So here’s the disclaimer I put in front of this column every year when I do it (we alternate them): The biggest surprises list (which was last week) is the stuff that you didn’t see coming. The biggest stories list is big stuff that’s going to have long-reaching impact but may not have been all that hard to see coming. Some of the flubs and failures on this list were things that you could see from miles away, and likewise some of the good news was pretty well forecast ahead of time.
As with anything, some of this is going to be subjective and if you don’t live and breathe MMO news like we sort of have to to do our jobs, maybe some of these things came as big surprises to you. That’s fine! The point is that these are the 11 biggest stories of the year, based on where we are right now, that did not involve surprises. So together, they form 22 big stories for the year! Like a combiner made up of two component Transformers. Yes, the fandom has names for that. No, I am not going to belabor that point right now. Onward!
1. Blizzard spent the year pre-War Within whiffing every at-bat
Look, I’m not going to say that Blizzard hopes that World of Warcraft players lack object permanence. But it sure seems that way when up until the expansion launch, this year was heavily about Blizzard screwing up. BlizzCon in the game’s 20th year? Cancelled. Layoffs? So many that a project got cancelled and Microsoft ended up in court for doing more layoffs after saying that wouldn’t happen and all of that finally got the dang WoW team to unionize. Remember selling a mount for an exorbitant price? Remember charging people to play the expansion early and then nerfing leveling before the masses could play, pissing off even die-hard fans? Remember when the pre-patch was a huge mess for weeks, and then at the end, Blizzard told guilds with missing guild banks too bad? We remember. But hey, at least the expansion was good, and at least the next one will finally introduce a feature all the other big MMOs have introduced before Blizzard managed it!
2. Blue Protocol was canceled
It is not ha-ha funny that some people were saying right up until the shutdown announcement that Bandai-Namco was clearly not giving up on Blue Protocol, but it is grimly funny. You know, the laughter that turns into a heartbroken sigh. Regardless, the writing was on the wall for this one for a long time; while the game looked gorgeous, it clearly just didn’t have the juice. And really, you can’t even blame Amazon for this one. This is on Bamco.
3. Amazon Games botched New World’s console port announcement
You can, however, totally blame Amazon for this one! It’s not really the fact that the game decided to stop updating to prepare its console port, although that is pretty bad; it’s the fact that it was put forth as a great moment when everyone would be super happy with how things turned out and it would justify all that waiting. Combine that with marketing trying hard to believe that no one had object permanence and the game’s existing reviews were based on the game pre-release and… yeah. Maybe I should have saved the Lowered Expectations clip. There’s a reason this took our biggest blunder award for 2024.
4. US Copyright Office struck a blow against game preservation
I’m not going to rewrite the whole piece that Chris wrote about this particular issue, but the short version is that the copyright office decided that there is no protection for allowing people to access games digitally and remotely for research purposes, which is another strike against long-term game preservation, especially for online games. This is a complex issue with a lot of moving parts, but if you want a justification for keeping servers up, this was a blow.
5. Stop Killing Games sprang into being
Ubisoft is truly reaching revolutionary new landmarks of screwing up when the company messes up its online games so badly that a whole movement starts to protest against games being shut down for good. Thus far it doesn’t have a whole lot of major wins, apart from apparently frightening Ubisoft into creating an offline mode for The Crew 2, but the fact that it’s a thing at all is impressive and good for our industry. Yes, these two things are supposed to be back-to-back. Just because there are legal and uphill battles doesn’t mean we shouldn’t celebrate wins and wider awareness.
6. Guild Wars 3 got a weird oopsie announcement
Technically, at this point, we don’t even know anything about the genre of this title. For all we know it could be a single-player card battler roguelike. Unlikely, but it’s possible. But the important thing is that Guild Wars 3 is happening, even if clearly no one is actually ready to announce that just yet beyond bizarre proclamations at investor meetings.
7. AI and blockchain remained the scams that will not die
I thought we were actually done with the blockchain nonsense, but here comes EVE Frontier, acting like it’s doing something worthwhile with the technology (spoiler: It’s not because there’s nothing worthwhile to be done with it). AI, meanwhile, is kind of a useful tool for a couple of edge cases, but people keep acting like it’s an art and writing and everything generator so it becomes a scam machine too. Whee.
8. Smaller titles got spinoffs and pivots
So Wayfinder did a big old pivot, but at least it actually made it to launch and kept the game alive, so that’s a good thing. But meanwhile, the Kickstarted MMOs Zenith and Temtem just went all-in on pivoting to see if maybe making an entirely new game from pieces of the old one would be the key to making big money. Spoiler: It was not! It never is! Please stop thinking that will work! It has never worked, not even once, and the closest we got was Fortnite cashing in on a trend with a game that was already doing fine without it and happening to strike gold. That isn’t going to happen twice, and definitely not to you.
9. Path of Exile 2 launched and the industry lost its mind
It turns out that all you really need to do to follow up your game with insanely complex builds wherein you get showered with loot to make more complex builds and make more monsters explode is to just… make a game that’s more of that with new systems. This isn’t really complicated, and while Path of Exile 2 is still dealing with the usual cycle of being tuned a bit too hard and finally being exposed to people who aren’t marinating in the development environment 24/7… hey, it’s a big launch, it’s a win. It feels like such a simple formula that the sequel just needed to iterate on, and that’s more or less what it does. Take half a holiday. Wait, actually, don’t take a holiday at all, you need to fix your game. Eventually take half a holiday.
10. Fntastic’s Fabulous Year of Flim-Flam
Remember The Day Before? You probably don’t because you have had countless deeply stupid things fed to your mind-maw subsequently, but the thing about the company behind that game, Fntastic, is that you should remember it. Not because it has other hits; quite the opposite! It is the rare company that is actually Oops, All Shams. Even more amazingly, the company keeps finding new rackets to run through, from early access slop to crowdfunding to volunteer labor to asset flips. It’s a bit of everything! I half expect that before the year ends, the devs will personally log into a game and try to run an item-swap hustle in an MMORPG just to really fill things out.
11. The Elder Scrolls Online canceled its fan gathering and cut back its cadence
So fun fact, on the day I initially wrote this column we had no clear explanation for why The Elder Scrolls Online cancelled a fan gathering in more or less the most sudden way possible, thereby causing a big fan freakout. But it sure did serve as a reminder of how fragile fan perception really can be, since it immediately prompted calls that the sky was falling and the game is in bad shape based on that lone event. And then a week later, the studio also canceled its chapter-driven annual cadence in favor of less content and a seasonal format, thereby prompting even more fan freakouts. So that’s great.
Everyone likes a good list, and we are no different! Perfect Ten usually takes an MMO topic and divides it up into 10 delicious, entertaining, and often informative segments for your snacking pleasure. And per tradition, we’re cranking this column up to eleven with our annual special features in the End-of-Year Eleven!
