MassivelyOP’s 2022 Awards: Biggest MMO Surprise

December 19, 2022 11:00 AM

Welcome back to Massively Overpowered’s formal end-of-the-year awards!

Today’s award is for the Biggest MMO Surprise, which was awarded to the revival of Fallen Earth last year. This category is meant to offer something quite different from big stories, disappointments, and blunder; it’s meant to be something nobody saw coming at all, usually something positive, though not always. Don’t forget to cast your own vote in the just-for-fun reader poll at the very end!

And the MassivelyOP staff pick for the Biggest MMO Surprise of 2022 is…

TERA’S SUNSET

Andrew Ross: Crowfall going dark but not exactly canceled (yet?). I was worried about the game (especially how it made me want to play a roughly 15-year-old PvE MMO instead), but I figured it’d either decay or cancel. This attempt to possibly pull a FFXIV Reborn while also going offline is pretty odd, kind of interesting, and super surprising.

Andy McAdams: Dragonflight making it out on WoW’s regular cadence after all.

Brianna Royce: TERA’s sunset. I’m still a little astonished by this one; I knew it had slowed down compared to its heyday, but I didn’t think it was on the cusp of closure. I half suspect it was closed as a Hail Mary to drive players to Elyon, and we all know where that one ended up. What a bummer.

Carlo Lacsina: Guild Wars 2’s season one revival.

Chris Neal: Pushback against NFTs, TERA’s sunset. I’m not going to say that TERA was setting the MMORPG world on fire, but I also was not expecting it to be shuttered, let alone its PC version. I guess I just sort of took it for granted. RIP, true action combat MMORPG.

Eliot Lefebvre: You know those days when everything is going fine and then you see a notification that Jason David Frank is dead at age 49? Sure, you might not have been the biggest fan of all his work, but he had a place in your mind palace and he seemed to be doing well and then you find out how wrong you were? That’s what TERA’s sudden sunset brings to mind.

Justin Olivetti: TERA’s sunset. We had a lot of abrupt shutdowns in 2022, but the one that felt like an actual shock was TERA’s downfall. Like many people, I kind of assumed this one was doing all right and would be around for a long time to come.

MJ Guthrie: have to go with TERA’s sunset, which felt so out-of-the-blue and I still have to remind myself it happened when I start planning holiday streams, and Guild Wars 2 reviving its original season one storyline, which never crossed my mind as a possibility even though I wanted it! Since when do I get what I want?!

Tyler Edwards: Guild Wars 2’s season one revival.

TERA’s sunset took our award for Biggest MMO Surprise. What’s your pick?

Reader poll: What was the biggest surprise in the MMO world in 2022?

TERA's sunset (14%, 86 Votes)
The sudden demise of Crowfall (3%, 19 Votes)
Dragonflight launched in 2022 after all (4%, 26 Votes)
Guild Wars 2's season one revival (11%, 68 Votes)
Blizzard pulling out of China (16%, 96 Votes)
Daybreak canceling the Marvel MMO, again (2%, 11 Votes)
Industry unionization (2%, 15 Votes)
DUNE finally got a reveal and it's an MMO again (3%, 19 Votes)
Blue Protocol is coming westward (3%, 18 Votes)
Stadia's cancelation (3%, 16 Votes)
The slow decline of Elite (1%, 9 Votes)
Blizzard abandoning Heroes of the Storm (2%, 13 Votes)
Wargaming pulling out of Russia at great personal cost (2%, 14 Votes)
LOTRO's big comeback in 2022 that drove queues (12%, 70 Votes)
Ultima Online made it to 25 years old (1%, 4 Votes)
Tibia added sound after 25 years (1%, 4 Votes)
Lost Ark launched big and stayed huge (3%, 17 Votes)
Hi-Rez resurrected Global Agenda (2%, 12 Votes)
Guild Wars 2's End of Dragons was a big hit (3%, 18 Votes)
Lineage Eternal got rebranded as Throne and Liberty (0%, 3 Votes)
Blizzard announced a new survival game (1%, 6 Votes)
Blizzard bought Proletariat (1%, 5 Votes)
Camelot Unchained scored 15M in new investment (4%, 23 Votes)
Daybreak pretty much took over EG7 from the inside (2%, 12 Votes)
The Sims 5 will basically be an MMO (2%, 13 Votes)
Something else (let us know in the comments!) (1%, 7 Votes)

Total Voters: 431

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How does MassivelyOP choose the winner?

Our team gathers together to nominate and discuss candidates and hopefully settle on a consensus winner. We don’t have a hard vote, but we do include commentary from writers so that you can see our thought process. The site’s award goes to the staff selection, but we’ll include both it and the community’s top nomination in our debrief in January.

How does MassivelyOP populate this poll?

Poll options include all MMOs nominated plus a few others we thought should be included.