmill's a nice concession between your limited personal time—or is it a pressure cooker that you're growing weary with? You can either give your hot take in the comments, or fill out this handy poll I've made just for you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'We hit the wall'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'They are bored'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Old relics

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

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

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

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

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

Takin' it slow

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

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

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

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

At a crossroads

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fragging out

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Future perfect

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

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

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

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

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

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

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