MassivelyOP’s 2024 Awards: Biggest MMO Surprise

December 31, 2024 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 SWTOR’s move to Broadsword 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 2024 is…

WORLD OF WARCRAFT’S HOUSING REVEAL

Andrew Ross: Nintendo is finally making an MMO

Andy McAdams: Stars Reach’s announcement

Brianna Royce: WoW is finally getting housing, Daybreak bought Palia. CoH got the NCsoft license. OK, maybe City of Heroes Homecoming getting the license wasn’t a surprise; everyone paying attention and not in deep denial (there’s a ton of weird conspiracy thinking in the CoH community) knew it was only a matter of time before the negotiations finished and the license happened. Fine, fine. But I definitely didn’t see World of Warcraft announcing housing or Daybreak buying Palia coming. Holy crap.

Carlo Lacsina: Throne of Liberty shows that old school MMO tropes still work in 2024. I just did not expect Throne of Liberty to be so enjoyable for me. Open world dungeons and the EXP grind through killing monsters and events are enhanced by modern conveniences and the game found a balance with open-world PvP and PVE gameplay. I’m going to reiterate what I’ve been saying the whole time: developers need to look at what went right with Throne and Liberty and BUILD ON IT! Throne and Liberty looks back at some legacy systems that many games have written off as archaic, but I think we need to look back to those older games and systems to move forward.

Chris Neal: WoW announcing housing, The Repopulation and Fntastic coming back into the news. Nobody had this WoW housing on their bingo card, and if they say they did, they’re straight up lying to your face. All of the indications from Blizzard for years and years and years has been that housing just is not an important part of the WoW experience, yet lo and behold, there’s that mug sitting on a table. I worry that this is going to be another dropped ball, but I hope against hope that this one is just as wonderful as players wish it to be.

Eliot Lefebvre: WoW announcing housing

Justin Olivetti: Housing is coming to World of Warcraft. While late to the party with this, World of Warcraft made a lot of people sit up in shock when it announced that a full housing system was coming to the MMO next year with Midnight. About dang time, Blizz!

MJ Guthrie: CoH Homecoming getting a license wasn’t really a surprise, as we knew it was in the works for a long while, with much effort being put into it. Yet at the same time, the surprise is that NCsoft gave Homecoming a license! A giant of a studio didn’t just turn a blind eye to an emu; it actually gave legit permission to operate. Imagine a studio caring enough about a passionate playerbase after it has moved on to other things. Not “I can’t have it so no one can!” but “Here ya go, enjoy.”

Sam Kash: Multiversus made it to a second launch

Tyler Edwards: Tie between WoW doing such a good job of redeeming itself and New World doing so much to burn its goodwill with long-time fans like me.

WoW announcing housing took our award for Biggest MMO Surprise. What’s your pick?

Reader poll: What was the biggest surprise in the MMO world in 2024?

World of Warcraft announced housing yay (22%, 63 Votes)
NCsoft granted Homecoming the City of Heroes license (20%, 57 Votes)
Raph Koster finally announced Stars Reach and it's SWG2 (8%, 22 Votes)
Daybreak bought Palia and it's actually doing well (7%, 20 Votes)
Throne & Liberty made old-school content new again (2%, 7 Votes)
WoW actually managed to change its trajectory by listening to players (10%, 28 Votes)
New World grossly mishandled the Aeternum rollout (1%, 4 Votes)
Nintendo is actually working on an MMO after years (2%, 7 Votes)
Blue Protocol's global PC version was canceled (5%, 14 Votes)
ArcheAge sunsetted around the globe (1%, 3 Votes)
Multiversus made it to a second launch instead of being canceled (0%, 0 Votes)
Daybreak brought back Fippyfest (0%, 0 Votes)
Palworld came out of almost nowhere and blew up (3%, 9 Votes)
Guild Wars 3 was unwittingly announced at a hostile NCsoft investor meeting (8%, 22 Votes)
EG7 and Daybreak sold PlanetSide and moved PS2 to a subsidiary (0%, 1 Votes)
Blizzard cancels BlizzCon in WoW's 20th anniversary year (2%, 5 Votes)
Gigantic was revived after years offline (0%, 1 Votes)
The Day Before devs can't stop won't stop (1%, 3 Votes)
Legends of Aria was revived as Classic (0%, 0 Votes)
NetEase and Blizzard reunited in China (1%, 2 Votes)
Camelot Unchained is back with a new investor and launch window (1%, 3 Votes)
Phoenix Labs was bought by a blockchain corp and tried to cover it up (0%, 1 Votes)
Thousands of game devs, including WoW's and ESO's, unionized (4%, 13 Votes)
Something else (tell us in the comments!) (2%, 5 Votes)

Total Voters: 199

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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. Reader poll options include all surprises nominated plus a few others we thought should be included.