As we do every year, today we’re going to peek back at the horrifying outcomes of last year’s MOP staff predictions for the genre and the games within it to determine how well we did. After all, what would be the fun of making predictions if we couldn’t giggle over our guesses a year later?
So did we nail it or fail it? And did you fare better? Let’s find out.
World of Warcraft and Blizzard
Andrew: “World of Warcraft’s next expansion will exist, but not do as well as the previous ones as the mighty Titan has fallen, but people will still come back and enjoy it for a month or so before waiting for another major update while they play other games.” In fact it did rather well in terms of sales, even setting a sales record for the game, though that’s partly down to its now-global rollouts.
Bree: “World of Warcraft’s expansion will do much better than Legion. We won’t see Classic in 2018, however (fall 2019 is my bet). Overwatch’s e-sports push seems like a longshot to me, but I’m sure that if and when it capsizes, someone will be walking away with a ton of cash and call it a win.” Yes on WoW, but Overwatch is still hanging in there.
Eliot: “World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth releases in early November after people repeatedly predict incorrect earlier dates for it. Island expeditions and warfronts are almost immediately popular (although there are balance issues), while dungeons and raids notice a bit of a downturn. It’s too early to tell how the game is doing by the end of the year, but there’s a fair amount of, ‘Wow, I thought it was a weak premise, but the actual gameplay is surprisingly good.'” Missed the date, and most everything else too. Look how hopeful Eliot was last year about BFA.
Eliot: “World of Warcraft: Classic servers arrive midway through the year. They see a brief population surge, followed by a whole lot of people swiftly leaving while claiming that the servers ere somehow mismanaged because they wanted something other than the actual true-to-vanilla servers. It’s because of bugs/balance/something other than the actual inconvenience, definitely. In a darkened room, a man chuckles, lights a cigar, and whispers, ‘You think you want it, but you don’t.’ Somewhere in the distance, a wolf howls.” Still not here, but this should all carry over.
Justin: “World of Warcraft is going to have a strong year based on the new expansion and classic server buzz, but it won’t see the typical expansion high based on the apathy levels of Battle for Azeroth’s announcements.” Fair. Apathy set in pretty early.
Daybreak, EverQuest, and H1Z1
Andrew: “Daybreak will retire Planetside 2 because it exists but isn’t making bank. H1Z1 (both versions) won’t make any major comebacks as the survival genre’s time is passing. Yes, the arena play style for [PUBG] is up, but Daybreak’s baby’s probably too old already and losing its following.” Nope on PS2, but H1Z1 definitely struggled this year in spite of strong PS4 performance; Daybreak suffered multiple rounds of layoffs, dropped Just Survive, and is in the middle of a nasty esports scandal involving H1Z1’s pro league.
Bree: “Standing Stone will hang in there. Daybreak too, but H1Z1 will still not officially launch, and Parabolic will be an Overwatch clone.” H1Z1 did launch, finally, though JS sunsetted before it did. We heard nothing on Parabolic, unless PlanetSide Arena is it.
Eliot: “Daybreak continues to flail around looking for a hit vaguely like H1Z1 before PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds existed, ultimately being unsuccessful. PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds falters a bit as well once the novelty wears off, but Daybreak makes it clear that things don’t really fully materialize. By the end of the year, H1Z1 appears to be in real trouble.” All hits, though we should probably separate H1Z1 for PC (Z1 Battle Royale) from H1Z1 on PS4, the latter of which seems to do OK.
Justin: “Daybreak’s going to announce a new EverQuest title, but it won’t be what we expect. Smaller studios, like SSG and Broadsword, are going to continue to tread water with interesting expansions and updates for their games that won’t quite recapture former glory.” Technically true, as the NantWorks partnership will include an EverQuest mobile game.
MJ: “The EverQuest franchise will have a major closing scare (loss of major dev, legal troubles by by parent company?), but it will make it through to 2019.” I think the layoffs, Columbus Nova mess, and NantWorks panic-moves all count here.
Star Citizen
Andrew: “This year, for sure, Star Citizen will finally come out, but again, it can’t live up to the hype. It may be serviceable at best.” Nope.
Bree: “Star Citizen will eventually get alpha 3.0 out the door in March. It’ll settle that lawsuit by summer. It won’t launch, and the next phase it does promise also won’t launch next year.” Right on all counts except the lawsuit didn’t mostly end until this very week.
Eliot: “Star Citizen’s 3.0 issues prove to be extremely deep-seated and keep hampering the game as more and more backlash materializes through more obscure funding methods (like, stuff that makes the land sales seem downright prosaic). Squadron 42 is, at best, in an early test state at the end of the year; whether or not it is marketed as a launch will depend on too many factors to examine here.” The absurd sales definitely ramped up this year, and still no S42.
Justin: “Star Citizen will get alpha 3.0 out… and it will be plagued with issues.” Now that was just low-hanging fruit. :P
NCsoft, Guild Wars 2, and WildStar
Bree: “NCsoft will leak news about Guild Wars 2’s next expansion, starting the whole cycle again. WildStar will somehow manage to get another year of life. I’ll try this one again: WildStar announces console plans, and the Blade & Soul console launch will be a windfall for the company.” Oddly, nothing on GW2’s next big thing is out yet, so a ding there. Wrong about WildStar too.
Eliot: “Guild Wars 2 starts the year out strong, but a few controversial business decisions hit in the middle of the year and update cadence slows down significantly through the later months. It’s still better than life was with Heart of Thorns.” That last line, you bet, but the company was definitely plagued with several big messes, including Pricegate, this year. Spot on.
Eliot: “WildStar continues to limp along with no real updates, waiting for the actual shutdown. (That might happen next year, actually, but I’m tired of guessing about when.)” Won’t have to guess anymore.
Justin: “I’m going to call it: This is the year that WildStar will shut down. And that will be a shame.” Sigh. Dead on.
Elder Scrolls, Black Desert, and FFXIV
Eliot: “The Elder Scrolls Online has two major updates. One is well-received and in the same vein as the stuff that we’ve had over the past two years; the other is… less so. One step forward and one stumble, then.” More than two, but I think it’s fair to say the chapter was better-received than the DLC.
Bree: “Elder Scrolls Online will announce a new chapter. It and Black Desert will vie for dominance next year.” At this point, I’ll be more worried if ESO doesn’t announce another chapter to keep its annual pattern going. Like in the next week or two.
Andrew: “Current MMO darlings Elder Scrolls Online and Final Fantasy XIV will do well enough this year. ESO will probably stumble with some lockbox thing because, let’s face it, all games with lockboxes do this, so doing it at least once this year is bound to happen. On the other hand, FFXIV will put something overpriced in their own shop, but most likely just a vanity item and not something game breaking like a ghillie suit of ganking goodness.” Both of these titles managed few stumbles this year, to their credit.
Eliot: “Final Fantasy XIV continues to update on a reliable schedule and reveals its third expansion in November, bringing players either to the southern or western continent. It knows what it’s doing and continues to do it well.” Yep. Expansion announced just a few weeks back.
Eliot: “Black Desert continues to grow and expand, with another big landscape update to help spur more player interaction.” Yup. And another on the way.
MJ: “At least one more developer/game will jump on the fan convention bandwagon (as more should!) and it will an awesome time to hang with devs and fans. At least one special announcement will be made there!” I’m giving MJ credit for this one as Black Desert began running a fan convention this year.
Indie MMOs
Andrew: “Chronicles of Elyria may get its MUD online, but I can’t imagine much more than more demos of the MMO proper.” Yup. Pre-alpha basically. The layoffs early in the year didn’t help.
Bree: “Crowfall will finally launch and do pretty well, but not a blockbuster. Camelot Unchained will finally roll into beta one by late spring. Ashes of Creation trucks along in quiet testing but doesn’t make any bold moves in 2018. Ship of Heroes will also find moderate success, beating the other superhero MMOs to a truly playable early access.” Bree, Crowfall is never gonna launch. It got another delay. But CU did hit beta many years late, Ashes pissed everyone off with battle royale and the My.com partnership, and Ship of Heroes is still in dev.
Eliot: “We get at least one surprising new title announced that isn’t a Kickstarted probably-not-happening indie that promises tons of backward-looking systems. Speaking of that group, at least one of the well-known smaller titles (like Chronicles of Elyria, Saga of Lucimia, City of Titans, et al.) winds up shutting down altogether. (It’s happened before.)” We could give Eliot a couple of points here: Dogma Eternal Night went kaput, as did 3001SQ, and Torchlight Frontiers is our big non-KS MMO en route.
Justin: “Ashes of Creation and Crowfall are going to pick up serious steam this year and begin to generate a ton of buzz.” I’d say they both picked up more steam. Fair.
Justin: “I think we’ll see a winnowing of the City of Heroes successors, and that Ship of Heroes will be the game to come out on top of that effort.” Nobody’s dropped out just yet. In fact, the three bigguns keep upping the ante.
Justin: “Camelot Unchained is going to start its long-awaited beta test in June. Shroud of the Avatar’s launch will be a non-event for most gamers.” July, in fact, and yes, most people still don’t know SOTA launched. Again.
Justin: “Kickstarter won’t be a thing of the past, either; 2018 will get not one, but two major MMO crowdfunding projects that stir up buzz.” Temtem and Fractured should count for two to give Justin the win here.
MJ: “A handful of games will actually launch launch, surprising players who all thought Early Access actually means launch. One game will completely forgo Early Access and paid betas, shocking the industry and endearing itself to fans.” How about we call it for MJ on this one for Wild West Online, which cut its early access so short to launch that it surprised everyone and then promptly flopped since it really wasn’t done?
Incoming MMOs
Bree: “We will get a trickle of info about New World, but it’ll become clearer that it won’t be a sandbox MMORPG and will look a lot more like PUBG than originally planned. Ironically, I don’t think we’ll still be talking much about PUBG in the west a year from now.” Pretty close. On both counts.
Bree: “If The Lineage (Lineage Eternal) and Lost Ark do finally launch, they won’t have nearly the impact in the west that they did years ago when first announced. A:IR will not make 2018.” Still awaiting all three games in the west.
Eliot: “Ascent: Infinite Realm launches to some mixed responses at first, gets some polish passes, and is looking very healthy as it starts testing in the west.” Nope.
Eliot: “Amazon’s game studio continues to put out a grand total of nothing. Whee.” Hey, does a ton of screenshots on Twitter and an alpha nobody’s allowed to talk about count as nothing? Yes? OK.
Justin: “Amazon’s New World will eventually be proven to be vaporware, but John Smedley’s team is going to come out with a neat little MMO thing that gets us excited in his visions again.” Not vaporware, but people are definitely excited for Smed’s visions.
Destiny 2
Andrew: “Destiny 2 will not do well. Bungie will continue to struggle to make it cool again, but lighting seems to have escaped the bottle. Amazon may be working on games, but I don’t think we’ll see anything from them this year.” Fair.
Bree: “Destiny 2 won’t recover, in spite of popular DLC, and Bungie will move on to the next thing.” Also fair.
Eliot: “Destiny 2 has a minor revival mid-year as its underlying issues finally start to be patched out and fixed, but there’s still no talk about Destiny 3 or even rumors of same. The game finds its niche as it becomes more convincingly MMO-esque.” Man, nobody around here has any faith for Destiny 2. Neither does Bungie, apparently, since it was literally giving the game away at BlizzCon.
EVE and CCP
Bree: “Hilmar Petursson will exit CCP and EVE will hover as it does now.” Petursson’s still there, but the investors did basically sell the whole company to Pearl Abyss and lose a ton of devs including Andie Nordgren, so, um, there’s that.
Eliot: “EVE Online spends the year mostly in recovery mode; rather than CCP spinning out more big and expensive projects, it focuses on doubling down with its existing content. Things are looking up more toward the end of the year, although there’s a certain degree of player apprehension focused around the game’s financial health.” In this case, given the sale, it seems like CCP Games will be tasked with fresh new titles, but all anchored on EVE.
PWE/Cryptic
Bree: “Cryptic will cancel the Magic MMO it’s working on, but otherwise, PWE does fine with its whole stable.” Not canceled, but super quiet. And none of us got Torchlight here!
Eliot: “Cryptic reveals details on its Magic: the Gathering MMO, with release scheduled for late 2018 or early 2019. People who love Cryptic’s other games are going to enjoy it, and it’ll bring in some new blood. It will still feature some obtrusive lockbox stuff.” Still in the dark on this.
Other MMOs
Bree: “Funcom will continue tinkering on the games it maintenance-moded and fall back on Secret World Legends content.” Surprisingly, Funcom did just this.
Bree: “Trion will put RIFT on console.” Fail here. I had been predicting this as a wild card for years. Defiance, however, did make it to console this year, just before, uh, the whole company imploded and was sold to Gamigo. Yikes.
Bree: “BioWare won’t get any bounce off The Last Jedi for SWTOR and continue its anemic updates.” Seems fair.
Eliot: “TERA does all right on consoles, but it shows its age. A few more import MMOs open, a few more close, as it always has been.” Yeah.
MJ: “Season 2 of Secret World Legends will launch and it will be glorious! Veterans and new players alike will be frothing at the mouth wanting more because cliffhangers will be involved. Something shocking happens with a well-known/beloved NPC.” Welp, it definitely got some stuff this year. Frothing, maybe not.
Bree: “The F2P pushes for Ultima Online and Dark Age of Camelot will make mainstream news for a day but not really pull in new players in the long haul.” Broadsword didn’t release numbers, but this feels fair to me. DAOC’s F2P was pushed into 2019.
Andrew: “Warner Bros (which sadly owns Turbine) will continue to make bad mobile titles of popular IPs and I’ll continue crying myself to sleep knowing they own the rights to Asheron’s Call but won’t do anything with it (please, please Santa, let this be the one thing I’m wrong about!).” No. -Santa
Other online games
Bree: “Sea of Thieves, on the other hand, will rope in a ton of MMORPG players.” It seems to have done well, but MMORPG players seem to have sussed out the griefing problems ahead of time and stayed away…
Justin: “I’ll lose myself in Sea of Thieves for about two months straight.” …Justin included.
MJ: “Following the very, very delayed release of ARK’s third DLC (which will again break the base game), Wildcard announces a new game that will be going to early access.” Huge hit from MJ on this one, as WildCard announced Atlas.
MJ: “Warframe will take another long stride into MMOness and be ‘discovered’ by more MMO players (but it will still not officially launch =P).” Yep on all counts.
The broader industry
Andrew: “VR may continue to see a push on console and mobile, but I think its PC time (especially for MMO) won’t see any major renewal outside of maybe whatever work’s done on the Sword Art Online game. Speaking of mobile, yeah, expect more mobile MMOs, especially from Asia, but at this point, don’t expect them to ‘get’ the western market yet. I’m actually still struggling with it myself!” Almost nobody is talking about VR anymore. Yep.
Andrew: “Nintendo will continue to skirt the edge between multiplayer games with social media community events tying into larger narratives and actual MMO but still refuse to commit to making the latter. Pokemon Go, in particular, will continue testing the waters.” Fair. POGO gets more and more MMOish all the time, in spite of Nintendo.
Bree: “Definitely think we’ll see more companies grudgingly showing transparency on lockboxes and trying to head off legislation (which will come anyway) by playing nicely while the teacher’s watching.” We didn’t get much more transparency this year, aside from games like Dota 2, which are kowtowing more to China’s laws than to the western push, but the lawsuits and legislation keep coming.
Eliot: “Next year sees some shakeups across the genre, with some well-known titles shutting down and some others stepping into places of renewed prominence. We also see more titles embracing the pseudo-MMO aspect that has become far more common in ostensibly single-player titles, including at least one title that actually provides an interesting question of whether or not it really is an MMO or just close to one.” I’ve yet to write our sunsets-of-2018 article yet, but my skim of the list shows that surprisingly few major MMORPGs, apart from WildStar, kicked the bucket this year. The pseudo-MMOs just keep piling up, though.
Justin: “We’re definitely going to see far fewer new MOBAs and far more ‘battle royale’ shooters, because copycatting is a constant.” Absolutely so.
MJ: “Survival sandboxes will continue to be a popular design choice, but companies will have to start getting more creative with unique hooks to distinguish their game from the massive sea of similar titles.” Yep. Survival games that are not Fortnite clones still do pretty well.
MJ: “Instead of lessening, lockboxes will find their way into even more single-player and co-op games — even TV shows and streamin services! New ‘no lootboxes’ lootbox mechanics will be introduced.” The endcaps of Target aisles have freaking lockboxes. Enough said.
MJ: “Nothing will even come remotely close to having as feature-rich a virtual world as SWG, and Bree and I will lament that fact no less than 142 times.” And here we are. Though I solved my problem with just playing a SWG Emu. Fixed.
But wait, there’s more
Eliot: “I will eat a burrito bowl.” It happened.
MJ: “Mo’s secret relationship finally comes to light!” It was with the burrito bowl. RIP.
Your turn!
Are video games doomed? What do MMORPGs look like from space? Did free-to-play ruin everything? Will people ever stop talking about Star Wars Galaxies? Join Massively Overpowered Editor-in-Chief Bree Royce and mascot Mo every month as they answer your letters to the editor right here in Ask Mo.
