Harvey Randall, Staff Writer
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.
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.
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 are both better at videogames, and have less time to play them. If you go to the trouble of making assets, designing encounters, and fleshing out bits of the world—you should make sure there’s something for everyone there.
Critical reception to Dawntrail seems to’ve given Yoshi-P the kick up the butt he needed to start adjusting his past assumptions
FF14 has… not been doing this, beyond frankly dated normal/Savage structures for certain fights. This came to a head in patch 7.25’s Forked Tower, a straw that broke the camel’s back: Hard to access and punishing to complete, yet also difficult to organise for, a vanishingly slim amount of players actually saw the dang thing.
Which is fine for, say, WoW’s Mythic+—but if you actually wanted to do the Forked Tower raid at all, you were stuck on that difficulty, which is absurdly wasteful on Creative Studio 3’s part. A whole chunk of very hard work and encounter design, all for the service of—at the time in the story linked above—approximately 2% of the playerbase.
That seems to be changing. Pilgrim’s Traverse released with a variable difficulty, aimed at allowing casual players to explore most of what’s on offer with a tough-as-nails fight for the sweats to chew on at the end and, bar a few issues with the rewards? It went down well.
Other problems, like the game’s stagnating job design and scared cows, also seem to be under director Naoki Yoshida (Yoshi-P)’s crosshairs. The next expansion, which will likely release either late December next year or early January 2027, is said to have a job overhaul in the reworks.
And, as proven by the latest patch’s changes to glamour, critical reception to Dawntrail seems to’ve given Yoshi-P the kick up the butt he needed to start adjusting his past assumptions—finally letting go of a design philosophy you’ve held for 10+ years is a sign that things are about to change, even if it’s just fashion.
In summary, Final Fantasy 14’s been floundering—and 2026 will determine whether Creative Studio 3 is capable of properly turning the ship around and getting her in the right direction, again. World of Warcraft, on the other hand, has already got itself away from its crash-course. Now it just needs to avoid slamming into a second cliff.
AddOn-B-Gone
It really has been a miraculous turnaround for ol’ WoW, given how truly dire things looked during Shadowlands—an expansion so disastrously bad it drove a literal exodus of players to Final Fantasy 14, and saw the studio rethinking every design philosophy it had. Dragonflight was a solid expansion, The War Within built on its successes, and now Blizzard’s poised to launch into the second part of a three-year saga that might genuinely stick the landing.
What’s more, Blizzard’s managed to keep a lot of players happy by spinning several plates at once. If you’re subbed to WoW, you’re also been getting access to Classic, Season of Discovery, and the occasional Remix—all of which have received solid updates and support.
Here’s the problem, though: There is a very real chance that Blizzard might screw everything the hell up.
See, as has been announced, Blizzard is taking on the enviable challenge of doing away with most of the game’s combat mods, or “AddOns”. A move that, in fairness, has been long overdue. The prevalence of things like WeakAuras has kept Blizzard complacent on making the game’s many specialisations usable, and has also meant the devs have had to design its hardest content around using them.
However, those very same AddOns provided a lot of support for both accessibility and quality-of-life. If you didn’t like something about how a spec was handled, you could always automate it—like, I played an Outlaw Rogue. I could not tell you what the buffs of my Roll the Bones do. I just hit the button when the funny Weakaura tells me to because my rotation’s busy enough as it is. Anyway, there’s already been panic before these changes even made it off the test server.
Not only that, Blizzard’s taking several big-boy swings at the same time. Player Housing’s a huge one (and it’s been going decently well, so far) but the dev is also fiddling around with how glamour works. And, genuinely, I cannot overstate how bloody important fashion is to MMOs. If you piss off the fashionistas you are in serious trouble.
I’m in full support, mind. As someone who has watched FF14 make so many conservative, status-quo maintaining decisions it’s nearly spun itself into an early grave, I think Blizzard is right to up the ante. When you’re on a winning streak, you don’t get comfy—you keep trying to make stuff better.
But it does put the game in a precarious situation because, as we’ve seen before, WoW players do not forgive and they do not forget. Some of them may even be shaking their heads at me for the simple sin of daring to call their game good (sorry, it objectively has been, even if you’ve been having problems with it, I know. I’m upset too). They hold grudges.
Yet those grudges didn’t sink WoW through the worst of times so, hey—who knows what it can endure.
Make or break
In summarisation: 2026 is going to be a really, really interesting year for both of these titans. Both are tackling long-standing problems, both are attempting to make big, sweeping changes to the way they run business, and both are gambling with their reputation and stability by doing so.
But whereas Final Fantasy 14’s trying to dig itself out of a ditch, WoW’s been out of the ditch for a while now and is trying to preserve momentum—the thing these games have in common? They exist in an industry that has not, at all, been kind to the genre they nestle in.
It’s hard to imagine WoW or FF14 falling, and I’m not saying it’s even likely in 2026 for either of ’em, even in the case of catastrophe—but also, I figure folks sitting in Rome felt the same way about… well, Rome. And we all know what happened there.
Personally, I’m hoping both survive and flourish—I want what’s best for everybody, the days of bad blood over repping your favourite MMO are over. But I’ll also be bracing for impact, because whoo boy. Nothing can be taken for granted, anymore.
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