Daily Archives: December 30, 2025

Looking Back at 2025 – I Really Have to Just Focus on the Highs Again

4 Replies

Once again on the path out of 2025 continues with what is sometimes my final reflective post to be written during the year.

The Year is 2025

There is, at this point, a long tradition of such posts here at TAGN.  If you are sufficiently bored, you can indulge yourself with the musings of past years:

Usually I do highs and lows.  Once in a while I try highs, lows, and in between.  Those are rare years.  And then there are years where the lows will grind you down if you spend too much time dwelling on them, so I just have to zero in on the good things.  2024 was like that, and 2025 even more so.

For years like those I have to just leave behind all the layoffs, cancellations, studio closures, corporate greed, transparent bonus chasing, lies, betrayals, and any AI related stupidity… which is 99% of the pro-AI discourse… and focus on what went right.

Or at least I have to try.

I cannot be held responsible for any backhanded compliments or sarcasm you may perceive.  I am only human, and can only play along with so much greed and stupidity before I start using “fuck” as a modifier in every other sentence.

So here we go.

Microsoft

  • Hasn’t completely gutted Blizzard to boost margins yet.  Crap, I’m off to a bed start already.  But sure, Blizz is still mostly whole.
  • World of Warcraft gets housing!  20 years late by most accounts, but finally there!
  • The War Within got some good updates, even if they had to play the nostalgia card with the Legion Remix to fill out the time between summer and the next expansion.
  • Still had a variety of WoW Classic options in 2025
    • WoW Classic Mists of Pandaria
    • WoW Classic simply vanilla
    • WoW Classic Season of Discovery
    • WoW Classic Hardcore
    • WoW Classic Classic
    • And, coming soon, WoW Classic Classic TBC
  • Diablo IV seemed to pull it together with that last update that made the loot grind… I don’t know… fun maybe?
  • Hearthstone keeps Hearthstoning.
  • A year with a “2” in it, so probably another Call of Duty game shipped
  • XBox no doubt shipped some things and only raised prices… again… but only once… right?

CCP

  • Remained a contributing factor to the Pearl Abyss bottom line, ensuring its continued existence… and possibility of being sold.
  • Hasn’t been sold off to a capital management firm yet… but there are rumblings.
  • Might get sold… maybe to NetEase… would that be bad?
  • EVE Online Legion and Catalyst expansions landed this year with solid results as the “expansions named after in-game ships” era continues.
  • The peak concurrent users hit its highest point since the Covid influx of May 2020.
  • Some pretty big things happened, including the Imperium packing up and moving east, PanFam collapsing, and the Drone Regions being opened up to new groups.  That’ll be something for 2026.
  • Finally started work on the new in-game map!
  • Occasional indication that they fix things based on player feedback… though this would be more convincing if it wasn’t so often stuff that they broke or shipped broken.
  • Some things happened outside of their one money making title:
    • EVE Vanguard testing carried on
    • EVE Online board game Kickstarter shipped
    • EVE Frontier still in testing, hasn’t gone completely crypto mad… yet
  • No layoffs… also yet.  But a new year is coming.

Enad Global 7

  • While caving to many capital management demands, hasn’t sold itself to the Saudis yet!
  • All the annual expansions!
    • EverQuest – Shattering of Ro
    • EverQuest II – Rage of Cthurath
    • Lord of the Rings Online – Kingdoms of Harad
    • Whatever it is DDO, DCUO, and PlanetSide do for new content… I feel like I say that every year.  I should figure out what they do some day.  Wasn’t there something about fishing in PlanetSide, or was that an April Fools joke?
  • Shut down that THJ pirate server… for now, but they will prevail, the law being 100% on their side… which was making $100K a month according to the court.  They need to follow up with the players to make anything positive about it though.
  • Possible chance that the Norrath team might actually listen to players for their 2026 special servers, because if THJ did one thing, it proved there was some demand for something different.
  • Palia doing strong business for the group.
  • LOTRO managed to get most everybody onto the new 64-bit servers… but it was a half a year march of easily avoided mistakes and all the lag problems seemed to move with the players.
  • SSG is also, finally, trying to make LOTRO look better at resolutions above 1920×1080.  I approve of this, but am not going to gush like some until I see what gets to live.  I have been lied to before.

Other MMO and Online Game Things

  • Pokemon Go hasn’t been wrecked by its new Saudi owners yet… yet.
  • Guild Wars 2: Visions of Eternity expansion launched.
  • Guild Wars: Reforged came out of nowhere and people are not talking about it enough.  Or maybe I am talking about it too much.  One or the other.
  • Old School RuneScape got boats!  Boats!  I want boats!
  • Playable Worlds had a successful Stars Reach Kickstarter campaign.
  • Enshrouded gave us water… and is set for 1.0 in the spring.
  • No Man’s Sky hit hard, first with Worlds: Part II and then with the amazing Voyagers updates!
  • Patheon: Rise of the Fallen has kept it going and is even introducing mounts.
  • Dune: Awakening landed and had some solid points, even if Funcom had to learn, yet again, that maybe a lot of players don’t want PvP.
  • For all its issues, the Ship of Heroes team shipped their title.  A lot of indies don’t even get that far.
  • Dual Universe may have shut their servers, but the team left players a way to run their own.  That puts them ahead of the game.
  • Speaking of universes, Prosperous Universe, a web wannabe spreadsheet space title, keeps sending me email updates.  They must still be going, right?
  • Hey, TorilMUD carried on… 22 years since the last pwipe, 32 years since I first wandered into its vision of Forgotten Realms.

Other Video Game Items

  • Sid Meier’s Last Hurrah; Civilization VII launched… not sure it was great, but it persists.
  • I don’t know if we needed a fifth Europa Universalis, but we got a fifth Europa Universalis.  I failed at the last four, so passed… but it is there if you want it!
  • A good year for indie titles.  I know some people get salty and go on about how not every indie title prospered whenever you mention an indie success.  So a good year for quality indie titles, because it is never a good year for mediocre, knock-off crap indie titles.
  • A shout out to GoG.com for keeping some old titles alive.  A pity Amazon ditched it for their AI Luna platform, which I absolutely will not touch.  Hope the new owner… who was one of the old owners… doesn’t mess things up.
  • Despite my blase attitude towards the event, the Steam Winter Sale still has some tempting deals… it is only the size of my library and the number of unplayed titles that restrains me
  • Oh, and Steam hasn’t gone evil on us yet… though Gabe buying a mega yacht with a submarine dock does make you go, “uh, what?”  But at least he keeps his mouth shut.
  • The Gabe Cube promises to… I don’t know, but people seem to be excited about it.
  • Oh my, Half Life 3 rumors for 2026 already?  A launch title for the Gabe Cube you say?  Tell me more!

Blogs, Social Media, Media, and Online Life

  • The blog abides – TAGN made it past the 19 year mark.
  • In 2025 TAGN saw another uptick.  I think writing about No Man’s Sky helped a lot.
  • The 2025 TAGN Fantasy Critic League was fun for me.  Was it good for you?
  • Google search continues to accept my existence and send people to the blog.
  • WordPress.com, despite all its drama and bad updates, hasn’t broken their platform yet or completely wrecked it with AI slop options… but it is trying hard with the latter.
  • The blogging community likewise abides.
  • Hey, we even had a pretty good Blaugust in 2025.
  • Blue Sky has shaped up nicely and isn’t owned by a right-wing billionaire eager to suppress speech they don’t like (You’ll say “X” and I’ll point to Threads as well).  It is still full of people who seem to get enraged if anybody disagrees with them, which makes me want to ask if they are new to this social media thing.  Seriously, mute or block and move on if crazies show up.  Life is too short.
  • Mastodon likewise hangs on, having grabbed that “Linux of social media” corner of the market.  Still clunky and odd, but it abides.
  • Despite some questionable moves… like ads in all the things… streaming services have managed to put out some decent content.  I was down with things like Pluribus, Alien: Earth, and Mobland on various services, along with a fresh season of Slow Horses.  Oh, and the second season of Andor was so very good, if a little too on point for our current situation.
  • Meanwhile Netflix remains in a league of its own for new content.  If I go back and look at my Binge Watching posts for 2025, Netflix dominates.  I turn streaming services off and on regularly when we’ve finished shows, but I never even think about it with Netflix.  There is just always something new there every week.  I don’t know if their business model is sustainable, but absolutely dominates.
  • On the big screen… or on the small screen when we watched… there were some decent films to be found.  I was pretty happy with F1 and KPop Demon Hunters was fun, even if the music didn’t do anything for me.  We saw the former actually in the theater, but I cannot remember if we saw anything else beyond our living room.

That is what springs to mind in my stream of consciousness.  What else good happened?

2026

It is coming.  We cannot stop it.  We will have to see what it brings and what we can make from that.