Loving MMOs in 2026 is an exercise in frustration, grief, and moving on

I'm breaking my routine, here—typically, when I sit down to write Terminally Online, I'll alternate between a hot take or an interview and something a little more light-hearted, like a poll or a discussion. This week, though, you're getting two in a row, because recent subjects I've covered have me a little bummed out.

Maybe it's my allergies acting up, or a remnant of winter blues, or the fact everything feels just a little bit dire in the world at the moment, but I'm kinda bummed out about the state of MMOs, man. And it's not because of the experience of actually playing them, mind. There are a lot of great offerings out there right now (peep our best MMOs list).

Sure, WoW's having a bit of a tizzy right now, but the bones of Midnight are good and will continue to be so once Blizzard's gotten its act together. The Elder Scrolls Online, Final Fantasy 14, and Guild Wars 2 are all some degree of decent. Warframe's doing its own thing and Fallout 76 is good now.

If you want a taste of retro, you can hop back to several points in WoW's history via Classic, check out the still-stellar City of Heroes, or mess about in Old School Runescape. There are even some halfway decent indie MMOs making strides.

But if you want new MMOs to get excited about, you're out of luck. We literally described 2025 as an MMO massacre, because so many work-in-progress games were cancelled, and some younger blood shut down too soon after going live. Rest in peace, New World—as for Project Blackbird, we hardly knew ye.

Which leaves you and me stuck with the old guard. Ah, jeez. On second thought, maybe this is all just because I'm aging into my 30s and getting a proper sense of the passage of time.

Everything changes, and it has to

There's a sort of monkey's paw curse that happens when you're invested in an MMO—if you get particularly taken, the rewards are vast. These are sprawling, giant worlds filled with lovely communities that can absorb you for years at a time, giving you friendships and companions who can eventually become real-life pals.

But they're also in a constant state of flux. If I talk to a friend about a game I adore, generally speaking, I can go ahead and play it. If it's really old, maybe that's not a sure thing—but if I can get it to run, I can head back into those halcyon days without fear of things being different.

Not so for the MMO. Every two to three years, the game you love will change—and not always for the better. WoW's the biggest example of this, dipping in and out of controversy and catastrophic design like it's about to do the Hokey Pokey, turn itself around, and show us what it's all about. Warlords of Draenor bad, Legion good, Battle for Azeroth bad, Dragonflight good, and so on.

Sometimes not changing is a problem, too. Final Fantasy 14: Shadowbringers is one of the best RPGs I've ever played, and Endwalker made me cry dozens of times—but as a game, the stagnation has eaten at me terribly, to the point where Evercold's job shake-up feels like the light at the end of a tunnel.

And hey, let's say you boot up something like World of Warcraft: Classic for a hit of liquid nostalgia: Too bad, things are different here, too. Ragnaros dies in a matter of days, rather than months. The game has been optimised into something different, changed by the hands that hold it.

When I say loving an MMO is an exercise in frustration, this is what I mean. If there are no new games to go to, then you're either in a cycle of being happy with your lot and waiting for the other shoe to drop, or grappling with update-borne depression and anxiety that your game's on the decline. If you've seen it happen enough times, it might drag you out of love with a game entirely.

Nothing new can stay

Sometimes it all ends in tears: City of Heroes, Star Wars: Galaxies, Wildstar, Warhammer Online—nothing lasts forever. Maybe it'll take another decade or two, but there'll be a time when even Blizzard closes its doors for good, sure as death and taxes.

The upshot is that sometimes these games make their way into good hands. City of Heroes: Homecoming is on my recommendations list because it's pretty much in the best state it's ever been in—divorced from microtransactions and the need for profit, powered by donations and enthusiasm.

But there is this eerie sense that we MMO players are all sort of just in a retirement home waiting for the next one to pop off. Oh, sure, occasionally a game gets a golden era—sometimes bingo night slaps—but that doesn't change the fact we're all sitting here with dentures and knitted blankets.

How'd we get here? Well, a couple of reasons: Firstly, shareholders. While game cancellations have always been a thing, MMOs take a heck of a long time to make, and the hunger for quarterly growth makes that a terrible proposition for a late-stage capitalist system that only cares about the incline on a graph somewhere.

And that's not just my take. Listen to Matt Firor, steward of the trashed Project Blackbird this week, speaking to YouTuber MinnMax: "They want a business they can look at that has numbers that go up reliably every year by a certain amount—and this isn't [just] Xbox, this is all public companies, they want reliable, forecastable business."

Nothing described here works very well in the messy sprawl of an MMO. An MMO has ups and downs, busts and booms, and requires consistent, deliberate love to flourish. Instead what we get are $75 housing bundles chasing that sweet, sweet short-term payout, and seasons. Because you can align seasons with quarters, and a little bit of excitement probably looks great on the balance sheets.

And hey, seasons aren't inherently a bad thing—except for when you can't keep up. The price you pay for constant evolution is, inevitably, the embracing of instability. And the MMO genre writ large could really use a bit more stability right now.

Moving on

I really would love to be proven wrong. Maybe Riot's new MMO comes out of nowhere and ushers us all into a second golden age—after all, these trends come in waves. Just as WoW brought on its own flood of imitators, Fortnite begat more… well, Fortnites. We shifted from MMOs to battle royales to extraction shooters. There's every chance the pendulum comes back again.

But right now, in 2026? I feel a bit of vertigo for a genre I deeply adore. A lot of my favourite games will probably make it through the next decade, sure—but certainly not forever. And if there's no-one there to pick up the torch (and 2025 saw an entire generation of prospective MMOs wither on the vine), what happens then?

I don't really have an answer that isn't just a bummer, and hey—there are certainly bigger ills to worry about in this world than 'my favourite kind of game doesn't exist anymore'. But I'd still rather it did, because MMOs are lovely. I've made some of the most enduring friendships of my life in them, and I want that experience for future generations. Assuming we're not back in the stone age by then, or technofascist serfs, or something.

But this is my hope: If someone's still writing this column when I'm fifty, they won't be forced to pick a different genre to write about.