Ask Slashdot: MMORPG Recommendations? 555
An anonymous reader writes "Lord of the Rings: Online's latest expansion, Helm's Deep, involved cutting many skills for all classes, with a only a handful reclaimable through the new, 1-dimensional trait trees. If you're not an end-game raider, you're out of luck. And if you are, you can now play your character perfectly with only one or two buttons. Like many who preordered the expansion, I feel robbed and I'm joining the mass exodus. What do you folks suggest? How do Guild Wars 2, RIFT, World of Warcraft and all the other MMORPGs stack up these days? What else would you recommend looking at?"
Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn (Score:4, Informative)
Final Fantasy XIV is currently my MMO of choice. As you have the freewill to spec as any class on the same character, it gives you a great deal of flexibility on how you want to play.
EVE (Score:4, Informative)
Have you tried Everquest 2? (Score:3, Informative)
While Everquest 2 is a older MMORPG it's one that has a huge depth and complexity.
There's good low level content and a reasonable player base (size wise). I have to admit it needs more people, but it's a really solid game and worth a look.
Re:I recommend non - RPG (Score:5, Informative)
Well, I'm kinda addicted to http://worldoftanks.com/ [worldoftanks.com] at the moment.
Sure, it gets repetitive after "figuring it out", but it actually has pretty varied gameplay, and each battle lasts 15-minutes max.
I like it because it's not much of a stats or twitch game.... yes stats and twitch helps, but a lot of your success often hinges on finding a good rock (or teammate) to hide behind and playing the camouflage system. Still, it's a pretty detailed physics engine, so you can still score the occasional blind shot if you know what you're doing (and you're lucky with the RNG, but mostly by knowing where to aim).
I hate RPG-type battles like in EVE where you're basically playing rock-paper-scissors with dice... Vendetta Online is much more interesting where you can use physics and cover and stuff rather than just banging out options into the interface like you're playing DDR.
WoT is free-to-play, but there's not really anything worth paying money for that you couldn't get by grinding (via successful gameplay, not "menial repetitive tasks"). I only spend a small amount of gold to carry over expensive modules when upgrading tanks, and you can score enough gold for free by doing tutorials and various other things.
Bonus for actually learning things about physics, WWII-era tanks (which all looked the same to me before), various historical artifacts, etc. so I'd even call it mildly more educational than your typical fantasy clickfest.
Re:I left them all behind for Minecraft (Score:5, Informative)
I'll agree with the AC. Minecraft with friends has been a lot more fun than the stress of end-game raid night and there are enough creepers, endermen, and lava to keep that thrill of danger going. You can even add mods to make the game more to your flavor of game.
If you're looking only to MMOs, though, my suggestion is to wait a bit. The Elder Scrolls Online [elderscrollsonline.com] is coming out in 2014, as well as Everquest Next [everquestnext.com] and Everquest Next Landmark.
Both games seem promising, with ESO bringing back PVP themes from Dark Age of Camelot in addition to a promised solo focus and EQN/EQNL promising more of a sandbox game with raiding rather than a themepark game like WoW.
Non-comprehensive list (Score:5, Informative)
EVE Online:
Pros: player-driven game, space!, huge selection of ships, skills, development paths.
Cons: subscription-driven, scammers galore, some RMT, mandating long gaming sessions, a destroyed ship is a lost ship, steep learning curve.
World of Tanks:
Pros: Free-to-Play, one of the cheapest premium costs around, tanks!, PvP-only.
Cons: filled to the brim with retard players.
World of Warplanes:
Pros: Free-to-Play, airplanes!, PvP-only.
Cons: fledgling game, retard players galore, gay game mechanics (literally: get behind the enemy player so you can fuck him up)
War Thunder: World of Tanks and World of Warplanes combined, same pros and cons apply.
Mech Warrior Online:
Pros: mechs!
Cons: pretty much everything else...
LOTRO: screw it, it's discussed.
Path of Exile:
Pros: Free-to-Play, no P2W whatsoever, huge skill tree.
Cons: confusing trading system, too much crap loot, if you mess up your build you have to start over.
Firefall:
Pros: Future-based, apocalyptic setting, jumpjets!, battleframes! (and a nice selection too), PvE, nice graphics, original mining method.
Cons: forever beta, filled with bugs, weird mix of fluff and gloom, confused development path, durability hit on death, gets boring and repetitive very fast.
Warframe:
Pros: Nice space-based lore, battleframes, interesting idea behind the game.
Cons: confusing level design, in-your-face P2W, gets boring after a while.
Neverwinter:
Pros: great lore, nice graphics, good game mechanics, good skill tree, consistent development, web gateway with crafting.
Cons: one of the most P2W games ever!, end-game means you either do 5-man quests or nothing.
Planetside 2:
Pros: huge maps, has tanks, has motorcycles of sorts, has flying vehicles, pew-pew PvP, massive PvP.
Cons: P2W galore, rubberbanding massive fights, vast areas feel devoid of... well, everything.
Hawken:
Pros: F2P, mechs!, PvP
Cons: too complex to handle for a twitch-based game. I think game speed should have been 1/2x of what's now to warrant tactical thinking rather than just "the younger player wins by reflex skill".
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Some of the games I have only played very little:
Rift: horrible game mechanics. Enough said.
Vindictus: too manga. Could have been great but...
Tera: played the stress test limited open beta, didn't quite understand what was happening, I just didn't click with it.
Ryzom: played it a bit years ago, I heard it no longer requires subscription. IIRC it was good enough for a F2P MMO, but not good enough for subscription-based.
Disclaimer: this is my personal, subjective opinion on all these games. I played them all. YMMV.
quick summaries (Score:5, Informative)
Plain and simply, wow has the best boss and quest mechanics, and is essentially required to be fairly balanced. Few bugs. No mmo has come close to the wealth of mechanics they have, from riding vehicles, reverse gravity, several stages of fights, dual-phases where people teleport around, special abilities gained to help defeat a boss, etc. And they have some clever people who balance things out to make sure the challenge is appropriate.
GW2 has attempted to get away from the holy trinity of tank/healer/dps, and introduced working area quests. Yes, they're not the first, but it works. It also has many exploration quests, which I find awesome. Even unmarked platform jumping challenge "quests" of sorts.
Sad to hear about lotro. But as I've always said, "The best, and the worst, thing about MMOs is the people."
Your enjoyment might hinge on having a good social construct in-game. If you're moving with your guild, move to whatever game they go to. If you're off to solo, find a game that's soloable. If you have limited playtime, find a game that you can dabble in and still be successful. But just saying "I need a game that requires more than 2 buttons" doesn't give much insight on how you actually prefer to play. There are tons of different games out there, from things like group-oriented Puzzle Pirates to soloable Asheron's Call to Star Wars to Neverwinter. But it's not possible to make a good recommendation without better info.
You might even be happy playing a single-player game, depending what you want.
Re:Everquest Next (Score:5, Informative)
I keep my EQ1 subscription up, but the old UI just bugs me after being used to modern MMOs, so that gets in the way. However, for PvE content, bar none, EQ1 is king and emperor. There is a lot to do, although some of the more older content may not be worth the time (epic 1.0 quests for the most part.)
WoW is good with friends, but I just get bored there, especially when the mindless dailies have changed to goofing around on Timeless Isle where it feels like a playground... kick over this turtle, get a purple. Kick open a random chest, another purple. Jump in, toss some spells at one of the spirits, etc.
The next expansion announcement didn't help much, especially with flight (which previously was something you got once you hit top level) becoming apparently a months long grindfest similar to the artifact cloak [1]. WoW has a lot of cool single player intro quests (such as the Thunder King Isle quest arc), but once done, things can be really random. One night may be OK, another night can be a complete waste of time with pickup raids. Of course, chat in towns is banal at best.
For being able to tune stats and your exact DPS/heal/tank play style, Rift was great. However, since they put raid level gear for sale in their RMT store, I just lost all interest in the game whatsoever, even though I have bought a multi-year subscription. The fact that they are going to have an entire expansion that is like one big Kedge Keep doesn't help either.
These days, I've ended up on EQ2. Its population isn't huge, but people know what they are doing in groups/raids, and even the trolls in General chat are intelligent. The devs know how to make combat and such work in zones with flight, so each expansion doesn't take flight away from the players in order to have decent content progression. EQ2 also has a nice tradeskill faculty so one can actually wind up in endgame areas at a low adventure level, which can help later on.
The game that had so much promise, IMHO, was Vanguard. I wish that it could have been kept under development for at least a year, perhaps 18 months. That would have been a solid MMO, and a decent challenge for PvE. However, these days, even though EQ2 doesn't have the cool quests like rolling down the Great Wall, it has very good content all around from solo to group to raid. Plus, one can start at level 85, so one can hit endgame raiding fairly quickly, although there is a lot of interesting content to be seen at lower levels (Sol eye especially.)
I have some hopes for Everquest: Next, but the graphics are off-putting (it looks like a 1950s cartoon and a WoW character model had offspring.) However, gameplay is what matters, so I'm going to wait and see on that.
IMHO, I dislike F2P, because it implies P2W. EQ2 is probably the best balance -- other than starting at level 85, there are no raid level items (other than appearance stuff) that one can just buy. Gear still has to be earned to hit ToV or other endgame places. No chest and keys system either. What you loot is what you get.
Of course, there are other MMOs, but when you get PK-ed when you create your first character before you ever load completely into the newbie zone makes the games an instant turn-off, or even better, you keep getting killed repeatedly at the respawn point until you just kill the game client.
[1]: I'd hate to deal with the next expansion on a PvP server. Flight means being able to get somewhere versus becoming someone's HKs, so it just makes playing less worth it if one is on those realms.