Thus far, Funcom has focussed mainly on changes to its survival MMO Dune: Awakening, with the Norwegian studio reworking the entire game to function as both a solo experience and a PvE adventure. Now that overhaul is done, however, Funcom is now set on expanding players' adventures on Arrakis, having just announced a free expansion that adds a new and completely different map to explore.

Coming in December, the Blood and Ice DLC will let players depart the searing sands of Arrakis for the planet's frozen north, adding a new survival map called the Polar Sink that flips the game's central survival concept on its head. Rather than avoiding the heat, players will actively have to seek it out, while also developing new technologies to help them adapt to the extreme change in climate.

There's some variance within this environment too. The Polar Sink is composed of two different biomes, the tundra and the icecap. While the icecap is the more extreme of the two, both areas are closely guarded by "water shippers", wealthy traders who supply Arrakis' second most-valuable resource from the polar regions down to the deserts. Players' primary objective in the DLC will be breaking the water shippers' stranglehold on the ice, which they can then use to cool their base equipment back in the desert and speed up resource production.

Funcom says that the expansion adds "around 35 hours of new progression", which sounds pretty beefy for a free DLC. It also apparently "brings the focus back to ground-level survival" for veteran players, "traversal, temperature management and combat all playing important roles in your progression."

Blood and Ice will be released on December 1. Alongside the expansion, Funcom has also introduced a Cosmetics Store to Awakening, and is also working on several other heavily requested features. These include an offline single-player mode that's coming in November (the game can be played solo right now, but only with an Internet connection) and fully supported cross-play in January next year.

Funcom also says that Blood and Ice represents "another step in the ongoing development of Dune: Awakening" and that it will "continue expanding the game" through 2027. This falls in line with the studio's recent announcement that it was pivoting to exclusively support its existing games—which includes Conan Exiles alongside Dune: Awakening—and was laying off an unspecified number of employees as a result of that shift in strategy.

Final Fantasy 14 released a new typing minigame recently—you hop on over to the Gold Saucer, you rock up with a party of four, and you compete with each other to see how many waves you can defeat with the literal power of words. It's a fun little laugh, and as someone who types for a living, I spent a couple hours getting all of my rewards from it.

But not everyone has had as much fun as I—someone who has spent arguably too much of their life in front of a keyboard—am having. Typing speeds among MMO players vary greatly, despite it being the predominant form of communication. This became incredibly obvious to me when I sat down and tip-tapped my way through this mode.

Some players, I left in the dust—others I was level-pegging with, and some of them seemed blessed with divine powers of fingerwork (stop giggling) that left me agog. Also some people were just using bots, but hey, not everyone who's faster than me did. Which got me thinking—you, my fellow MMO players. How fast do you type?

If you're not familiar with your own speed, I invite you to go on your WPM tester of choice (there are plenty on Google) and pump some numbers.

For reference, most sites put the average keyboard typist at 40-60 WPM. I, a person, who does this for a living, average around 130-140 WPM on a site like Monkeytype, which doesn't require any capitalisation or many unfamiliar words. Putting the effort into proper punctuation and spelling on other tests slows me down to around 110-120 WPM (in both cases I'm pretty accurate, between 95-98%).

But then again, I grew up playing videogames on my PC (you might call me a PC Gamer) and MMOs were my jam, so I got a lot of practice; which is part of why I'm curious as to how you, dear reader, match up. Furthermore, do you reckon that your time in MMOs has made you better at typing and improved your grammar? Feel free to share your own experience with the wonderful English language in the comments down below.

Yesterday, the world received the sad news that legendary stage and screen actor Patrick Stewart had died at the age of 86 following a "brief and poignant journey with Alzheimer's Disease and Lewy Body Dementia." His passing has triggered an internet-wide celebration of his life—particularly from Star Trek fans honoring his tenure as The Next Generation's Captain Jean-Luc Picard.

While countless social media posts have already been penned in Stewart's memory, a subset of Trekkies are grieving together in the shared virtual spaces of Star Trek Online, the modest MMO that's still keeping the lights on 16 years after its 2010 launch. With orbital starship flotillas and starbase torchlight vigils, STO's humble playerbase is turning out to mourn one of its most beloved figures—just as it had done earlier this week for the death of Walter Koenig.

Recalling the faint memories of having made my own STO account in prior years, I logged in to join in that mourning myself—at which point I discovered that I'd never finished the tutorial questline, and that the intervening years' updates to the new player experience had broken my character's ability to progress. But after an hour of building a fresh, new cadet-turned-captain and getting my space legs by scanning radiation clouds and blowing up a collection of Borg shapes, I was free to head Earthward to participate in players' impromptu memorial gatherings.

Once I arrived in the Sol system, it didn't take much looking. I was welcomed into Earth orbit by an assembly of player-captained Galaxy-class exploration cruisers, the same class of starship as the USS Enterprise-D that Picard captained in The Next Generation. The vessels arranged in Stewart's honor included names like the USS Remembrance, the USS ForEverPicard, the USS Champion—and the USS Purple Enterprize, which was like The Enterprise, except purple.

After surveying the fleet, I beamed aboard the Earth Spacedock, the in-game faction hub for Federation players. There, ringed around a large Starfleet seal, was a gathering of players all holding aloft torches—an emote the game provides for honoring "absent friends." It was just one of a number of concurrent player memorials happening across the Spacedock's map instances, seven of which were either full or near capacity when I was online.

It was a touching scene, even if one of my fellow mourners was a tiny Ferengi lad named "Shmunguss" and—in true MMO fashion—an argument about atheism broke out in the zone chat. But the tension was diffused by one player offering a farewell wish that "may the Force be with you, Gandalf." Close enough.

From the Spacedock, I headed planetside to the Starfleet Academy grounds, where multiple instances were likewise packed with players commemorating Stewart's passing. In my instance, the torchlight vigil was even more solemn than the one taking place in orbit. One user—named Picard, and customized to match—had volunteered as a sort of body-vessel for the player base's collective grief.

At rank 63, the character evidently hadn't been made with this purpose in mind. But they stood still and silent before a crowd of sorrowful Star Trek fans. Many were content with holding their torches; some—like one player dressed like a Napoleonic admiral—saluted. Others shared Picard quotes, or scraps of Shakespearean soliloquies. One character, a Vulcan, diligently progressed through every available emote that could serve as an expression of anguish.

Judging from the untranslated text that accompanied his emotes, he was a Vulcan who hailed from Germany.

Between the Galaxy-class cruisers massed in orbit, the Spacedock tributes, and the Academy vigils, the hundreds of users gathering to offer their farewells represents a substantial portion of the 1,500 or so STO players online on Steam at time of writing. Star Trek Online might not be topping charts in 2026, but it can offer its players a place to come together and mourn the man who brought their captain to life. For an MMO at its age, maybe that's the sort of thing that matters most.

World of Warcraft: Forever is "realmless", which has a couple of advantages for oceanic (OCE) players—who so often get the short end of the stick when it comes to MMORPGs. Blizzard has servers in Australia, so OCE players can enjoy not having terrible ping, but due to the smaller playerbase they share a lot of overlap with the North American server architecture.

Which produces a unique problem: As it stands, OCE players are stuck in perpetual night. See, Forever has a 24 hour day/night cycle, so if you play during the evening and your timezone's matched to the server, the sun will set in Azeroth roughly at the time it would outside your window. But since OCE players are very much not local to North America… the curse of endless night persists.

As explained here on the WoW forums: "Because our servers share North American clock cycles, playing after work means the game is locked in pitch black. Log on at 7 pm? Midnight. Saturday afternoon? Dark. Unless you ruin your sleep schedule to play at 4 am, you practically never see the sun in Kalimdor."

A solution, however, was offered by the game's developers in an official podcast on the WoW channel—since Australia does actually have local server architecture, lead software engineer Ana Resendez says that "we could have an Australia timezone in those, but what happens if you're playing and suddenly you get an invite from [a North American player], then all of a sudden you go from night to day within like a couple of seconds? It's something we talked about."

Which is a little immersion-breaking, for sure, but likely preferable to being stuck in eternal night—especially given how gosh-darn pretty Forever's lighting changes are. There are a ton of lovely sunsets that'd be a shame to miss. Senior game designer Josh Greenfield, however, straight-up asks if Australian players would be happy for the chance to get some virtual vitamin D every once in a while:

"How would you feel about that, Australian players? Is that a thing you'd be okay with? Would you be okay with your day/night suddenly changing abruptly? … Getting feedback on that honestly would be helpful."

It's a teeny-tiny sample size, but at least on the r/wowforever subreddit, OCE players are all in favour: "In Retail," writes the author of one thread, "to make ourselves day time we are constantly having potions or toys to shift the sky for us anyway, it's something a lot of us are accustomed to … the shift would only happen when joining a dungeon.

"The gameplay in WoW Forever is a lot slower, you are not joining and leaving groups, getting kicked for your score or your gear level, you spend a significant time in that group so you're not going to be always changing the day and night."

However, as some players note, maybe the problems with the day/night cycle being 24 hours to begin with. Some suggest it exists on a 20-hour cycle, instead—which would gradually shift the time of sunset around so that players with more rigid schedules could experience Forever's different lighting states for themselves.

Which, personally, sounds like the best bet. While I do think it's neat if a game world matches my real-world state—it's always fun to get cosy—I'd rather have variety than consistency, especially when Forever's lighting is such an upgrade.

A major draw for World of Warcraft: Forever is how much slower it will be compared to the modern version of the MMO. Traveling across the world takes longer, quests take longer, and even fighting enemies takes considerably longer than most players have gotten used to.

This slower pace is basically the whole point of having an MMO set in the original era of WoW. It's an opportunity to experience what it might've been like if Blizzard never sped things up over the course of several expansions.

WoW: Forever will still evolve over time, though. Blizzard plans to regularly update it like the rest of its games. And unlike each version of WoW: Classic, it can pull from all of WoW's history to keep things going in perpetuity.

According to a recent interview with IGN, WoW: Forever's update schedule will accommodate how much longer it takes to do things. Principal game designer Kris Zierhut says it'll be "a little more laid back" than the modern game.

"So we've done a lot of experimentation to see what is the correct rate, and we're fairly convinced the correct rate is something closer to once every four months or 17 weeks or three times a year, whatever you want to call it. That is a cadence we have in mind for releasing new content," he says.

Many of the developers on the WoW: Forever team already experimented with releasing new stuff every eight weeks while running the limited-time Season of Discovery mode and Zierhut says, "It felt way, way, way too fast."

Major updates for WoW: Forever will be timed around new raid tiers, giving players several months to work through them. But raids won't be the whole focus. Blizzard intends to add new things to do for characters under max level, and some portion of every update will "unlock two or three months in or one month into that," Zierhut says.

For a game that celebrates the glacial pace of the old MMO, long before it adopted a seasonal model, that seems like a promising way to keep things fresh without tarnishing the spirit of it. That said, I'm still super curious how this will go in the long run, especially as players reach max level and squeeze the game dry with optimized routes and guides. One of Blizzard's big goals is to "unsolve" the game and I wonder how it will continue to do that as the years go on.

The design politics of studios in the early 2000s will always fascinate me—not the unsavory stuff, I am glad that is well and truly binned—but rather, the little elbows and feet put on other designers in studios where there wasn't a clear, clean pipeline or a mandate.

Such was the case with Blizzard where, as revealed by principal game designer Kris Zierhut in a recent Polygon interview, there was a little cheeky in-fighting over the power of crafted gear. Zierhut, who joined the company in 2005, was reflecting on the corrections the team wasn't allowed to make during the "no changes" era of Classic in 2019. Corrections that are now possible with World of Warcraft: Forever:

"The only design direction that really existed was: Don't change anything … I was there when we made some of these decisions. I had those discussions with Tom and Jeff and Scott. And I knew some places where we made mistakes."

One such mistake, as the article gets into, is the role that crafted gear had in vanilla WoW—this isn't to say that crafted items were never on the list of best in slot recommendations, but professions were actually meant to give you good gear from the word 'go', with a series of clear outlines for how powerful gear could be.

The problem? Some designers bumped up their gear's power on the sly. "Eric Dodds, the crafting designer, was always very responsible and followed the rules, and other people cheated a little bit."

This is, with over 20 years of hindsight and distance, really funny. The concept of a team of developers quietly bumping up their stats like they're in some gear equivalent of The Big Short—yeah man, just give those boots a few more points of stamina. Dodds isn't gonna know a thing, the sweet fool. But we know the future of WoW is dungeons, dungeons, dungeons, baby!

Anyway, having played the beta, I can confirm that this is indeed addressed. There are a lot of really good blue items that're soulbound which you can craft for yourself if you're, say, a blacksmith or a leatherworker—items that absolutely compete with questing and dungeon items. Crafting is absolutely worth it for your levelling journey.

Final Fantasy 14's "Evolved" jobs—that is, the new redesigns—feel like a much-needed way to shake the game out of its homogenisation rut, but they're also a huge departure from the status quo, which is why Square Enix will be giving all the old jobs "Reborn" modes that function as they did before the switch-up for Evercold.

However, it's clear that Evolved jobs are the intended future path for the game, given all new jobs will be designed with Evolved gameplay in mind. As such, they'll deal a little more damage overall as an incentive to encourage players to take them for a whirl, rather than just staying with what's familiar.

Koji Fox is quick to emphasise that he's not on the battle-team after the quote above, but he is very involved in the development process—often appearing on stage at fan festivals and working very closely with game director Naoki Yoshida. So while his word isn't gospel, it's not to be dismissed out of hand, either.

He also clarifies earlier in the interview that part of the whole Evolved project is to make these jobs—which have been drowning in hotkeys for some time now—less confusing for new players: "With so many expansions and so many level cap increases, adding new actions, weaponskills, and spells, it's a lot of things on that hotbar, and it's gotten a little bit overwhelming for, especially, new players that come in."

Personally, I'm very excited to try them out, even if I am nervous as to what they have done to my baby, Ninja. Final Fantasy 14 has been suffering from doing the same old patterning for multiple expansions now, with some systems—I'm looking at you, FATEs—not receiving significant changes in years.

James Wyatt, the principal game designer and project lead designer of the upcoming Dungeons & Dragons: World of Warcraft book was already running games in Azeroth long before he took on the project. For him, the fun of bringing WoW to the table is not to ignore the flexibility of D&D but to embrace it.

"Part of the beauty of playing D&D in the world of Azeroth is that you can do things in D&D that you can't do in a digital game because the options haven't been programmed for you," he said in a recent presentation attended by PC Gamer.

On November 12, you'll be able to see how Wyatt and the other designers mixed the two RPGs by "paraphrasing" the MMO into the tabletop ruleset. But Wyatt and senior game designer Ben Petrisor gave us a peek into how their approach affects the classes you can play in D&D: WoW.

WoW's classes are thematically similar to D&D's, and that's part of what makes the collaboration so fitting. However, WoW's classes have to fit into restrictive roles, like a tank or a healer, that don't really exist in D&D, so the D&D: WoW designers decided to return to some of the class customization that was introduced with 2020's Tasha's Cauldron of Everything.

Paladins won't have to give up their usual kit when they invest in WoW's holy specialization, for example. Wyatt explained that a lot of the unique abilities and talents WoW classes have access to have been translated into options players can incorporate into their characters. A holy paladin in D&D: WoW will still smite their foes into piles of ashes but they'll also have stronger ways to heal their allies than they normally would.

The same goes for classes like wizard that can pick up the Fingers of Frost feat at level 4 to lean harder into mastering frost-based spells like a frost mage would in the MMO. Beast master rangers can see what it's like to have a pet with its own weapon mastery on top of your own, emulating the tight bond WoW hunters have with their companions. There are dozens of new subclasses, spells, and additions to the core D&D classes like these, each pulling directly from the most iconic parts of WoW.

"We really crammed as much of the impactful talents across each WoW class into this book," Petrisor said.

Not only can you play WoW's unique hero classes—death knight, demon hunter, and evoker—you can experiment with new classes that Blizzard hasn't touched: Everyone who misses the early days of WoW when shamans could stand on the frontlines as magical warriors can pick up the barbarian subclass in D&D: WoW and channel their rage into elemental storms. Even bard, a class that was only an April Fool's joke in WoW, is fully playable in D&D: WoW.

The goal, Petrisor said, was to pull the restraints off of D&D's classes so that everyone, no matter which game you're most familiar with, can try something new.

"Even if you're coming into this without a lot of familiarity to WoW-specific classes, and you kind of want to just hit the ol' reliable button you'll still have an expanded experience and new and fun stuff to play with," he said.

Petrisor explained how the limitations of publishing a single, physical book were really the biggest hurdle when it came to imagining all the ways the two worlds could collide. But just like Wyatt stressed in the first preview presentation I attended, Petrisor has plenty of other ideas that he'd love to work on if people want more.

"If there's an IP that has the space to cover another book this is definitely one of them," he said. "So, the real challenge was—for me at least—while designing things was to try to find everything that would appease the fans of the game while also being options that would be interesting to D&D players and try to cram as many of those into this book as possible."

The World of Warcraft: Forever min-maxers have been arguing about the pros and cons of each playable race since the throwback MMO was announced. It isn't enough to just pick whoever looks cool for some people. They need to know how the math works out so they don't spend a hundred hours leveling a character who will do 3% less damage than the others.

Admittedly, WoW: Forever will be stuck in an era where unique racial abilities and traits mattered a lot more than they do in the modern version of the MMO. Some of them directly synergize with certain classes and others just make your life a lot easier for what will be a long journey. This is probably why Blizzard is still tweaking them a week from launch day.

Despite trying to balance them evenly before, Blizzard is doubling down on some racials having clear advantages for certain classes over others. You can see how this looks in today's patch notes, but you won't be able to test anything out until the WoW: Forever goes live next week.

Most of the changes fit that ethos: orcs, for example, won't have an increased critical strike chance but increased pet damage for warlocks and hunters. The skyborne, the new blue elves, had their absurdly powerful Read Leyline ability that makes them regenerate health and mana faster than anyone else cut in half. It's still good, but not broken good.

And then there are the tauren, the bipedal bovines who have been in WoW since the beginning, who have apparently discovered nitrous oxide.

Blizzard has blessed the tauren with a passive that increases your movement speed the longer you stay in motion. Plainsrunning was already strong as a way to move 30% faster than everyone else in the game, but the new patch doubles it to 60%. With enough time to gain speed, tauren will be as fast as the mounts you have to pay hundreds of gold for.

I kind of admire how much Blizzard is leaning into this idea, even if it costs tauren some minor damage buffs. There's a long-running joke among WoW players that playing a tauren makes you move slower. This is because they're so huge that their run animation just looks like they're moving in slow-motion compared to the rest of the cast. Now, the joke's on us, I guess.

Setting aside taurens growing wheels, messing with racial abilities this close to launch is brave. Blizzard intends to regularly balance WoW: Forever, but this is the kind of foundational stuff it won't be able to touch without pissing a ton of people off. Even if most people probably won't have the tier lists open for the best race/class combinations, they will still inevitably influence what kind of meta materializes for high-end PvP and raiding.

World of Warcraft: Forever's beta is now closed, meaning I can no longer appreciate the pretty god rays in Ashenvale. To soothe this yawning ache in my soul, however, Blizzard has released a fun little stats tracker to tide me over with the knowledge that I apparently jump in MMOs way more than I thought I did.

If you played the beta and sign in, you'll be given a full list of fun little stats including your hours played, where you spent the most time, what killed you the most and, crucially, how often you jumped.

I jumped 7,738 times. And considering I played the beta for 57 hours (putting me in the 69th percentile—nice), that means I averaged around 135 jumps an hour, which is… honestly a lot more than I thought I'd jumped. Now of course, jumping is a time-honoured tradition. Even in a game with a /wave emote, simply jumping around someone to acknowledge that you see them is a far more efficient means of communication.

It also makes you go faster when you're running somewhere. This is absolutely correct and not at all unsubstantiated, don't look it up.

The enemy that killed me the most was the Silithid Swarmer in the southern barrens, which I'm going to chalk down to those bastards being a touch overtuned rather than any skill failing on my part (I do not know why the minions it summons have so much health). I'm also heartbroken to find out that I spent the lion's share of my time in The Barrens, presumably killing lions. If you know anything about the absurdity (and sometimes obscenity) that takes place in Barrens Chat, you'll know why this news upsets me.

Anyway, I'll be able to jump a lot more when Forever goes live come November 4, where I'll be able to relive the experience of fighting 900 other players for a cactus apple on launch day once more. Though if my uncertainties about how its endgame's gonna shake out are true, I'll be thankful for the slower pace.

World of Warcraft: Forever's beta has just ended, and I'm basically sold, for now. I've had such a good time, in fact, that I dipped at around level 26 on my warrior (and 16 on a Shaman) because I didn't want to spoil or burn myself out before the full thing releases in November and I am consumed in a quest-drunk fugue.

But there is one thing that's rattling around in the back of my mind: This version of WoW is designed to be played perpetually (so in MMO terms, for about 10-20 years, give or take) at the level cap. There won't be any expansions, and the game will continue to expand horizontally.

Which leaves a major question hanging over its endgame. Now, collecting a few interviews together, we've seen a smidge of what that'll look like. In an interview with SkillUp, associate production director Clay Stone contrasts overtly horizontal progression systems (such as the Legacy tree) and gear, which he notes "our intention very much is to try to limit the amount of power progression as we release each raid tier."

Speaking to IGN Nordic, lead game designer Tim Jones says that "we're not going to make a Tier 2 raid without making the loot better … Tier 2 and Tier 3 raids will therefore have better gear, but we're going to be responsible about it. We still want gear from previous raids to remain useful, such as the Onslaught Girdle."

In other words, Forever'll still absolutely have a vertical progression, but your best-in-slot might include gear from all sorts of raids, which… oh, boy.

I'm not going to put a wooden plaque on my chest and say the end is nigh. If Forever's raid tiers only increase your overall item level by a couple of digits, then it really is not that much of a problem. It's essentially playing out that power creep in slow-motion, and if it takes a decade for there to be a numerical difference between, say, tier 1 and a hypothetical set of tier 10 gear that matters for more people than just hardcore min-maxers? It's all gravy, baby.

But as someone with a vested interest in these sorts of systems, I can't help but wonder if Blizzard is just making broad, sweeping assumptions about the way it has to do things at endgame. Forever is going to be purpose-built to keep folks in this rehashed version of classic Azeroth for a very long time. Is it not poison to the entire exercise, then, to purposefully introduce vertical progression at all?

Going up, up, up

I can see a few issues—or let's call them challenges—with this approach. Firstly, three tiers is manageable. But if Forever continues to add raid tiers, then those small incremental increases in gear power slowly stop becoming incremental at all.

Unless a character can set foot in a tier 3 raid comfortably without getting gear from the first two tiers, what you've done is essentially created an attunement questline. That questline being, 'do several tiers of raiding to get up to snuff'.

In a game that resets every expansion, or season, this is a non-issue. But Forever'll have the task of bridging that gap the wider it gets—either with catch-up gear, which kills the older raids dead, or by issuing stat squishes, which never feels good on the other end of things.

The other problem is that, even if you do solve those problems, you've only got so many players. The wider the raiding scene is spread apart over the course of these raid tiers, the harder it becomes to find a group or a guild to do the specific raid that you need.

This can be solved, as these interviews mention, by giving each class useful best-in-slot gear from lower tiers so that they have an incentive to go back and do them. But there's another problem there, too: Characters only have so many equipment slots, and what's considered a BiS getup is dependent on a ton of other difficult-to-tune factors.

My point being: Blizzard really cannot rely on gearing to keep Forever's raiding scene alive in the long run, and yet (at least to start off with) it'll be mimicking old patterns. Just smaller, more controlled, and slower-paced. It's a little like trying to avoid an iceberg by designing the world's slowest boat. Sure, you're avoiding it for longer, but if you don't put a steering wheel on the damn thing you're gonna crash.

This is by far Forever's biggest risk. Playing the game casually is going to rock. Questing is going to rock. Levelling alts is going to rock. Forever has already convinced me of all of these things—but the delicate, finickity balance of a pseudo-horizontal endgame is far harder.

You have to wonder if a developer who has been designing linear progression systems for over two decades is simply finding it hard to break from that ingrained patterning. Jones' words: "We're not going to make a tier 2 raid without making the loot better." They're sticking in my craw, because… well, why not? Why are there tiered raids to begin with?

You could do as Guild Wars 2 does—new classes or skill trees to unlock that require endgame feats, character power for specific zones that'll stay relevant in perpetuity, an equivalent of "masteries". Basically, expanding the definition of what endgame is, and then having raids be a part of that ecosystem, rather than trying to slow-death power creep.

Blizzard's going to have to learn some very hard lessons to get there, though. I think this attitude towards tiers will work absolutely fine for a while, but there will come a point where the developer has to wonder if it wants to keep kicking the can down the road or really, genuinely reinvent what an endgame is in World of Warcraft. And that'll be either very exciting or very, very messy. Perhaps both.

I'm beginning to wonder whether Star Wars Galaxies Restoration can still be considered accurately named, given the community-driven revival project has gone so far beyond keeping SOE's 2003 MMO up and running. Previous updates have already added huge features like a new Jedi system and a galactic civil war. Now, the latest patch overhauls numerous aspects of the game, including a massive upgrade to its visuals.

Star Wars Galaxies Restoration: A New Dawn differs slightly from those previous updates. Where earlier patches have centred around one big new feature, A New Dawn is composed of various ideas suggested by members of the Restoration team. "We've expanded our team, adding 13 new team members to our project" the Restoration team wrote in a press release. "We asked everyone: work on something that they loved about Galaxies, and showcase that to the world."

This approach has produced an array of changes both large and small. The headline update is a game client upgrade that adds support for DirectX 12. This enables a bunch of snazzy graphical enhancements, including volumetric fog, clouds and atmosphere, a new water shader, greatly improved terrain distances, and support for upscaling tech like DLSS, FSR, and XeSS.

Beyond these visual changes, two major features of Galaxies have been overhauled. The first of these is the planet Kashyyyk, home to the Wookiees. The forest planet—which was the setting for Galaxies' second expansion Revenge of the Wookiees—has been given "new and revamped instances" as well as a rebalance to everything that was introduced back in 2005. The second feature (or to be more accurate, features) getting a rework are the Scout & Ranger professions, which have been given new traps, advanced creature tracking, and "expanded camp functionality" that includes a whole new prestige system.

Elsewhere, the Restoration team has given pets and mounts some TLC, including the implementation of mounted combat (both melee and ranged), while creature taming is more interactive. Player cities can be improved to a higher tier, while the Doctor profession should now be a little less passive. Finally, the Restoration team has introduced a drag-and-drop interface for moving furniture, so you no longer have to adjust your space sofa's position by typing in coordinates.

A New Dawn is being released today. If you fancy checking it out, Star Wars Galaxies: Restoration is completely free to play, and can be downloaded via the project's website.

Yesterday was a pretty bleak day for the videogame industry, as BioWare announced the end of its more than 30-year run. It's closing down and development on the next Mass Effect has ceased. For Star Wars: The Old Republic lead writer Caitlin Sullivan Kelly, however, the announcement was upsetting for an additional reason: SWTOR was snubbed.

In BioWare's post, shared on social media, the studio listed Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Dragon Age, Mass Effect and Anthem. But not the MMO that's been running for nearly 15 years.

Quoting the announcement, Kelly said, "No mention of the game that's been going for almost 15 years, that supported the studio and all of its projects with income and manpower and time (sometimes to our own detriment). Heartbreaking."

The desire to get recognition for hard work and maintaining a successful MMO when so many others have fallen by the wayside is entirely understandable, but there's important context that makes this seem less like a snub than is being implied.

While BioWare did create SWTOR and ran it for many years, it's now a Broadsword game and has been since 2023. Which is fortunate, because now it's safe from the impact of BioWare closing down.

Now, this alone should not preclude it from getting a mention. Baldur's Gate got a nod, even though the latest game in the series was developed by Larian and, like SWTOR, won't be affected by the studio's demise.

But I'd argue that most of the nods are for franchises, rather than individual games. It doesn't mention Dragon Age: Origins or Inquisition, either, just Dragon Age. Since KoTOR is in the list, that also covers SWTOR, which is technically a sequel.

It's not the only omission, either. It's wild that Anthem—a catastrophic failure that kicked off BioWare's worst era—got a nod and not Jade Empire. Sonic: Chronicles also doesn't get a look in, but that's perhaps a bit more understandable.

All that said, SWTOR absolutely deserves a shout out. Its creation was a vast undertaking, featuring more writing and voice work than any of BioWare's games before or after. And since then it's weathered so many storms and persevered. While it doesn't boast the player numbers of WoW or FF14, it's still undeniably been a success. It's also the one BioWare game that will continue even after the studio's demise.

So BioWare should have absolutely celebrated this feather in its cap, but I don't think it was snubbed.

In anticipation of the full launch of World of Warcraft: Forever next month, Blizzard is throwing the gates wide open on the throwback MMO to stress test the servers.

Anyone with a World of Warcraft account will be able to play the 'WoW: Forever - Stress Test" client in the Battle.net launcher later today. You don't need an active subscription, nor do you need to have purchased any of the WoW: Forever special editions. All you need is some patience for what could be a bumpy few hours as people pile in.

The regular beta servers will be offline until the stress test is over, which means anyone who can't go that long without a hit of WoW: Forever will likely show up. I wouldn't be surprised if some Blizzard folks drop in with some surprises of their own, like spawning world bosses or something in the last hour or so (this happened during a recent PvP tournament).

Everyone will start fresh on the stress test server, so you won't have time to do much but the first couple of leveling zones. You will get a taste of what to expect on launch day: Crowds of players wandering around like ants, and quest enemies dying before you can even click on them. Get ready to fight for your XP.

Here are all the times for the WoW: Forever stress test:

• West Coast US: 2 pm - 6 pm PDT
• East Coast US: 5 pm - 9 pm EDT
• UK: 6 pm - 2 am BST
• Europe: 7 pm - 3 am CEST
• Australia: 8 am - 12 pm AEDT
• New Zealand: 10 am - 2 pm NZDT

Once everything wraps up, Blizzard is going to flip the switch back on for the regular beta servers until Friday.

I'm crossing my fingers that this stress test actually helps with stability on launch day. There will almost certainly be long queue times, but having to start and stop as servers go haywire will ruin any chance of actually enjoying the game that day. We already witnessed this with the launch of the beta, and that was only the people who paid for the game. On November 4, when WoW: Forever properly goes live, anyone out there with a subscription will be lining up.

Ah, zone chats in MMOs—trade and general chats, /shouts and /yells. Intended as a way to render the social glue that binds these videogames together, they are often instead a tableau for (and I say this somewhat affectionately) absolute lunacy, pock-marked with some of the most vile verbiage you'll see online.

Take, for instance, the time-honoured tradition of "Barrens Chat" in World of Warcraft. Combine a big zone that spans around 10-15 levels along with proximity to a major city, and you get a certain kind of verbal hooliganry that, in my journeys through WoW: Forever, I was actually pretty nostalgic for.

I mean, sure, the Chuck Norris jokes have gotten a smidge old. But while collecting Zhevra Hoofs, I would find myself possessed to ask Barrens Chat philosophical questions, and while I never received much in the way of wisdom, responses were always entertaining.

I'm not so fond of trade chat, though, which—at least on the horde side of things—has mostly been dominated by a bot by the name of Margrave Tyrael. Who, I kid you not, was literally sitting there for days spitting out the same automated messages, questioning why Blizzard was deleting beta characters.

I fell for it, at first. Then I started trying to warn people not to fall for it. It didn't work.

Things are no less cursed in my other MMO of choice, Final Fantasy 14. I shan't repeat some of the obscenity I've seen in Ul'dah here, but it does always stagger me that the same kind of infectious absurdity can persist, particularly in a videogame whose moderators are altogether far more heavy-handed with banning folks for ill behaviour.

Which leads me to my question, dear reader: Zone chats. Are they a force for good, or ill?

Personally, I'm weirdly fond of them. I don't think these chats are particularly healthy to engage with, and they're certainly not worth arguing with some rando over. But the belligerent nonsense of the masses feels somehow pure. Unsullied by the algorithmic mechanisms that drive us, purposefully, towards enragement and bickering. Instead, we piss people off all by ourselves. And that's kind of beautiful.

Life comes at you fast, as the saying goes, and the folks at RuneScape developer Jagex can sure attest to that. Less than two weeks after announcing RuneScape Reignited—essentially a way for new and lapsed players to restart their adventures from fresh on separate, unique servers—the studio has decided to cancel it.

There was trouble with RuneScape Reignited almost right from the start, with complaints ranging from a potential community split to restrictions on character interactions and the need to pay for a separate subscription. Just a few days after the initial announcement, Jagex apologized for making veteran players feel like they were being shunted aside, and said it was "exploring a heavy set of revisions to Reignited based on your feedback."

A few days after that, it laid out a more specific list of intended alterations, and invited more feedback from players, "so we can follow up next week with more of our thoughts." With that feedback now received, it seems that Jagex has heard enough.

"It is clear that we missed the mark on this, and so we are not moving forward with it," Mod Ryan—associate creative director Ryan Philpott—said in a blog post announcing the cancellation. "Our goal is to see Runescape grow again, with returning players coming back and new players joining, but never at the expense of our existing community."

It's a very sudden about-face, but not unprecedented. In 2023, for instance, Jagex dropped a new RuneScape battle pass in the wake of massive player backlash; in 2025, the studio scrapped "Treasure Hunter" microtransactions, in what Jagex CEO Jon Bellamy said was "part of a wider transformation across Jagex, which is seeing a renewed commitment to delivering deeper value, greater fairness and long-term improvements for players."

It hasn't been entirely smooth sailing: Recent price hikes have not gone over well (no surprise there, though), and Jagex's cowardly decision to scrap in-game Pride Month events was allowed to stand despite players absolutely mauling the studio for it. But in terms of gameplay, at least, Jagex has demonstrated a willingness to react with relative haste when it's blown things sufficiently badly—and this definitely qualifies.

Despite the cancellation, Philpott invited new and returning players to jump into the game with a 10 day free trial beginning on December 2, which will offer full access to all worlds and content. The 2027 roadmap for RuneScape also remains in place:

"The future of RuneScape is still extremely bright," Philpott concluded. "RuneScape will always be built for and defined by its community. So please keep letting us know when you feel we're getting it wrong and shout with that same energy when you think we're getting it right too."

The developers of World of Warcraft: Forever, the venerable MMO's newest 'Classic+' flavor, say that even though the level cap is staying at 60, there will always be new gear to chase, and lower level gear has never been more powerful.

Blizzard Entertainment developers are wary of the drastic increases in power in WoW's modern version, including the recent Midnight expansion, which render previous seasons of gear irrelevant, require massive resets between expansions and lead to periodic stat "squishes" to avoid players becoming omnipotent gods.

"Classic wasn't far off from this," vice president and senior game director Ion Hazzikostas said of Forever's approach in a recent PC Gamer interview. "It's gradual. Going from [Classic raids] Blackwing Lair to Ahn'Qiraj that's actually only a couple of item levels higher. Those two largely coexist. C'thun drops are probably better than anything in Blackwing Lair, but that's like one or two items per player. This is a system that can last for a long, long time."

Associate production director Clay Stone says that's part of what makes gear in Forever—and Classic—meaningful.

"Your best-in-slot that you pick up from a previous raid tier may continue to be your best in slot for a long time. It's very much our intention to try wherever we can to not invalidate old content."

Then again, a long time isn't expected to be literally forever, Hazzikostas says.

"At some point, if you're running the Barrow Deeps raid that's coming out in December, you're going to have all the items that you want. That's fine. You're done with it."

Forever players will see gear progress at level 60: those modest item level increases, gear that's good in specific niche situations, and rare "chase" pieces should keep people hunting, Forever developers say.

An item might be especially powerful when fighting in a desert, or against a dragon, for example, making it particularly good in one especially tough fight.

(And yes, players, developers are aware that this means bag space will be at a premium. "We're already thinking about that," principal designer Kris Zierhut says, mentioning the ideas of more bank space, trinket bags or even garment bags to hold the excess.)

Un-solving the game

Forever launches on November 4, and so far players have seen few of the pieces that will entice them at the end game. The current level cap in the beta is 30, and future items have been hidden from view and datamining to keep them guessing.

"We resurrected some old tech that keeps item stats and properties and tooltips secret, unknown to the client, until the item has actually been obtained by someone on the server," Hazzikostas says. "That's something we can use in modern WoW if we want."

Essentially a flag on items determines whether they are known, making them visible in the game's data. It trips when someone discovers an item for the first time, making sure that if the player links the item to others, it doesn't cause bugs

But until that moment, players can't get a sneak peek at what the piece of gear does. It's one reason why Forever doesn't have an Adventure Guide for dungeons; developers want the game to keep its secrets.

"Every single boss in our raids has some items that are very low percentage drop chase items, kind of like the Dragonspine Trophy was in Gruul's Lair—but for every boss," says Zierhut. "It might be three weeks, four weeks before somebody sees that item drop, and the whole meta is torn up again."

The goal is to keep the magic of exploration alive, he says.

"The goal is to un-solve the game, so players have to figure out again what's the best path," Zierhut says. "They don't know what the best items are. They don't know what to get. It's back to 2004 and nobody knows anything and figuring it out all over again."

Hand-crafted power

To add a layer of complexity—and, again, keep players from gaining power too quickly—items deliberately aren't optimized for players' preferred classes and stats. "Our items are much more idiosyncratic, and you don't get exactly what you want," he says, noting that knowing your class and choosing between gear sets will be one way players express skill in Forever. "None of the gear is perfect."

That's an old strategy—there are oft-discussed items from WoW's original launch that put strength on cloth gear, for example—but what is new is how much power items can have at a relatively low level.

Both low-level drops and crafted gear are powerful early, and that's on purpose, developers say.

"A lot of times tradeskills felt like an afterthought in Classic. Like, 'Oh, I could craft this item, but it's too much work and I'm about to out-level it anyway. Skip it. I'll level up my tailor when I get to level 60,' " Zierhut says. "I made a deliberate effort to make more crafting recipes worthwhile to craft while you are leveling up, including lowering the skill requirement to craft them.

"The typical item from tailoring, leatherworking, blacksmithing requires 25 fewer skill points than it used to. So you'll be able to craft that item right around the time it's your best-in-slot at that level and get the real value out of doing it."

Much of the tuning done so far to gear in Forever's beta has been to keep that idea of modest but steady progression across the whole leveling process.

"It's just a slightly different gradient in terms of power level," lead game designer Tim Jones says.

Part of World of Warcraft: Forever's charm is that combat is considerably slower than the regular version of the MMO. It's the kind of game where you'll spend 38 seconds hitting a scorpion because there are so few buttons to press in the early stages of your journey.

Classes in WoW's past were simple, but had small quirks to them that you'd pick up over time. Melee classes, for example, can squeeze abilities in between their auto attacks to maximize their damage output. You'd never care about this if fights only took 10 seconds, like they do in WoW today, but back then you had to use all that time in more drawn-out battles for something.

The WoW: Forever beta has reminded me how satisfying it is to play a class that isn't built like Whac-A-Mole, where the challenge is to hit the right buttons the moment they start to glow. There's a rhythm to WoW's old classes and I'm delighted to hear that Blizzard fully intends to maintain it in WoW: Forever.

Blizzard developers told TechRadar that they want "to err on the side of simpler classes, but with engaging depth," and that all of it will align with its guiding principle of staying true to the old MMO's "core design, pacing, and tone."

"The level of mechanical complexity found in the beta classes is indicative of our intentions," Blizzard says.

That suggests to me that Blizzard isn't trying to speed up the pace of combat, nor will it look to shore up a class' weaknesses by adding new abilities where there were none before. My level 15 paladin will never graduate out of spending most of her time smacking monsters with a hammer while she waits for her Judgement ability to come back up. I won't ever have so many abilities on my bars that I'll need to refer to an infographic to understand which one to press first.

A strict adherence to the methodical combat of yore also means dungeons and raids will follow suit. Blizzard says encounter design will remain relatively simple so that some of the challenge will be found in preparing for them via gear sets, consumables, and team composition. I am skeptical that this will convince me to go back to farming for crafting items before every raid like I did as an over-achieving teen, but I can still appreciate that someone could take the time to do that again.

All of this makes me excited to see how creative the developers get with items that let WoW's old classes bend the rules a bit. Players have already discovered a sword for mages that deals bonus fire damage on frozen targets, for instance, which opens the door for more opportunities to play classes in ways you would've never seen in WoW's early days. My guess is this is what will ultimately drive players to stick around and make new secondary characters as part of Blizzard's goal to keep progression in WoW: Forever incremental and "horizontal".

The developers of World of Warcraft: Forever would very much like it if you would create multiple characters, please.

There are a number of reasons for that, including that having lower level characters means you'll be well set up to welcome new friends to the game, as well as to experience the new leveling zones and dungeons and encounters coming in future patches, the developers tell us in exclusive interviews. So they're building in a bunch of incentives.

"There will be reasons to play alts and to unlock Legacy points, to have new journeys," vice president and senior game director Ion Hazzikostas says.

The newest flavor of the juggernaut MMO launches November 4, and executive producer Holly Longdale says it's expected to be Warcraft's flavor of choice for people joining the game for the first time.

"If you're new, this is the one, right?" she says. "This is the lowest barrier to entry that we have going."

Part of the game is the Legacy System, which awards achievement-style points for major accomplishments that players receive in the game. Those points can be placed in talent-tree-style options that give players major quality of life improvements. Alts, additional characters, make stacking them up much easier.

Principal designer Kris Zierhut says he created elaborate spreadsheets attempting to guess what progression-minded players would choose as options for amassing those points, and creating alt characters to snag some of the easier low-level ones makes perfect sense versus aiming for all of the most-difficult points possible.

"There's less time investment," he says. "One of the things I love about that is, now let's say my brother wants to start playing the game. Normally I go, 'I got my level 60 character. Sorry—I can try to boost you.' Now I can say, 'You know what? I've got this level 20 guy I've been leveling. You can get there pretty quick. Let's group up and play together.'"

Encouraging alts is also one way that Blizzard wants to make sure you see all the new content they continue to add to Forever. Since the level cap doesn't change, a good amount of those new areas and features will be oriented toward leveling players.

"We're releasing content around all of the different level bands," says lead game designer Tim Jones. That should also help people spend as much or as little time in Azeroth as they want, he says, because it opens up many different lines of progression. "It helps people rationalize being able to play the game differently, to be satisfied with sessioning their time in different increments.

"I'm a dad. After [the kids] go to bed, I have time time, and for someone like me, I can log in for 30 minutes or an hour. I can open my quest log, see I have a couple quests that will help me round out completing Elwynn Forest, or I can head up to the auction house, grab a couple materials and make a few incremental advancements in blacksmithing. That's a form of meaningful progression."

Developers are adding new items to professions, new leveling dungeons and new areas in future patches, lead software engineer Michael Nuthals says.

"When we think of future updates, we want to make sure we're creating content that everyone who plays the game has something to look forward to," he says. "If I love leveling, I've got a new path or a new quest chain or a new dungeon I can do."

"Your journey is never identical to what it was," lead software engineer Nora Mills says. "We're basically trying to entice players to want to create new characters, to roll an alt."

Vice president and senior game director Ion Hazzikostas says Forever's emphasis on alts has the team considering options that might support that gameplay, including swiping things like warband banks from the modern game.

"Particularly with a Legacy system that encourages playing alts, taking out the extra couple of steps of having to mail items manually from your main to your alt—logging over, taking them out of the mail, I don't know that's in anyone's interest," he says. "An account-wide bank is something I could see adding in the not-too-distant future."

"As people decide to make their alts, they'll take different paths," lead game designer Tim Jones says. "We promise to consistently add new leveling dungeons and new leveling zones."

World of Warcraft: Forever seems, at first blush, like an antidote to the idea of a modern MMO. I see it in the (naturally, traditionally) insufferable trade chat as I potter about on my fury warrior—people turning up their noses at the idea of retail players. Cushioned as they are in their soft little bubbles, ptooie!

But as someone with a 9-5 job and other MMOs I play, I wouldn't particularly describe myself as a "hardcore" WoW player. Competent, sure. I've cleared high-end content in other games (like a Savage tier in FF14). I know how to push buttons and avoid mechanics—and I also like hard games in general. But I'm definitely not on that grindset, particularly not in a beta.

And while I do admire the folks trying to get best-in-slot gear for a month—there's something beautiful and ephemeral about the effort—I do have to wonder: Are we playing the same game? Because WoW: Forever's actually super casual friendly. And if you played it with the right attitude, honestly, Classic was pretty casual friendly, too.

Seasonal grindset

WoW's gone through what I'm going to frame as a water cycle of difficulty—its starting point, back in vanilla, is what we're going to call an "oldschool" mindset. A big, open world that required a lot of patience and cooperation to get around, littered with quests, where getting to level 60 was part of the journey itself. The water in this laborious metaphor.

Then we start moving towards Cataclysm, a halfway state—steam rising up into the clouds. Things are more straightforward, you've got people griping about "welfare epics", the dungeon finder has well and truly obliterated the social contract, people are finding new and inventive ways to insult your mom, and so on. However, you still need a challenge, a carrot on a stick.

Enter borrowed power grinds: Your artifact weapons, your Azerite armors, your Covenants. In a world where everything but the hardest of content comes easy and levelling is a brisk inconvenience, these systems are needed to keep players logging in every day. Eventually these systems go from beloved for their sense of progression to reviled for their meaningless tedium.

And, crucially, for the fact that a missed day, week, or month sets you permanently behind folks who're putting in the hours every single day. The clouds get heavy, resentment brews, and suddenly—bam! Max exodus, pandaemonium! And to fix it, we move into the downpour cycle: A seasonal structure.

Seasons are an antidote to borrowed power. You're no longer permanently left in the dust for an entire expansion, and their short lifecycle allows them to be filled mostly with secondary rewards—there's the gear treadmill, sure, but you can pepper 'em with less impactful things like cosmetics. But they have a catch.

At the end of a season, a lot of your meaningful progress is reset. Seasons are meant to be played very intensely, but there's a large, awkward gap in the middle where joining halfway kind of feels like a waste of time. Not to mention, the same kind of demotivation you had in earlier expansions where all your hard-earned loot was made meaningless by quest greens? That happens three times over, here, between each major patch.

Seasons are designed to appeal to a "casual" player, but they just as often push them away—especially, as retail has experienced in recent months, because they're sometimes flush with so many things to do that it can become deeply overwhelming.

Which is why, I think, WoW: Forever has struck such a chord—because when you put the expectations of that loud, noisy seasonal structure against that oldschool design… which is asking more of you?

Retail, which bombards you with a dozen quests every time you log in—where you might complete five delves, three dungeons, and 10 world quests in an average evening of play? Or Forever, in which you jog around a forest for a bit, collect some pelts, and maybe run Ragefire Chasm if you've got the time?

Sure, when we get to level 60, the time investment for those big raids might start becoming a problem. But the actual experience of levelling in Forever—and, indeed, in Classic—is kind of chill. It was designed to provide you with little snack-sized adventures you could wrap up in 40 minutes, and if you came back a month later? Nothing changed.

What, like it's hard?

It might be easy to be fooled into thinking that, because you might die if you pull more than one monster in WoW: Forever, that it is somehow a more difficult game. I am here to tell you that Forever is not hard. As a matter of fact, Classic isn't hard, either.

I'm not the first person to make this observation, mind, but I'll reiterate it here: The difficulty of this old school design is more a question of patience and knowledge than it is mechanical skill. It's not particularly hard to use a bow to pull a mob away from its friends. It's not very challenging to have to hoof it from Orgrimmar to Thunder Bluff to learn how to swing a two-handed club.

Even in dungeons, where we might accidentally overpull and wipe a couple of times… c'mon man, let's not kid ourselves. You're spamming frostbolt. I hit Heroic Strike once every couple of business days. For the most part, I'm watching my orc slap a Worgen about, getting a brief and fleeting hit of dopamine whenever I see that dodge button fire up and can fire off an Overpower.

Everything takes a while, sure, and if you mess up, you're punished with a little tedium—and that's one of the big sticking points between a "casual" and a "hardcore" MMO, right? Time investment. But that only really matters if you care about the destination more than the journey.

For the hardcore people who want to hit level 60 in a week, navigating around the patience WoW requires (efficiency, routing, and so on) is a fun puzzle—and hey, more power to 'em! I'm something of a min-maxer myself, when the mood takes me.

But if you really don't give a crap about all of that, then the fact that the game requires a bit of time from you isn't actually an obstacle for a casual player. It's whether or not you get something enjoyable out of a short time investment, and because WoW's designers knew what they were doing 20 years ago? You absolutely still get that. You can turn in a couple quests and get a gear upgrade in an hour or two.

And, as Clay Stone, associate production director, pointed out to me earlier this week: Someone with a ton of responsibilities and obligations outside of a game might actually prefer the slower oldschool pace, anyway. He put it pretty well:

"It could be something with the times that we live in. It could be something with the amount of information and noise that we're facing all the time, the distractions of all the notifications on my phone that are glaring at me all day, but there's a real longing for that slower, more deliberate pace."

Which means that, yes—WoW: Forever is casual friendly. Very casual friendly, in fact, in the same way that something like Webfishing or Animal Crossing is casual friendly. If you aren't trying to minmax, what you have is a relaxing (dare I say cosy) videogame where you run around a fantasy world and hit a scorpion with a club for 38 seconds. Not a bad place to be if you've only got an hour to spare and need to decompress.

World of Warcraft: Forever has me in a chokehold, and it's partially because—well, it's relaxing. As my colleague at PC Gamer so succinctly put it: "Sometimes it's fun to hit a scorpion with a club for 38 seconds." Despite aping an era seen as more 'hardcore' to some players, Forever's lack of blaring and annoying seasonal grist is honestly refreshing.

Speaking with associate production director Clay Stone about why I'm certainly not the only one feeling that way (given the success of Classic, Season of Discovery, and now Forever's beta), he says it's a question Blizzard's been considering "for a little while.

"We saw, certainly with the success of Classic and the response to that, it was more than just a nostalgic experience for some people. The fact that they didn't leave, you know? They didn't just play for a month. They fell in love with it all over again. Then we saw it again a lot with Hardcore in 2023. All of a sudden, now you had a whole bunch of people who'd never played the game before, but were coming in because of that slower pace, and the fact that Hardcore reinforced that slower pace for them."

But it's more than just about the pace of levelling—it's also about the wider structure, too. Retail WoW is a seasonal game, which certainly has both benefits and drawbacks. One such drawback being that if you miss the start of a season, you're kind of put off the whole exercise:

"We had so many players who didn't even play Season of Discovery simply because it was a Season, even though they had friends who were saying 'this is the best version of World of Warcraft that they've ever made!' But because it was a season, it felt ephemeral, and therefore [people thought] 'I'm not going to jump in'."

Forever, in many ways, feels like an extrapolation of Season of Discovery—the Classic+ of it all—in a package that's not going anywhere. Personally, I fear for my free time, because even knowing my beta character's going to be deleted, I just can't seem to pull myself away. And it is, again, because of that zenlike state—the modern world is busy, which makes hitting satyrs chill by comparison.

"It could be something with the times that we live in," says Stone. "The amount of information and noise that we're facing all the time, the distractions of all the notifications on my phone that are blaring at me everyday, but there's a real longing for that slower, more deliberate pace.

"And I think something that we've seen over these past few weeks, which I'm really happy to see, is that players who are coming into WoW Forever, whether they played World of Warcraft before or not, are trying themselves not to rush it. There seems to be a deliberate pushback on this 'go go go' nature."

That's not to say Stone's anti-go go go entirely, though. Even in the beta, I've seen plenty of folks min-maxxing or trying to reach for bis, which has its own charm: "We love them too. We think that they're great, and the endgame is going to be spectacular.

"But we're deliberately trying to build something with WoW Forever that answers that question of… 'Is it too late to start?' With an emphatic 'no' as much as possible." Horizontal progression, baby—it worked out for Guild Wars 2, and I'm excited to see Blizzard take a crack at it as well.

Questing through the World of Warcraft: Forever beta, I've been impressed by just how much has been layered on top of the game's Classic world—new quests and new dungeons, designed to slot in seamlessly to the more oldschool playstyle without causing too much friction. It's an impressive magic trick, and one I'm really excited to get stuck into properly come November.

Talking to associate production director Clay Stone, Forever initially had far more humble beginnings: "It's been an evolution, and I think that's probably pretty clear from all the classic titles we've done so far in the level of experimentation and breaking away from #NoChanges at the beginning."

While Mists of Pandaria Classic and Wrath of the Lich King Classic added small changes and adjustments, Stone says the ball really got rolling with Hardcore and Season of Discovery:

"Obviously, with that, it was a wonderful testing ground for us to be able to see what the limits were and what what players would accept as [something that] does or does not fit into the space, how classes could function, and certainly for us as a team, wonderful opportunities for us to be able to learn how to develop things or new content in that vanilla era space."

Season of Discovery was tremendously successful: "The response to it blew us away … Shipping that in November of 2023, and then seeing that immediate response to it was incredible. And that's really when the discussions began about, 'Hey, what what does a version of this look like that is not pitched as a season to players?'"

Said version apparently snowballed the more excited the developers became, says Stone: "There is a version of WoW Forever that really is that version of Vanilla with just a couple slight class changes. We give paladins a taunt, and presto change-o, you got Classic Plus or WoW forever … Our original pitch internally was: We'll do four new dungeons, and the next thing we know, we're doing six, and the next thing we know, we're doing nine.

"That appetite amongst the team, and much broader in Blizzard, to be able to deliver something much more substantial than perhaps even what our players were expecting, that that built and that that grew … The actual scope of what we're ultimately delivering with launch was something that built up over time."

Which was satisfying for the developers when the floodgates opened for the beta last month: "There were players that perhaps expected us to announce something much smaller, but I believe, at least based on the response that we've seen, we've exceeded a lot of players' expectations in terms of the overall scope of what it is that we're delivering, which has been really exciting for us."

A tension that will never go away as long as World of Warcraft: Forever exists is how true it is to the 2004 MMO. Blizzard signed up for this by creating an MMO that is trying to blend the old with the new so that anyone, regardless of their experience with WoW, can get into it.

That tension has been at its highest concentration with the new blue elves it debuted with WoW: Forever. The Skyborne have never existed in WoW before; they look almost exactly like the Blood Elves from The Burning Crusade expansion, but their lore tells us they're a faction of High Elves.

Some players love the twist on a race they've been asking to play for years, while others believe they tarnish the authenticity of an MMO that's trying to recreate the joys of playing the oldest era of the MMO. Even though the debate over the Skyborne will probably never be resolved, most players agreed that, at the very least, they looked way too new alongside WoW's crunchy old player models.

Blizzard said it would respond to the feedback about the Skyborne visuals before WoW: Forever launches in November and today it has done just that in a blog post promising to give them a retro makeover.

"Over the course of development, we have been aligning on the right range of fidelity and what feels like it belongs in the WoW: Forever world and what does not," Blizzard writes. "The team has learned much in the process, and that will continue to strengthen more with future content."

Blizzard says the Skyborne "didn't quite meet the consistency and cohesion we are aiming for," and will be tweaking how they look with the "HD" player models setting on. There's an example of their druid forms in the post and you can see how the feathers and fur have harsher lines and shapes that fit much better with WoW's original style. The old version used to look extremely smooth with a bright light blue gradient covering their bodies and now everything is much more muted.

The people who play with the "SD" models on to fully live like it's 2004 will also get visually updated Skyborne, but they won't come until early next year. Blizzard's work-in-progress image shows a bunch of elves who have had their smooth features replaced with jagged, low-poly shapes. They're basically Skyborne on low settings and I think they look great. Blizzard says they'll have another update on the models—and their SD druid forms—when they're closer to being finished.

I wasn't convinced Blizzard would be willing to technically downgrade a race that costs $30 to unlock, but I'm glad it did. It sets a precedent for how close it wants the newest stuff in WoW: Forever to adhere to the classic MMO, and, hey, maybe it'll convince some people to chill out and see how things go when it's out of beta on November 4.

If you want to make money in World of Warcraft, well… I cannot rightly say that we at PC Gamer are any good at it, based on the evidence given to us—but we are at least inventing new ways of money-making. And isn't invention the mother of necessity? Or was it the other way around? Who cares, we've got pockets to line.

I wrangled two of my erstwhile co-workers, Fraser Brown and Joshua Wolens, to see which of us was the best at making money in World of Warcraft: Forever's beta. Which felt like a fair testing ground, given both how populated it is and how un-inflated its new, fledgling economy would be. Here were the rules:

• We started as level 1 horde characters.
• We each had a nest-egg of 20 silver to get us started.
• Starting from our spawning points into Azeroth, we had to make as much gold as we could in two hours.
• There were some additional rules about auction house postings that didn't become relevant.
• No really. I spent a lot of time thinking about them and their implications for the challenge. None of us bothered.
• I'm definitely not mad about it.

Each of us entered with a different strategy. Well, two of us did (more on that later) to try and make the most bank. I, the Orc of Wisdom, would weaponise my 15+ years of roleplay experience to trade knowledge with the masses. Josh, the Majestic Celebrity, would try to wield his status as a games journalist and very famous person to his benefit—hamstrung only by the fact he had never actually played much World of Warcraft.

There was also Fraser, as Boeuf Beef, who did a secret third thing. I'll let him enlighten you about his masterful machinations myself.

This is a story of wisdom, courage, and bull-headed bravery—and, more importantly, it's a story of how those virtues could be mercilessly weaponised to siphon as much money from the economy as possible.

I've been roleplaying in MMOs for about 16 years—it is, in fact, what got me into writing—so rather than simply beg the masses for hand-outs, I would use it. I am, first and foremost, an entertainer.

I assembled a document full of snippets of wisdom—some reworded adages and sayings, others my original work—and decided to leverage them around WoW: Forever's new campfire feature. For those not in the know, anyone with a cooking skill can set down a campfire, around which may be set various fixtures. Sit around the fire for a minute, and you'll get buffs.

This made for a pretty cheap initial investment of seven silver and 66 copper: Enough to train my cooking skill as well as some simple wood and tinder. All of which was available on the jog up to Razor Hill, which was very pretty. An auspicious sign, I thought, for my journey.

With the ability to make campfires in hand, I parked myself somewhere people would be forced to interact with me by game mechanics alone: The top of a zeppelin tower. Being the only convenient route to the Undercity, home to the new Ruins of Lordaeron dungeon everyone was keen to try, passengers would be forced to stand around while I gave them my spiel.

Originally, I was going to set a static price for my wisdom—but at the last minute, I decided to change my tact to simply requesting whatever people could spare. I am, after all, a humble old orc simply looking for a hot meal and a place to stay. Durotar nights get so very cold.

And, listen—I'm guilty of my fair share of cynicism of the MMO populace, but the two hours I spent up here were nothing short of delightful as the WoW community played ball. Here's a short-list of the characters I encountered:

• A druid, who could not give me money, but did give me meat.
• An absolute mensch who gave me one entire gold piece.
• An elf who was very mean to me, but hit my ramblings about the vigors of youth with "And the daftness of age is clear upon your face", which is unfortunately a solid dunk.
• An undead named Glenda, perhaps my one true love, who replenished the fire for me when it ran out.
• A tauren who gave me 5 silver, then whispered to me that he didn't want wisdom, he just wanted to tip me for my good roleplay.
• An orc rogue who straight-up mugged me (note: threateningly opened a trade window). She got so into the RP that she panicked when the zeppelin was leaving and managed to fall off the tower instead.
• A cat burning themselves on my fire. TheOrc OfWisdom said this was concerning, to which someone else quipped: "Don't worry. They've got nine lives."
• An undead who told me I couldn't park here, and that it was "time to move". Then then proceeded to bust it down. TheOrc OfWisdom took a break to bust it down with them.

I had a lovely old time—and one that was very profitable. My final score—minus my initial silver stipend—can be found at the bottom of this article.

I don't know what WoW is. I don't know what my abilities are. I don't know where this zeppelin is taking me and I don't know what the buttons in my hotbar do. I don't know what any of this shit is and I'm fucking scared.

What I do know: I'm incredibly important. My name is on something like 68 million articles on PC Gamer dot com, making me a rough hybrid of Scarlett Johansson and George Herbert Walker Bush in fame and significance. Play to your strengths, they always told me, so off I went to ignore circa 99% of WoW's actual mechanics in favour of simply impressing my incredible renown on other players and asking them for money.

My other strength is slander, so at the same time as I harangued people about my own importance, I also let them know that my two opponents were dreadful. Just utter bastards.

This worked alarmingly well. Did you know you can just ask people for money and get it? I might try this out in real life. Just a few minutes in, my very first beg netted me some silver pieces and well-wishes.

The issue was not the effectiveness of my tactics but my complete unfamiliarity with the videogame 'World of Warcraft'. I quickly realised that I had genuinely no idea what the relative value of these coins were. Is a silver piece nothing? Is it a billion dollars? Am I the richest man in MMO history already?

Likewise, simple mechanics hamstrung me. Did you know to actually get into The Undercity there's a whole elevator system? I didn't! So instead I just sort of roamed around the top part for a while, unsure what kind of zone I was even in. This was, on reflection, not a lucrative use of my time.

The highlights of my adventure? I'll be honest, I mostly just had a pleasant time ambling from town to town and asking people to give money to the world's most important man (me). This did backfire once, though.

In dialogue with one player, Zippie Skadoo, I referred to him as a "good man" (or maybe "good friend," I forget). It turns out this was not acceptable. Zippie Skadoo quickly educated me that he was, in fact, bad to the bone, on the verge of going berserk, and might be inclined to assault me.

So that could have gone better.

Elsewise? I reckon I could have won this thing had I not wasted time in A) The Undercity and B) taking a boat or something to another continent and getting repeatedly killed by panthers for a bit.

Lessons for next time, I suppose, when Majestic Celebrity once again graces… Azeroth(?) with his presence.

I've been playing WoW off and on since 2004. So you'd think I'd find this challenge a doddle. Nope! This was, and I am not prone to exaggeration, the worst two hours of… if not my entire life, at least this month.

OK, so, I didn't have a plan. Or rather, my plan was to tell everyone I had an amazing plan, in the hope that an amazing plan would just pop into my brain. It did not. What actually happened was I rushed headfirst into insanity. It's a good thing the video accompanying this is short, because I really don't want the world to see the extent of my madness.

At one point, I just started making animal noises.

After failing to prepare a plan, I decided to simply skin a bunch of critters and make money that way. Perhaps selling them to generous players. Easy, right? Obviously not, or I'd still have my sanity. I have listened back to my full recording and plucked out some choice quotes.

• "I'm flagging and it's only been half an hour."
• "What am I doing with my life?"
• "I feel time just slipping away."
• "My screams of anguish have woken both my dogs."
• "I am so angry."
• "I am filled with rage."
• "I am filled with rage. I am filled with rage."
• "This is my supervillain origin story."
• "This is Hell. This is Hell."
• "I have lost my mind."

So, yeah, I had a great fucking time. And then I had to listen to my two-hour descent into madness. Which, let me tell you, was not fun! I got to relive the experience of wasting time and money when I should have been making money.

At one point, I spent about 20 minutes trying to complete a single quest, which I should add only promised a reward of two silver. I never really dipped into WoW Classic, so I forgot how unforgiving OG WoW was. I'm not used to being a weak baby who will die as soon as a large bird or boisterous pig-man so much as looks at me. And I was already tired and annoyed by this point. I could have moved on. But I was determined to complete this stupid bloody quest. And I did it! I got my two silver.

Why was I even taking quests on!? I should have just stuck to murdering and skinning critters.

Anyway! I had a horrible time, made less than 10 silver, and because I'm not a very nice man, the knowledge that Josh and Harvey had a lovely time only makes me feel worse.

The final scores...

At the end of our two-hour stint, we'd made a combined two gold, 49 silver, and 20 copper, after subtracting our 20 silver stipends. Which isn't exactly that much for a combined six hours of work, but given we were all starting at level one? I'm not that upset.

It's somewhat telling that Josh managed to produce roughly the same result by simply telling folks that he was trying to beat "two bastards" in a competition. Still, I chalk this up to WoW's community being refreshingly funny and willing to play ball: I had a lot of folks whispering to me during my wise vigil with kind words, which honestly brightened up my time as TheOrc OfWisdom considerably.

What did we learn? I think, unfortunately, that begging in an MMO is surprisingly effective, provided you're insightful or "famous" enough. Maybe stick to selling copper bars, or something.

Even though I was way too new (and low level) to understand how PvP worked in World of Warcraft's early days, I knew by osmosis that it was made for tryhards. WoW PvP was not only a massive grind, but a competition against other grinders for a unique title that no normal person would even dare to go for.

WoW: Forever borrows a lot from the classic game, but the torturous PvP system won't be one of them. In a new blog post, Blizzard explains how it has simplified the system overall to avoid asking players to derail their entire lives for bragging rights.

Those old titles are still there—High Warlord for Horde players and Grand Marshal for Alliance—but you won't be racing to keep your place on an invisible leaderboard every week. Instead, it's going to be pretty straight forward: Anyone who plays a lot of PvP will get rewarded eventually.

You'll have a currency and a point-based progression system to worry about. Honor is the currency you'll earn for killing enemy players, completing battlegrounds, and finishing PvP quests. Blizzard says it has normalized Honor gains across all the different battlegrounds so that none of them are more efficient than the others. As you do all of those things, you'll earn Rank points that unlock 14 tiers of rewards, which include powerful PvP gear and those flashy, prestigious titles. Rank points will have a weekly cap, too, so you can't just marathon to the end over a weekend.

All of this will be wrapped up in a PvP season that will reset once a new one starts, presumably to let Blizzard add a fresh set of rewards encouraging players to do the climb all over again. Every season will have weekly tasks that will give you bonus Honor and Rank points as well as a Legacy Point, Forever's account-wide meta progression system.

While I'm sure the most hardcore WoW veterans will scoff at the idea of normies running around with fancy PvP gear and titles, I don't think it would be responsible of Blizzard to ask people to stay up for multiple days trying to maintain their place on a leaderboard. Back in the old days, the system incentivized people to share their accounts with friends or guildmates just to keep up. The new system, while still a grind, follows Forever's general ethos of capturing the spirit of the old MMO while making it realistic for people who can't spend every waking moment of their lives logged in.

A new map-viewing tool of the WoW: Forever client has just dropped, and this thing is so gosh darn nifty. It's not perfect, and it can take a while for textures to stream in, but as long as you have the files on your computer, this map viewer lets you zip around Azeroth with your mouse wheel like an omniscient god. Please enjoy me marvelling at this fact.

RuneScape developer Jagex descended upon Birmingham (the British one, not the Alabama one) over the weekend with its annual RuneFest. As part of its RuneScape keynote, it showed off a trailer for its upcoming Dragon Slayer 2 quest which, er, featured a player character with six fingers and a bizarre sneaker-like sole on their very not-sneaker armoured shoes.

It didn't take long for posts on social media to point out what was undeniably generative AI, and an incident which, unfortunately for Jagex, came very swiftly after another genAI controversy surrounding its clothing collaboration with 100 Thieves just days before.

Despite the trailer being for RS3, Old School RuneScape's Alec 'Mod Sween' Sween took the lead on releasing a statement on the 2007scape subreddit addressing the situation. "We're aware of the concerns raised about the Dragon Slayer 2 trailer and have taken it down, while we investigate this urgently," he wrote. "This trailer was produced by a trusted external partner who had explicitly confirmed that GenAI would not be used. But, among other things, there's a sixth finger and, well, that's pretty hard to explain away. For that we apologise."

Similar to his statement after the 100 Thieves incident, Sween reiterated Jagex's stance. "Our position is clear at Jagex: we don't use GenAI to create our games, artwork or creative assets, and will not knowingly allow it to be used on our behalf. This is the second time in quick succession that concerns about generative AI have arisen through partners we trusted, and for us that highlights an issue with our own processes which we must address."

Sween said that the developer is "overhauling" the review process, and in the meantime will "work with and commission creators from the community to make sure that the story of Dragon Slayer 2 is told to the standard befitting of such an update."

I can't help but feel a little surprised that a video this blatantly riddled with generative AI slipped through the cracks—the six fingers are clear as day, even if you manage to miss everything else—and in a response Sween said that the team "should have caught these things," adding: "We didn't do well enough and can't simply place the blame elsewhere."

For Jagex's sake, I hope the phrase "bad things come in threes" does not also apply to generative AI videogame controversies.

Despite the immense volume of similarities between Dungeons & Dragons and World of Warcraft, the team working on the upcoming collab rulebook knows that you can't translate everything 1:1. Half of the MMO is about fighting the same bosses over and over until you finally get a good piece of loot. The grind isn't made for tabletop players.

During a recent presentation attended by PC Gamer, principal game designer and project lead James Wyatt says D&D: WoW is more about "paraphrasing" the MMO within the framework of the tabletop game rather than trying to emulate its mechanics. The entire world of Azeroth and the MMO's many expansions (up to Midnight) are fair game for players—the book opens with a big temporal hand-wave from time dragon Chromie—but the smallest details have been shuffled around to fit the format.

Popular dungeons from WoW's past, like the Deadmines, are mostly intact, save for a few alternate routes to accommodate parties who might want to sneak around bosses or skip some altogether. You're still in for the kinds of adventures through deep caverns and ancient cities that WoW players reminisce about today. Some dungeons are lifted right from WoW's earliest era, while others mix in their revised layouts (and loot) from later expansions.

I was delighted to hear that you can still take on the challenge of avoiding every boss in Dire Maul for the bonus rewards after you slay the king, otherwise known as a "tribute run" to WoW veterans. D&D: WoW is built to capture the spirit of exploring the MMO's dungeons for the first time, before the age of datamined loot tables and YouTube guides, while also letting you relive their most iconic moments at the table.

The team calls dungeons a toolbox for DMs to tell the stories of WoW's world without the trial-and-error of the MMO's combat or the tension of deciding who the blue dagger drop should go to. Enemy encounters are curated and there are no restrictions on taking a rest or leaving and coming back later—although the dangers can grow while you're away.

Climactic battles with WoW's biggest names are in there, too, including the Lich King, Illidan, Jaina Proudmoore, and more. They're also where you'll see some of the biggest changes from the MMO. Jaina, for example, doesn't gradually chill your party during the fight, but freezes a player and strikes them with an ice lance if you don't find a way to thaw them out fast enough (the devs recommend using fire, if you've got it) instead.

On the way to the dungeons, you'll have opportunities to prepare your party through WoW's gathering and crafting professions. D&D's crafting rules didn't require a ton of changes to make this work, the team says. You'll be able to do a wisdom check for supplies or ore to mine as you explore. You can take that ore and craft items from a list of recipes, provided you're proficient with the right tools. Powerful items, like armor, will be gated by your proficiency bonus, so there's a real incentive to keep improving your skills as you go along.

D&D's renown system also isn't that far off from WoW's faction reputation system, so the team kept it fairly straightforward: You earn rewards as you climb up the ranks of trust. Becoming exalted with the Earthen Ring can unlock a charm that lets you summon a big Elemental minion or a portal to teleport across the world. The dragon aspects, WoW's oldest and most powerful factions, will even grant you the equivalent of a Wish spell if they like you enough. Rival factions, where raising your reputation with one might damage the other, can show up, too.

Everything here sounds like a smart way to handle a collab that could've barely felt like a collab at all. WoW has so much overlap with D&D already that I can imagine a version of this book that just swaps some names around and calls it a day. Instead, you can tell this was created by people who know exactly what to pull out of Blizzard's world and what to leave behind.

We were told a lot more will be revealed in the lead up to the November 12 release, particularly the way classes from WoW map onto the tabletop format. Wyatt—who spent most of the presentation eagerly answering questions from chat—had to stop himself from spoiling things too early. He also says he's already thinking of all the leftover things that could fit into a follow-up book, but wants to see how this one goes before diving back into Azeroth.

It's very easy to look at RuneScape Reignited's announcement blog or fancy trailer and assume it's a new upgraded version of the classic game—it certainly walks and talks like one, not dissimilar to the upcoming World of Warcraft: Forever. "Begin the journey anew with a year of restoration changes paving your path," et cetera. But it's actually a new character type in the existing RS3, and existing players aren't all convinced it'll be good for the MMO.

In fact, some of them have wheeled out the dragon-headed cannons for one of those Falador riots. People have gotten their yuks in: on X, PhosaniNex posted, "All 100 RS3 players in attendance for the final riot to end all riots, what a sight."

So, what is a Reignited character? Well, they'll all begin play with no progress and share an isolated economy, but they'll be able to play on existing worlds or new, Reignited-exclusive ones. Reignited and regular players can hang out together and form a clan, but they can't fight the same bosses or trade with one another. A dev blog states there will be no new updates exclusive to these new characters, and once you've selected a character type you can't switch.

In other words, it's sort of like creating an Ironman character, but not quite as lonely. While the announcement page promises the chance to play without unpopular systems like Treasure Hunter, that move away from microtransactions was actually announced at the start of this year. Rather than an overhaul unto itself, this seems more like a push to get new people trying RS3 without the fear of being 20 years behind on everything.

But for those who never left the game for OSRS, Dragonwilds, or even one of those non-RuneScape games, it feels like something that could split up the playerbase more—and while Jagex stated in the above dev blog that neither veteran or Reignited characters will be favored, some aren't convinced their progress will matter the same way anymore.

"What does everyone that has spent 1000s of hours gain by making a new account? Does this make all previous progress worthless," Reddit user RiquaaLz posted on the game's subreddit. "It's already very hard to find enough players to do group content, this is just going to fragment the player base even more." That thread has around 1,500 upvotes currently. "I am not starting over bruh this game is waaaay too grindy for that," reads a comment from Last-Horror9563.

The response is interesting to behold, personally, as someone who hasn't spent much time in the true, original RuneScape since it looked like the game people now call Old School RuneScape on Miniclip. A fresh start certainly sounds appealing to me, though I'm not sure the state of the leaderboards or the Grand Exchange are what have kept me from trying RS3 all these years. Whether this gambit will resuscitate RS3 as RS4 looms and OSRS continues to pile on new features, time will tell.

As reported by MMORPG.com, developer Jagex has announced a new MMO follow-up to RuneScape with the working title "RuneScape 4." The announcement came as part of Jagex's yearly RuneFest convention being held this weekend.

The announcement was accompanied by a brief teaser trailer showcasing the game's art style, which builds on the recently-released Dragonwilds survival game: It's like a hybrid of the latest Jagex MMO, Runescape 3, and the ascendant Old School RuneScape based on the series' 2000s heyday.

In the trailer, we see a real Dragon Quest-looking medieval town in a verdant valley under floating islands. An adventurer riding a dragon comes under attack by a three-headed dragon while a wizard watches from below. The trailer ends with the wizard welcoming a new adventurer to the city.

MMORPG.com has more details: RuneScape 4 apparently emerged out of a planned expansion for Dragonwilds. A Jagex developer said that playtesters kept asking for a more traditional, MMO take on the survival game's setting and aesthetic. Other than that, we know RuneScape 4 is being built on Unreal Engine (unclear if we're talking version 5 or the upcoming 6), and that the MMO's original, Dragonwilds expansion version was targeting release in 2027. Scaling up to being a full, new game has almost assuredly pushed that back.

If you're wondering where the "4" comes from, here's how Jagex maps RuneScape's numbered releases:

• RuneScape, 2001: The Reason for the Season.
• RuneScape 2, 2004: Introduced full 3D rendering. Old School is based on RS2 circa 2007.
• RuneScape 3, 2013: Overhauled the art and systems, the current main fork of the game.

Stay tuned for more coverage from this year's RuneFest from PCG features producer Mollie Taylor, who is on the ground at the event.

WoW: Forever's had me nostalgic for a bygone era of MMOs that seems to be enjoying a touch of a resurgence—the idea of a lived-in immersive world, versus the daily task theme park of modern MMO design. Not that I have anything against the latter, mind. Theme parks are neat and roller coasters are fun.

But I have, true to the point, been grouping up with strangers more often in a slower-burn world, partially for convenience, but also partially because the slower pace has me less hungry for rampant progress and time saving. I've gotta hike for six minutes to get to this quest anyway, why wouldn't I stop and help someone in trouble?

When I get all sappy and soft-hearted like this, I also think of The Remarkable Life of Ibelin, a documentary about a WoW player Mats Steen, who sadly died in 2014 of Duchenne muscular dystrophy—a man whose closest online friends travelled from across the world to attend his funeral.

Steen had a massive impact that I wouldn't presume to match, but in my 16 years playing MMOs (and roleplaying in them, like some kind of nerd), I've also met a lot of people who have changed my life. My first girlfriend, for instance—but I've also made a lot of friends who've become part of my social makeup, as much as any of my "real" pals.

I won't name them for privacy's sake, but one of these people—though I've only heard their voice for the better half of a decade we've known each other, for reasons I cannot share—has been a constant force of good in my life, and I hers. We've pulled each other out of some real mental swamps in the time we've known each other, and I've even met her sister in the real world through sheer accident.

Hopping from City of Heroes: Homecoming to Final Fantasy 14, we've told countless stories together in both MMOs. We know plenty about each other—she knows I write for this very website—but it's all been in the tiny, cosy window of Discord. It would not be going too far to call this person one of my best friends, and while I have a more regular balance of "real world" mates and digital friendships, the latter ones have never stopped being vital.

Ultimately, the friendships are what make these games—beyond any trick of design, art asset, raid, or loot system—special. As such, I'm carving out this week's Terminally Online to ask you all about the folks you've met in MMOs who've changed your life for the better: Please share in the comments below!

Final Fantasy 14's free trial is massive—so massive, in fact, that it's become a bit of a copy/pasted meme over the years. The sentence "have you heard of the critically acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy 14" is burned into our brains.

And, to be fair, it's a bloody huge one, currently letting you play for free for as long as you want right until the end of Shadowbringers (with some big limitations, mind). Still, it's a few hundred hours without a single monthly sub payment. Well, Final Fantasy 11's gonna be following in those footsteps, per the FF11 site:

The site also mentions that previously-created trial characters will also be able to once again play the game, so if you started a free trial and ran out of game time, you can hop back in.

That's a pretty huge bump—especially since it also lets players do some of the "Limit Break" quests. For context, while FF11 technically caps out at level 50, players can up that to a maximum of 99 by doing a certain questline every few levels. And they'll have all the time in the world to do it in, hooray!

Honestly, this now makes two of Square's premier MMOs very generous—and as a fan of the genre writ large, I'm happy to see genuine efforts made to keep old dogs like FF11, which is doing pleasantly well, alive and kicking. There's a dearth of new MMOs out there, so I'm just glad to see efforts to maintain the old ones.

To great effect, mind. Back in March, FF11 was getting so many new players it had to pause character creation on its busiest server for a while and, checking this auction house database, the game still has around 88,000 active players.

The blue elves might not be the only wholly original addition to World of Warcraft: Forever. Blizzard started surveying players about a list of new classes, some of which have been requested by fans for years.

Last week, a survey popped up on Blizzard's Battle.net launcher to gauge interest in future additions to WoW: Forever. Participants were told not to publicly share anything from the surveys, but, well, you know how well people listen to warnings on the internet.

The full survey was posted online by some brave soul, and in it you can see several proposed classes: Monk, Demon Hunter, Tinker, Illusionist, San'layn, Necromancer, Rune Knight, Bard, Warden, Witch and Death Knight. Each one has a short description, their role in a group, the kind of gear they'd wear, and a breakdown of some example abilities.

The Witch class, for example, is a ranged damage-dealer and support that wears cloth armor. A cauldron ability that buffs anyone who drinks from it as well as a ranged attack called "Voidbolt" that drains the caster's own life are two of their example abilities.

Bard and Tinker are two classes I always see come up whenever anyone talks about potential new classes. Blizzard's suggested version of them sounds like they'd fit right in with the rest of the roster. The Tinker description says they'd climb into their own mech to fight; Bards would perform songs to heal and buff their allies.

Returning classes, like Demon Hunter and Monk, sound pretty close to the versions that exist in other versions of WoW today. The survey specifically calls out familiar abilities that they wouldn't have in WoW: Forever, and clarifies that Demon Hunters would start at level one, rather than level eight as they do in WoW's Midnight expansion.

Even though these class outlines are pretty short, they feel considered in a way that makes me think this is something Blizzard is almost certainly going to do eventually, if not shortly after the MMO launches in November.

Plenty of people shelled out the money to play the new elves in the beta judging from how many I see running around every time I log in. I wouldn't be surprised if Blizzard starts selling classes, too. Ideally there would be a way to unlock them for free by playing the game, but I have my doubts about the kinds of things Blizzard would give away these days if they'd likely prove lucrative. The survey already has some players worried that any additional classes might come out considerably more powerful than the others and ruin the throwback experience. They could be right, but it's still unclear how far WoW: Forever will veer away from the oldest version of the MMO. The full release on November 4 will hopefully provide some insight into what the future holds for Blizzard's retro spinoff.

WoW: Forever's been a great time so far, partially because the old-school design of it has forced me to actually group up with strangers. But there's just one problem: My working memory is shot from being a very tired millennial, and I can't possibly remember all these names.

Enter Grayvves' "I Remember" AddOn, which has now been ported over to WoW Forever. This lets you assign a quick note and a smiley, neutral, or frowny face to anyone you meet. Not as commitall as a friend request, but robust enough to make you seem like an attentive person with a good memory.

What do you mean, "it looks like a social credit system." I don't know what you're talking about.

I've been very much enjoying the World of Warcraft: Forever beta—and I will be the first to cop to the fact I think it's recapturing a lot of the essence of an oldschool MMO that we lost. Tongue in my cheek, I'll even join in with the "reject modernity" crowd. But, crucially, I'll be doing so as a joke.

I've noticed, skimming my hand across the surface of the discourse, a propensity for folks to be getting up in arms about which version of their favorite MMO was better and to do so loudly, passionately, and obnoxiously. These factions stand divided:

My heart lies with the Coalition, sure. I think Forever is one of the most exciting things to happen in the MMO space in years. I have a fondness for the old tab-targeting techniques of older MMOs and a resentment for the dodge roll, and I much prefer the slow-paced explorative nature of Forever to something like Retail, which has, I admit, temporarily lost me with its seasonal structure.

But I am also a lover of variety. My favourite games range from hopecore science fiction RPGs like Citizen Sleeper to basically every Soulslike I can get my hands on. I adore silly "friendslop" games and the hope-crushing simulator that is a MOBA, which Deadlock has pulled me kicking and screaming back into. Point being: I think there's a space for everyone.

Rose-tinted Warpaint

I don't think the design of retail World of Warcraft is inherently bad, it's just different. I think Midnight has got a lot of things right—player housing is an absolute win, the game's increasing alt friendliness suits what it has become, the lack of mandatory borrowed power chores is nice, and I like being able to rinse through my Delves and Preys and zip around on my flying mount. It's frictionless, easy, keyboard-smashing fun.

Sometimes I'm in the mood to mindlessly do a bunch of low-stakes content. That mood hasn't taken me lately, but I'm not naive enough to believe it'll never take me at all.

Similarly, I also enjoy how Forever shrugs off those systems in favour of their design opposites: No overstimulating heaps of new patch-specific systems to partake in, no chore lists full of faction grinds, no dungeon finder. You log in, and you plod along with your playlist of choice in a world filled with players, and you do some quests. Maybe you find a group to clean out RFC with. You meet an undead paladin called Glinda Smlinda around a campfire. That's it, that's the game.

The issue I have is when this preference is put forward as a matter of moral imperative—the idea that modern WoW is somehow this corrupt, anti-gamer monolith that must be wrangled back to the way things were. I will say it plain: This shit sucks, it's annoying and it's subtractive and it's exhausting.

From a personal perspective, it's pretty unhealthy to make an actual identity and personhood out of a videogame you play, and it's certainly not subversive or impactful to make yourself a staunch defender of the old ways online. Because the truth is, Blizzard couldn't give a toss if we like modern WoW or not—it's all umbrella'd under the same price point, we're all pulling from the same buffet.

The community taglines the company incorporates ("putting the 'war' back in 'Warcraft', for example")? That's kayfabe, to get you to spend money. It's not part of a culture shift, Blizzard's just doing what it's proven profitable to do after years of safe success with Classic and Season of Discovery. And it'll keep running Retail WoW because guess what, that's also been very profitable too! Folks still play it.

From a pettier perspective, and this is just my personal exhaustion: It's console wars. We're doing console war stuff. Except, rather than doing them with blocks of hardware that can at least be attributed to different experiences on the whole, we're arguing about different versions of the same video game. Why?

More to the point, Forever itself is kind of a counterargument to the idea that these versions of WoW have nothing to learn from each other. What's made it interesting is how it's reinterpreting oldschool MMO design with just a few sprinkles of convenience. I do not blame people for being in love with the past, but we can't be trapped in it forever, but saber-rattling and name-calling over it? We shouldn't do that to ourselves, or each other. We should (and I know this is a vain hope) be normal on the internet.

Even though World of Warcraft: Forever is only in beta right now, players are able to explore a good amount of Azeroth to see what secrets Blizzard has tucked away for the full release.

Several secrets have been found, like a bunch of hidden books that reward powerful leveling items, but some of them have hints for what to expect when it launches in November. There are plenty of items that don't have a clear use yet that might become extremely valuable as time goes on.

A new NPC was recently found in the new Riverglades zone who sells a bunch of expensive crafting items. Theoretically, you should be able to get these items by playing the game normally, but many WoW: Forever players suspect he exists to prevent the auction house prices from skyrocketing due to their rarity.

Mister Graphed, the black market goblin merchant, sells items for 20+ gold—a hefty chunk of change in the Classic-era of WoW—that should prevent anyone from feeling obligated to buy them for more than that from other players. I'm sure it'll still happen because people love to sell items you can buy from vendors at a premium for the convenience of not having to travel around, but it will at least keep the prices from getting too ridiculous.

Notably, though, the vendor also sells new crafting materials called Fel Crystal and Stranglevine. Blizzard has done a big overhaul of professions in WoW: Forever, making them considerably more useful while you're leveling up. I was able to craft a nice set of gear before I was anywhere close to the beta's level cap of 20. These new items suggest there will be some really rare items to craft that never existed in previous versions of the MMO.

One item is available that isn't a crafting item at all: It's called the Gift of Galloping and it's a whopping 150 gold. This item says it gives you a 10% boost to your mounted movement speed for 15 days. Classic WoW never had anything like it, but I guess if you're rich you can pay a pricey subscription fee to go a little faster if you want.

It seems Blizzard is doing its best to prepare for WoW: Forever being a game that won't transition into new expansions. The level cap will permanently stay at 60, so there will have to be reasons for players to keep playing their characters or start new ones. It also means the economy will need things like that NPC in place so that the prices don't get out of control as players presumably get more powerful and the mysteries of the game get solved.

Uh-oh. The MMO no-life virus started coursing through me as soon as I jumped into WoW: Forever's beta, and it's refusing to let up. Which is a problem, considering I'm also housing the kind of sickness that makes me pump dozens of hours into Final Fantasy 14 every week like it's a goddamn full-time job. My body is a temple for poor time management afflictions.

My only prior experience with Blizzard's MMO is a level 13 Paladin I made a poor attempt at trying out around the release of Battle for Azeroth nearly a decade ago. This time it's sticking. I am absolutely loving WoW: Forever's stripped-back, old-school feel, complete with sprinklings of modernity that make it palatable for folks like me who lack those rose-tinted glasses.

The one thing I'm struggling to come around to, though? The music. Not that I think it's bad. The opposite, in fact—I've been loving the ominous tones of Durotar's overworld music, and venturing into Orgrimmar for the first time I was met with the perfect grand, foreboding sound that a city for the Horde deserves.

My problem is how little I seem to hear any of it. World of Warcraft likes for you to sit in these long, occasionally uncomfortable stretches of silence, instead letting the sounds of its world do the talking. Crunchy orc footsteps, the whispering of the wind, the squawk of an eagle. I am admittedly warming up to that deliberate choice of ambiance, but I also can't help but yearn for the thoroughly themed ways of Final Fantasy 14.

There's a song for just about anything in that game. Music for each zone during daytime hours. And another one for each zone during nighttime hours. Music for dungeons. And sub-bosses. And boss bosses. Hell, this expansion's raid series has a bespoke song for every single fight. And the final boss of each tier gets two of 'em! That's 15 whole ass songs just for one raid series.

Do some of its songs get relentlessly overused? Of course. I'm pretty sure most Warriors of Light suffer from some sort of Machinations-induced trauma at this point. But I'm convinced that for the most part Masayoshi Soken and the wider music team have, in fact, spoiled me rotten in this regard.

Tagging an enemy in WoW: Forever without being rewarded with some juicy combat music feels downright wrong, and it's the most unexpected way I've had to adapt from one MMO to another. I've become so used to that aural response that I've been feeling oddly lost without it. Hell, sometimes I'll be smacking away at an enemy while the serenity of the overworld music plays, which feels extra weird.

I kind of appreciate that World of Warcraft doesn't do it the way I expected it to, but I also certainly wouldn't say no to hearing more of what its composers have to offer. What I've heard so far has been downright fantastic, and I'm sure it won't be long before my brain starts getting all nostalgic and giddy when I hear the first few notes of Durotar's music flooding my ears as memories of my Troll Shaman saying "I need more range… cannot cast that yet… I need more mana… it is too far away…" will haunt/bless me once more.

The Elder Scrolls Online's developers have had a rough couple of years, starting with the scrapping of Project Blackbird in July 2025, which also led to 62 employees being laid off. Then, in July of this year, Xbox's reset tore into the studio's numbers, with a whopping 213 employees laid off from Zenimax Online. Overall, Zenimax Online's dev team dropped by roughly 60% in one year.

Which is a terrible blow, given I spoke to its development team back in January and was told it had rallied—and things were, for a while, really looking up. Refreshes to animations, a new seasonal structure, and a heaping help of experimental gameplay. Which made the aforementioned 2026 bloodbath both confusing and deeply disheartening.

I spoke with a few developers from the game to check in on how they were doing: "It is challenging," says game director Nick Giacomini, "something like this, it affects us. It affects all of us and the developers at a personal level. So we can't just pretend like it didn't happen and that it hasn't impacted us. We're human.

"At the same time, we still love this game. We love our players, and we love contributing to this and continuing to make it exciting, giving players something to look forward to. We're committed to doing so."

Giacomini himself dropped a letter to the community back in July, which echoed a lot of that same resolution—while also making the difficult choice to postpone a lot of the game's updates to 2027. "With what happened," Giacomini tells me, "That required us to take a look at schedules, see what's possible, and things needed to shift. And one of the underlying principles with that was that we didn't want to rush to just hit a date, right?

"We want [the] player experience to be as rewarding as possible to continue to surprise players and get them excited. And had we rushed it, would have put that at risk. So we wanted to give the team the space to be able to do it right, which necessarily meant pushing dates out for some things."

Giacomini says that, despite everything, the studio's not just in damage control mode: "I was just in a meeting earlier today about our plans for the end of 2027 and early 2028. So we're not just trying to figure out what to do now. We very much have an eye toward the future and how to continue to grow and excite players in this game."

Loremaster Michael Zenke views it as a means of honoring his colleagues who put in a ton of hard work already to getting ESO back on its feet: "Because ESO is here to stay, because it's not going anywhere, I personally feel like indebted to the people that we worked with, and want to make sure that the vision that they had goes out in the world and lands really successfully with the people that we love and appreciate on the community, and that's that's our long term thing that we're looking at right now."

Fortunately, Giacomini says the team has been buoyed by the community's support—and while some have been disappointed by the delays, no real ire's been directed at Zenimax Online itself: "I think our community is certainly one of the best—perhaps I'm a little bit biased—but it's one of the reasons that I love this game … We've had people reach out, we've had people post.

"We had a book that was made by our community, and it's now sitting in the office on a desk open right in the middle where everybody can see it … They wrote about what makes Elder Scrolls Online special to them, things that have stood out, and it is extraordinarily heartwarming. And it's just really it's been really incredible how they've supported us through this."

Looking forward

Mercifully, it's not like ESO's going to be completely dry before these delays—come September 28, the game'll be getting three new bits of content: The Nowhere Vault, an experimental set of puzzles, mazes, and jumping challenges put in a randomised order, The High Seas of Tamriel, an event that'll see you battling on ships and underwater, and perhaps the most interesting one: rumours.

A rumour is a special type of quest that's essentially a scavenger hunt—no quest markers, just hints. Associate game director Jason Barnes says it's designed to pull players out of a streamlined questing experience and into something a touch more immersive:

"We all have grown and up in MMOs, and I know probably [for] everyone here, our our time has changed dramatically over the years, but there was this sense of discovery and exploration [back then], and coming across something interesting where you don't really know the answer, no one's pointing to a direction and saying you have to go here or anything like that."

That's what rumours aim to do, as Barnes puts it: "You're not playing the UI; you're playing the actual game itself. Early testing and feedback has been very positive. Matter of fact, we've gotten feedback saying 'you need to make them harder, you need to make them more obscure'. So we're like, OK, cool, acknowledged."

A lot of these are hold-overs that were in the works before the layoffs of July this year, but still—it's nice to see ESO properly trying to experiment, something Giacomini is pretty key to the game's future. And those experiments have, in his mind, been successful:

"Night market is a great example … at first, players didn't quite know what to make of it. They came in and just got steamrolled right away. It was hard content, and so there were a lot of calls for like, 'Oh my god, this is so overtuned. What have you done!' But as time went by they started grouping up and they started enjoying it more … It's one of the few examples that I can think of where we didn't have to go to the drawing board."

Despite everything, there's some genuine excitement to be found still among Zenimax's developers: "I'm just really excited," says Zenke, "in general, that we are trying things. We've been making the game now for a very long time, and the way that we made the game and the best practices we developed are all really good … [But] I'm very excited about taking a hard look at like, 'Why do we do this this way? Why is this set up this way?'"

I'm not going to sit here and tell you, in this harsh and chaotic industry, that The Elder Scrolls Online is immune to future hardship—almost nothing surprises me anymore. But while it's clear that the one-two suckerpunch of layoffs and restructurings have hobbled Zenimax Online, it's still trying to keep ESO going. And in a genre that's on the ropes, I certainly hope this game can get back on solid ground without further earthquakes.

One of the developers running the World of Warcraft: Forever beta has no patience for the people who think they can get away with naming their characters something inappropriate.

I was surprised at how many awful player names I've seen while playing the beta over the last week. WoW usually has a pretty strict filter that covers a lot of racist or disgusting names and all their permutations. But in the beta, I saw more than usual that felt like they should've been blocked at the character creation screen.

It turns out, this was a mistake on Blizzard's part, according to senior game producer Tom Ellis on X: "Our naming filter wasn’t ready to rock for dual names but we naively thought after twenty years folks knew what was and wasn’t OK and we’d be fine for a few weeks of beta till it came online."

Things were not fine from day one of the beta, which required Blizzard to manually run every name through their filter system and then double check them just in case, Ellis said.

A wave of bans went out alongside the beta's first major patch yesterday to revoke access for the worst names and force the iffy ones to be changed. This prompted some of those players to go on social media and Reddit to complain that they were wrongfully punished.

"A couple of us spent the evening reading through everything again and checked every Reddit post and Twitter and so far every one of them who's posted their three cheeky or just inappropriate names has had a 4th character they have accidentally omitted," he says.

Ellis says there isn't a new policy for WoW: Forever and that anyone with names like that "would have not been allowed in any variation of WoW at any time in its history and would have earned you a suspension."

"If you're genuinely confused, remember that it's our database, we can see every character you've created, not just the one you're playing," he says. "I read the list. No sympathy. Be a better human next time."

It was very brave of Blizzard to launch what was inevitably going to be a massive beta without a working name filter. I don't envy the poor developers who have to manually go through them all as a result, but I do appreciate that there's zero tolerance for players who are abusing it. For every "Jack MeHoff" or "Ligma Bowlz" sparking delight and joy from us all, there are far nastier malefactors who should know better.

If WoW: Forever's devs want to bring back old-school social interactions in the MMO, this is the moderation approach it needs. The best moments in the beta have been the times where I've grouped up with strangers for a quick quest or saved a fellow adventurer from being mauled by several enemies at once. The last thing I want is for WoW: Forever to be ruined for anyone hoping to experience the kind of social interactions that make MMOs feel alive.

My first MMO character was...

Sakura-Lola

Born: 2004? Maybe?

Game: RuneScape

As a child who was not willing to try to convince their parents to send money to a strange company on a monthly basis, I had resigned myself to looking at MMOs like Final Fantasy XI longingly from afar. After being introduced by my best friend, the browser-based RuneScape was it for me…well, at least until we got a bit older and began devoting all of our time to Gaia Online.

My recollection is hazy, but I distinctly remember selecting flowing golden locks for my avatar, sticking her in a pink polygonal crop top, and setting out on a quest for cuter clothes. A rando gave me a ring and asked if I'd like to be their internet girlfriend. After that, I saw off randos by pretending I didn't speak English (if memory serves, I was obsessed with Final Fantasy X at the time and 'Suteki Da Ne?' was my go-to conversation-killing phrase—it was incredibly effective).

Somehow, some way I ventured into either a high-level area or player versus player zone and promptly lost everything. Many such cases—but perhaps it's time I pay a visit to the ol' RuneScape account.

(Read the full article here)

My first MMO character was...

Rennyfuu, Archer

Born: ~2002-2006

Game: Priston Tale

I spent time poking around in RuneScape and Graal Online as a kid, but they didn't stick. It wasn't until my failed campaign to persuade my mom into giving me her credit card for Final Fantasy 11 that I found my true MMO gateway: Priston Tale.

The western release was in beta for years, and I spent most of that time lagging to death on a 4MB integrated GPU as the game's worst archer. I have fond memories of arguing with grown adults twice my age about winning strategies in Survive or Die—the game's big arena brawl against waves of monsters—and distinctly remember a thread on an old fan forum dedicated to complaining about me. I was a menace.

I made multiple characters before Priston Tale eventually died out and was sold to Suba Games, where I'm fairly certain it remains active. I'm sure Rennyfuu is long gone by now, but sometimes I toy with the idea of going back for a visit.

(Read the full article here)

The World of Warcraft: Forever beta has gotten less stingy about talent costs. It was a little strange that it was stingy in the first place, given the fact you probably do want to let your players test out your refreshed talent system, but hey, here we are.

Resetting your talent now costs one silver, per the WoW Forever beta development notes on the official forums: "If you have not recently changed your talents, the cost is now 1 silver to re-spec. This is temporary for the Beta only. After your first talent reset, the subsequent cost will be much higher, but it will drop to 1 silver after 1 hour has passed."

My first MMO character was...

Zarwulf, Orc Hunter

Born: 2004

Game: World of Warcraft

Zarwulf was not my first MMO character, but I'm far too addled to remember anything about playing Ultima Online in 1998, or pretty much anything about my childhood. I do remember a wee bit about what I was doing at university, though, and that was mostly playing World of Warcraft, Star Wars Galaxies and Guild Wars.

My buddy Zarwulf had a big sword, an impressive grimace, and probably a pet wolf. And he still exists, frozen in time—a situation I'm not going to remedy by playing him again. Better to leave the past in the past. In a way, he lives on in Guild Wars 2, where I sometimes muck around as a Daredevil with the same name.

(Read the full article here)

I grew up in the 2000s with a PC but not a whole lot of money. That's the kind of combination that gets you bargain-bin Sold Out Software games from Poundland or, more so in my case, an absurd number of free-to-play online and browser-based games that were utterly pervasive across the internet.

My childhood was a never-ending revolving door of these mid-tier Flash and Java games. Some have long left my memory, a fleeting experience. But some continue to rattle around in my brain, reminding me of simpler times where I didn't have to pay taxes or subject myself to at least one hour of screen-free time before bed lest I wake up with a headache the next morning.

But where are these weird and wonderful games now? Are they still scattered across the internet? Are they in their original forms, practically untouched, or have they evolved into far deeper and darker games than they once were?

Well, as I continue to march into my 30s against my will, I've been thinking back to the games I would play as a child and asking myself just that question. So why don't we go and check in on a couple of them?

Where the hell is Puzzle Pirates now?

Puzzle Pirates is, if you haven't already guessed, an MMO where you are a pirate and you do puzzles. Every component of a ship's operation is done through different puzzles—bilging is a Bejeweled-inspired match three, sailing is a buccaneering Doctor Mario, patching the sails is incredibly similar to Pipe Dream. You get the drill.

It's an incredible niche premise, one I expected to have long sunk. Except… it hasn't? As I popped on the internet to see if the game was still kicking around, I was shocked to discover that it was. Hell, it's on Steam. Still official and everything! No private, fan-run server to be seen! A couple seconds and a mere 85mb download later and my ears were being thoroughly blasted with jaunty pirate tunes. A search through my ancient childhood email inbox revealed that my original account was unfortunately deleted in 2012, so I made a brand-new pirate called Johnpcgamer (pirates are a singular-named folk, it seems) and dove right in.

And, well, aside from being told how to purchase premium currency within the first 60 seconds of being born, it's exactly how I remembered it. There are a lot less mateys milling around these days—most of them seemed to be the real for-lifers, ones with more trophies and gold and puzzle proficiency than most of the server combines—so I dove into a few tutorial voyages with some friendly bot pirates.

As a child I mostly stuck to bilging—as far as I could remember it was one of the easiest, and it was also one of the main duties assigned to scrubs like myself. I made a start with that one, before moving on to carpentry and rigging. And the minigames still hold up surprisingly well today, unsurprising considering most of them are inspired by iconic, already-established puzzles.

The occasional mid-voyage reports were informing me that I was, unfortunately, doing a little bit shit. The puzzles are good, but they require a level of speed, foresight, and cleverness that I clearly do not possess. At least there were no real-player captains there to yell at me about it.

After sailing the high seas for a little while, I went for a quick stroll around the town of the island my ship had arrived at. It was stuffed to the brim with tailors—every business in Puzzle Pirates is player-owned, and as with all MMOs I assume fashion is the endgame—with a single inn wedged between them all.

I nipped in, hoping to partake in drinking games with some NPCs. Unfortunately, they all massively outclassed me and in a display of pirate honour, politely refused to go toe-to-toe with me in a drinking contest lest I end up in some sort of hydrogen bomb vs coughing baby scenario.

Unfortunately, much of Puzzle Pirates seems to be gated off to swabs like me. Everything is too expensive (even buying doubloons, the game's premium currency), a good handful of the minigames are paywalled behind a subscription, along with many of its systems. But that's exactly how I remember it, so I'm taking a weird sort of comfort in this deja vu.

It's strange seeing this relic of my childhood stand the test of time. A niche MMO that I'd be surprised if it was drawing even triple-digit numbers these days, still drifting along the ocean slowly but surely. I doubt I'll be going back anytime soon, but I'm happy I even have the option to in the first place.