
When I was going through our historical awards for the debrief earlier this month, I had a little chuckle looking at the awards for Best Trend over the last 13 years. At the end of 2024, of course, we gave it to the resurgence of MMO expansions, which is fair; a ton of big and small MMOs put out expansions this year. But if you scroll down to 2015, what won?
That’s because in the early teens as F2P was taking off, a ton of MMOs started trying to change around their content cadences, and the classic paid-for expansion started to diminish in importance compared to smaller, more frequent updates that would pull those F2P gamers back over and over. Did it pay off? Maybe a little, but then the studios remembered how much they also liked expansion money, so they went back to expansions. And then they changed their minds again. And again. And again. It’s almost as if this genre is cyclical!
So maybe that’s why I’m worried but not in full panic mode over Elder Scrolls Online’s new cadence plans: We’ve seen all this before, and if it’s not making money, it never sticks long. I don’t think I’m alone!
But what if it is making money? What if it does work out for the best for the team and the players? For this week’s Massively Overthinking, let’s talk about these cyclical trends for content output. Which MMOs have gone back and forth on their cadence and size of updates? And has an MMO cadence switch-up ever actually worked out for the best?
Brianna Royce (@nbrianna.bsky.social, blog): I’d say it’s going pretty well for the Daybreak/SSG MMOs, honestly. Watching Lord of the Rings Online slip into the EverQuest annual expansion cadence has actually filled me with a sense of calm. I like the consistency and routine.
I think Guild Wars 2 is actually settling in fairly well too. If I’m perfectly honest, Guild Wars 2 spent the years just before and just after End of Dragons unmoored, and I really liked the stability that SOTO and Janthir Wilds brought the game. Is it less total content? Nope, just the same content spread out more, and I know when it’s coming every time.
Let me throw out a wild card: Albion Online. At the end of 2023, it swapped to a quarterly content cadence for 2024 that (in my opinion) fell a little flat compared to 2022/2023. The game kept on seeing growth because it kept launching in new regions and picking up new playerbases, but the content deluge definitely slowed down. I know it’s tweaking it again this year, with more frequent updates and even shorter seasons, so I don’t think I’m the only one who noticed!
Chris Neal (@wolfyseyes.bsky.social, blog):Â I admit that I’m struggling to think of an MMORPG that changed its content cadence for the better. Nine times out of ten, when things are being wound back, it tends to be a portent of bad things down the line at worst and some long spans of boredom at best, which still isn’t great but I’ll take boredom over a legitimately dead game any day of the week.
Case in point: The adjustments made to Final Fantasy XIV’s patch content release timing, as earlier discussed by Eliot here. As he pointed out, it’s not entirely clear whether this is an experiment in cadence change or not, but the dissection of things to do over a longer time span has made a palpable impact on the interest in the MMO among myself, my guildies, and my friend group.
Sam Kash (@samkash@mastodon.social): Guild Wars 2’s changes come to mind for me. It’s been a real long time, but from what I remember it started out with their actual living world content where new events happened live. You really only had a short window of time, like a couple of weeks, to play and experience the event before the world actually changed. Which was really cool! But it also really felt bad when you missed it, then it was just over! So changing off that routine was probably a good idea.
However, ArenaNet then went with expansions, but the content for the expansion was not for me. Yet the idea of moving towards expansions instead of bits of content that dies and goes away forever was right. Then they tried the Saga expansion content, which was good content, but initially it didn’t feel good when you paid expansion prices for a slow drip. However, like it or not, this annual expansion mode looks as if it’s going to be the one – it sure was a lot of experimenting only to go back to the basics.
Tyler Edwards (blog):Â Among my many unpopular opinions, I think a regular content cadence can be a little overrated. It’s definitely possible to go too far to the opposite extreme as well and be too unpredictable or have severe content draughts, but I think it gets a little boring if you can always predict exactly what content is coming and when. Ideally I’d something with some stability, but also the flexibility for devs to still try new things. In a perfect world I’d like to see a paid expansion every year or two, but for devs to get a little more experimental with the timing and content of patches in between.
I think Elder Scrolls Online has been one of the worst offenders of being steady to the point of tedium, so while I agree their change in direction is probably the result of reduced resources and fully sympathize with all the concerns people have about it, I’m actually cautiously optimistic about the change. The game has been so stale for so long that I think almost any shake-up would be welcome at this point.
I think they will go back to expansions at some point, and that’s for the best, but hopefully in the meanwhile the game gets to break out of its rut a bit.
