Where are the new, major prestige MMORPGs from the West?
In the last ten years, there has actually only been one launch of an ambitious MMORPG that aimed to compete with the big players and came from a Western studio: New World in 2021. Amazon Games’ first online RPG attracted attention with an exciting setting, Buy2Play model, and well-produced trailers.
At the same time, many outsiders knew that the development was challenging. The focus shifted due to feedback from testers from survival and PvP to a theme park framework with quests, PvE challenges, and more story content. Skepticism was also warranted since Amazon Games had yet to release a single successful game at that point.
The gameplay trailer for New World Aeternum:
Accordingly, New World had a mixed reception at launch. While the audiovisual design of the game world impressed and crafting and combat were fun, the quickly designed and therefore incredibly generic quests were frustrating. Numerous problems also arose at launch, such as queues and gold duplication exploits.
The enormous hype at launch (underpinned by Amazon’s streaming platform Twitch) demonstrated impressively how great the demand for a new, ambitious MMORPG was. 913,634 players were online simultaneously on Steam in New World at one point – which still ranks 11th in Steam’s all-time charts (via SteamDB).
With New World Aeternum, there was a kind of reboot for the Amazon MMORPG in 2024. However, there was not the hoped-for boost:
There is reason for hope
The good news is: Currently, there are more ambitious MMORPG projects from the West in development than in a long time. We have already mentioned Raph Koster’s “No Man’s Sky, but as an MMORPG”, Stars Reach, as well as Ashes of Creation from Intrepid Studios and genre enthusiast Steven Sharif.
Other exciting projects of the (sadly medium- to long-term) future include:
- Project Ghost from Fantastic Pixel Castle and former Blizzard designer Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street
- “League of Legends” MMORPG from Riot Games
- New MMORPG for Lord of the Rings from Amazon Games
- New Warhammer MMORPG from Jackalytpic and industry veteran Jack Emmert (City of Heroes, City of Villains, Neverwinter)
- New MMORPG for EverQuest from Daybreak Games
- Guild Wars 3 from ArenaNet and NCsoft
In addition, in the near future (2025 / 2026), we can expect Asian MMORPGs such as Chrono Odyssey from Chrono Studio and Kakao Games, Aion 2 from NCsoft, and ArcheAge Chronicles from XL Games – all backed by large teams and some ambitions. On the list of all MMORPGs currently in development for PC, there are actually more than 50 games.
