For me its:
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Ultima Online
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Final Fantasy XI
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Ragnarok Online
UO was a game I just recently discovered and it's fantastic, best sandbox experience I've ever had in a game.
FFXI was another recent discovery. It took the formula from Everquest and made it better. The game is even less grindy today with the QOL changes.
RO was a big part of my teenage years. I love the look of the game, it reminds me of Final Fantasy Tactics. It's a great casual game to just pop into and grind out some levels or explore.
FFXIV: As a complete work, from the exceptionally great and varied music to the extended Valentine that the game is to the entire prior run of the series, it's hard to top.
Elder Scrolls Online: This one has unique vibes among MMOs, and has a special sort of "wander any direction and something will happen, voice acted and all" immersiveness to it, even if the game can sometimes feel too compact to feel like a world and more like a theme park instead.
I'm having a hard time narrowing down on a third.
Pretty standard fare for mmorpgs since WoW, the whole themparkization of questing.
Even with that big shortcoming, there is still a lot to see and do, and just about all content but DLC dungeons are functionally free after you pay the box price, and the most recent box typically includes all previous expansions.
Tamriel is one of my guilty pleasures, even with
's ongoing skullduggery and bad ideas floating over the rest of the series.
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There's "Extreme" and "Savage" mode raids for every expansion's content, if you wanted to try those.
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Yeah, the overworld is meant to be roamed around in casually. Like many MMOs, the challenging areas are contained experiences.
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I suppose the difference there for me is I never liked leveling up and mostly saw it as a way of learning how to play the class for the actually challenging endgame content, a sort of extended tutorial with story beats.
The older games that outright took away level progress on death, I played those too before. I don't want to go back.
It's definitely subjective preference, because for me returning to "classic" WOW (yes, I was there) would feel more like a punishment.
I started MMOs back in Everquest 1 and I don't want to return to day one vanilla there, either. Like I said, personal difference.
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Yeah, we're definitely different there. I played Guild Wars one a bit when it was brand new and had just come out, and I tried to like the experience, but it was sort of a crawl to me, a chore, and I felt especially fucked over by the story by the time "the Charr have devastated your land and you must guide the refugees somewhere where they can be safe, and honor the sacrifice of their prince who was killed while also trying to protect his people" turned to "oh oops forget all of that, you're a GOD now and it's time to PVP with other GODS! EPIC(tm)(r)!"
The plot seemed to get dropped like a hot rock and I was seriously asking "what the hell? What happened to the people I was trying to protect? Even the 'ascending' thing was supposed to be for their sake, right?" And all I got back from that was ultra sweaty esports teams obliterating me in what little content there was to do at the end game.
Oh, side rant: I used to call that game "NEED MONK ONLINE" because that's what zone chats were all like, and that was my least favorite character class to play, even as secondary.
I had this issue too while questing, it took some tinkering to make a 'nerfed profile' where the overland enemies pose a bit of danger, wearing almost no armor, no blue/red CP skills, fairly low health, also using some of the new 'scribing' skills, they're customizable but not very powerful, I use a npc companion too because it's more fun gameplay overall, on average I don't think people have enough time to mess around like this though, the overland feedback thread on their forum has like 200+ pages of people debating for and against raising overland difficulty lol