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.
EVE-Online
Path of Exile
Ragnarok Online
Why yes, I am an excel wizard.
I forgot about PoE, but I don't count aRPG diablo esque games to be quite MMORPG (largely bc you can't completely ignore multiplayer besides trading)
I played RO's closed beta on the loki server, I think that was the official one for international players. Quit for a while. Came back on some random private server years later. Quit again. Today I play on Payon Stories and retail.
I'm an oldhead that stopped playing mmos around the time WOW got popular... so:
- Pristontale
- Ragnarok Online
- Runescape (classic)
Pristontale
TIL South Korea was really pumping out the mmos in the aughts, sadly most of them turned out to be poop.
Yeah it was a great time for a young teenager to play free games. I use to search for free MMORPGs all the time and there were new games like every week lol.
R.O.S.E, Flyff, lineage 2, etc etc
Toontown
Any good? Never tried it but it looks cute.
All I remember is that I had fun, but I was like 12. I've been meaning to check out Toontown rewritten
Unfortunately the only traditional MMO I've put any significant time into is SWTOR - which I did enjoy playing as a singleplayer experience, or going through storylines in coop with a friend. The voice acting and storylines for the classes could be great, though there was a lot of variance in quality between them. Too bad it was held up by pretty mediocre gameplay.
I've played a little bit of FFXIV and while I believe what the fans tell me about it, going through early A Realm Reborn stuff was a boring slog which didn't compel me to play more.
If Warframe counts as an MMO then it's my favorite, ez.
Played it with my brother for a bit after launch, I think I stopped playing around when they added Forochel?
My main was a Human Champion
I tried a bit of it a looong time ago and I never got into it, I should try it again.
If you want someone to play with, just DM me. I can never find anyone else interested
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.
even if the game can sometimes feel too compact to feel like a world and more like a theme park instead.
Pretty standard fare for mmorpgs since WoW, the whole themparkization of questing.
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.There's "Extreme" and "Savage" mode raids for every expansion's content, if you wanted to try those.
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
Yeah, the overworld is meant to be roamed around in casually. Like many MMOs, the challenging areas are contained experiences.
Yeah MMOs seem to have just evolved over the years to make the leveling process extremely fast and extremely easy.
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.
I always just end up back on a classic WOW private server.
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.
Even Guild Wars 1 that was the part I enjoyed the most.
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.
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FFXIV. While it's been awhile, due to life circumstances, it will always hold a place in my heart.
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Rift. I only started after it went F2P, but I had an absolute blast running around in that game. I still adore the Chloromancer/Stormblade as a class concept, running around whacking shit with my electric sword to heal back health.
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Florensia. This one is probably a bit obscure, these days. It was a F2P MMO with an added focus on ship building and combat alongside your standard dungeon crawling and such. Cartoony graphics, grindy as hell, and where some early cracks probably started forming in my egg.
It's high up on my list, but I have to admit, it wasn't for the game itself. There was a community there like no other, one that I really felt like myself in. Every day, the same names, the same faces, most of us doing more chatting than anything else.
I just don't mesh with the overall vibe I get from XIV otherwise I'd give it a try on a trial account.
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I've only played a handful. Let's see if I can rank them accurately by fondest memories:
- World of Warcraft
- Everquest
- Ultima online
Guild wars and the old Republic are the runner ups
in a few months i will have put 20 years of my life into world of warcraft, starting at age 7.
so idk what the best mmo is, but i can say with absolute certainty that its not WoW
- Star Wars Galaxies (pre-CU/NGE)
- ???
- ???
spoiler
I am gonna be honest I bounced off of basically every other MMORPG after that. Really ruined the genre for me, especially playing that game's evolution into a F2P WoW-clone like many others in the genre. I had put hours into MANY others (and some very obscure ones, anyone here played Ryzom?) but didn't really stick with any for more than a trial month. Then I got into Dota...
Star Wars Galaxies (pre-CU/NGE)
I played on the Basalisk emulated server a couple years ago, classic SWG got me interested in Ultima Online since so much of it's inspiration was taken from that.
The EMU servers are great, I just don't have that kind of time to spend on games anymore.
In the OG, I played a Bounty Hunter / Carbineer / Ranger chasing down motherfuckers in the middle of nowhere and leading Krayt Dragon hunts. Back when hunting a jedi actually meant something because there was only like a dozen of them on any given server and they were all sweaty no-lifing weirdos.
I have yet to see any MMORPG with a more robust class or crafting system than OG galaxies.
In the OG, I played a Bounty Hunter / Carbineer / Ranger chasing down motherfuckers in the middle of nowhere and leading Krayt Dragon hunts. Back when hunting a jedi actually meant something because there was only like a dozen of them on any given server and they were all sweaty no-lifing weirdos.
I had a marksman too I think iirc, carbines or heavier blasters, I didn't make much progress at the time outside of just mucking around.
Now UO I have a house in. So my goal if I come back to SWG again is to get a house and fill it with stuff.
Classic EverQuest (pre Luclin)
Classic FFXI
Classic WoW
Classic EverQuest (pre Luclin)
Fond and painful memories of grouping in Blackburrow and Crushbone and getting killed by trains. I recently tried out modern EQ and there's so much content, plus you can have an npc companion for heals which makes soloing viable.
I can't get into modern, I did project 1999 for awhile but modern sweaty gamers really ruin what it once was. A big part of the fun was logging in and playing with DnD nerds who had no idea that they didn't need to take everything very seriously (socially)
Yeah try-hards that min max EQ and play to get the best loot kill the fun.
ok but between MMOs i've played recently it's probably:
- OSRS
- Eve Online
- Albion Online
- Guild Wars 2
- Dofus (retro) / Wakfu (basically the same)
- Path of Exile
Any other French/Spanish zoomer who skipped WoW because everyone played the Ankama MMOs?
I'm totally a casual tho I don't think I spent more than 60 hours on GW and PoE each
