Massively Overthinking: Our MMO predictions for 2025

This might just be my favorite roundtable of the year: It’s time to lay down our predictions for the MMORPG genre for 2025. And as usual, we have to add a caveat here that just because we think something will happen does not mean we hope it does, although sometimes it does.

Let’s roll the dice and try not to look too dumb for posterity in this week’s Massively Overthinking! Join our roundtable for our MMO predictions for 2025…

Brianna Royce (@nbrianna.bsky.social, blog): I went 1 for 2 on my console predictions last year, so let me try again. I still think Guild Wars 2 is going to come to proper consoles. Lost Ark should do it too. I think World of Warcraft will eventually, but not in 2025. Maybe 2026?

I expect an extremely quiet year out of the former Cryptic MMOs, from the devs anyway. Players will not be happy, especially Star Trek Online players. It just won’t be enough content with enough polish to measure up to Cryptic.

Tencent will go quiet on Tarisland by summer and announce a western sunset by the end of the year.

Final Fantasy XIV will do something extremely unexpected content-wise at the beginning of summer and grab a bunch of attention it normally wouldn’t get in a non-expansion year.

Elder Scrolls Online will finally shake up its cadence and also deliver a new zone for its chapter that isn’t an obvious nostalgia pull. This is what I get for writing my predictions before December. OK, how about this: Elder Scrolls Online will decide that while changing up its cadence was a good idea, killing its anchor expansions was a really bad idea, and Microsoft will reluctantly acknowledge that it can’t strip ZOS bare and expect the money to keep flowing.

World of Warcraft will launch Midnight and the housing will be acceptable, on par with Elder Scrolls Online but not Guild Wars 2. Existing WoW players will love it, but it won’t bring back lapsed players.

As for Guild Wars 2, I think the 2025 expansion will forego a big new feature and instead do something else, like customizable pets or powers. Or heck, maybe a partial complement of new elite specs? By the end of the year, we’ll be hearing about the company’s next cadence plans (as we’ll have gotten to the end of the three annual expansions we knew about).

New World’s season 7 doesn’t really bring back players, as PvP people have moved on and there’s little promise for PvE players, so player numbers will continue to sink with no hype or content pushing, and we’ll find out the rest of the team has been moved to the LOTR MMO.

Albion Online will completely change its content rollout and do a full expansion and a NA fresh start server.

Pearl Abyss will finally get Crimson Desert out the door and return attention to Black Desert to get its revenues back up.

Dune Awakening has a huge launch but peters out to roughly Conan Exiles-levels of concurrency players.

EVE Online will do nothing different and end 2025 in exactly the same playerbase and revenue spot. The EVE crypto game will launch, fail as they all do, and vanish, having lost a bunch of crypto bros a lot of money paying those devs for a few years, so… a win?

Finally, we’ll see more good things out of Daybreak. Lord of the Rings Online will see a return to 2023 form, and DC Universe Online will have a big break-out moment. We won’t get more significant news on EverQuest 3, but Palia will fully launch and break into the mainstream, a big success for Daybreak.

Carlo Lacsina (@UltraMudkipEX, YouTube, Twitch): Path of Exile 2 will be amazing and it’ll just keep getting better and better and better and better.

Diablo IV will have a problem with even bigger damage numbers and too much loot dropping.

Phantasy Star Online 2: New Genesis will continue to do well with its hardcore playerbase and probably work towards maintaining the status quo.

Black Desert Online will continue to release some good updates, but will mostly have a quiet year.

Throne and Liberty will continue to do well. Major guilds will begin to solidify their power in the game.

New World won’t have anything bad happening this time around.

FFXIV will have a relatively quiet year; a new deep dungeon will release.

WoW will test out a new approach to Mythic+.

The Riot MMO will show something.

Marvel Heroes’ private server will have a comeback, but Disney is going to cause issues and probably shut it down.

Chris Neal (@wolfyseyes.bsky.social, blog): I think we’re going to see some more of the in-development projects move toward playable states this next year. I expect Ship of Heroes will make a 2025 release but not before the middle of the year, maybe. I expect Monsters and Memories will enter into some form of more open testing at the end of 2025. I also think we’ll see some more formation for Ashes of Creation as it probably nears beta by the end of the year too.

Of course, there are some projects that will malinger. Star Citizen is an easy bet for never getting close to its 1.0 goal, but I also am going to guess that Camelot Unchained will finally give up the ghost, as will Tarisland, Crowfall, and Fractured.

In completely mad blind hopes: Palworld will slap Nintendo’s litigious mouth closed, Fantastic Pixel Castle’s MMO will actually get a name and a pre-alpha date, Fntastic will finally wither and die, and Overwatch 2 will be forced to actually design something in the face of Marvel Rivals’ competition.

Also next year I will be completely lost to Monster Hunter Wilds. I will turn my OPTV time into Monster Hunter channel time. I will become an influencer and have lunch with Ryozo Tsujimoto.

Colin Henry (@ChaosConstant): Guild Wars 2 adds a new house with its next expansion. This will become an annual tradition. It continues its smaller, released-quarterly cadence for another year.

Spurred on by Guild Wars 2 and World of Warcraft’s new housing systems, Final Fantasy XIV revamps its housing system to make it accessible to casual players.

ESO players panic as the release cadence changes from the comfortable one it has been in for a while now. It loses some players who were already growing bored of it, but most accept it and keep playing. Their panic is reignited when, at the end of the year, ZOS announces its new licensed MMO project.

After seeing all of the good will and moderate success generated by City of Heroes Homecoming, another MMO studio decides to turn over its MMO to fans rather than shut it down.

Star Trek Online and Neverwinter go into maintenance mode, but hang on for another year.

Eliot Lefebvre (@Eliot_Lefebvre, blog): World of Warcraft has a year full of content updates but no housing in 2025, not yet; the patches it does release have some content people like and some content people don’t, and overall reception toward The War Within feels like it sort of ping-pongs a lot between people who are perhaps overly happy that the game is making some strides compared to the people who are annoyed it isn’t happening faster. The up side is that the game manages to avoid any major backlash from the gatekeepery crowd, and the housing previews actually look relatively powerful and good for housing fans.

Final Fantasy XIV releases its expected content patches over the course of 2025 and the tempest-in-a-teapot over Dawntrail quickly fizzles out as people enjoy the new field operations (which are a step forward after the previous ones) and other new content, including Beastmaster’s new gameplay loop before the end of the year. Fan speculation about the next expansion does start to rise above a murmur, but notably there’s less buzz than in prior years, in part because people have now been playing the game for over a decade. It’s just not as novel any more.

Guild Wars 2 does not have a follow-up to Janthir Wilds that can match the impact of Janthir Wilds. This isn’t a big failing on its part; you can only add housing for the first time one time! But 2025 is definitely a more low-key year for the game, and that’s fine.

The Elder Scrolls Online gets absolutely excoriated as time goes by and people start getting a sense for what the new content cadence looks like. We’ve joked before that one of the big points in the game’s favor is consistently pumping out content updates, and it turns out when that stops… hoo boy. Not good times for the game’s fans.

New World avoids running into a wall again this year only because really what’s happening is that it already ran into a wall at full speed. Content updates slow down to a crawl, and the slight player surge drops off pretty quickly.

Black Desert keeps putting out updates of medium size and kind of settles into the place that ESO occupied prior to 2025. It’s a solid mid-tier performer. We start talking about whether or not there should be a “medium three” and a “big three” in the wakes of developments in the industry, but honestly, who cares? I’m bored of this debate and I only just spoke it into existence.

Riot’s MMO wishcasting goes nowhere this year but we do, occasionally, get promised that it still exists.

Star Citizen continues to rake in cash even as the fanbase gets worse and the signs of weakness become ever more glaring.

EVE Frontier collapses, quelle surprise.

Crema launches another Temtem spinoff that no one asked for.

Throne & Liberty eases into being a reliable mid-tier performer for Amazon and NCsoft, encouraging the publisher to seek out other games in a similar space.

At least one crowdfunded unlaunched title finally collapses.

Warframe starts talking up its ambitions post-1999 and they sound a lot more like continuing what players loved about 1999 and really signals a new direction for the game. Well… part of a new direction, the game is what it is, but it’s clear that more story and more NPC interactions are the order of operations.

I finish the year happy to be around. (Look, I always include one about me.)

MJ Guthrie (@MJ_Guthrie, blog): I’ll be honest, 2025 is a year that I feel is just “Come what may.” I am not especially expecting anything, but I’ll be glad for good things and sad for the bad. Where my brain is: I just really want the floors in my house to get finished!

MMORPG remains a dirty word in the industry, with studios afraid to use the term and use it appropriately.

Warframe’s TennoCon 2025 will go big for its 10th anniversary. It will expand yet again (although I am not sure where else they can go other than the roof?) and bring in a record number of Tenno. Envoys will have a bigger presence as well for Soulframe. The event will raise a big chunk of change for charity. (OK, so that’s really a given!)

After DDO’s Year of the Dragon, it moves to Year of the Kobold. This needs to happen.

Guild Wars 3 will have news, but nothing that players can get in and experience for themselves. Sorry, no launch for you. However, it will introduce a new playable race. Perhaps the Kodan? A Dragonkin of some kind? Housing will also be a bigger feature with more variety than in GW2.

Rodent Rumble will launch and build a small but passionate following, though it will grow. Folks won’t be able to resist fighting as a squirrel.

Party Animals will introduce at least two new modes (perhaps experimenting with jumping puzzles or obstacle course) and expand on the PvE missions. A number of new animals are introduced that are obviously adorable. I’m pitching for the Wombat and Jackalope, but Chipmunk and Squirrel are a necessity. And a Quokka!! It will smile brightly as it beats you to a fluffy pulp.

After the success of V Rising, even more games will allow for personal, locally hosted servers to play with friends without having to fork out for permanent servers through hosting companies.

SMITE 2 will squeak in launch by the end of the year.

Is this even a prediction? CEOs will continue to be greedy, monetization will continue to get worse, and scammers will try pushing AI games to make money before abandoning them.

MOP will celebrate its 10 anniversary and will continue to be heckin’ awesome! OPTV will stream the streams, including an anniversary streamathon. And at least one where MJ and Chris both snort laugh.

Sam Kash (@samkash@mastodon.social): I’ll get right to the point of my predictions. Even though I’ve only put a few evenings into Throne and Liberty to date, I think I’ll be maining it next year. (If only I can get the time in my schedule for it. Right now we’re just too deep in boardgames. That industry is really booming in terms of large deep campaigns and we’re right in it right now.) However, once we complete this currently running one, I want to play more T&L.

In other news, Blizzard is going to Blizzard. Except for when Microsoft begins integrating Bethesda into Blizzard. That’s really going to rattle some people to their core. But really, does one company need two different MMO studios?

The alpha for Guild Wars 3 is going to make me jealous. Of course Anet still won’t understand how to take advantage of their excellent combat to make a proper PvP mode again.

Elder Scrolls Online is going to transition to a multiplayer, online, persistent game. It’ll be spicy.

New World, more like old world, am I right? Amazon Games has continued to act like this isn’t an MMO, and it’ll credit its recent improvements and successes to that end. Even though maybe the game’s increased uptake is due to all the ways they improved gameplay. See Tyler’s multiple pieces on the site for that.

Ashes of Creation will have its first beta test. It’ll conclude in 2027.

Tyler Edwards (blog): The War Within will continue to be an excellent expansion. There may be some minor controversies a la the Buckasaurus mount, but nothing that really disrupts WoW’s redemption arc.

WoW launches the 12.0 pre-patch with player housing in December, with Midnight itself launching early 2026. Housing will be the only major new gameplay feature of the expansion. I’d give about 50-50 odds on at least one of High Elves and/or Amani Trolls being added as an allied race. It will feature revamped versions of Silvermoon City, Eversong, and the Ghostlands, plus an expanded open world Zul’Aman zone and the obligatory Troll raid. The old versions of those zones will still be accessible in their own separate instance.

New World will return to operating more or less as it did before the Aeternum kerfuffle, for better or for worse. Expect moderately sized quarterly updates. Come autumn, the devs will release the long-teased Dunwood zone and one new weapon, which is probably pistols and will definitely have at least one ability that deals lightning damage. It will remain unclear whether the game is making enough money to survive long-term.

Corepunk will struggle to find an audience. It will eventually begin relaxing its old school and PvP-centric sensibilities in the hopes of attracting players, but it will be too little and too late.

Dune Awakening will launch to mostly positive reviews from survival sandbox players, but fans of traditional MMORPGs will find it doesn’t deliver the Dune MMO experience they were hoping for.

Nightingale will struggle financially, ultimately ceasing development in favour of releasing the game as a barebones single-player title.

Diablo IV will announce its second expansion late in the year. It will be set in the Mount Arreat region, and it will add the paladin class everyone is asking for.

Stormgate will cease development, Immortal: Gates of Pyre will continue to hover in limbo with no release in sight, and ZeroSpace will delay its planned May launch but may see a release by the end of the year.

Every week, join the Massively OP staff for Massively Overthinking column, a multi-writer roundtable in which we discuss the MMO industry topics du jour – and then invite you to join the fray in the comments. Overthinking it is literally the whole point. Your turn!