They survived the MMO massacre of 2025, but 2026 is going to be a tense year for WoW and FF14: And for completely different reasons | PC Gamer

Harvey Randall, Staff Writer (Image credit: Square Enix) (Image credit: Blizzard Entertainment) (Image credit: Square Enix) (Image credit: Future) This week I'm - on holiday, actually. I wrote this in advance. I'm the ghost of videogame takes past. OooooOoo. Last week I was: Coping a little about Hades 2. 2025 was a bloody year for MMORPGs as a genre. And by bloody, I actually mean catastrophic: New World announced it'd be closing, Greg Street's MMO had its funding pulled , that ZeniMax game was killed before it could even hit the market, and a Warhammer MMO was cancelled . But World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy 14 survived-which... isn't really any sort of surprise, really. In the world of MMOs, the old guard will always stand strong. It'll take more than a deeply ominous state of the industry (and the fact that no-one seems to get to make MMOs anymore ) to take these big boys down. Yet there's trouble in paradise: In a fascinating bit of coincidence , both World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy 14 are in for a very interesting 2026 (and beyond). How either game is handled in this fateful year will set the tone for years to come. Turning that ship around Final Fantasy 14 has, as I and my fellow FF14 enjoyer Mollie Taylor have often said on this website, been in a weird state . It has been in a weird state since the aftermath of Endwalker, mind-but the cracks have only been deepening . There's a few contributing factors to this. (Image credit: Square Enix) To try and summarise it: Final Fantasy 14 is a game that has lagged behind its peers in terms of both design sensibility and actual content cadence-as I pointed out back in 2024 , Blizzard has basically been running circles around Creative Studio 3 when it comes to the sheer volume of stuff to do. Sheer scale and development heft is the first hurdle. WoW's a bigger game, helmed by a studio that was purchased for over $68 billion and has been enjoying a huge amount of investment from Microsoft for that very reason-meanwhile, FF14 has been a breadwinner for Square Enix , and yet, it's been taken for granted; Its funds have been seemingly siphoned off to ill-fated projects, and if they haven't? Then, uh, I'm not sure what Creative Studio 3's been doing with all that money. But the other problem sits squarely in design philosophy. Until as recently as patch 7.35 , which came out in October of this year (almost a full year after I wrote that 2024 opinion piece) Creative Studio 3 was still divvying up content on a casual-hardcore line . Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team. In case you're unfamiliar, basically: Modern MMO design sensibilities state that you've gotta use the whole cow. Release a raid? There should be different difficulties for all skill levels. People...

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