The genre of MMORPGs has written countless stories of failure and success over the past decades. Upcoming online role-playing games must learn from these experiences if they want to succeed. For our Grindfest theme week 2026, we highlight these examples.
The history of MMORPGs is unfortunately often a story of failure. There is probably no other genre where the risk is so high, the development so lengthy and expensive. A wrong decision is enough to crash right into the next wall at launch. Or even worse: never reaching the starting point at all.
It is said that one should learn from the past to do better in the future. Therefore, in this article, we present to you 10 MMORPGs from which upcoming online role-playing games should definitely learn if they want to succeed. If you can think of any further examples that provide important lessons, please share them in the comments.
This week, you can look forward to exciting articles every day about the topic MMORPG. Included: nostalgic retrospectives, exciting analyses from renowned industry veterans, previews of upcoming online role-playing games, and entertaining streams.
For the program of the great MMORPG theme week 2026 from MeinMMO, click here to the schedule
Through our summary, you can jump directly to the sections that interest you:
New World
You are surely familiar with the turbulent development history of New World. The developers at Amazon Games made a devastating rookie mistake by shifting focus midway through production from survival and PvP to a theme park framework with quests, PvE challenges, and more story content.
However, the remaining time was too short to fill the vast world with fun quests and adjust all the planned systems and content accordingly. Instead, there were generic tasks from the drawing board and PvE group content that didn’t quite fit with the combat system. Moreover, the content, systems, and mechanics resulted in a wild patchwork.
Many bugs also came into play. Fatal gold dupe exploits, for example, were fought with hotfixes that opened up new exploit possibilities. In short: despite having some veteran developers working at Amazon Games, many mistakes were made that really shouldn’t have happened. Mistakes that would negatively impact the quality of New World for years to come.
Only in October 2025 did the team, under new leadership, achieve a turnaround: After the Aeternum reboot had created a solid foundation for newcomers, season 10 finally tackled various issues in the MMORPG’s endgame. In addition, barriers were broken down as New World joined the PS Plus catalog, and the long-time paid expansion “Rise of the Angry Earth” was integrated into the main game on PC.
However, it was too late. The Amazon executives had already lost faith in their ambitious MMO plans and decided to restructure the gaming division. As a part of this decision, the end of New World was announced. The servers will go offline in early 2027. Anyone wishing to avoid such a hellish trip should refrain from turning the fundamental orientation of their game upside down a year before release.
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