Daily Archives: January 30, 2026

Friday Bullet Points – 2026 MMO Roadmap Round Up Edition

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It is the start of a new year.  Beyond the start, really, as we’re already at the far end of January.  This is generally an optimum time for a game company to come out and revive a bit of interest in their title or titles now that the holidays are behind us.

And what better way to do that than to give us some things to look forward to, something accomplished with a product roadmap.

This is especially true of MMOs and other live service games that depend on ongoing player engagement.  You can’t just tell them what you have today or what you might have next year, but why you should stick around in the interim.

And some titles have obliged, while others… have not.  But since I went as far to rank the various 2025 roadmaps last year, I figured why not gather them all in one place again for 2026.

We will start with the elephant in the room.  Blizzard had their big 2026 preview of plans for WoW and WoW Classic yesterday which yielded a combined roadmap for the Azeroth franchise.

World of Warcraft 2026 Roadmap

We have a nice linear roadmap with three swim lanes for the three major flavors of WoW running right now.

The highlight is, of course, on retail WoW and the WoW Midnight expansion and what will be going on with it, down to what the planned major patches will deliver over the course of 2026.

Down the list, in what one might assume is in order of interest and/or neglect, are two of the flavors of WoW Classic.  There is anniversary classic, which will be jumping into The Burning Crusade expansion next week, on February 5th.  The pre-patch has been for a few weeks… more than we got back during the first round of WoW Classic… and will soon be in the rear view mirror and the whole thing will be committed to TBC for the balance of 2026 it seems.

There are some phases, but a year is a long time for a re-run… a second re-run… of old content.  They wouldn’t run a Burning Crusade Remix in retail for that long, would they?

Meanwhile, the 2019 OG WoW Classic servers are stuck in Mists of Pandaria without any mention of anything else.  Are these servers going to be done by the end of summer?  Or is everybody hoping that springing Warlords of Draenor Classic on us at a later date will make things better?

The WoW Classic community on Reddit is taking this very well, as you can see here, and here, and here, and also here.  And anybody looking for Classic Plus… well, maybe next time.

Jagex is in full swing, celebrating the 25th anniversary of RuneScape, and they have a classic roadmap laid out to get out the news.

RuneScape 2026 Roadmap

I’ve already covered this in a post, but I figured if I was going to roll up roadmaps I have best drag it along.

Enshrouded 2026 Roadmap

As a roadmap it does do better than their 2025 edition in that at least there is a linear order to it.  But there are also only two checkpoints along the way, Spring and Update 0.8 and Autumn with the 1.0 release.  You do get a sense of moving forward though, so I’ll allow it.

Daybreak got on the roadmap release cycle back around the 25th anniversary of EverQuest, when they had a lot of stuff to talk about.  Since then however, their roadmap has ended up getting cluttered with a bunch of stuff, turning it more into a calendar than a roadmap.

That is an accurate observation.  I think I made a similar point about their 2025 roadmap being mired in a lot of details rather than a vision of progress.

So Jen Chan posted in the forums that there would be the usual two game updates and an expansion for 2026, along with a time locked expansion server of some sort, which is what we all would have predicted in any case.  So the message is that there won’t be anything really new… not unexpected out of a game coming up on its 22nd year.

However, and I might be over-reading this, the statement also included a somewhat ominous “nobody can predict the future” statement.  I don’t know what that means, but people who say that generally don’t say it in a happy, cheerful tone of voice.  And they often have a reason for making such a statement.  Blink twice if we should be worried JChan!

As with its younger sibling, no roadmap, just a simple statement in the forums about not wanting to have to post redundant information.  Again, last year it became a calendar more than a roadmap.  They will announce things as they come up.

No mention of a plan, though we can probably assume the usual game update and expansion routine along with the two announced special servers, but at least there was no ominous foreshadowing about not being able to predict the future in the mix.

The thing with SSG is that they will put out a roadmap and it will be… well… kind of crap.  And part of the reason it will be crap is that, in the post presenting the roadmap they will add in something that obviously should be on any reasonable roadmap.

LOTRO Roadmap for Q1 & Q2 2026

I can appreciate a shorter term roadmap I suppose.  I have said elsewhere on the blog that anything beyond six months is often fiction when it comes to new product features.  And we saw LOTRO blow its own roadmap last year when the whole 64-bit server thing got out of hand.

But, really, are you planning much more that the same two major updates and an expansion for 2026?  It is hard to tell.

  • EVE Online – I am pretty sure this is right

There has been no 2026 roadmap for New Eden, but I am pretty sure we’re safe in just running with this roadmap that I swiped from r/eve last year.

EVE Online 2026 Roadmap Prediction

I guess there might be roadmaps for the other games that CCP has in flight… but somehow, I suspect those are all in flux.  I was hoping for a last minute entry from CCP, but no such luck.  If they come up with something later that will get its own post.

Anyway, that is what I have here at the end of January 2026.  Were there other roadmaps I missed?