The most anticipated online games of 2025

The public looks forward to the year 2025 with great hope. Gamers are especially impatient, waiting for high-profile releases. It so happened that in 2024 developers more often postponed, tested and postponed than released something interesting. Nevertheless, there is already enough information about future novelties - from MMORPG based on "Dune" to Russian multiplayer shooter, where post-apocalypse and Escape from Tarkov mechanics are mixed. Let's tell you more about the upcoming premieres.

This game is expected as much as the third part of Denis Villeneuve's movie epic. Gamification of "Dune" promises to be a large-scale adventure in the open world, but without a predetermined scenario. That is, in Awakening there is no Paul Atreides rebelling against the rules of the empire, his sister Alia, mother Jessica and other characters familiar from Frank Herbert's books. But there is a confrontation between the great houses and the local Freemen, fighting back against both. In an MMO game about a desert planet where the most valuable substance in the universe is mined, everyone determines their own fate. In what way, you may ask? Funcom employees have already answered this question.

First you have to create a character, find freemen and learn the discipline of the desert from them. In other words, learn how to survive on the surface of the planet. You will have to conserve water, wear a special suit and take spice if you want to develop unique abilities in your character. On the map there will be settlements of Atreides and Harkonnen, camps of bandits and slave traders, as well as a place to build your base. The developers promise to ride giant sandworms and several paths of social development, in the end of which you can gain control over spice mining or lead one of the great houses. At the same time, there will be hundreds more of the same glory seekers on the map.

NCSoft used to be on the lips of all MMO-game fans - you bet, because it released Lineage II and Guild Wars. But lately it is rarely mentioned. And it's not about the quality of products, but about the fact that the profitability of development began to fall steadily. For several years now, Korean gamemakers have been working on the second part of Aion - and judging by the news of 2024, next year they will really have something to show. There is already confirmed information about the project's release in the second half of 2025. And we know enough about the game itself. In particular, unlike the first part, the main focus here will be on PvE, not PvP.

Aion 2 will take place 900 years before the events of the original. Heroes will have to travel and fight in a large open world, where there are no classes, and the ability of each determines the equipment. But there will be factions, including hundreds of participants, and the freedom to fight in any of the zones on the map. In their announcements, the developers separately note that they intend to completely change the combat system (obviously, to adapt to smartphones) and partially limit the flight mechanics, which became the hallmark of the first part. A global release with cross-platform support is expected, that is, it will be possible to transfer progress from PC to mobile device and back.

This MMORPG has been called the most ambitious in the history of MMORPGs - and it has been so for eight years, from the very announcement to the alpha status. At the same time, there was no exact release date, and there is still no exact release date. It is only known that the release is scheduled for 2025, or even the next year. But it doesn't matter, because the main thing is that it will be released, which can be understood at least by the user tests. And what is waiting for us then? According to official data, the development is conducted on Unreal Engine 5, and the role-playing system will be classic - with the choice of race, class and adding additional properties of the hero at level 25.

The main feature of Ashes of Creation is that its virtual world is planned to be at the mercy of players. That is, the users themselves will be able to manage the economy and politics - from founding settlements, which will then develop into cities, to sending caravans with any goods to any destination. At the same time, the environment will react to the actions of the characters. Of course, not everyone's development will go as planned - someone will definitely decide to attack your settlement (node), or you and your friends will attack your neighbors. This will be the PvP mode, without specially allocated territories and guild wars on special servers.

The space MMORPG by Icelandic company CCP Games is known all over the world. Taking advantage of this fact, the developers are trying to switch the perspective of the game from flying among the stars to something more down-to-earth and compact. One of such experiments will be a first-person shooter Vanguard, where mercenaries fight among themselves for the redistribution of power in New Eden. But in 2024 another game with the subtitle EVE was announced - it's about the flight and survival simulator in the open world Frontier. Here you will take on the role of a researcher who goes to the edge of the galaxy and penetrates a system full of gravitational anomalies.

The plot will be based on the pilots' struggle with the crazy artificial intelligence, which keeps in fear a remote sector of space. But there will also be other adventures, and a chance to write your own story through interaction with other heroes and their squads. Along the way, everyone will collect resources, including raw matter, which is most valuable here, and at the same time to improve the starship, trade, unite and fight with the rest of the inhabitants of the servers. The developers threatened to add a blockchain to the project to manage the game's economy, but the boom of such solutions is now coming to an end - probably, everything will still have time to change by the release.

Here we got to the Russian game in the selection. Studio GFA Games promised to release Pioner this year, but due to various circumstances the release had to be postponed to 2025. Now for sure, as evidenced by the data on the pages in digital stores. That said, despite the postponements, the concept of the online action game remains unchanged. If you reduce the gameplay to one formula, you will get a mixture of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series entourage and Escape from Tarkov style outings. That is, you will be able to enjoy the view of post-Soviet devastation, look at dangerous anomalies, fight mutants - and all this in the company of friends.

In the game you have to go to an island where something strange is going on. Villages are extinct, and the laws of physics in some places as if abolished. But the real heroes are unlikely to stop this. Before them stretches 50 square kilometers of mysteries. You can gather a squad and go down into the dungeon, take part in PvP shootouts or risk for a prize in PvE. On the map will appear and peaceful zones, where you can upgrade equipment and buy ammunition, and "Shadowlands", where every step can be the last. To improve the guns will allow you to improve the workbenches installed at the base, and to collect unique things will be able to only those who will get artifacts from anomalies.

Today, the work of Embark studio is well known to fans of multiplayer shooters. The thing is that former Battlefield and Battlefront series developers from DICE joined this team, and the debut of the team was The Finals - a very good start. ARC Raiders is the second project of the studio, which has undergone a lot of changes during its creation. Suffice it to say that originally the game was made with the aim of PvE-fights in cooperative mode, but now we know something else - it will be a PvPvE-shooter with evacuation and survival mechanics. In other words, another variation of Escape from Tarkov is on its way, only in a sci-fi universe and with release not only on PC, but also on current consoles.

The abbreviation ARC in the world of the game refers to robots arriving from outer space that destroy all life. A handful of Resistance soldiers will have to repel the attack and clear the planet of mechanical invaders. You can do it on different maps and with a third-person view. The rules are clear to any fan of the genre: you have a squad and the goal of the mission, but other teams on the location are striving for the same goal, so you need to shoot enemies, and from competitors to fight off, and then leave the battlefield with the loot. On the way you will have the opportunity to use gadgets and items of the environment. What will be especially pleasant for gamers, ARC Raiders, as well as The Finals, will be available for free on the day of release.

If the first parts of the series offered a lot of adventures for single players, the third part of the series clearly showed that if you want to survive on the planet Pandora, you should have the support of your partners, especially if there is a boss battle to be fought. Borderlands 4 continues this trend: although it has a solo mode, the developers from Gearbox advise to go through the trials with friends. Despite the close release, we don't know much about this action game yet, except that it has the same location, four characters to choose from and, as the developers promise, "billions of guns and ferocious enemies". Even the sel-shading graphical gimmick isn't going anywhere. But some things will be really new.

Firstly, we will see the continuation of the story, which was started in Borderlands 3 and is connected with the search for Pandora's companion Elpis. Secondly, there will be an interesting main enemy - despotic Time Keeper, who controls masses of people, but doesn't know what is waiting for him yet. From the gameplay details we know only about the arsenal with customization of guns and adding different effects to them. What else to expect from the game on release, will tell Gearbox employees themselves in early 2025. There's a good chance they won't go wrong. After all, the Borderlands universe has to smooth out the unpleasant impression from the recent movie adaptation with Cate Blanchett in the lead role.

Let's conclude the selection with a rather unexpected piece of work. It would seem that GTA rarely comes to mind when it comes to online games. Rather there are associations with the characters and ridiculous situations in which they get into. We do not know how good will be the plot of the sixth part of the series, whether the characters will be interesting, but the fact that the developers from Rockstar Games will screw to the game the world's best multiplayer, hardly anyone doubts. Online fifth Grand Theft Auto is still full of people: gamers pass standard tests and invent their own, together participate in robberies and races, and sometimes just drive around the open world of Los Santos.

We should not forget about the phenomenon of private servers generated by GTA Online. That is, it is a multiplayer, within which skillful people create another multiplayer with any rules. There are, for example, RP-servers (from the word role-playing), where everyone must play a role, and for violation of the wagering person can be banished. But there are also worlds with complete freedom of action. Some are available for free, for entry to others you have to pay. But the main thing is that this entertainment remains popular for about a decade. And if the developers from Rockstar manage to repeat something similar in 2025, it will be great.

What online games are you looking forward to this year?