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?"
I left them all behind for Minecraft (Score:5, Interesting)
Being able to put my own stamp on the world ranks so highly in importance for me that I'm staying out of the fray until EQNext comes out.
Go Tabletop (Score:2, Interesting)
Pathfinder.
The Secret World (Score:5, Interesting)
Personally I find The Secret World very nice for my wife and me as we play casually. There is new content on a steady basis and lots of outfits that my wife loves. :)
It's set in a dark contemporary world where the secret societies are comming into the open due to paranormal events.
It's quite a horror style dark mmo
We also play minecraft multiplayer on a whitelist server, and my 2.5 year old daugher is starting to take very much interest in watching us feed cows or ride the minecarts :)
Re:I recommend non - MMO (Score:3, Interesting)
Eve Online (Score:1, Interesting)
Good question, they are all crap (Score:3, Interesting)
Don't get me wrong, I've spent the better part of my MMO experience playing WoW, SWToR, Rift.... unfortunately, none of them seem to sate my appetite.
MMO developers are dumbing everything down. When Everquest was big, the game was complicated and challenging. I actually miss that. When Warcraft came out, it seemed like a fine balance between playability, and challenge. Just my two cents, but companies need to stop dumbing the games down, and making them a more advanced playing experience.
I quit WoW before they did the tree updates that just ruined the game, and no... I won't give it a chance because honestly it isn't worth my time. Give us a complicated game. Give me a tree as big as path of exile, a crafting system like Fallen Earth, and the spell system of Everquest. Make crafting more complicated, and allow the rewards to serve the character's level.... not always being behind the curve (you craft an item that's considered "HARD" for your crafting level, and it's for someone 3-5 levels behind you).
Stop making everything Bind on Pickup. This will allow guilds to gear geared for endgame a bit more quicker. Stupidest system ever.
Oh, and stop letting whiny 15 year olds decide the direction of the game and class balancing. Seperate what the classes do, and what they contribute to the group. There needs to be more specific roles other than DPS, Tank, Heal.
Sorry, I'm bitter :P
Re:Eve Online (Score:5, Interesting)
The best review I ever heard of EvE Online was from a guy who said that he wasn't going to pay $15 a month to be chased down and killed by some teenager with daddy issues in the Battlestar Galactica. Pretty much summed it up for me.
When I tried it out, it seemed like their were basically two modes to the game: either incredible boredom in safe space or getting constantly jumped and butt-raped in unsafe space. I guess there was some appeal in trading (kind of a much less satisfying version of the old trading routes in Elite), but it seemed like all the good routes were owned by the corporations and all that was left for the little guys were the scraps. In the end, it's even less rewarding than mining.
In short, EvE Online reminds me way too much of real life. And that's what I play videogames to avoid.
Re:As a LOTRO player (Score:5, Interesting)
I think the skill revamp is a big change, but it's not the disaster people claim. Many other MMOs have even simpler play styles. People are really using the skill revamps as the excuse they were looking for to justify their pre-planned departure.
The real problem is that the game has gotten simple anyway and the developers are making leveling up be faster and combat simpler. The sooner you get to end game the sooner you feel compelled to spend money on an expansion. It is true we used to have a large variety of skills, even before the first expansion you could argue that some classes were overloaded, but there was more grouping involved from just getting together to defeat a tough opponent on the landscape up to doing a full raid. Later it was simplified so that casual grouping was never needed, as that would slow people down on their accelerated leveling schedule. If you only solo then you really don't need many skills, but this applies to all MMOs.
Part of the problem is with players too. They really don't want to do quests on the landscape as much, they don't want to explore, they're not doing any of the single player RPG style of play at all. Instead they want to get to end game fast. They'll feel powerful if they kill things with one shot while leveling but then at high levels that same play style makes them wonder why it's easy. Most new players focus intently on making a high damage build, choosing high damage classes as main preference, others will discourage new players from trying harder or more nuanced classes, etc. So don't blame just the devs, also blame players who want to turn the game into yet another generic MMO.
And for those players who left last year for the glorious offerings of new games, I've seen quite a chunk of them returning later saying how another game was even worse or that they couldn't stand the other players and so on. There's good stuff in this expansion: the epic quests are very good again compared to the last few updates, the landscape looks great, etc. Sure not as many raids but this was never a raid heavy game.
As for the original poster: you were NOT robbed. Every game out there changes mechanics along the way, this was just a bit larger than some. But it is in no ways similar to the massive change of NGE that some compare it too. And pre-ordering is always a bad idea for any game or product. It's just dumb. Always know what it is before you buy. And since there's not sub required, you can still keep playing. The game is not the pay-to-win so many claim when you compare it to other games; you can get everything for a much smaller cost than a traditional subscription game (being forced to subscribe to play is the very definition of pay-to-win).
Finally. Please, if you're going to leave a game then just leave. Don't stick around bad mouthing it. Don't go onto all the forums to bad mouth it. Don't go onto slashdot to whine about it. JUST LEAVE! This is not a popularity contest where you're required to drag others away with you when you leave. Getting bored and leaving because of that is natural; it's an old game so it is normal for people to leave. Just don't try to drag it down when you do go.
Re:World of Warcraft (Score:5, Interesting)
On the whole though, you'll have a hard case to make that TBC or vanilla was any fun though. The questing there really really sucked, leveling sucked (e.g. Nagrand), PVP and PVE classes were hopelessly unbalanced, and 1% of players every even saw the end game despite mechanics being ridiculously simple. The run backs were endless and mind numbing, the servers had wait times to get on, the fights had all sorts of BS (immunities, fall deaths, mind controls, silences, stuns, etc). There were lots of ways to customize your talents, but only one right way to do so making all "choice" pointless. I honestly don't see what the fuss is about.
Right... WoW reached 13 million subscribers when the game wasn't any fun, and since then has slowly dropped down to under 8 million subscribers because it has been fixed....
Re:I recommend non - MMO (Score:4, Interesting)
By far the least repetitive MMO I've played, with the best low-level content, is D&D Online. There's so much low level content that you never need to repeat a quest on your way to max level.
I'm not a fan of the new endgame, the latest expansion plays too much like NWNO, but there's tons of fun game content before you get to the endgame, with many complex and interesting build choices (being very D&D based, there's remarkable depth to the "skill system" - it's like nothing else I've seen). I had years of fun just making new builds, sometimes to optimize and sometimes to just make something crazy work, before getting bored.
It also has the Underdark / Drow city Demonweb quest line (the original "dark elves in gaming", and thus the only take on that concept I've ever found interesting) which is just a darn cool area to explore and get lost it, even if the devs were losing their way by that expansion and the quests weren't the best, just wandering around was a blast for an old-school D&D player like me!
Re:Eve Online (Score:5, Interesting)
The best review I ever heard of EvE Online was from a guy who said that he wasn't going to pay $15 a month to be chased down and killed by some teenager with daddy issues in the Battlestar Galactica. Pretty much summed it up for me.
When I tried it out, it seemed like their were basically two modes to the game: either incredible boredom in safe space or getting constantly jumped and butt-raped in unsafe space. I guess there was some appeal in trading (kind of a much less satisfying version of the old trading routes in Elite), but it seemed like all the good routes were owned by the corporations and all that was left for the little guys were the scraps. In the end, it's even less rewarding than mining.
In short, EvE Online reminds me way too much of real life. And that's what I play videogames to avoid.
I may have been the guy who wrote that review—I certainly have passed up no opportunities to damn the game whenever the subject was brought up. Yet now I'm playing the thing again. Why?
Well, the number one reason is probably lack of something better to do. Also, I'm retired and now have a surplus of hostility that I can no longer vent on my boss. I had been playing the original Everquest from the day it started until about 9 months ago, except for the 3 or 4 year break I took to play Eve, World of Warcraft, and Aion. None of them held my interest, so I went back to EQ. Then one day, I just had my fill of EQ again. There's no attempt to keep the game improving or growing; Sony just wants to keep hold of the same few thousand players they have who stick around for the sake of nostalgia. I doubt whether Sony has more than one developer assigned to EQ, and his job is to create cut-and-paste "expansions" where the only differences are armor with higher stats that you have to do the same crap missions to get as every other expansions. Oh, and new spell levels that do basically the same thing as the old spells. Nostalgia is a powerful force, but it can only take you so far. Maybe some day I will feel nostalgic for EQ again.
So I popped back into EVE again just to remember how awful it was. And indeed, the awfulness is still there. To judge by the language people use, by the stuff they put in their character bios, etc. the players are still a bunch of 12 year old sociopaths with a fixation on anal rape. About half of them pretend to be girls, but you know they're not. Girls are too smart to play a game like this. (Besides, most females I've met have had a fairly limited interest in anal rape.) But I've been playing the game since early this year. Why in the world would I do that?
There are some very good things that have to be said about the game design of EVE and about the way it's run. First of all, the game is continually being improved, and the expansions are free. To get a new expansion, you just have to pay your monthly fee to pay, and that's it. There's no "free to play" BS where you get nickle and dimed to death for better sword models or whatever; you just pay your fee and you get the service you pay for. Some of the improvements have made the game more playable for me than it was before.
Eve has got a complex and fairly realistic economic simulation going (if you ignore the fact that the economy is propped up by the nightly re-seeding of minerals and NPC drops), so if you are one of those obsessive people with no other life who draw up complicated spreadsheets and calculate how to make money off manufacturing, and spend many, many hours buying and selling at the best prices, then you can be an EVE tycoon. I'm not one of those: I never did spreadsheets for work, and I'm certainly not doing them for a game. Still, it's a role some people like to play. The spaceship tech is well-thought out and complex enough to keep you working at coming up with a perfect "fit" for that cruiser or battleship you're flying. There's a lot of different kinds of things you can do in EVE, and the game doesn't force you to play one