For the uninitiated, Isekai refers to an anime or manga that primarily focuses on its main character being transported to another world, dimension, universe, what have you. In Sword Art Online, to use Koster's example, the main characters are trapped inside of a virtual reality video game while their real-life bodies are in a state of suspended consciousness. If they die in the game, they die in real life, and the only way out is to essentially beat the game.

Of course, vaguely similar ideas have been explored in other forms of media since at least the 1800s with books like The Wizard of Oz and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, but Koster is obviously referring more to the relatively recent explosion of modern Isekai anime and manga.

Talking to GamesRadar+, Koster points to the Isekai boom as evidence that people are hungry for transportive virtual worlds.

"It's a fantasy of a more immersive parallel world, and players crave it, we think," Koster said. "Like, we see you. Look at, for example, all the Isekai anime, the Sword Art Onlines, and all of those. When you look at those, like the games that they show are not theme park games. They are immersive alternate realities, right?"

As someone who's made lifelong friends playing Ultima Online specifically, Koster is speaking straight to my soul here. I love the idea of a modern, more immersive, more interactive sandbox with the same depth to the social elements and open-ended PvP as Ultima Online. I don't know if that's what Koster is working to achieve with Stars Reach, but he's definitely taken notice of the popularity of another, wildly different game: Animal Crossing.

"When you look at the rise of all of these other sandboxy forms of gameplay done at smaller scale, it's super clear, right? I think you know, the way that something like Animal Crossing went really viral during COVID is indicative of that. So, yeah, bringing those things back into the context, we think there's a huge, huge appetite for it."

The nod to Animal Crossing might sound a little out of place at first, but I think in the context of the COVID pandemic, when people were desperate to escape a bleak reality and immerse themselves in a very different world, it does help to clarify what Koster is aiming for with Stars Reach.

Stars Reach will be the debut project from Koster's studio Playable Worlds, which he co-founded with fellow RPG veteran Eric Goldberg in 2019. The game, which is billed as a "sandbox science-fantasy MMO where you explore deeply simulated living worlds in a shardless galaxy", with "a fully player-driven economy full of peaceful ways to play." Basically, it sounds a lot like a modern sci-fi spin on Ultima Online, which I'm 100% down for. A release date has yet to be announced.

Meanwhile, for the first time in 28 years, the ancient MMO Tibia is adding a new class.

For the uninitiated, Tibia is an MMO from German developer and publisher CipSoft released in 1997, years before genre titans Everquest and RuneScape were more than twinkles in their publishers' eyes. It even beats out Ultima Online, if only by a few months. Point is, it's not quite the oldest MMO ever made, but it's one of the oldest and certainly longest running ever.

To really contextualize just how old Tibia is, it wasn't until 2022 that the game added sound... yes, sound. Now, it's getting arguably an even more significant update that adds the game's first new class ever. That's right, for 28 years there have been four classes; the Knight, Paladin, Druid, and Sorcerer; but that's about to change with the addition of the Monk class later this year.

We don't have any footage or even clips of the Monk in action, but CipSoft says in a press release that gameplay is focused on melee combat and "mystical powers."

The Tibia project manager known only as Niadus says the idea of adding a new class after so long was long deemed "too complex and too risky," but ultimately CipSoft decided "it felt actually possible as well as a natural step for the game."

"All in all, we see the addition of a new vocation as an opportunity to rekindle the sense of discovery that was always part of Tibia. A chance to learn the intricacies of a new vocation, experiment with new strategies, and adapt to new team compositions."

There's no release date for the Monk just yet, but the first playtest will be on February 25 and the full release is slated for the second quarter of 2025.

In the meantime, here are the best MMOs you can play today.

Chris Kaleiki is perhaps best known for designing WoW classes for 13 years, but he's trying to change that at his new company Notorious Studios with a new game, the PvPvE RPG Legacy: Steel & Sorcery, which is headed to early access on February 12.

Of course, launching any game these days can be a gamble because, well, there are way too many games to keep track of and gamers only have so much bandwidth to play with them all. Even so, Kaleiki told GamesRadar he feels "super excited" about launch and "in some ways, I was more nervous or had more anxiety when we did the first alpha friends and family play test, because again, I didn't quite know how the game would go." Now that he knows "the game is good based on player feedback," some of that trepidation is gone. "There are some players who play the game literally, gosh, 60 hours during a week play test. So I think there's a market for it. There's a player who is interested in it. I think it's fun."

His personal feelings aside, there's also the commercial side of releasing a game - "the marketing, getting it out there, getting players to see it" is a whole different story. "And this is the bane to every game developer's existence these days because marketing is completely shifting on how to market a game."

Despite all the external challenges, Kaleiki still feels "there's not much we can do there with the budget" and "the most important thing is the game has to be good." That's because, according to him, "Valve does a very good job of surfacing games that players like or that players are enjoying" and "the algorithm is almost impenetrable."

"If you watch some indie dev videos, they'll often say we tried hacking the algorithm, we tried doing all these goofy things, and there's not much you can do," he said. "All you can really do is make a good game, which, in a lot of ways, is good news for us, but also this is really hard because there's no little hacks you can do to surface your game like you could 20 years ago. "

We'll see how Legacy: Steel & Sorcery does when it hits Steam early access in just a few days.

In the meantime, keep an eye on the upcoming indie games of 2025 and beyond.

Kaleiki now works as the boss of Notorious Studios, prepping the imminent early access release of its first game Legacy: Steel & Sorcery, which is mixing the get-in-get-out PvPvE gameplay of an extraction shooter with more traditional fantasy RPG trappings. It looks really cool, despite the really generic name.

But one problem that was on top of Kaleiki's mind during development was how the "meta" will often stagnate in modern RPGs and players will almost always declare that one character build is the "best for any given situation," he said in an interview with GamesRadar+. He then found some inspiration in the unlikeliest of places.

"The only solution I think is you have to change the meta continually," he continued. "If you look at Marvel Rivals, actually, it's kind of interesting what NetEase did. They have teamups where two heroes get a bonus if they play with each other, like Storm and I think Thor get something... What they're planning to do, which I think is smart, is that every season or every now and then they'll just change them."

NetEase have said that character teamups will rotate in and out every season or so to keep up with the game's evolving story, but also to encourage players to try out new combinations.

"So constantly the meta is shifting on the player, so players constantly have to re-evaluate and think through 'what is best, what is the new meta?' That's the only thing you can really do," he said. "I think players like it and developers like it. League of Legends does the same thing, they flip the board every time they do a season. This hero that was terrible before is now the best. DOTA does the same thing. That's what we've been seeing and I think it actually works pretty well."

Legacy: Steel & Sorcery doesn't have teamups and special heroes to rejig every season, though, so how is it solving the problem? "Probably what we'll do in our game, we've been talking about adding different maps, and we'll have seasons in the game as well," he explained. "That's a whole other thing I learned from WoW about seasons. Maybe this season certain crafting materials are rarer than others and that can make different builds more common because you can create other items easier than you could last season."

Legacy: Steel & Sorcery hits Steam early access on Febrary 12.

For now, don’t miss a single exciting release with our new games of 2025 and beyond release calendar.

Kaleiki recently sat down with GamesRadar+ for a comprehensive talk about Notorious Studios' debut game, Legacy: Steel & Sorcery, which he bills as a AA game sitting somewhere between indie and AAA. The conversation frequently gravitated toward some of the key distinctions, in Kaleiki's view, between indie, AAA, and that nebulous space in between the two. Those distinctions played a big part in his decision to leave Blizzard back in 2020.

"When you're a game developer in AAA, you're doing all the things that game developers do, like design and put stuff into the game and iterate, but it's a very different experience to what we're doing now, which is starting our own game and working from scratching, starting up all the foundations and creating philosophies and pillars of what we should be doing for the game," he said.

It sounds to me like a big reason Kaleiki left Blizzard was due to the heavy compartmentalizing of developers into specific teams working on very specific parts of the game, leaving them without a comprehensive understanding of what's being made.

"I saw the studio model and their motivations and what kind of games we wanted to make were changing," Kaleiki explained. "I thought, 'I haven't really changed much but the studio has,' and that's kind of why I left.

"Like I was saying earlier, I didn't really feel like a game developer in some way. I felt like I was a World of Warcraft class designer or game designer, but I didn't really know the full gambit of the entire game development process, which I do know now."

Kaleiki also agreed with us that "it becomes harder for these larger AAA studios to maintain this connection to the player as they grow, because it becomes a challenge of scale."

Distilled into the simplest possible terms, the concept for Legacy: Steel & Sorcery is an RPG that plays like "World PvP: The Game" and feels like a mini MMO channeling "early Blizzard." It's due to hit Steam Early Access on February 12.

In the meantime, here are the best MMOs you can play right now.

You can read our previous coverage on the exploit for more details on how it works, but in short, the new blacklist means that when you block a character, you now block all characters tied to an account. That function is facilitated by the fact that servers now broadcast an account ID for all the characters you come into contact with. This isn't visible to players, but if the right mods were created, you could collect account ID information and start building a list of every character tied to a given player's account.

A mod that did exactly this soon went public, and, while it's since been driven underground, players came to fear that stalkers would use the information generated by this mod to create alternate accounts and start harassing a target's alternate characters.

A few weeks after these concerns started taking hold, Yoshi-P put out a public statement noting that the devs "will continue to take a firm stance against" the usage of third-party mods, and were exploring both "requesting that the tool in question be removed and deleted" and "pursuing legal action."

In today's Letter from the Producer broadcast (which was entirely in Japanese, but helpfully translated by the folks at the unofficial FF14 Discord), Yoshi-P reiterated some of the details from that previous statement, reconfirming that no personal information – such as address or payment information – could be accessed by the tool.

Nonetheless, Yoshi-P said "I am very disappointed that this kind of tool exists, but we will be improving the system going forward," according to that fan translation. These improvements – which the devs are remaining vague about for now – will start to land in the upcoming patch 7.2, which promises to be the biggest Dawntrail update yet.

"It's simply impossible": Final Fantasy 14 lead explains why the MMO's difficulty level will never be "just right" for all players.

GamesRadar+ had the chance to sit down with Kaleiki for a pretty wide-ranging conversation about Legacy, the tricky process of trying to fit it into any one genre box, and the middle category of games that are big enough in scope and budget to exceed what qualifies as indie but not quite big enough to be considered AAA either. In case there was any doubt, that's exactly where Keleiki puts Legacy, and it's a space where he expects to see significant growth in the future.

"If you think about games as a market, we always talk about indie and AAA," he says. "Indie is incredibly saturated. There's so many indie games. Most of the games that come out on Steam are essentially indies, right? AAA, there's actually not that many games that come out. There's certainly more, growing over time since I was a kid, but there's not that many because they're incredibly expensive. They've become more expensive to develop, more complicated, more complex, development times take a lot longer. So you've been seeing this real stretch between indie and AAA."

In Kaleiki's view, there's an "underserved" market for games that are "more substantial than indie" but aren't necessarily going to "make billions of dollars," or at least not overnight. He also predicts a world where all three categories of games co-exist. There will always be demand for low-budget indies as well as big-budget AAA tentpole releases, he acknowledges, but he's hoping Legacy sits comfortably between the two in a burgeoning new market space.

"I compare Elden Ring, Dark Souls, and some of FromSoft's games to the modern-day Colosseum," he says. "It's really thrilling as a game dev to work on the Colosseum. Holy crap, what a story that is. So that will keep continuing. I don't think that's going to go away, because players do appreciate those types of games. But it's not sustainable building this many Colosseums."

For that reason, Kaleiki reckons there will be "less of those games being made and more diversity in some of these larger game studios where they create some AA ones, some indies," pointing to Princess Peach: Showtime and Riot's now-defunct indie label as recent examples of this sort of thing happening already.

From a developer's standpoint, Kaleiki says there can be a real preference for AA work compared to AAA, and there certainly is at his studio. That's because, in his words, "it's easier to get alignment. It's less bureaucracy that you have to go through. You feel you can jump around and do multiple different things on the game, whereas in AAA you're kind of a specialist."

Kaleiki adds that "most AAA devs who have joined our team really do not want to go back to AAA because of some of those perks. But like I said, AAA is fun too because you get to work on a large product that a lot of people know about. You're working on the Colosseum."

Legacy: Steel & Sorcery is described as a PvPvE extraction-style RPG with MMO stylings and roots going all the way back to the legendary Ultima series. It hits Steam Early Access next week on February 12 for $24.99.

Here are some upcoming indie games to keep on your radar.

It's out in Steam early access on February 12 for $24.99, and in an interview with GamesRadar+, Kaleiki says the aim is to make a AA, not AAA, take on "World PvP: The Game," leaning into his favorite part of WoW and one of the most memorable elements of the Ultima games. Kaleiki is hoping to solve or avoid some of the design challenges he faced on World of Warcraft while leveraging the strengths of a smaller team working on a much smaller game and dialing up a hostile, engrossing world.

It all started with Ultima

"I thought it would be compelling to create a world PvP RPG, and what's interesting is, when you look at what games resonate with players today or that are popular, they have a lot of elements of world PvP, right?" he begins. "If you think about [Escape from Tarkov], I think it's really a world PvP game. You go into the world, the objective really isn't to kill other players. It's to do quests, kill creatures, get loot, and then progress yourself. And PvP can happen, but since it's left to the player to decide, you create these interesting stories, player stories, and I think player stories and these sorts of things in games today are so important. I think players want to create their own experiences in games. They don't want to go from like, hey, the game designer says go here to here to here to here, follow that hallway. I think that kind of feels a little dated and old."

"That was the ultimate vision of the game, to be World PvP: The Game, essentially," he adds. "And that's why I think it's compelling. There is this underserved audience for a game mode that has been around for a long time, and was actually the predecessor to a lot of other popular games like Tarkov, or even battle royales I would consider world PvP in some ways, like PUBG, Fortnite, that sort of thing."

Behind – and also alongside – the PvP, Legacy is a fantasy PvE RPG where you build your character by collecting, crafting, and equipping items with unique skills attached. Your core perks are baseline passive bonuses that everyone can unlock just by reaching max level. The defining skills and synergies are in the items, and after years of making MMO builds and inevitably watching players flock to the go-to meta pick, Kaleiki fancies this a pretty innovative way to handle a talent system. "It's what we call the paper doll," he clarifies. "It's your helm, shoulder, chest, legs, that kind of thing. There's two rings and then your weapon." Those items, in essence, are your talent tree, which brings Monster Hunter to my mind in a good way.

In a game with DPS calculations, Kaleiki reckons choice is ultimately an illusion, but players can still meaningfully enjoy the variety of that illusion. Legacy's item system is meant to additionally create impactful conditional choices that affect how you play based on who you're playing with, what quest you're tackling, what area you're exploring, and how you like to play. "You may queue solo and have a certain build because you just want to avoid other players and get herbs and extract," Kaleiki suggests. "Or you may have a build as a priest that heals other people." It sounds like an interesting intersection of extraction loot economies and RPG customization, which underscores the genre soup at play here.

A mini MMO

Kaleiki describes Legacy as a "mini MMO" channeling some of those "early Blizzard" philosophies, "which is really just about making games that we wanted to play and for a different audience, something smaller scale." He's quick to clarify that he wasn't unhappy at Blizzard, but is happier now since he gets to work on more parts of a game at once. Legacy ended up being a mix of things that worked well in WoW and some things that WoW couldn't really do.

"For example, in our game you can vault up and climb areas, castles, hills, these sorts of things," he says. "That in itself really makes the world feel more tangible, more like a living thing, an extension of the player and combat and that sort of thing. There's destructible elements in the game, which really kind of came from playing Breath of the Wild. I even shared that with the WoW team at the time. Wow, there's so many things where the world feels more alive, I wish we could do this in the game. So there's that part too, where stuff we wish we could have done in WoW, we incorporate into the game."

It's a lot to wrap your head around, and even Kaleik admits he's still been trying to think of some way to effectively describe the game. "What players would probably call the game today in its current form is like an extraction RPG, which is actually a relatively new genre," he says. "And when I pitched the game originally, the investors, publishers hadn't even heard of kind of the primordial game in this genre, which is Tarkov. And so I was like, 'This is the game, this is how it works.' And even Tarkov, at the time, wasn't called extraction. It was just more of a military sim, but it had this extraction gameplay. But I think it's sort of a reduction to call [Legacy] an extraction RPG, although I'm fine calling it that for marketing purposes so players know some expectation, but the long-term vision is something more of what I would consider in a mini MMO."

What makes a mini massively multiplayer online game? Kaleiki points to a few key details in Legacy. The world isn't perpetual like an MMO, for one. "Instances do spin up and spin down, and this isn't just because we think that's better," he explains. "It's mainly because it allows us to create a better, concentrated experience, and then also just so the instance isn't living forever and people are wandering around there. And then you have to deal with the server costs and these sort of things, because we are on a smaller studio budget. But the game does have a lot of traditional MMO features, which is crafting, which is leveling, which is RPG classes, these sorts of things. And in the future, we will have more social features as well as deeper character customization. Right now, you can't really change your hairstyle, your race, but we are going to add that in the future if the game does well."

He reiterates that "there's so many things that are very similar to an MMO, but I wouldn't call Legacy a traditional MMO, and I've been trying to not call it that because a lot of players know the heritage of the team at the studio and kind of assume we are making another MMO. But I think as the game matures and we add more features to it, it will become more of an MMO than not."

How mini is mini? Legacy is currently targeting roughly 24-player instances as Notorious looks to find a balance that makes PvP encounters exciting but not exhausting. This cap may change over time based on new maps and player feedback. For now, the focus is on the February 12 early access launch, which will build on several pre-release tests. It's an especially important time for a small studio looking to get into PvP, a notoriously competitive space that can turn up hits or spit out flops.

Kaleiki is up-front about the risks, optimistic about how "sticky" PvP players can be when they really connect with a game, and also cognizant of the fact that Legacy doesn't have to be an industry-dominating mega-hit to do well. In fact, while any success is great, the Notorious team is kind of hoping for a modest start in early access that they can gradually build on and learn from.

"Another thing I learned at Blizzard is just that involving the player in the game development process is so critical and important, kind of a secret of their success," Kaleiki says. "And it's a lot of it that you never saw. It was a lot of communicating to players, at the time on Ventrilo or email and these sorts of things, and getting their feedback, iterating from that, learning from them. Many of the developers at Blizzard played the games a lot and loved them, but even then, you don't know everything. Talking to the players, learning from them, is super important."

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Back in October, WoW players could buy the Trader's Gilded Brutosaur mount for $90. It's essentially a cheaper version of the old Reins of the Mighty Caravan Brutosaur mount. It's special because it has two slots for NPC vendors that can sell goods or repair armor, and it gives you remote access to the auction house.

This new $90 version offsets the need to buy the original on the black market, which often sells for upwards of 5 million gold. The Gilded Brutosaur was seemingly popular enough to cause some economic issues within the game, most notably a spike in scarcity for WoW tokens, so the folks over at Wowhead wanted to figure out how much money Blizzard has likely made off it.

I'm not going to get stuck into the methodology used – I quit engineering for a reason – but the original article goes into a lot of detail about account ownership. The short version is, Wowhead checked player data from two sources to figure out the percentage of accounts that own the mount. Then it's a simple case of multiplying how many accounts own the mount by $90. 188,289 accounts at $90 a pop brings the total to $16,946,010.

Wowhead notes some of the shortcomings of its method. Firstly, multiple characters on a single account could have purchased the mount multiple times, so the number could be higher. Then there's also the fact that players could have traded in WoW tokens to buy the mount, which would mean Blizzard made less real money. Additionally, there's issues with how accurate the data is as one of the sources used only provides it on demand, so again, the number could be higher.

So, while $16,946,010 is a decent estimate, only Blizzard knows for sure how much the Gilded Brutosaur has made in the last few months. That said, the number seems high either way. 

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Is Dune: Awakening akin to Final Fantasy 14 or World of Warcraft? Is it entirely multiplayer or is it enjoyable as a single-player experience within an online game? I ask Ryborg this, who responds with exactly what I was hoping to hear – how someone plays is entirely up to them. "The main story is very much a single-player experience. You're playing in the multiplayer world, obviously, but it's something that you kind of drive and do on your own."

"We've got more story content apart from just the main story, with factions that you can try and align yourself with, training that you do for specific disciplines, and so on," he continues. "But apart from just the story, [there's] just building bases and the like. I'm a big fan of building and decorating and things like that. I think it's really fun. That is absolutely something you can do, both solo but also co-op."

You can also enjoy Dune: Awakening with a close friend or two, "collaborate and build your own thing and just hang out and enjoy the survival mechanics for what they are," rather than pair up with strangers. The only time you absolutely have to lock into any more multiplayer-aligned gameplay is for the MMO's "endgame" or so-called "hardcore" content.

"A lot of the endgame loops are strongly multiplayer," says Ryborg. "So if you really want to kind of engage with things like the political endgame or the big spice harvesting operations, then you obviously need a lot of people – but you can still engage with and enjoy a lot of the other mechanics entirely single-player if that's your preference." As someone who doesn't always enjoy MMOs' more social features, I breathe a sigh of relief.

A whole new (but still sandy) world

When it comes to Dune: Awakening's less MMO-inclined mechanics, Ryborg says that the studio's experience producing Conan Exiles has been a boon. "We've been making jokes about it internally," laughs the dev, "but we started out making the oldest sand tech for Conan because we started in the desert. Now we're just upgrading it here for Dune because we're back in the desert, right? But even apart from that, we're quite familiar with general survival mechanics. And with Dune, we've had the pleasure of being able to upgrade the quality of it. So in Conan, it's very focused on food, of course, because that's the normal kind of go-to survival mechanic."

However, Arrakis is anything but normal. "Here we have an IP where food is, of course, a thing, but it's really not the most interesting focus," explains Ryborg. "Water is the most important thing on Arrakis apart from spice, so building our survival mechanics around the water and water retention instead has been really exciting." Water isn't the only way in which Awakening strays from genre predecessors, though – Funcom is evolving survival in other ways, too.

"Things like shadow play, having to hide from the sun and thinking about that, and being able to harvest water best at night, and things of this nature have allowed us to take not only our experience and kind of use it but also to evolve it into something that's more interesting and more fitting to the IP," reveals Ryborg. "So yes, absolutely, we do feel it. We're well positioned to make a strong survival game because of experience, but it's also fun to be allowed to evolve it with the help of a new IP."

With hundreds of hours in other survival games, I'm particularly interested by the other mechanics or systems that might set Dune: Awakening apart from titles like Conan Exiles. He tells me about the MMO's mind-boggling shield feature – one that hardened Dune stans are sure to enjoy. Shields aren't a force that can be whittled away over time, but impenetrable defenses that players can only break through via the slow use of a dagger.

Ryborg also mentions sandstorms, but the strangest thing in Dune: Awakening will almost certainly be its spice – "the most important thing in the entire universe." and "also something that you're going to use to fuel your own ability." That's right – spice can be used to enhance players' abilities, but its use comes with a catch.

"If you want to be able to use [abilities] at your absolute peak, you're going to need some spice," says Ryborg. "But if you keep taking spice all the time, you're going to start getting addicted, then you start needing to deal with addiction symptoms." It's yet another way Dune: Awakening tries to stay true to Herbert's lore, and its devs love it. "Finding ways of taking things that are classically Dune and turning them into gameplay mechanics has been really exciting."

A tale (not quite) as old as time

Funcom isn't able to recreate Herbert's universe word-for-word, however, and that's largely due to Denis Villeneuve's 2021 and 2024 film adaptations. Dune: Awakening follows an "alternate timeline" of sorts, but this has allowed devs a sense of creative freedom they might not have otherwise had. As Ryborg puts it, "The alternate timeline really changed a lot of things and made it a lot easier to work with."

With the different storyline, which sees Paul of House Atreides never born, Ryborg says the studio had "a lot of cool things we were able to do thanks to the alt timeline." Paul being absent means other characters who were killed off are alive in-game. "These are really cool, iconic characters we still want to be able to see, right? And so our little changes to just that little bit, Paul not being here, lets us keep all these characters around – lets you interact with them directly."

Duke Leto, Duncan, the Baron – all of them. "You get to speak with them, interact with them, help them, harm them – depending on how you want to play the game," says Ryborg. "And that's been super exciting for us to be allowed to work with so I would say [the alt timeline] really just helped. It's given us a ton of creative freedom." This freedom doesn't see devs straying too far from the source material, though, which Ryborg jokes the leads treat "like a bible."

Circling back to Dune's more recent film adaptations, I ask the producer how their popularity has affected Awakening's development. Ryborg tells me the movies are "absolutely helping" production. "It's fantastic to see the films kind of come to life, and then note you are working on that very same IP. And you know, we got our own little sneak peeks of things in advance, which has helped us kind of maintain some of the visual language from the movies."

Villeneuve's films were still in pre-production when Funcom started its work on Awakening, "so there will be deviants between the two of them" – especially as Ryborg states "we're not making the movies, we're making our own version based on the books primarily but with a lot of inspiration from the great work [Villeneuve] and his team did." As for any challenges presented by the films, Ryborg points to the necessity for an alternate timeline but asserts once more that it hasn't been all bad.

Aside from the "freedom" provided by the rewritten story, the dev admits that "normally people step on each other's toes a lot" in similar situations with simultaneous adaptations – but Funcom hasn't had to worry about doing so with its own version of Herbert's lore. It helps that "the IP holders have been super cooperative and really helpful in making sure we get all the info we need," too.

"A game with its own identity"

As a longtime fan of both Herbert's books and now Villeneuve's films, I'm now even more curious about Dune: Awakening's identity as a game and how it stands out in either the survival or MMO genre. It has its unique mechanics and quirks like the lore-friendly shield system, sure, but is there anything else that makes Funcom's new title shine? "So many things," according to Ryborg. From its fantastical side to its attention to Dune's setting, many factors help set Awakening apart – its "sheer size" included.

"There's a lot of world to cover. The multiplayer aspect, letting you see how other people build, getting to ruin their spice race and get your own in, or be collaborative and build your bases and raid eco labs together, and things of that nature," says Ryborg. "[It's] a game with its own identity, and I think it stands up very well."

How will this one-of-a-kind identity evolve after launch, though? I wonder this aloud, asking Ryborg what evolutionary direction Dune: Awakening might take. "The world is very big," he tells me, "so there are definitely opportunities even beyond Arrakis. I cannot confirm or deny anything beyond that, but it's a big universe, and we want to showcase a lot. We've made choices already on Arrakis to try and help bring this up."

Could this mean expansions or trips to other planets? Only time can truly tell, but Ryborg assures me that we'll "get to see a lot of Dune in the future" as Funcom still has "a lot of cool ideas". They're ideas I'm keen to see play out, and by the time our interview wraps up, I'm itching to sink into the unforgiving sands of Arrakis right now – dehydration, sandworms, and Sardaukar ships be damned.

Need even more to look forward to now? Here are the biggest new games for 2025 and beyond.

While I only spent around eight hours playing the new Dune game, it was enough time to grow properly acquainted with (and genuinely hooked on) the ways that Fucnom's unique MMO-survival blend stands apart from its predecessors. I went into it ready to grapple with pesky hunger bars, translucent building screens, and vicious beasts. Instead, I found sandworms.

Besides the subterranean monsters shaking the ground I walked on, I was also met with a relentless thirst that called for some seriously creative solutions, and an unforgiving desert planet inhabited by ever-warring cultures. This is no Conan Exiles – this is Dune, through and through, in all of its parched, political glory. This was the lore I grew up with, the lore my father grew up with – 60 years of world-building, reimagined for a video game I can't wait to play more of.

Beginnings are such delicate times

While Dune: Awakening aligns itself well with Herbert's books and, of course, Denis Villeneuve's films, it follows its own alternate timeline in which Paul of House Atreides was never born. Lady Jessica instead birthed the daughter she was meant to birth for the Bene Gesserit, which also means that the Duke never died.

It's an exciting spin on the story many of us already know and love, offering Funcom a degree of creative freedom it wouldn't otherwise have. Everything is familiar enough to dedicated Dune fans while also feeling new – a breath of fresh air for the beloved setting. The choices I had in character creation proved as much, where I gave myself a Harkonnen background marked by deception and nobility: "A place for every man and every man in his place."

I also opted to walk the Bene Gesserit path, because who wouldn't want to have the Voice on their side? I felt all the more comfortable with my decisions after surviving the gom jabbar test and embarking on my sand-swept journey, too. Not everyone on Arrakis can compel others to stop in their tracks and accept their death without so much as a peep, after all, but I was thrilled to find that I could do so with ease – and much more besides.

From water does all life begin

As producer Nils Ryborg tells me, "water is the most important thing on Arrakis." You don't need to worry about food while playing Dune: Awakening, but you sure as hell have to worry about water. Arrakis is a dry planet with unrelenting sandstorms – the game doesn't need a hunger mechanic to feel like a survival experience, because before you know it, you'll find yourself parched in the middle of nowhere with no water in sight.

Upon wrapping up in the character creation menu and leaving the tutorial cave, I immediately learn what it means to be thirsty to the point of death. My cyberpunk-esque white hair and cool, black irises can't save me in the dunes, unfortunately – not from hot worm summer. I desperately drink the dew from scattered plants in caverns for a small bit of hydration, but it wasn't until later on that I truly mastered the art of gathering water.

Once I discover and advance the in-game technology tree, a menu fellow survival stans know well, I unlock the ability to harvest blood from foes and transform it into clean water. By drinking the blood of my enemies, I potentially have a handle on my thirst – but most importantly, it would be by choice. You don't have to take the morally gray route and drink refined blood, but doing so made more sense than gathering dew as a hardened Harkonnen.

Such person-dependent choices are core to Dune: Awakening and how true the game stays to the pre-established universe. They're not the only way Funcom's survival MMO is loyal to its source material, however –  one feature in particular not only proves Dune: Awakening's attention to Herbert's lore, but also separates the experience from any other in the survival genre: massive, largely unavoidable sandworms.

I expected them, as any longtime Dune fan would, but I didn't expect them to be as much of a game-changer as they are. Dune: Awakening doesn't boast the enemy variety other fantasy or survival titles do, but the sandworms make up for it and then some. There's sand everywhere (this is Dune, after all), which means that getting around the map is a constant internal battle between your own fear and powering through it to progress.

Once you step onto the sand and off the safety provided by cliffs and caves, the brilliant sound design coupled with the sandworm's whale-like groans make you feel as though you're in Jaws – you're being circled by a monster that can destroy you and everything you've built or gathered in one simple move. You might get a warning vocalization or two, or you might not – but you'd better hope you do if you want to survive.

Fear is the mind-killer

Sandworms present me with another obstacle. How and where will I set up my base? Base building is one of my favorite survival game features, just as decorating homes is one of my most beloved MMO mechanics. I couldn't just set up shop anywhere, though. I'd risk losing everything to a sandworm's gaping mouth. I knew that I'd have to settle for a base elsewhere, away from the sea of sand encompassing so much of the map.

Thankfully, there are trusty red rock formations and hanging cliffs scattered about Arrakis. I found a spot I liked and tried not to worry too much about wanting to move later on, as the game features a handy copy-and-paste system for builds. Building is so much fun with all of the customization and Funcom's attention to detail in design, I lost literal hours to it. The grid and snap systems were finicky at times, but as an Ark veteran, I can safely say they could be much worse.

I could've spent all day tweaking my base, unlocking better recipes, building more floors and layers, decorating to my heart's content, and coming away with the base of my dreams – which I feel speaks to the quality of Dune: Awakening's more survival-aligned gameplay. I'm looking forward to the day I can build a guild house with my friends now, and perhaps even dominate a portion of the map in PvP if I'm lucky.

When it comes to PvP, it's as unique as everything else on Arrakis. In Dune, killing isn't necessarily power. Taking on enemies is important in PvP, of course, but something else is even more important: spice. He who controls it controls it all, as fans know - and Dune: Awakening offers no exception. From collecting to selling, players can establish a true monopoly over it.

There's more to the PvP than just spice, but spice is a big deal in both PvP and PvE. You can use it, sure, but are you ready to deal with the reliance upon spice that comes with its use? It may help you become more capable momentarily, but you'll end up needing more of it, and going without it will hurt, to put it lightly. I'd find myself enjoying spice melange one minute, only to have none left on me the next. It's the sort of balancing act not found in other survival games – a thought-provoking mechanic unique to Funcom's MMO.

Dune: Awakening is "a game with its own identity," according to Ryborg, and I'm inclined to agree. Between the sandworms and the spice, blood-drinking, and constant danger of Arrakis, there are so many special features that make it a delight for both older Dune fans and general survival genre stans searching for something new alike - and boy, can I not wait to dive back into the sandy depths. Wriggling worms and all.

Need even more to look forward to now? Here are the biggest new games for 2025 and beyond.

Foxhole is a brutal and tedious simulacrum of World War Two. Frontline soldiers fight over territory while logistics troops manufacture weapons and build up the tech tree from the safety of the rear. Every bullet has to be delivered down the lines, every tank has to be made, it's as complete a war as you'll find in a video game. Players even go on strike.

PCGamesN spotted one war that had gone on for an unusually long time; over 70 days. The war on the Charlie server resulted in a stalemate where neither side was getting closer to winning, both had maxed out their technology, and all players were stuck in an end-game loop of manufacturing, delivering, and fighting with little to show for it. Honestly, it sounds like the perfect metaphor for war.

To win, one of the sides needs to earn enough victory points, which they get by taking control of parts of the battlefield. To speed up the war, developer Siege Camp announced it would be reducing the number of victory points needed to win. "The main reason is to ensure that new players that have joined Charlie in the last month get the chance to experience a war as it's meant to be played, progressing through early, mid, and late phases of the tech tree," a statement by the developers reads.

After more than 70 days and over 9 million player deaths, the war ended before the developer measure even came into effect. The winning Colonial side managed to succeed in an offensive push of the Warden's areas before the victory point threshold was lowered.

The decision to intervene seems to have gone down well over on the Foxhole subreddit, too. The dev's choice to end the war pushed players to act fast, "When everyone came back for one last hurrah, the war ended [...] People dumped their stockpiles and made a massive push that they should have made before, but they lacked the confidence/manpower," notes one player.

"It was mostly a ship suicide run because the war was going to end. It's not something we could have organized without that info imo," comments another player.

If Foxhole isn't your thing, check out some of the other best war games you can play right now.

At the time of writing, Old School RuneScape's recent Steam reviews have dropped to 58% positive – a fair bit lower than the game's overall rating of 87% positive. There was a small but noticeable uptick in negative reviews on January 16 with 16 negative reviews, and that's more than quadrupled today with 76 negative reviews. It's a small salvo by review bombing standards, and 92 angry Steam users aren't going to move the needle at Jagex HQ – or more pertinently, at its corporate owner, because again, the game's overall rating is unphased – but it goes to show how hopping mad the community has been.

Still, this was enough to put a big ol' red line on the game's Steam graph, and the OSRS community seems to be wearing that red line like war paint. A Reddit post sharing word of the "Mixed" recent reviews seems to have prompted more players to reverse their positive review or write a new negative one of their own as the community continues to shut down the proposed membership ideas.

As a quick refresher, the most unpopular ideas among the various survey variants included enhanced account security and player support locked behind more expensive membership tiers, access to exclusive members world, and mobile-only access or in-game advertisements for cheaper tiers. Many negative Steam reviews have lampooned the survey's verbiage, yielding such classics as:

"To read this review, please upgrade to the Deluxe package for a premium fee of £2.99 extra per month," one user put it.

"You done ****** up jiggleflex," from another user, really says a lot.

Others have been more direct with their criticism: "There is no amount of apologising that will regain the trust of the community. The audacity to even suggest locking game functionality behind a paywall goes against everything this game and community stands for," says Brother Cabbages in one of the reviews rated as most "helpful" by other users.

As players continue to share screenshots of their canceled subscriptions and call on others to do the same, and as Steam becomes another way for players to express their anger, a recent Twitch clip of ex-Jagex employee Mod Mat K began circulating. Discussing the backlash on stream, Mat K reckoned that whenever the OSRS player base threatens to riot or cancel membership, "you guys never do it. Never. Maybe it drops 0.001%. You're all mouth, all of you. You don't follow through. Those who do unsub on the day sub about two days later."

Mat K has a point, though the player response here has been particularly fierce by my assessment. There are, notably, 115,533 people playing Old School RuneScape at the time of writing, which is comfortably within the game's norms. As severe as this backlash has been, the vast majority of players clearly haven't been put off playing. Then again, this has all been positioned as proactively shutting down proposed ideas before they actually manifest, not reacting to actual in-game changes. None of the subscription changes mentioned in the survey have happened or even been formally pitched, alarming as they may be.

Mansell said in the Jagex blog post addressing the player response: "Surveys like this allow us to gather feedback on ideas before they even come close to becoming reality. They act as an important safeguard, ensuring that anything unpopular or misaligned with the community’s values is identified early." That said, I would expect this storm to continue for a few more days at least, or perhaps until Jagex releases another statement outlining what it will and won't do.

After backlash and a Steam review bomb last year, Tekken 8 dev Bandai Namco gave out $5 to cover controversial DLC and said it will do things differently next time.

Jagex isn't saying this stuff is happening, only asking players how they feel about the idea. Folks, they ain't feelin' good. The fact that the company, which has a history of intrusive microtransactions in RuneScape especially, even proposed these ideas was enough to trigger a storm of fire, brimstone, and canceled subscriptions in both communities.

Jagex has already responded to the outcry with a blog post explaining "why the survey exists" and insisting that "we include controversial or polarising topics in surveys" because they demonstrate "what players truly like, dislike, and feel strongly about." This reaffirms the hypothetical nature of these changes, and Jagex specifically said that "no final decisions have been made" and "we're listening," but this has done little to calm the storm.

"Surveys like this allow us to gather feedback on ideas before they even come close to becoming reality," Jagex writes. "They act as an important safeguard, ensuring that anything unpopular or misaligned with the community’s values is identified early.

"This approach reflects our commitment to transparency and collaboration. We believe that asking hard questions - while sometimes difficult - helps us stay aligned with your expectations and build a stronger, more resilient relationship with the community. When we include a wide range of options in these surveys, it ensures we’re not just guessing or relying on assumptions about what’s important to you."

Dozens of hypothetical membership tiers were proposed, some covering RS and OSRS, and others only covering one game. Almost all of the membership tiers proposed – or at least those shared online, which are numerous – would be more expensive than the game's current offerings, which have already seen multiple price hikes in recent years.

The prices and features discussed vary dramatically between tiers, with pricier ones generally offering more and better stuff. Jagex claimed in its post that "any potential changes to membership options will not impact gameplay fairness or the availability of in-game content," but that doesn't quite mesh with some of the features discussed in the survey. Here are a few standouts:

• "Character name reservations"
• "Shorter AFK timer"
• "Specialized member worlds"
• "Pre-verified account recovery"
• "Complimentary Bond" (redeemed for membership time)
• "Additional account security features"
• "Enhanced player support"
• "Enhanced display name features"
• "Mobile-only access" for cheaper tiers
• Added fees for additional characters – $12.49 for an additional member character in one proposed subscription that starts at $9.89 a month when purchased in a yearly lump sum

"The areas being explored in the survey focus on services outside of gameplay, such as account-related features or optional benefits," Jagex continued. "These are designed to enhance flexibility and provide more tailored options without altering the fundamental experience of playing Old School RuneScape."

Singling out AFK timers, Jagex added: "Suggestions like shorter AFK timers for non-premium players have been widely criticised. These ideas were included to understand player preferences and were not intended to be concrete plans."

The idea of tying improved account security or customer support features to pricier membership tiers has been particularly unpopular since players have been asking Jagex for better customer support for years. In its response, Jagex said: "We’ve heard loud and clear that robust customer support is a baseline expectation. Your feedback makes it clear that this should remain a standard part of membership, and we’re taking that into account."

Everyone post your cancellations from r/2007scape

Players of Old School RuneScape, which has a much larger audience and which has been largely shielded from the monetization that's overtaken mainline RuneScape, have been especially vocal and exacting. A statement issued last year by Jagex lead Phil Mansell after the company was acquired by yet another corporate owner, promising the company "will not compromise the integrity of our games and there are no intentions of changing our game's business models," has been paraded around.

The idea of "in-game advertising," as Jagex calls it in its post, was quickly pilloried. Here again, Jagex said in its post that "there are no plans to include ads in the base membership or to make ad-supported options a significant part of the game. We understand your concerns, and we are reviewing this feedback closely."

The proposed cost of playing multiple characters on one account has also prompted unfavorable comparisons to World of Warcraft, which allows for many more characters at once without such a drastic price increase. The two are very different games, but the value proposition isn't all that difficult to parse.

The backdrop to all of this is a river of screenshots showing players canceling their existing membership subscriptions. Two characters, five characters, a freshly maxed-out character – all kinds of players have come out to protest, with some also reviving the tried-and-true methods of marching through Falador city or, of course, putting nan in the cage. Some popular RuneScape content creators, like the frugal FlippingOldschool, have already put out videos arguing "this would destroy OSRS if Jagex makes these changes," and I'd be shocked if more videos like this don't pop up soon.

I played RuneScape for many years, including during the divisive Evolution of Combat era, and have followed and covered Old School RuneScape closely for many more. It is hard for me to recall player backlash of this scale. In the shadow of RuneScape's microtransactions and the latest corporate handover, this survey's vision for the game, even if treated purely as a hypothetical, has clearly struck a nerve.

"It may not always be easy, but these conversations are invaluable in helping us make decisions that benefit the long-term health of Old School RuneScape," Jagex's response concluded. "We’ll keep you updated as we move forward."

I don't really know what else to say here, so here's a fun story about Old School RuneScape that shows how special this game can be: players gave a big vtuber so many dragon bones that she's nearly maxed one of the MMO's most expensive skills.

Koster certainly knows his stuff when it comes to MMORPGs. Beyond serving as the creative director of Star Wars Galaxies – an open world Star Wars MMO that existed long before Star Wars Outlaws, and survived for a solid eight years before its shutdown in 2011 – he was also the original creative lead of the fantasy MMORPG Ultima Online. However, when he first announced his new game, Stars Reach, he said: "This is the game I have wanted to make for nearly thirty years." 

Stars Reach has been in development for five years now from Koster's own studio, Playable Worlds, and up to this point, it's been funded by investors. Explaining the decision to launch a Kickstarter, Koster states on Bluesky: "We're doing this because the climate for games investment is terrible."

After five years of development, Koster says the team is "reasonably close to the finish line," and the game is already a hit with those who've been playing it over the last six months, as he notes: "I haven't seen feedback this positive since when I did Ultima Online." Based on its Steam and Kickstarter descriptions, you can understand why – the galaxy itself is "vast," and "no two planets are the same." Players can permanently reshape the space around them, with shared multiplayer environments "fully persistent, and fully modifiable." Whether you chop down a tree or construct a building, you're making a massive impact on the world.

Beyond exploring and living life on the various planets, you'll also be able to craft items, fight aliens, and even be elected as the "mayor of a town or the governor of a world" thanks to the leadership skill tree. It sounds incredibly ambitious, but Koster says: "We are true believers in what we are doing."

The Kickstarter campaign hasn't begun just yet – as highlighted by Massively Overpowered, it was revealed in a Fireside Chat earlier this week that it's not planned to start for another month, but those interested can sign up to be notified when it does. 

In the meantime, be sure to check out our picks for the best MMORPGs you can play now.

Speaking in a recent interview with PC Gamer, Masaki 'Mr. Ozma' Nakagawa explains why he doesn't see Square Enix ever designing the "perfect" difficulty for all of Final Fantasy 14's players. "I believe it's simply impossible to design a difficulty level that's 'just right' for all players," he says. "Each [piece of] content should be designed with a specific demographic in mind, with a difficulty that's just right for that target audience." 

Nakagawa continues, detailing how diverse he believes content should be and how different types of duties fit different kinds of players best. "At the same time, I also believe the content should still have something in store for players outside the primary target audience," says the lead. "For example, alliance raids are primarily designed for those who don't participate in high-end duties such as extreme trials or savage raids."

Alliance raids aren't necessarily fun for everyone, however. "On the other hand, those who enjoy savage raids and other high-end duties may find that alliance raids are neither satisfying nor engaging; to them, alliance raids would just be boring content. So although we adjust difficulty levels based on a primary target audience, we still try to make the content as enjoyable as possible for all players, and we apply that philosophy to all content."

The lead then looks back at some of Dawntrail's content and describes how difficulty played a part in its development. "For example, Patch 7.0 added Worqor Lar Dor (Extreme), which was designed with the target audience of 'players who are trying extreme trials for the first time.'" As a result, Nakagawa admits that "many players probably felt the encounter was easier than the extreme trials in the Patch 6.x series."

That doesn't mean it wasn't rewarding for longtime fans: "I believe many veteran players still found the battle against Valigarmanda to be a refreshing and enjoyable one, thanks to flashy attacks and mechanics like Mountain Fire." When it comes to Dawntrail's difficulty, it also wasn't all down to Nakagawa. In fact, MMO director Naoki "Yoshi P" Yoshida himself helped with the development of the battle content in patch 7.0 and on.

"The difficulty of battle content in Patch 7.0 onward was discussed with core members of the battle team, including producer and director Yoshida, and certain aspects of our direction were changed compared to pre-7.0." Before Dawntrail, the team's "policy of reducing gameplay-related frustrations was sometimes taken too far," resulting in the gameplay being "less fun" without some of its necessary "hurdles and frustrations."

Considering all of this, Nakagawa says developers "shifted to a design policy of placing greater emphasis on enjoyability." This "was a bold decision for us with a lot of unknown factors, but we're relieved to hear that people enjoyed it!" As for what's to come, he states that "the impact of this policy change will be more evident in future patches" - and I, for one, cannot wait to see how it all ends up playing out come later updates.

Final Fantasy 14: Dawntrail helped players block stalkers, but the problem might get much worse with a backend exploit some mods are already taking advantage of

With the introduction of the new blacklist features in Dawntrail, blacklisting an individual character would now block all characters tied to that player's account. As PC Gamer notes, players soon discovered that, alongside this feature, each player now had a unique "account ID" that would be broadcast to the game client whenever you entered the same area as one of that player's characters.

With the right mod, somebody could, in theory, start matching characters to account IDs and build a database that makes public any given individual's full roster of alts. It doesn't take much imagination to see how such a feature might be used for harassment. While your best defense against a genuine stalker in FF14 might once have been to create a new character, if somebody could track down your alts you'd have to make a whole new account - something Square Enix's notoriously labyrinthine account system would not make easy, to say nothing of the progress setbacks.

This week, the community discovered that just such a mod was already in development. Called PlayerScope, it promises to track pretty much all character information tied to a given account, from alts to retainer assistants, and future updates promise to add in Free Company and PvP team info, too. The mod has not been made publicly available yet, but its developer is currently whitelisting players for use of the plugin.

To say that the overall response from the community has been negative would be an understatement. The consensus is that the only purpose of such a tool would be to harass other players, and nobody's happy with the dev's suggestion that you should join the PlayerScope Discord if you want to opt out from being tracked.

The Discord for PlayerScope is currently quite small, but the community has some hope that making noise about it early will draw Square Enix's attention to shut the whole thing down - or, ideally, to correct the account ID issue that makes it all possible in the first place.

Final Fantasy 14 is one of the best MMORPGs around, but you can't host a massive online community without some of its members trying to spoil things for everybody.

Greg Street previously served as lead systems designer on WoW and lead of the in-development Riot MMO before moving on to form his own studio, Fantastic Pixel Castle, which is making its own MMO codenamed 'Ghost.' Needless to say, he's had plenty of first-hand experience with two of the most notable studios in the industry, but in a new thread on Twitter, it seems that it's only since reading Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier's recent book about Blizzard (Play Nice) that Street has noted "how similar the journey was of Riot to Blizzard." 

Elaborating on this, he explains that despite both of the studios having "early success by deeply understanding the gameplay of the genres in which they wanted to innovate," they "both moved on from that success to focus so much (overly much [in my honest opinion]) on polish. Polish is enormously expensive, like nine-year dev cycles expensive." While he acknowledges that players care about polish too, he's uncertain if "they care enough to wait for nine years," and claims to have seen "both studios throw away gameplay that probably hit an 85% quality bar because they thought they could hit 95% with another couple of years."

It's not always been like this, as Street points to League of Legends itself, which was "janky as hell when it launched, but it was satisfying and offered hundreds of hours of deep gameplay." The process of releasing something "far from perfect" and working closely on what fans actually cared about "felt like such a deep and respectful conversation with players," he continues, adding: "It was a philosophy that I always believed in."

This philosophy, Street says, sees studios approach "game dev from a place of humility instead of arrogance," but he claims to have "watched both companies seemingly abandon that philosophy," with polish having "won out over gameplay."

As for Street's current project, he admits that he's unsure if his studio can get Ghost into players' hands within five to seven years' time, even if "the trajectory is good so far." With that said, he contemplates that "maybe the real test will be the second game. How do you avoid it doubling dev length?" Wrapping things up, he says that his focus, for now, will remain on "gameplay > polish, player value > endless dev timelines."

World of Warcraft veteran says MMO power leveling is a "mistake": "Getting to level cap should be an accomplishment, not a blip."

Nerissa has been playing Old School RuneScape for a few months, and her most recent stream, titled "I'm sick but there's always time to bone," gave a particular subsection of her audience more of what they love: Prayer training. Yes, all this boning was ironically done in service of the lord.

There are other ways to gain Prayer experience, but the typical way to train Prayer in Old School RuneScape is to collect or purchase a whole bunch of bones, normally dragon bones of some kind, and then offer them at altars since it gets you more XP than just burying them. There's a popular altar in the Wilderness that gives you a chance to save on bones, but good old-fashioned gilded altars in player-owned houses work just fine. They're also easier and safer to access, especially when you have dozens of devoted fans following you around.

"I was gonna go straight to boning, but everybody told me not to do that because apparently there's a Christmas event," Nerissa said at the start of her stream. "So instead of boning we're going to do that." Not even an hour later, she declared "It's boning time. Now I just await the bone donations."

As of her latest stream, Nerissa has burned enough dragon bones – donated en masse by her posse of fans, dubbed "Jailbirds" – to reach 96 Prayer, putting her over halfway to the max level of 99. (The actual halfway point is 92.) Prayer is a notoriously expensive and time-consuming skill to train, and comes with pretty minimal benefits at higher levels once you've actually unlocked all of the buff-giving prayers, so it's usually a significant and late-game hurdle for players to clear.

It turns out, however, that this goes a lot faster when you never have to leave the altar because people are constantly giving you free dragon bones, not to mention the pricey superior dragon bones, and even lighting the altar incense burners for you. Behold the power of vtubing fandom.

Nerissa isn't the first vtuber to stream OSRS, but she may well be the highest-profile one. The game's community clocked her interest in OSRS almost immediately, and her streams have spawned piles of fan art, including impressive OSRS chiptune covers of her original songs, which Nerissa has naturally used as background music.

I've seen some people fret about donations ruining her experience with the game, but she's said she was familiar beforehand, and she does seem to be having a good time, so I don't see any reason to worry. Most OSRS skills are laid back enough that they're a good match for the "just chatting" culture of vtubing, plus she's got the patience to train Agility, so I reckon she'll fit right in.

We spoke to hololive boss "Yagoo" about getting vtubers into more games, building a Fortnite-style open-world game, recent graduations, the 10-year plan, and his famous "dream."

Twitch streamer and professional WoW player Cdew had been streaming himself playing on his level 57 Rogue in Hardcore, with a variety of gift sub incentives on offer such as forcing him into first-person, only using click spells, or deleting a random piece of gear. This was all pretty standard stuff until one viewer, MartianPig, donated a whopping $7,000 to the stream along with the simple message "Delete everything", as shown in a video posted to Twitter by @N_Tys26. 

Immediately, Cdew replies "No shot, Martian," believing the donation to be a joke, before realising that the offer is, indeed, not a bluff. At this point, Cdew starts to weigh up the very real opportunity to make a cool $7k, listing out everything he stands to lose including gold, bags, gear and even a mount.

The clip ends with Cdew repeatedly saying "yes", having seemingly come around to the idea, but in the end, he inevitably decides to turn down the bribe, opting instead to keep his items. Many replies to the Tweet seem incredulous that Cdew would even have to consider it, with one commenter stating "I'd delete my entire account and start fresh for 7 grand."

WoW Hardcore has been tremendously popular with players since its addition in 2023, with the game's director even going so far as to say that it might be a better version of classic WoW too. Whether you agree or not, just make sure you don't die because, unlike Cdew, you probably won't have $7,000 coming your way if you do.

Check out where WoW ranks on our list of the best MMORPGs around. 

Introduced last year, Hardcore WoW is a mode that, while using the same servers as WoW Classic, adds a permadeath mechanic, challenging players to reach the endgame without dying a single time. While this mechanic certainly wasn't around in WoW's early days, in an interview in Edge issue 405, game director Ion Hazzikostas confirms that he believes it captures that classic experience better.

"It's definitely not for everyone," he clarifies, though he feels that it "better captured the actual feel of 2004 or 2005 World of Warcraft better than the 2019 Classic release did." Rather than reflecting the game itself, Hazzikostas believes that the permadeath mechanic causes players to put more stock into their adventure as a whole, rather than simply beelining to the late-game content.

"Every step of the way mattered," Hazzikostas says of the early days of World of Warcraft, whereas nowadays, "endgame is all that matters." For him and many other players, Hardcore WoW allowed them to rediscover a love for the game as a whole. "It wasn't just being on that journey alone, it was like this group of players versus the world, relying on each other."

World of Warcraft has received criticism from players in the last few years, and more recently with regards to its handling of loot from events. WoW Hardcore, however, has been a particularly bright spot in the game's recent history, with the mode proving exceedingly popular with the game's player base.

Check out where WoW ranks on our list of the best MMORPGs you can play right now.

"As we boldly continue on our mission of fostering joy and belonging for everyone, let’s celebrate some highlights from the past year," writes Blizzard president Johanna Faries in a news post, sharing stats "which represent only a slice of the many magical moments we’ve experienced together with all of you."

First off, you've played over 8 billion hours across the publisher's extensive games catalog. "That's 952,055 years - in that time, a person could walk around the world 1 million times," according to Blizzard. Seems Americans really will use any unit of measurement except the metric system.

You've also slaughtered "4.5 billion spiders and nerubians" in World of Warcraft and "over 1.7 trillion all-time demons" in Diablo 4 – and apparently, "that's almost as many demons as there are domesticated honey bees on Earth." Unsurprisingly in digital worlds as unforgiving as these, the community has accrued "480 million player deaths" in Diablo Immortal. "Stack that many smartphones flat on top of each other and you'd reach the highest level of the earth's atmosphere at over 3,700 kilometers." Well done on using a normal unit of measurement, Blizzard - We are so proud of you.

Finally, all you Overwatch faithfuls have clocked "over 203 years played across 2024's new maps; Hanaoka and Throne of Anubis. Enough time to fly to Neptune and back 8 times over."

How Blizzard calculated these daring comparisons, I've no idea. But hey, here's to giving the publisher some real numbers to crack when 2025's end-of-year stats roll back around in 365 days. That's as many days as there are in a year!

Check out the best MMORPGs to play next if you're looking for a fresh challenge.

In an end-of-year update from ZeniMax Online studio director Matt Firor, it's revealed that Elder Scrolls Online will no longer be doing the big, yearly chapters that have been series mainstays since they were first introduced with 2017's Morrowind release. Instead, the MMO is shifting to a seasonal update structure that'll see the release of "smaller bite-sized" content drops several times a year.

We will be talking much more about this in the future, but in 2025 expect to see named Seasons of three or six months duration with a mix of themed story content, events, store items, dungeons and more. Seasons will be named and themed like a lot of modern live-service games, and they'll last anywhere from three to six months. Firor says there will still be "some larger items" the studio's been working on for more than a year, but there's still a tight lid on that stuff.

"Freeing up the dev team from needing to adhere to a strict annual cycle means we will be able to have teams launch content when it is ready throughout the year and not work to a date in June – this will let us focus on a greater variety of content spread over the year," Firor explains. "This supports the new Seasons model, and will enable us to release content, updates, fixes, and systems in a more efficient manner."

While new content-wise, it's hard not to look at this as a downsizing, Firor detailed some actual, meaningful changes designed to address various pain points. Chiefly, he says the studio needs "to experiment more, to shake things up and not be so predictable."

Going forward, ESO will start testing out new and experimental content that will be marked as such in the patch notes and "may or may not be fleshed out into full game systems. With our new focus on breaking up content into seasons and away from years, it gives us time to do these experiments and changes."

Here's where things get interesting, because Firor actually gets into some specifics. Notably, he says Zenimax needs to "seriously address Cyrodiil performance," which is a long, long-standing issue that's yet to be properly addressed. The PvP zone has suffered for years with performance, and Firor says the plan is to "experiment with a Cyrodiil campaign where all classes will have PvP-specific (and more performant) skills that replace the standard player skills with the expectation that we can support more players per campaign."

Elsewhere, ESO's standard overworld combat difficulty will be increased, and the "overall feel of combat with animation, FX, and potentially audio work" will be improved. There are also plans to bring in more zones similar to Craglorn, "although not as large in area or scope," designed for high-end group play and proportionate gear rewards.

Recruiting, managing, and interacting with guild should also be a little "easier and more logical."

I'm of the ESO player variety that drops in to check out the big, annual chapter and then dips out until the next one, and so I'm jumping for joy to hear that Zenimax is "concentrating on new and returning user experience" in 2025. Truly, this might be my favorite thing I've ever read from Zenimax:

"It is long past time that we address ESO's new and returning user experience," Firor says, to thundering applause from me and my cats. "The game is so large at this point that we need to refine the new user experience. Our goal is to shield new players from being overwhelmed by dozens of content options presented to them on entering the world, and instead give them the essential guidance they need to enjoy the game before opening it up to all possibilities.

"Additionally, we have many millions of players who return to the game every year after taking months to years off – and it is often confusing to them what they should be doing. We need to address this by making sure that the game’s map and other quest/informational UI areas clearly show the user where they were when they left, what has been added since then, and where they will find content they will love."

As part of this initiative, PC players will be treated to a new patcher with improved visuals and performance. The original Wailing Prison tutorial area, which is where all new players start now, will be regularly tweaked "to improve the experience."

Firor also says the base game zones will be improved visually "with updated textures and art assets, starting with the 'starter islands.'" These improvements are scheduled to go live in March.

And thank goodness, new players won't be able to see prologue quest or chapter quest compass pins, which I've always found to be distracting when trying to focus on the main quest.

Otherwise, Firor says the map and UI systems are being tweaked to be more friendly to new and returning players, but specifics beyond that are unclear. He does say the PC UI has been spruced up "for a modern visual upgrade" he says was "long overdue."

Overall, I'm not sure how to feel about all of this. On one hand, I worry that the main draw that's been pulling me back to ESO year after year is being removed, but on the other hand a lot of the frustrations I feel as an on/off player are being addressed, so it's possible I'll be more compelled to become a more regular player, even without the big, flashy new chapters every year.

Firor says ESO will keep on telling new stories in content updates, but it won't be adding massive new zones anymore. At least not for now. Instead, the game will focus on "bringing back familiar characters and telling "new stories focused on hallmark Elder Scrolls organizations like Dark Brotherhood, Thieves Guild, Fighters Guild, and Mages Guild," which doesn't sound so bad, especially if you're a big fan of the series already.

Find out where ESO ranks on our list of the best MMOs to play in 2024.

Last week, Fantastic Pixel Castle revealed that it would offer a prototype gameplay update on Project Ghost today. In addition to the announcement, studio head Greg Street reiterated that the aim is to "share every step of the way, so just be prepared that this is really early to show off a game."

"We're taking Unreal Man with a bunch of store-bought assets, but you can get an idea (I hope) of how the game will play," he said. "Finding the fun can be harder than pouring 1,000s of pieces of art in the game, though that's hard too."

Since it was formally announced last year, we've had a few glances at Ghost in its rough but not-quite-ready form. The studio has published several 'milestone' updates that chronicle the project from idea to fruition. We've been warned the game would "look like ass" as the main goal is finding the fun right now, though it still offers a level of transparency we enjoy and seldom see.

We'll have to wait and see how it shakes out, though this one has plenty of familiar talent. Street got through plenty of World of Warcraft work before joining Riot to eventually work on League of Legends' own MMO before leaving and setting up Fantastic Pixel Castle with plenty of other Blizzard veterans. A potential release is a long way off, though it's a project unlikely to greatly leave the public eye should you wish to follow along.

Meanwhile, the League of Legends MMO has "a lot of momentum" and "a great direction," despite going dark for a reset earlier this year.

In an interview in Edge issue 405, former executive vice president of game design at Blizzard Rob Pardo spoke about the huge demand for quests during WoW's playtesting phase. During early playtesting, things had initially gone smoothly "until playtesters ran out of quests, at which point they reported that the game felt 'broken'." For Pardo and the team, "the answer, of course, was to simply add more."

This was easier said than done, with the number of quests they needed being astronomical compared to their initial estimates. Pardo and his team ended up creating "ten times the amount of quests" than they had originally planned for, resulting in the World of Warcraft of today offering a monumental 38,000 quests.

Part of this need for more quests came from WoW's Blizzard's desire to compete with EverQuest, the reigning MMO of the day, and a game that Pardo had himself played before joining Blizzard. WoW was supposed to be "more approachable and easier for people to get into", and relied on word of mouth from uber guilds in EverQuest to drum up interest. "If we could make a game that is deep enough for those types of players, we'd have something really good that may last a long time" recalled Pardo.

And last a long time it certainly did. 20 years on, World of Warcraft is the undisputed king of the MMORPG space and has undoubtedly become one of the most iconic games of all time—not bad for a game that had initially aimed to make just $1 million per month.

Take a look at where WoW features on our list of the best MMORPGs around right now.

In an interview in Retro Gamer issue 266, former Blizzard and WoW developer Bo Bell spoke about the expectations for the game, with some fairly low numbers on the table before the game's later explosion in popularity. "At the time EverQuest was pulling in something like $500,000 per month," Bo begins. "We said things like we could see WoW easily hitting that, maybe even $800k. Or how about $1,000,000? We had a good laugh about that one, but we all kind of thought maybe it could do that for real."

In today's terms, an MMO making $1m per month is, of course, nothing particularly impressive, but in the wider gaming landscape that WoW launched into, it was certainly nothing to be sniffed at. In that context, it makes WoW's record-smashing rise to the top all the more impressive, with the game's 1 million plus subscribers turning over $15m per month for Blizzard at the start of 2005—mere months after the game launched in November 2004.

Since those early days, WoW has cemented itself as the undisputed king of the MMO market and is now celebrating its 20th anniversary. And while many fans are somewhat negative about the current state of the game, the game continues to have an estimated 7 million plus subscribers. Not too shabby for a game that initially didn't dare to dream beyond a few tens of thousands.

Check out WoW among others on our list of the best MMORPGs to play right now.

As reported by PCGamesN, the website of developer Robert Space Industries shows hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly data for how much money it's raised. You can check it out here. Over 5 million people have given their money to the cause. Back in 2016 it was the most crowdfunded project ever when it had raised $124 million, and now it sits only behind EOS, an ethereum blockchain project.

There have been playable alpha builds of Star Citizen made available, but there's still no actual release date for the game. Last year's Alpha 3.18 update crashed the servers for a while. Fans were unable to try the "immersive careers, stunning locations, and thrilling gameplay" due to the outages. 

The alpha is currently in version 3.24.3 and is free-to-play until December 5 if you want to check it out for yourself. Find out how to download it here. It may be your last chance to play this build as 4.0 is "tentatively" planned for the end of this year.

Star Citizen is infamous for just how long it's taking to make and the huge sums of cash it has raised. In fact, a single-player spin-off starring Mark Hamil, Squadron 42, that's also being made has been delayed due to the devs trying to make "bedsheet deformation" look more accurate.

Some of the methods it uses to get money are seen as dubious, too. One ship pack costs a whopping $48,888. Who's buying these things? Send me an email, I've got a bridge to sell you.

If you're hungry for some interstellar action, here are some of the best space games you can play right now. FTL: Faster Than Light, my most-played Steam game is on there.

Former Blizzard lead animator Kevin Beardslee recalled some of the ideas they had to get the game into shape, one of which came from Hideo Kojima's stealth action series Metal Gear Solid, inspiring an equally iconic visual guide for players to help them on their journey through Azeroth.

"I think I was playing Metal Gear Solid at the time, and whenever that 'bbbrrnnk!' exclamation point alert would go above their head, I knew: A) I'm terrified and B) I clearly know that the guy hates me," says Beardslee. "I was like, what if we put that above the quest giver's head? You will know that you should probably talk to that guy, but in [WoW rival] EverQuest, you don't even know the magic phrase to say to someone for a quest."

For anyone who's played Metal Gear Solid, the visual and audio effects heard when getting spotted by enemies is an immediate sign that things are about to get bad. However, in World of Warcraft, Blizzard's interpretation of the exclamation point sign for NPCs is inviting, showing players an opportunity for new adventures and rewards in the area. However, Beardslee thinks that, in hindsight, the quest marker "probably should have been a question mark" instead.

At the time, Everquest was the largest MMORPG on the market, but things changed quickly once Blizzard's MMO launched, and a slew of other competing games tried to occupy the same territory. Twenty years after its launch, WoW is still going strong with millions of players worldwide. 

In GamesRadar+'s World of Warcraft: The War Within review, Alex Avard states that the expansion "continues World of Warcraft's comeback trajectory with a war worth fighting for Horde and Alliance alike. While this expansion isn't groundbreaking, it does do a great job of setting the stage for the Worldsoul Saga."

The latest issue of Retro Gamer has much more about the developer retrospective on World of Warcraft. If you want to read more, head over to Magazine Direct to subscribe or buy individual issues.

For more games like World of Warcraft, be sure to check out our roundup of the best MMORPGs.

"It's hard not to get enamored by it all," says Elliot Womack, senior systems designer at Jagex. We're chatting just a few days away from the launch of OSRS' fifth League – called Raging Echoes – and they've spent the week flitting between nervousness and excitement. "As a player, I'm very excited. As a dev? I'm exhausted by it."

Turn away, Guthix

Back in 2013, if you'd told me that Old School RuneScape would be at its most popular during a game mode that lets players become incomprehensibly busted, I'd have laughed you out of Lumbridge. But with Leagues consistently shattering playercount records, it's hard to argue with the message: 'scapers cannot get enough of the game mode's power fantasy, which – to name a few of Raging Echoes' Relic power-ups – lets them buy prayer XP, resurrect from death with ludicrously buffed stats, and infinitely alchemize items.

Associate design director Kieren Charles, who's been with Leagues since its inception, says these Relics sprung from "modest" beginnings. While the game mode was initially designed as a way for players to experience levelling up through Old School RuneScape again, Jagex instead decided to add some "spice" and make players "powerful in a way that you can't ever get in the main game, and we will never give you in the main game".

"In the first iteration that one of the designers on the team made, it was too modest," continues Charles. "We're not used to designing things that powerful. The first iteration felt a bit like quest rewards, or diary rewards – they were nice little perks, but weren't game shattering. My message back was 'No, I want you to break the game! Don't care too much about it – break the game, make the player feel like they are essentially just cheating!'"

But alongside these Relics, players must also choose which of RuneScape's regions their fresh character starts in – and although you can slowly unlock new areas by completing in-game tasks for points, you can't unlock them all. Throw in "ironman" rules – meaning you can't buy or sell items with other players – and the real goal of Leagues turns into trying to become monstrously strong within your means, weighing up the pros and cons of which Relics and regions to choose.

XP waste?

The thing I've found most interesting about Leagues is its ability to win players away from Old School RuneScape's usual grind. Jagex's MMO is unique in that just about anything you can do in Gielinor counts as progress in one form or another. With Leagues taking place on completely fresh characters that disappear after up to two months, a ton of players put their main account's progress on hold – something akin to heresy for many of the game's biggest fans. I missed the first few Leagues because I couldn't tear myself away from my main account, and Womack acknowledges it can be a "bit of a struggle" to win players away from their day-to-day grind.

"If you are really into your main account, it's hard to pull anyone away from that," they explain. "We probably get a lot of people that are maybe in the middle of a grind, and maybe [it] isn't too exciting – so it's easier to pull them away from it, right? But I do think people are also getting towards maybe the end of their account, and they're like, 'Okay, well, I can kind of see the end in sight now. So I'm not really in a rush anymore' – it's easier to pull those people away. That's true for the first time you get someone in a league, then I think after that, it's a lot easier to pull them back in. They kind of understand what it's about, they don't really care about losing two weeks of progress."

The bigger question, though, is whether too much of a good thing would change that balance. There's only been five Leagues since 2019 and they don't run on a predictable schedule, which makes their arrival even more exciting. Charles agrees that Jagex doesn't want to "oversaturate" the mode by wheeling it out too often, but says that the long gaps between Leagues also stems from a more practical reason. "It's a matter of: how much time is it going to take us to make the next League special?", he explains. "We don't want to keep delivering the same experience every time [...] this League will feel very different to the previous one – you'll pick different areas, and different things will matter. We need to make sure we do that next time, and the time after that."

Womack adds that OSRS' fairly frequent content drops – which doesn't follow a seasonal approach like many MMOs or live service games – further complicate planning Leagues. "Like, if we're going to release a massive update next year at the same time that we would have usually had a League, do we really release both at the same time? Do they conflict?"

"There's a lot of weird challenges there, compared to something like Path of Exile, which [developers can update every] three months, four months, and kind of ignore everything else," explains Womack. "It just kind of works for them – the only thing they have to dodge is competitors, right?"

On the topic of OSRS competing with itself, I've been wondering whether its upcoming customizable community servers will crowd Leagues' space. While Charles doesn't know the "exact details" of the feature – which is "still being worked out" – he doesn't think it will present any issues for Leagues. "My belief is there will always be a special difference when it's the big, official League, when you know it's going to have tens and tens of thousands of people playing it," he explains. "People may experiment a little bit and play it here and there, maybe for a few friends and that kind of thing. But I think it's a nice extra, and it'll be awesome to see if people experiment with that and see what people experiment with, and which modifications they make to a world – maybe [there will be] ideas we could learn from as well! It's win-win."

Right now, though, community servers are the least of Jagex's problems. "The thing I'm worried about is everyone's not going to be doing much work – probably for the next couple of weeks – because I guarantee everyone on the team is going to be AFKing something in Leagues while working," admits Charles. "That might be a slight problem."

"We do have quite a few people booked off," adds Womack, grinning. As far as issues go, it's quite a nice one to have. Over the years I've spoken to a number of RuneScape developers who started off as fans of the game, and I find that passion often finds its way back into the game. Plus – when it comes to Leagues, I think everybody should be able to commit a little time theft. You know, as a treat. Now if you'll excuse me, I've got a starting region to choose.

Exploring beyond Gielinor? Here are the best online games to check out.

The fresh WoW Classic 20th Anniversary Edition realms went live on November 21, giving nostalgic players the chance to make the journey to level 60 all over again. You could go about this in quite a relaxing way, taking your time and making steady progress, but some MMO fans instead took it as a challenge and began racing to see who could be the first to hit max level on the Hardcore servers, where the stakes are high and death means you have to start over from the beginning. 

As Wowhead reports, one Twitch streamer, Ahmpy, appeared to have victory in his grasp in the race over the weekend. He was in first place, had climbed all the way to level 54, and had just six levels to go before he was able to take the crown. However, this would soon crumble. In a clip capturing the moment, Ahmpy's game suddenly freezes while his character is being attacked. He waits for a while, but it just doesn't spring back into action. The streamer closes some extra tabs but is soon hit with a "World of Warcraft is not responding" and eventually closes out of the game. 

When he reloads, it's already over. His character was dead, and on Hardcore, there's no coming back from that. The player in second place, Zeroji, was able to take the lead despite originally being a couple of levels behind Ahmpy, and ultimately became the winner – WoW community commentator @N_Tys26 on Twitter says it took Zeroji almost four days in total to claim the crown.

No doubt there'll be more community-driven races in the MMO later down the line for players like Ahmpy to have another chance to prove themselves. Blizzard recently announced that the MMO will be introducing Mists of Pandaria Classic servers at some point next year, which will remain pretty faithful to the originals.

After 20 years of WoW updates, will Blizzard ever need to wipe the slate clean? Maybe "at some long, distant point," but the MMO has already been totally "rebuilt."

During Kai's currently ongoing Mafiathon 2 stream, suggestions began to roll in for games that chatters thought the streamer would not be able to complete, and one game that seemed to pop up repeatedly was Old School RuneScape. Now, if you know literally anything about OSRS, then you're likely already familiar with the game's infamous grinds to max out each skill, typically taking players years to max their account — if they ever manage it, that is.

Seemingly unfazed by the daunting challenge, in a clip posted to Twitter by @JakeSucky, Kai declares "My heart is too tough. RuneScape? I could beat any game I put my mind to". I certainly wouldn't want to call Mr. Cenat a liar, but I would wager that he probably isn't fully aware of quite how daunting a prospect that is.

OSRS is not a game you can 'complete' per se, but to obtain a max cape by reaching level 99 in all skills is often regarded as the end goal for many players. According to speedrun.com, the fastest that anyone has ever achieved this feat is by heboxjonge, who received his max cape after a whopping 32 days, 3 hours and 3 minutes of in-game time, which is a fair bit longer than the roughly 167 hours Kai Cenat took to beat Elden Ring.

While Kai could certainly speed things up a bit by splashing the virtual cash on skills like fletching, prayer or construction, the rigorous, tick-perfect execution that is required for maximum efficiency would almost certainly slow him down in other areas, meaning it would likely take him far longer than 32 days to complete the challenge.

Some fans have suggested alternatives to the max cape, such as earning a fire cape or quest cape, both of which could be completed far more easily than a max cape. For now, though, the Kai Cenat RuneScape stream doesn't seem like it's going to be happening any time soon.

If the OSRS grind is too daunting for you, our best MMORPGs list has plenty of alternatives to choose from.

Across 2024's Plunderstorm, Mists of Pandaria: Remix, a pre-The War Within event and now the 20th-anniversary event, WoW has repeatedly had issues with the rate at which players can receive rewards, with hefty grinds often being required. In response, Blizzard has had to make things easier for players for each event, with game director Ion Hazzikostas noting in an interview with GamesRadar+ that it may "start to seem like a pattern".

For Hazzikostas, it's important to find a balance between the scale and replayability of content and the ease of obtaining rewards. "When we look at something like the 20th anniversary, there's quite a lot to do there, and there's a lot that's fresh and novel that the players will enjoy over the course of the 11.05 update." he begins. "At the same time, we want to ensure people aren't running out of reasons to do content that they would otherwise want to do too soon."

Hazzikostas concedes that the team had miscalculated with some of these updates. "Even if they really enjoyed the 20th-anniversary content, there was this sense of 'I already have been spending a bunch of time doing dungeons and delves and levelling these other alts. This feels like too much to ask on top of that,'" before noting, "That's the part we hadn't grasped until we heard the feedback loud and clear when live."

He is keen to dispel the idea that they plan to start out stingy before inevitably buffing the rewards later, instead explaining why the team tends to err on the conservative side of things. "We can always buff the rewards." he begins. "We're never going to nerf the rewards, really, right? If things go out too fast and generous, we'll never pull that back. And so, while playing a bit of that guessing game of trying to pick the right values, we may tend to err on the conservative side.

"Hopefully, the players understand we'll be fast and responsive if it feels like we've missed the mark", remarks Hazzikostas. "We hear the feedback from the community loud and clear."

Including WoW, here are our picks for the best MMORPGs you can play right now.

Traditional sequels to multiplayer games like Halo and Call of Duty are fairly standard fare in the grand scheme of things, though over the past few years we've seen also a few live-service games undergo huge overhauls before slapping a '2' on the end to finish it off – Overwatch 2, Counter-Strike 2, and so on. It's a topic that recently popped up during an EA investor call, with company CEO Andrew Wilson batting away an Apex Legends 2 hypothetical since "the version 2 thing has almost never been as successful as version 1."

With that in mind, I asked World of Warcraft's game director, Ion Hazzikostas, about the long-term future of the MMO. WoW is, after all, about to turn 20. Will they ever need to wipe the slate clean to keep it healthy in the longer run? 

"Theoretically, at some long, distant point down the line, that may be a question we grapple with seriously," he says. "But, for the time being, we have a huge, vibrant, and growing player community that we're excited to serve."

Hazzikostas goes on to say that the "magic" of World of Warcraft is that the MMO "is a little bit of a ship of Theseus of video games" as "every piece of it at this point has been recreated and rebuilt over time."

"We're constantly tearing out some old foundational system and replacing it with something that will scale to support our new server architecture, to support new graphics pipelines, to support new aspects of multiplayer interaction that the original game couldn't have imagined," he says.

"When we have this vibrant world full of millions of players, our priority is to keep serving them as best we can – to keep extending those journeys, the worlds we build, and every step along the way, we are making the improvements that we think suit the modern audience best." 

Hazzikostas hails WoW Classic as a "separate ecosystem" for players that's "testament to the amount of change that's happened and the amount of evolution in World of Warcraft over this time." While some players dabble with both, Hazzikostas says that "for the most part," fans have picked a version of the game as their primary home.

"Technically, it's the same game now turning 20," he adds. "There's been a tremendous amount of diversions in evolution over time, and that's only going to continue."

World of Warcraft is finally getting player housing: the Midnight expansion adds a feature that MMOs like Final Fantasy 14 have had for years.

World of Warcraft's new solo-friendly dungeons, called Delves, took a few patches to figure out, the 11.05 patch's balance pass had some players protesting in-game, and a $90 version of a mount that costs even more on the Black Market Auction House left fans divided. And then there are the bugs. Just recently, Blizzard revealed that the reason some raid content became unplayable was that devs set about rebuilding "core parts" of the 20-year-old MMO.

Despite all that, game director Ion Hazzikostas is pretty happy with where World of Warcraft has ended up – even if he wished he had caught the odd scaling bug or two. 

"We have a lot of work ahead of us and a lot of exciting story to tell and systems and features to unfold," he tells GamesRadar+ in an interview. "But, reflecting on the first couple of months of War Within, honestly, at a very high level, there aren't too many regrets for me as a game director."

He continues: "And, of course, yes, if I could catch that scaling bug. I'd love to go back and fix a couple of scaling bugs and things like that. But at the high level in terms of how the big bets we made and planning out the feature slate and building this world and kicking off this ambitious new story, I think all of those have been paying off. It's been awesome seeing the excitement and speculation about the narrative as it kicks off, seeing players jumping into Delves and really discovering an all-new play style that didn't exist just a few months ago, that now is, I think, on its way to being enshrined as a part of the WoW end game and so much more."

World of Warcraft has plenty ahead of it, too. The War Within's first major update, Undermined, takes us to the goblin capital next year to drive some souped-up cars, tackle a new eight-person raid, two more Delves, and much more. Even further afield is the second expansion in WoW's Worldsoul saga, Midnight. A full reveal is coming next year, though we know for sure it'll finally feature player housing. The future is bright, some more bug fixes permitting.

For more, check out our World of Warcraft: The War Within review.

Thanks to JorRaptor on Twitter, we know that Guerrilla is hiring a release QA intern. This role requires someone with "both theoretical knowledge and practical experience to ensure the game is prepared for launch." The candidate must also be "Available for an Internship during the first half of 2025," meaning a game would likely come out in the latter half of the year.

Before you rush off to apply, this job is only open to people "Currently enrolled in a Dutch school within a relevant field of study." In the true spirit of an internship, it seems aimed at young people with a passion for the industry.

The internship could focus on the rumored Horizon MMO being worked on by NCSoft. According to a report from South Korean outlet MTN, Sony and NCSoft have teamed up to work on an untitled game known as Project H.

There's also a chance the job opening at Guerrilla is for its own internal multiplayer Horizon game. Rather than a sequel or just a third single-player entry, Bloomberg's Jason Schrier says, "Horizon Online is their next product."

Guerrilla Games studio director Jan-Bart van Beek has spoken about the series of the future before, saying, "As people probably already know, we're also going to be working on a multiplayer game."

It's unclear whether Guerrilla and NCSoft are working together on one multiplayer Horizon game or if both studios are building different projects. Sony has repeatedly said it plans to go all-in on live-service games, but it might risk spreading Horizon too thin if players have to split their time. It's more likely NCSoft is being brought on for a mobile version of a game or Guerrilla is supportting it in a full MMO.

If you want to play with a friend, check out our list of the best co-op games of all time.

That comes from Blizzard's chunky Warcraft Direct, which dips into what's next for WoW Classic among other things. A few tidbits are coming that we'll get into later, though the standout reveal was Mists of Pandaria Classic itself. Blizzard hasn't revealed much aside from the fact you'll get to explore the expansion as it was when it was released in 2012, with some minor changes likely to be included.

Those minor changes are a bit of a theme to WoW Classic expansions, though how sweeping they are depends on the expansion itself. For example, Wrath of the Lich King Classic initially said goodbye to Dungeon Finder on launch before bringing it back – you also had more inclusive character options. Given the chance to speak to Blizzard before the Warcraft Direct, I ask what we can expect from Mists of Pandaria Classic.

Software engineer Kevin Vigue tells us Blizzard's approach to WoW Classic balances what players want to see and where the devs think the game is going, though some lessons have been taken from Wrath of the Lich King Classic.

"With Mists of Pandaria, I don't know if there are really any of those decision points that we're making right now in the same way that we were for Wrath of the Lich King," he says. "I think that, when we proceeded through Wrath of Lich King and then listened to player feedback about 'we actually do want LFD for this version of World of Warcraft,' brought that in, then proceeded on to Cataclysm.

"That set a pretty clear course for what we're going to be doing with Mists of Pandaria, and that'll be staying true to what was in the original Mists of Pandaria, pretty much across the board. I can't think of any real diversion points that we've talked about or made a decision on."

As a result of that, Vigue says you can look forward to the full set of queuing for dungeons and scenarios alongside all the other good stuff like challenge modes and raids.

Initially released in 2012, the Asian folklore-inspired expansion comes with more story content and raids, though the show's star is the Pandaren race, which started off as an April Fool's joke. Alongside the joy of playing as a big ol' panda, the Pandaren are unique in Warcraft as they're truly neutral – no Horde or Alliance affiliation here unless you want it. That fact also spawned a community legend who has yet to leave the Pandaren's home isle to stay truly neutral.

While Blizzard has dabbled with Mists of Pandaria's content just earlier this year in World of Warcraft: Remix, it looks like WoW Classic's take will be less experimental and more faithful.

Back to the Warcraft Direct, that's not all you're getting for WoW Classic. Following fan feedback, Blizzard has revealed that 20th Anniversary Edition Realms will offer Classic era fans a fresh start to WoW, including hardcore server options – both of which will continue through content updates simultaneously. After that, non-hardcore servers will eventually progress from vanilla to Burning Crusade, the MMO's first expansion.

Thankfully, while you'll have to wait for Mists of Pandaria Classic, you've got the new Anniversary servers to enjoy until then.

Here are some more of the best MMOs you can play right now.

Blizzard is celebrating Warcraft's anniversary with a big ol' direct covering everything from the MMO to Hearthstone and Warcraft 3: Reforged. It's the 'one more thing' at the end of World of Warcraft's segment, though, that'll likely excite many.

The cinematic begins with us entering a cozy wee home with a chair facing a fireplace. You have trinkets and trophies adorning the walls and an explorer with their feet up. As we look closer, we see a tankard with the phrase "home sweet home" carved on it. If that leaves you in any doubt, Blizzard has confirmed that, yes, player housing is coming in World of Warcraft's Midnight expansion, which is the second entry in the Worldsoul saga.

We don't know much about World of Warcraft: Midnight just yet, but that should change next year. Blizzard has also released a roadmap that says we'll get a proper expansion reveal next summer.

Either way, the fact that player housing is on the way is likely to delight the many MMO fans who have had it at the top of their wishlists since, roughly, when the MMO came out 20 years back. Warlords of Draenor introduced Garrisons, character-specific sub-zones that offer plenty of customization possibilities, but not quite a home to show off your stuff.

We'll need to wait to learn more, but thankfully, plenty of other content is coming in the meantime. Blizzard has also revealed that World of Warcraft: The War Within's first major update launches next year and takes us to the subterranean goblin capital of Undermine as we chase Xal'atath to halt their plans. There's an eight-person raid, two new delves, and more to look forward to – including a ground mount that takes the elevated ideas behind skyriding and says, 'Why not a car'? Expect goofy antics and explosions aplenty. 

World of Warcraft devs set about rebuilding "core parts" of the 20-year-old MMO's infrastructure, accidentally making some of its raid content unplayable.

One sticking point has been the game's class or profession system, which basically gives you a fresh profession each time you start a new episode of content. This runs counter to the account progression in most MMOs, including the cumulative levels of RuneScape and Old School RuneScape, so Gower himself wrote up a massive Steam blog post explaining the ins, outs, and benefits of this system, as well as how early access player feedback has inspired changes. The headliner, I think, is this subhead: "Please give it a chance." 

"First, I would just like to reassure you that your hard work leveling up your professions is definitely NOT wiped, reset or made irrelevant when you go to a new episode!" Gower begins. "When you reach episode 2, Hopeforest, four new professions are introduced: Scout, Woodcutter, Gatherer, and Carpenter. Your existing episode 1 professions remain untouched and are still useful anytime you are in Hopeport. You will find that you still regularly go back to Hopeport and use and further progress those professions. However, whilst you are in Hopeforest you will predominantly be relying on your Hopeforest professions, which can feel a bit strange to start with." 

It's less of a reset, then, and more of a new beginning, with each episode letting you choose new professions to focus on. Gower says there are a few reasons for this, starting with keeping Brighter Shores fun "for players who want to play the game many hours a day AND for people who might only be able to play a few minutes a day."

"When we introduce new episodes we want them to be fun for everyone," he continues. "But if there was a single combat profession across the whole game, and the monsters in episode 5 started at level 100 for example, then all the players who play a lot would already be a way higher level than that. They would find it way too easy, skipping past a huge chunk of the start of the episode, and then find that they don't have much to do. Conversely, all of the players who only play a little would find it way too hard and wouldn't be able to take part in episode 5 at all!"

Starting each episode fresh gives everyone a level playing field, prevents the "dead content" caused by a normal rising MMO level cap, and avoids the mundanity of having content scale to your level, Gower reckons. "We have gone with what we call the 'breadth and depth' system," he says. "It is NOT intended that you first 'finish' episode 1, then go on to episode 2 and never go back to episode 1 ever again." 

The breadth comes from how quickly you can access new episodes, and the depth is provided by mastering the professions within those episodes. That includes rotating between the episodes you've unlocked. Gower says "the episodes are also heavily interlinked, so you will regularly find yourself going back and forth between them. For example: You might use your episode 3 combat to kill some monsters for potion reagents. You might then take these reagents back to episode 1 to make some potions, which you then use in episode 4." 

"All of our testing has shown that, once you get used to it, unlocking a fresh combat profession once in a while actually becomes quite fun," the designer continues, asking players to give the system more time to show its strengths. "The earliest levels of the professions are generally the most fun as you level up much more quickly, and it's all new and fresh. We want people to be able to get that 'new and fresh' feeling each time we launch a new episode, rather than only getting it when they first start playing the game and never ever again!"

Gower isn't insisting that everything is perfect and nothing needs to change, however. Based on the feedback that necessitated a post like this, the folks at developer Fen Research are working on ways to make professions clearer and, seemingly to mesh with the average MMO player's brain, more rewarding. 

One change has already been made: your total profession level is now displayed next to your character, reducing the feeling that you've been hit with a soft reset. Gower reckons that the popular suggestion to add content that "relies on multiple combat levels" is "a great idea, and we will definitely be looking to add content of this nature in the future." As it happens, the responses to this Steam post are filled with players pushing for global benefits from professions, with levels in specific Episodes also providing benefits to your entire account. 

"We obviously need to better communicate our 'breadth and depth' system," Gower adds. "Not only are people left thinking that once they move on to episode 2 their guard skill will be forever useless (it really won't!), but some people are also trying to complete ALL of the episode 1 side quests before even starting episode 2 and then finding it too grindy! This post is a first step towards solving this, but we also need to find a way to better communicate this in game! We are open to suggestions on this one!"

RuneScape creator answers our biggest questions about his new MMO Brighter Shores: classes, professions, monetization, and a TTRPG open world.

The first big post-Dawntrail patch is almost here, and boy is it packing quite a bit of content - fans can expect to experience the first Echoes of Vana'diel alliance raid, an older 24-man raid now essentially transformed into a Savage thanks to the Chaotic tier being introduced, even more Bakool Ja Ja, and a solid plethora of quests to play through. Patch 7.1 is certainly nothing to scoff at with all it brings, but it's some of the least expected notes that have caught my eye.

As revealed by Square Enix in the update's preliminary patch notes, "character toe detail" when wearing certain footwear has been improved. This visual enhancement applies to a whopping 118 different sandals and shoes - and yes, I did indeed sit here and count them all. The patch notes even include a handy little before and after comparison with a working slider, showing off 7.1's impressive new attention to the Warrior of Light's toe details.

Regardless of all the jokes that are sure to pop off following these patch notes, it's a welcome change for those of us with a hankering for all things aesthetic. As one fan writes, "it's nice to not have feet that look like dog food when wearing sandals." Plus, it's not the only alteration coming to character visuals in the MMO with the update - lens transparency is being increased for "certain eyewear," and transparency effects are being added to gear like leggings and stockings.

No longer will your Warrior of Light's fishnet stockings look like cheap knock-offs, nor will your cute shoes harbor low-poly toes. As silly as it is, I'm personally thrilled about these sorts of changes and I hope that more patches in the future add to the game's ever-evolving visuals. The huge graphical overhaul that came with Dawntrail made a massive difference in terms of immersion - although, I'm glad Square Enix knew better than to touch the low-poly grapes.

After "personal attack" of Final Fantasy 14 Dawntrail English VA, MMO boss Yoshi-P says if you have "any sort of criticism, bring it to me, I'm the one approving this material"

"The ammo-deletion issue with Dizana's Quiver has now been hotfixed," developer Jagex confirms in a recent tweet. "We're working on returning lost items to players. Don't worry, our system identifies this, so there's no need to contact us. Sorry for the inconvenience." 

Dizana's Quiver was released in March 2024 and it remains the strongest piece of ranged gear for your cape slot. It can only be earned by beating the highest-level monster in the game at the end of the difficult Fortis Colosseum combat gauntlet. It gives huge stat bonuses, further charge-based buffs per shot, and crucially grants players a secondary ammunition slot, making it invaluable for some setups. It's a fairly uncommon item due to the challenge involved in getting it, but that also means it's largely held by veteran players with more money to lose to a bug like this.

Several players reported the ammo bug on Reddit, with some claiming to have lost, or to have watched friends lose, stacks of tens or even hundreds of thousands of ammo. A Twitch clip of streamer molgoatkirby shows it in action, and the bug seems perilously easy to pull off. If you had one ammo type equipped in your secondary ammo slot and then picked up a round of that same ammo type off the ground, that pickup would delete and replace whatever you had in your primary ammo slot – even if that was 7,174 dragon arrows worth over 12 million gold, as molgoatkirby showed. 

This is one of those uniquely terrifying bugs with theoretically limitless reach. If you, for some reason, had a massive arrow or bolt stack worth billions of gold, it could disappear as easily as three bronze arrows. Thankfully the bug was fixed relatively quickly. Here's hoping all affected players have their ammo returned to them soon. 

"I bought a membership before I bought a steak or had sex": MMO fan jailed for 9 years says they "thought about RuneScape every day" of their sentence because "there is no other game" like it.

Nerub-ar Palace is an eight-boss raid that launched in September, not long after WoW's The War Within expansion was released. However, it's not quite been the place to be recently, as a recent patch has made certain parts of the MMO laggy as sin. As you can imagine, trying to clear the raid on harder difficulties while your abilities take forever to register isn't the sort of difficulty folk have signed up for. The random disconnects don't help, either.

Now, Blizzard has taken to the forums to provide some insight into what went wrong and what's been done to solve it. Essentially, World of Warcraft's latest patch features some background work to freshen up the MMO's dusty ol' infrastructure to keep it in good condition for the future, but some "side effects" are showing up in less-than-ideal ways.

"In 11.0.5, our engineers implemented a rebuild of some core parts of WoW’s infrastructure," community manager Kaivax says. "This work is being done now in preparation for the game’s future needs as it grows. Unfortunately, we experienced side effects that have been seen in certain high-performance parts of the game, such as several encounters in Nerub-ar Palace.

"We’ve been working on these issues with urgency, and earlier today, we have deployed hotfixes that we believe will reduce 'desyncs' with certain boss abilities and address sudden disconnects during combat."

Kaivax goes on to say more fixes are on the way, such as improvements to "client responsiveness" during raid encounters, which should hopefully remedy the reported issues.

"We’re continuing to stay focused on any game performance issues that remain, or arise following today’s fixes," he says. "Again, this is a top priority for us."

The lag issue is one of the few fires the latest anniversary-themed patch has thrown up, along with balance issues that are also being fixed at the time of writing. It's not all bad, I suppose – you've also got a $90 mount proving quite popular despite its eye-watering price tag. Except for one unfortunate player who bid a lot of gold on a more expensive version not long before the newer, cheaper one was announced.

The famous Blizzard graveyard of canceled games includes a sci-fi Diablo and a Warcraft take on Helldivers.

Last week, Blizzard revealed The Trader's Gilded Brutosaur mount – a big ol' dinosaur-like fella adorned in golden armor, who can become your friend for the low, low price of $90. I know, $90 for an in-game item is a lot, but it's certainly a lot less than the Reins of the Mighty Caravan Brutosaur mount – a similar, less golden friend who was released in 2018 for five million gold, worth around $475 of real money at the time. After late 2020, he could no longer be purchased, which made the expensive mount even more pricey on the Black Market Auction House, leading us to this painful situation right before The Trader's Gilded Brutosaur mount was revealed. 

As reported by Icy Veins, the tragedy was shared on Reddit by feminineambience, who wrote: "Can we get an F in chat for the person who bid on this on my server today?" The screenshot attached shows someone going all in with 9,999,999 gold on one Reins of the Mighty Caravan Brutosaur four days ago, the same day as The Trader's Gilded Brutosaur's reveal. Oh dear. By current gold exchange rates, Icy Veins estimates, this amounts to overpaying roughly 8.4 million gold compared to the price of the re-released mount – assuming you just want the big dino, not the first edition bragging rights.

Can we get an F in chat for the person who bid on this on my server today? from r/wow

To be fair, as others in the Reddit thread have pointed out, the new Brutosaur's arrival in the MMO won't make the old one any less of a collector's item, especially for mount collectors – it's just a more affordable alternative for those who want one version of the big guys themselves. So, with that in mind, this player might not regret the decision at all, right? I hope, anyway – they certainly dropped a lot of gold for the privilege. 

Desperate to get another RTS off the ground, Blizzard developers reportedly pitched Warcraft 4 and a Call of Duty RTS that got shot down.

"I thought about RuneScape everyday," they wrote. "When inmates in Florida were given tablets in 2017 (super locked, no internet), I downloaded every RPG and hack-and-slash game they offered in a vain attempt at capturing something similar to RuneScape. Never found it." 

In comments on Reddit, they say that they were charged with attempted murder of a police officer. Official reports from the time confirm that nobody was harmed. In our conversation, they attribute the incident to an episode of paranoia reflecting a drug-induced spiral that they've since recovered from, and after ending their teenage years in a bad place and ultimately in prison, they say they're now working a stable job and living happily with their partner, and with support from friends and family. 

OSRS is, of course, also still a part of their life, to the point that they have the game's stat sheet tattooed on their stomach. In prison, the MMO even fueled ideas for original fantasy stories – Hearsey's contributions to an online writing group offered to select inmates as part of an online education opportunity trialed in Florida. 

I really didn't think I'd see anyone beat the lapsed Welsh monk's OSRS story, let alone so soon, but Hearsey's experience may be the best proof yet that you don't quit RuneScape, you just take breaks. I'm still on a break myself. Hearsey got into the game in elementary school in a way that definitely resonates with me: when most kids were on Cool Math games in computer labs, some of the older, cooler kids would boot up RuneScape. 

"I thought he said Room Scape," Hearsey recalls to me. "And so the first thing I did, I went and typed in Room Scape. And it was some text-based escape room or some crap. Anyways, nah, he told me RuneScape. So I got on and got stuck on Tutorial Island. Literally, I played Tutorial Island for like two months straight. I got like 40 Woodcutting, 30 Fishing. I was just skilling on Tutorial Island." 

Welcome back

What keeps them coming back to OSRS? "It's the only game like that," Hearsey reckons. "I don't care, any new game – I mean, I'm not super up to date with games, obviously, but there is no other game that has that. You know how TikTok is getting banned because of the dopamine, the addiction and stuff? If RuneScape would have come out and was hitting how it hit back then, they'd be trying to ban RuneScape. 

"Some nights, I wouldn't go to sleep. We had this extra room in the house. We call it the computer room, and there was a bed in there. And one night, my stepdad, he'd get up for work at like 5:30. He saw me, he opened the door. He's like, 'What are you doing? You got school? Go to bed.' I was like, 'Oh, my bad.' Acting like I didn't know what was going on. So what I started doing was, when I'd hear him get up in the morning, I'd go hide under the bed and just turn the monitor off, and as soon as I heard his work truck crank, I would get back on the computer and play until it was time to go to school. And then right before my mom came to wake me up, I'd go jump in bed real fast like I was asleep." 

None of the games Hearsey tried in prison – a limited selection of often junky games, they say, with few exceptions – scratched the same itch. "I don't know how to explain that feeling," they say. "And it feels nothing like a drug addiction. I may play for like an hour a night. Me and my girlfriend, we go out every weekend, hang out. I'm still really close with my family, but I just, I do not know how to explain that feeling, why I keep coming back for this many years. There's been times in my shadier high school days where I'd be power-leveling accounts and trying to sell them, and I've gotten scammed and lost everything, had to start fresh, and I didn't care. I was like, fuck it, I get to play more." 

Returning to the game after nine years, which have seen a wealth of OSRS updates ranging from foundational changes to heaps of new content not present in the 2007 version of the game that was initially revived, has given Hearsey a bit of shellshock. If they'd been playing to see these things come gradually, "it would have been different," but getting hit with it all at once is almost alien. Their perception is a fascinating time capsule of the classic MMO's history and culture. 

"I have to wiki everything, everything that I see people wearing," they say. "When I left, I want to say I knew everything about the game. Even in prison, I could sit there and tell everyone what level required what, where you went for this. I'm a freaking noob right now, and I played for that many years." 

Getting access to games and reflecting on their memories of RuneScape were valuable comforts in prison, Hearsey says, and they also had access to a lo-fi version of the MMO's unmistakable soundtrack. However, they're mindful of becoming too hooked on the game again. "I was always feeling like if I'm not reading, working out, or writing, I'd feel guilty, like I was wasting my time in there," they say. "If I don't accomplish XYZ before I get out, I'm not ready to get out. I accomplished pretty much everything I wanted to, like learning about finances and just reading so many self-help books. I really got my mind right. 

"But gaming, there have been nights. They re-released some Nintendo classics on the tablet right before I got out. Oh my god, they finally got good games. I probably spent three days non-stop, day and night, playing the first Zelda. I felt so disgusting. I haven't been reading, I haven't been writing. That actually made me start questioning. But what I can say is that there are [people] in there, not me specifically, that all they do is play games on their tablet and it works for them." 

Hearsey mentions a friend whose mother, a 65-year-old Florida woman, plays OSRS on a more hardcore Ironman account. "All she does is babysit and play on her Iron all day long," they say. "And it kind of gives me hope. It's really a comfort. It is a comfort thing, like how some people binge watch TV shows over and over again, the same show. I can go look at the RuneScape login. You just go and hear that RuneScape main theme. You hear that and it's just more of a feeling than anything you can describe." 

OSRS will remain a part of Hearsey's new lease on life, even if it's just a small part of it. "Having everything taken away from you is an experience that not everybody gets to experience," they say, "and it makes you appreciate – there's so much stuff I don't take for granted anymore. Just food, for example. I will literally eat anything. I was on a super organic vegan trip before I went to prison. Now I will eat anything. I mean, I know it's not recommended, but I just enjoy it a lot. I just enjoy stuff. I just enjoy everything so much more now." 

RuneScape dev reveals Unreal Engine 5 survival game set in the MMO’s universe, accidentally blocks players from signing up due to Steam shenanigans.

Some MMO history to start: Back in 2018, with the launch of the Battle for Azeroth expansion, we got the colossal Reins of the Mighty Caravan Brutosaur mount. He's big, he's beautiful, and he cost five million in gold from vendors, which amounted to $475 in real-world value at the time, give or take.

Aside from being an absolute unit, our Brutosaur friend sets itself apart from other mounts as it can house two NPC vendors selling goods or repairing weapons and armor. Or, more interestingly, give players remote access to the MMO's Auction House and save you a jaunt back to Stormwind or Orgrimmar - a bit of a financial flex, but still a vibe to see a Brutosaur stomp about.

Regardless, as Battle of Azeroth gave way to Shadowlands in late 2020, the Brutosaur could no longer be purchased from vendors. The mount does appear on the Black Market Auction House here and there, though the price starts at five million gold, and, uh, that's a bit of coin. Just before the new version of the Brutosaur mount dropped, one player seemingly bid 9,999,999 gold for the old one. A bit of coin!

Now, World of Warcraft fans can get the next best thing. Blizzard has introduced and is selling the Trader's Gilded Brutosaur mount as part of the MMO's 20th-anniversary celebrations for $90 bucks. The big brute essentially does the same thing as its Brutosaur bro but is seemingly smaller and rather fashionably adorned in gold plating to mark the occasion. As this WoW mount is here for the anniversary celebrations, you only have until January 6, 2025 to pick one up.

The reaction among the MMO community has been mixed. On the one hand, $90 bucks is a lot! But on the other hand, it's certainly a lot less than $475.

Blizzard may have just hit the jackpot. from r/wow

Regardless, the new Brutosaur mount is proving its popularity quickly. So much so that World of Warcraft's in-game economy is feeling the sting. One way of getting the mount is simply parting with $90, but there is another way. If you've got the gold, you can purchase WoW Tokens at the Auction House, which can then be redeemed for $15 in Battle.net store credit. In theory, six WoW Tokens should be enough to get the new Brutosaur mount, but it's proving not so simple. The gold cost of a WoW Token is forever in flux, and, well, there's a new Brutosaur mount, so the WoW Token is currently sold out.

Is a World of Warcraft mount being more expensive than the MMO's latest expansion great? No. Is that going to stop me from joining the Brutosaur bros? Also no.

The famous Blizzard graveyard of canceled games includes a sci-fi Diablo and a Warcraft take on Helldivers.

Despite its old-school RuneScape-ish style and the crowds of 'players' running about, Erenshore isn't actually a massively multiplayer online game because all those people questing with usernames above their heads are, in fact, NPCs who are simply very good at acting like dumb real people. It's an MMO where the 'O' stands for offline.

Why have all the MMORPG-style quests and combat without multiplayer, though? Erenshor's Steam page explains that it's a game which emulates "the joys of open-world MMORPG gameplay," but this time "without the time commitments" and, I'm guessing, pressure from other people. And in case things do get a little lonely or you want someone to share the grind with, then you can just "partner up with our signature 'Simulated Players.'"

Those SimPlayers aren't simply set dressing, however. "These players will level up alongside you (whether you're online or not), they'll find new items on their own and they'll find them with your help," the storefront blurb explains. "They'll ask for loot drops, they'll buy and sell loot, join and leave guilds, and even invite you to raids as they get to know you. They'll remember you and how you treat them."

Erenshor already had a demo up before this latest Steam Next Fest event, but it's now gotten its Shivering Steps update that adds 12 more hours of content that's made up of new quests, six new bosses, new 'SimPlayers,' and general gameplay tweaks to things like mining.

For now, check out some of the other ten best Steam Next Fest demos that you should try before the event's over

Although we’re ranking individual weapons as well as weapon combinations, keep in mind that the weapon combo is ultimately more important. It’s best to consider the individual weapon ranking if you aren’t sure about the combo yet. For example, the greatsword is ranked as B-tier, but the greatsword and sword weapon combo is S-tier. If you’re going for that specific combo, go ahead! If you’re unsure, it may be safer to choose an S-tier weapon like the wand. All these combinations ultimately create what is effectively Throne and Liberty builds, and we can help you there if your not sure.

Wand - S tier

• S-tier weapon combos: longbow, sword, staff
• A-tier weapon combos: daggers
• B-tier weapon combos: crossbow
• C-tier weapon combos: greatsword

Throne and Liberty’s wand is arguably the most supportive weapon. Not only does it keep your allies alive, but it also improves mana recovery, decreases cooldowns, and buffs attack damage. If you’re new to Throne and Liberty and not quite sure which weapon combo to go for, the wand is an excellent choice as you can pair it with almost anything. Want to be a healer? Try the wand with the longbow. A powerful mage? Go for the wand and staff. A tank with healing skills? The wand and sword are for you.

Although its curse-inflicting attacks are decent, beware that the wand isn’t primarily meant to deal damage. It’ll be hard to play solo without a proper DPS weapon like the staff or daggers, so keep that in mind if you’re going for a full healer build or tank/healer hybrid. The weapon combo with the mana-heavy staff is the top choice if you want the best of both worlds though, not in the least because the wand’s healing is boosted by its max mana count through the ‘Noble Revival’ passive.

Daggers - S tier

• S-tier weapon combos: crossbow, longbow
• A-tier weapon combos: staff, greatsword, wand
• B-tier weapon combos: sword
• C-tier weapon combos: n/a

Daggers don’t deal the highest damage, don’t have good range, and don’t offer strong defensive abilities - and they’re S-tier nonetheless. It’s all thanks to the daggers’ arsenal of mobility skills, which allow you to hide in the shadows, pop up behind enemies, and increase movement speed. The ability to escape and return to the heat of the battle at will is always handy (especially in PvP combat), making the dagger a perfect companion to almost any other weapon in Throne and Liberty.

Another advantage of the daggers is the passive critical hit chance and critical damage boost (Assassin’s Instincts and Wrathful Edge). This makes it far easier to get a proper critical rate build and makes the dagger a perfect choice to be paired with a powerful DPS weapon like the crossbow. If you like the versatility in range but require health recovery (especially if you often play solo), the daggers and longbow weapon combination is also a top-tier choice.

Crossbow - S tier

• S-tier weapon combos: daggers
• A-tier weapon combos: longbow, staff
• B-tier weapon combos: greatsword, wand, sword
• C-tier weapon combos: N/A

The crossbow is a great DPS weapon to quickly unleash a flurry of arrows on (mainly) single targets. It has amazing damage potential which is further enhanced by its ‘weaken’ effects. The crossbow can also be used to strengthen off-hand damage, exchange HP for mana, and improve the hit chances of both ranged and magic attacks - making it a perfect partner to the longbow or staff.

Together with the daggers, however, the crossbow deals the best damage in Throne and Liberty. You can increase the weaken hit chance with the crossbow’s ‘Corrupt Nail’ passive and poison enemies with the daggers before stepping into the shadows. It’s hard to pull it off successfully, and the solo play survivability isn’t great, but the damage potential is through the roof.

Longbow - A tier

• S-tier weapon combos: daggers, wand
• A-tier weapon combos: crossbow, staff
• B-tier weapon combos: greatsword
• C-tier weapon combos: sword

The amazing range combined with the high damage output already makes the longbow a solid weapon choice, but on top of that, the longbow can recover HP, mitigate or remove weaken effects, and improve health recovery from other skills. If you want to get a fully support-focused build, providing as much HP recovery as possible, the longbow and wand are by far the best weapon combo.

Alternatively, the longbow can be used to boost critical rate and critical damage, which is why it’s such a great match with the critical-focused daggers. This weapon combo is very good in solo play too, as you have melee attacks, ranged attacks, mobility, and healing. The ranged longbow and its defensive capabilities aren’t great together with the melee-focused sword and greatsword though.

Sword - A tier

• S-tier weapon combos: greatsword, wand
• A-tier weapon combos: N/A
• B-tier weapon combos: daggers, crossbow
• C-tier weapon combos: longbow, staff

The sword, which is actually a sword-and-shield combined, is the perfect weapon for a tank build; besides its amazing shielding abilities, such as the ‘Counter Barrier’, the sword can increase max HP, stun and push enemies, taunt enemies, and pull enemies in to ‘bind’ them. On top of that, the passive called ‘Gerad’s Patience’ provides crowd control resistance upon successful blocks and evades, which is incredibly useful to this frontline warrior.

Combining the two tankiest weapons in the game, the weapon combo with the greatsword is extremely strong, providing constant defense while debuffing and crowd-controlling enemies. The more healing-focused sword-and-wand combo is another reason why the sword is one of the best support weapons in the game. However, the sword isn’t the best choice outside of tank builds. In solo play, it’s hard to find a good DPS pairing as ranged options don’t sync well with its melee-focused abilities, and although the dagger combo may seem great at first, the lack of area-of-effect damage can be annoying.

Staff - A tier

• S-tier weapon combos: wand
• A-tier weapon combos: daggers, crossbow, longbow
• B-tier weapon combos: N/A
• C-tier weapon combos: greatsword, sword

Somewhat similar to the longbow, the staff is a powerful ranged DPS weapon, but although it comes with better area-of-effect attacks, it lacks the longbow’s support abilities. Luckily, you can still get plenty of healing options if you equip the wand as a secondary weapon. This ‘mage’ setup deals amazing damage, has plenty of self-sustaining abilities, and many synergies, such as the staff’s ‘Manaball Eruption’ passive (which fires additional projectiles for wand skills too).

Despite its strong attacks, beware that the staff requires a lot of mana and it may be difficult to wield without a strong support weapon or mobility weapon. The weapon combo with the crossbow has a high damage potential, but the daggers and longbow offer some much-needed mobility and support, especially in solo play.

Greatsword - B tier

• S-tier weapon combos: sword
• A-tier weapon combos: daggers
• B-tier weapon combos: crossbow, longbow
• C-tier weapon combos: staff, wand

The hefty greatsword excels in close-quarters combat. Dealing devastating blows to multiple targets while inflicting debuffs, it’s an excellent melee DPS weapon as well as a solid choice for tank builds. The greatsword is an especially handy tool to stun opponents or boost your character’s HP, with the ‘Blood Devotion’ ability being particularly great for teamplay as it allows you to transfer incoming damage from a teammate to yourself.

Despite those qualities, the greatsword is a bit of an in-between weapon that’s not quite as powerful as the crossbow, and not quite as defensive as the sword. It’s hard to find a proper weapon combo as you need a second weapon to enhance the damage output, but you may lack versatility in supportive abilities. That said, if you’re willing to become the ultimate tank, combining the greatsword with the sword and shield makes you nearly immortal. The greatsword and dagger combo is also a solid choice as the increased mobility solves the greatsword’s clunkiness.

And that concludes this Throne and Liberty guide on the best weapons. Have fun trying your favourite combinations!

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Brighter Shores marks Gower's return to the genre with all the isometric perspectives, low-poly visuals, humble fantasy world, and life sim nuggets that made RuneScape a household name. The new MMO was once supposed to hit Steam early access on November 5, following a closed beta period starting on October 22, but it was apparently delayed to its new date because two politicians are competing to rule over the American machine on the very same day.

"We have decided to push the launch of Brighter Shores back to [November 6], because apparently there is some sort of election thingy on the 5th," Gower tweeted. "Who knew?!"

Jokes aside, he's obviously referring to the US presidential election between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, which is sure to dominate headlines and suck up attention from every other corner of the internet on November 5. On the flip side, at least anyone looking forward to Brighter Shores doesn't need to choose between voting and rotting in a desk chair with a new MMO all day.

But there's no rush, regardless of when you start Brighter Shores. Andrew Gower previously told GamesRadar+ that this is "not a traditional MMO where you play, get to the endgame, and that's where the game actually starts." Brighter Shores is focused on charting a different, comfier course, slotting into your everyday life, and even encouraging AFK play so you can bypass some busywork.

Brighter Shores' storefront description estimates that it'll be in early access for around half a year, in which time the developers plan to add PvP, new quests, and build on "hundreds of hours of gameplay." 

RuneScape creator says his new MMO doesn’t have to worry about investors: “There’s no publishers, no one’s breathing down my neck.” 

This guide will show you how to find the Secret Source Automaton in Genshin Impact and how to defeat him.

Secret Source Automaton location in Genshin Impact

The Secret Source Automaton boss is found in Genshin Impact’s Natlan region, the ‘nation of fire’ in the southwestern corner of the world map. The exact location of the boss arena is in the Toyac Springs area, not far from the Statue of the Seven. Even if you haven’t found the boss yet, you can already see its icon on the map.

Before you start sprinting towards that icon, however, beware that the boss arena is situated in an underwater cave, which means you can only reach it through a secret entrance. To get there, teleport to the waypoint north of the Secret Source Automaton - not the one below ground, but the one above ground. From there, look to the south; see the narrow wooden bridge? Walk towards that bridge, then drop down to the side.

Carefully glide through the narrow chasm underneath this bridge. Don’t just jump without gliding, as the fall damage may be fatal. Once you’re at the bottom of the chasm, simply follow the tunnel to find both the teleport waypoint and the Secret Source Automaton: Configuration Device boss.

How to defeat the Secret Source Automaton in Genshin Impact

Now that you’ve found the Secret Source Automaton’s location, it’s time to defeat this giant robot boss. While this Automaton only deals Electro damage, beware that he’s highly resistant to all types of damage - not just Electro. On the upside, this means you aren’t bound to a specific elemental team composition, but on the downside, no element is particularly overpowered against this boss.

Luckily, the Secret Source Automaton: Configuration Device has a weakness: throughout the fight, it’ll enter a ‘charging phase’ to prepare the Boltsphere Cannon attack (a large area-of-effect explosion). During this charging phase, two orange pillars will appear on the battlefield. You must get to the top of these pillars and smash the small charging devices, which not only interrupts the charging progress but also paralyzes the Secret Source Automaton and inflicts a massive resistance reduction for a few seconds.

Smashing the two charging devices (one per pillar) is the shortcut to winning this boss fight, but there’s one problem: how to reach them? You can’t climb the orange pillars the ‘normal’ way and neither is it possible to jump up, so you’ll have to rely on character skills. Don’t worry, there are plenty of characters who can help you out:

• Kachina’s Turbo Twirly: use Kachina’s elemental Skill to ride up the pillars. You only need to hop on the charging devices to destroy them, so this is arguably the quickest and easiest way to paralyze the Secret Source Automaton.
• Xilonen’s Blade Roller: similar to Kachina’s ability, you can use Xilonen’s Elemental Skill to ride up the pillars and smash them.
• Geo constructs: alternatively, you can use Zhongli, Albedo, or Geo Traveler to place Geo rock formations or platforms. Make sure they’re close enough to one of the orange pillars, then climb the Geo construct and jump onto the pillar.
• Anemo wind current skills: if you don’t have Geo characters or don’t want to use them, Anemo characters like Kazuha, Wanderer, Venti, and Xiao can create wind currents to fly upwards.

In case you’re wondering, you do need to stand on top of the pillars to destroy the charging devices. Even if you trigger an attack that visually seems to hit the charging devices, such as Zhongli’s Ultimate, it won’t count. Save your ranged attacks and area-of-effect attacks for the Secret Source Automaton boss himself - after he’s been paralyzed.

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To help you understand the most important gameplay information and ensure you don’t miss out on the essentials, here are our best Throne and Liberty tips and tricks.

1. Stack up on World Tree Leaves to stay alive

Wondering why you’re constantly on the brink of death, even though you were absolutely fine a short while ago? It’s probably because you’ve run out of World Tree Leaves. Your little Amitoi sidekick automatically heals you when you’re low on HP, but each of its skill uses consumes one World Tree Leaf. If you run out of World Tree Leaves, the Amiroi will stop healing you without warning.

The number of World Tree Leaves you’ve got is displayed on the skill bar at the bottom of the screen, right next to the Amitoi icon. To stack up on World Tree Leaves, buy them from the ‘Sundries Merchant’ in any city. One World Tree Leaf costs 20 gold, which isn’t very expensive.

2. Use the stats that play to your class

Instead of using a traditional class system, your Throne and Liberty weapon combos determines your class and combat role in Throne and Liberty; you can be a ranged DPS ‘Liberator’ (wielding a staff and a bow), a ‘Crusader’ tank (greatsword and sword), an ‘Invocator’ healer (staff and wand), and more. While this unlocks infinite possibilities, it also makes stat allocation rather tricky depending on what Throne and Liberty builds you're aiming for; should you invest in strength, wisdom, dexterity, or perception?

To help you get started, here’s an overview of Throne and Liberty’s main stat effects and the playstyles they’re typically used for:

• Strength: improves max HP, HP regeneration, and defensiveness, which is particularly useful to tank builds.
• Dexterity: improves attack speed, critical hit chance, and evasion. It’s particularly useful for highly mobile melee DPS builds or ranged builds.
• Wisdom: increases maximum mana and mana regeneration, and decreases skill cooldown time. It’s especially useful for most healer builds.
• Perception: improves buff duration, hit chance, and the chance to inflict debuffs. It’s great for most DPS builds, but also supportive classes trying to apply buffs or inflict debuffs.

If you’re playing as a tank, strength and perception should probably be your priority stats as you’ll need the defensiveness and buff application. Wisdom and perception are typically the best stats for healers as they need lots of mana, quick mana recovery, and a high chance to inflict buffs and debuffs. For DPS characters, consider the type of damage you want to focus on; if you’re a melee player, strength can be very helpful, but if you prefer long-range attacks, dexterity becomes more important. Likewise, you can tweak a DPS character to deal more critical damage (prioritise dexterity) or inflict more debuffs (perception).

3. Transfer gear upgrades to get the best stuff

It’s very important to keep upgrading your equipment as you progress through Throne and Liberty’s campaign - you can do so by spending Growthstones in the ‘equipment enchanting’ menu. Although gear upgrades aren’t free, don’t be stingy with your Growthstones since you can transfer the upgrade progress from old to new equipment pieces of the same type. In other words, there’s no need to ‘save’ your Growthstones for rare-quality pieces by refusing to spend them on uncommon-quality pieces. This will only make it harder to obtain weapons, armor, or accessories of rare quality, and will prevent you from gaining an instant upgrade boost on the rare equipment.

Throughout the campaign, it’s best to upgrade the current equipment rarity, then swap to the next rarity piece-by-piece and use the ‘transfer’ option in the equipment enchantment menu every time. Upgrade uncommon (green) gear to level 6, then transfer it to the rare (blue) replacement piece. Fully upgrade this gear piece as well, then transfer it to the epic (purple) replacement piece.

4. Don’t destroy gear, exchange it for upgrade materials or dissolve it for crafting materials

If you get any armor or weapons you don’t need, don’t be too quick to discard them as they may be used for Lithograph Book rewards. If you collect certain combinations of armor and weapons, such as the ‘Sparring Sword’, ‘Sparring Greatsword’, and ‘Reforged Sword’, you can claim a reward in the form of upgrade materials. To see the gear collections and their rewards, open the Lithograph Book from the main menu.

If you can’t exchange a gear piece as part of the Lithograph Book collection, it isn’t upgraded (otherwise you may be able to transfer the upgrades), and you don’t need it for your build, go to the inventory and be sure to ‘dissolve’ the gear rather then ‘destroy’ it - this will return some crafting materials.

5. Expand the storage, not your inventory

Running out of inventory space? There’s a seemingly easy way to expand your inventory by clicking on the tiny ‘+’ sign in the bottom right, but beware that this costs a whopping 250,000 gold. As if that isn’t ridiculous enough, you only get five extra inventory slots for that price, so you’ll only go from 130 to 135 inventory space.

Unless your Throne and Liberty character is loaded with gold, you get much more bang for your buck from the Storage Manager. It’s more of a hassle, but you can find the Storage Manager in any city and drop off the items you don’t need. The first five extra storage slots cost a measly 5,000 gold - although the price increases for every additional expansion, it’s still much less than 250,000 gold.

6. Use cooking recipes

It’s easy to ignore the stoves that are present in any Throne and Liberty town, but you’re missing out on amazing buffs if you don’t do your cooking. Upon visiting a cooking station for the first time, you’ll find that you lack most of the required ingredients, but you can farm them in the wilds or buy them from Sundries Merchants in any city. The best way to gather cooking ingredients passively is to send your Amitoi on expeditions (click on the Amitoi icon on your skill bar). Use hourly expeditions to quickly stack up on various ingredients.

Here are some of the best foods to use in early game:

• Vegetable Stir-Fry: improves maximum HP and HP regeneration.
• Fried Egg: hit chance and critical hit chance against bosses is improved.
• Herb-Marinated Chicken Drumstick: improves critical and heavy attack chance.
• Healthy Milk: quickly recovers mana.

7. Check the event calendar

Throne and Liberty organises plenty of dynamic events throughout the day, many of which are linked to exploration quests. However, the event schedule is irregular and it may take hours before an event restarts. Therefore, whenever you wish to participate in a specific community challenge or defeat a certain boss, it’s best not to hang around hoping for the event to begin, but to check the in-game event calendar.

The event calendar is well-hidden, but here’s how to find it: open your map and click the small legenda icon in the top left, then select the ‘timetable’ option. You will see the hourly event schedule listed on the left. Hover over the icons to see the event’s description, type, name, location, and territory level. If you click on an event, you’ll see the exact location displayed on the map. Beware that the default zoomed-in calendar doesn’t display every hourly event - be sure to scroll to the right or use the ‘zoom out’ button to ensure you don’t miss anything!

If you’re new to Throne and Liberty, the Wolf Hunting Contest, Starlight Stones Ritual, and Lantern Seed Festival are the best events to tackle first.

8. Edit the HUD

This is perhaps the easiest but most overlooked way to improve your Throne and Liberty experience; adjust the HUD. If you open the menu and click the ‘edit HUD’ option at the bottom, you can drag and resize every overlay according to your preferences. You can change this anytime you want, so feel free to try different layouts, but here are some suggestions:

• Save at least two personal presets: one for questing and exploring and one for serious PvE/PvP challenges.
• Change HUD UI size to tier 1 for exploration and basic PvE, as it may provide a more immersive experience.
• Change HUD UI size to tier 3 or 4 for difficult combat challenges, as it’ll be easier to check cooldowns, buffs, debuffs, etc.
• Place your profile next to your skills, so you can check your cooldowns, HP, and mana in one glance during battle.

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Here’s an overview of common Throne and Liberty error codes and what they mean. We’ll show you how to fix them or, in the case of the ‘different milestones’ problem, how to work around them.

If everything's working and you just want some general help, then we have some Throne and Liberty tips to give you a few pointers for progress.

Throne and Liberty doesn’t launch

Some players don’t encounter any error codes… because their game doesn’t launch at all. If that’s the case for you, it’s best to try the good old platform restart as well as a device restart (you never know, right?). If you’re playing on a PC, type ‘task manager’ in your search bar and open the app, then click on Steam and select ‘end task’ before launching it again.

If that doesn’t fix the error, upi can also try the following:

• Update your drivers/check for software updates on your console.
• Re-install the game.
• Check the network connection and restart your router.
• On Steam: right-click on Steam and select ‘run as administrator’, then try to launch Throne and Liberty again.
• On Steam: go to ‘SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\Throne and Liberty\TL\Binaries\Win64’ and right-click on TL.exe. Choose ‘properties’ at the bottom and go to the ‘Compatibility’ tab, then select ‘disable fullscreen optimizations’.
• On Steam: launch Throne and Liberty in dx11 instead of dx12: open its Steam page, choose ‘manage’ and then ‘properties’, and type ‘-dx11’ (without the apostrophes) in the ‘launch options’.
• On Xbox: change to another profile.
• On PlayStation: restart the device in ‘Safe Mode’ (make a backup of your data first!). Turn it off, hold the power button until you hear the second beep, and press the PS button on the controller. Choose the ‘clear cache and rebuild database’ option.

Keep in mind that Throne and Liberty isn’t the fastest-loading game to begin with, so it’s best to give it a minute or two before you start troubleshooting.

Throne and Liberty Log-in error

If you make it to the login screen but don’t get any further than that (the server doesn’t load or you can’t select your character), there are a few things you try:

• If the ‘start’ button doesn’t respond, try watching the credits in the lower left corner first.
• Click ‘settings’ in the upper right corner and change the time zone in the ‘gameplay’ tab. If that doesn’t change anything, adjust the time zone on your device.
• Use VPN. If you don’t want to keep using it, enabling VPN, logging in, closing the game, and disabling VPN seems to do the trick for many players.
• If you haven’t used your second character slot yet, quickly create an alt character (you can delete it later) and return to the log-in menu. Try logging in with your main character again.

Throne and Liberty world server disconnect error

This Throne and Liberty error may occur while playing, which means it can happen at the most inconvenient moments. While you should be able to log in again following a world server disconnect error, here are a few things you can do to minimise the risk of getting randomly kicked:

• If you’re using fullscreen, go to ‘settings’, then ‘graphics’, and change ‘screen’ to ‘borderless’. 
• Lower the graphics settings. Try ‘high’ or even ‘medium’ as your overall graphics preset rather than ‘epic’. In particular, lower the ‘volumetric clouds’. 
• If you’re using CPU or GPU overclocking on PC, disable it in your device’s BIOS settings.

Throne and Liberty different milestones error

You may encounter this error code if you try to change servers with an early access character. Early access characters aren’t allowed to join new servers because of a difference in progress (‘different milestones’). Unfortunately, there’s no ‘fix’ for this other than hoping Throne and Liberty will allow it in a few months’ time. For now, if you’re an early access player hoping to join your non-EA friends, they can either try to enter your server (if it isn’t full already) or you must create an alt character on theirs.

Throne and Liberty easy anti-cheat error

Sometimes the ‘disconnected from server’ error comes with the ‘kicked by easy anti-cheat’ message when playing on Steam. This often happens upon logging in for the first time, and then never again - so there’s no need to fix it immediately.

However, if the problem persists, open the Easy Anti Cheat folder in Throne and Liberty’s game files (location: SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\Throne and Liberty\EasyAntiCheat), hold ‘Shift’, right-click ‘EasyAntiCheat_EOS_Setup.exe’, and choose ‘copy as path’. Paste this in Notepad and paste ‘install 58dec5a58e8f4ce6beca223311f65b4c’ (without apostrophes) behind it.

The full prompt should look something like this:

“E:\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\Throne and Liberty\EasyAntiCheat\EasyAntiCheat_EOS_Setup.exe" install 58dec5a58e8f4ce6beca223311f65b4c”.

Press the Windows button plus the ‘R’ key to run this prompt. Relaunch Steam before opening Throne and Liberty again.

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