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 recommend non - MMO (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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:I recommend non - MMO (Score:4, Funny)
Repetition is good. My favorite repetitive MMOs are Candy Crush, or anything by Zinga. :p
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Those are more like Small Single-player Online, or SSO, games; all of the grinding with none of the content and none of the other players.
Re:I recommend non - MMO (Score:5, Funny)
But... but... I invite my friends and get more lives! ;p
Re:I recommend non - MMO (Score:5, Insightful)
Did you see that no one else had posted yet and absolutely needed to fill the void?
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.
Not sure how it stacks up. (Score:2)
As a LOTRO player (Score:2)
Re:As a LOTRO player (Score:5, Funny)
Amateur!
I solo'd up to the last level with just one button. Picked up some sweet 'shroom upgrades on the way, that Bowser guy didn't even stand a chance!
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.
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Well, something I've found on the server that I'm on is that grouping is almost non-existent beyond The Barrow-Downs. At least that's the way it feels. As a solo it doesn't bother me but there isn't a lot of interaction between players in places like Bree. I've had a few group quests that I was going to try to ge
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Most new players focus intently on making a high damage build, choosing high damage classes as main preference
I have to blame part of this on the design of games coming out. It seems like any meaningful crowd control, healing, and utility classes are being sidelined for DPS. Even with Guildwars, the mobs all die so fast that DoTs, heals and other utility are pointless.
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.
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.
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Given how little we know about Landmark's details, I'm a little leery of dedicating too much time to it. The building part of Minecraft is the least of the enjoyment I get out of it. What I have fun doing is funnelling mobs into death chambers, creating automated farms, complex piston contraptions, hopper and redstone circuits. If Minecraft was just a game of building large static structures... I definitely wouldn't put as much time into it.
With the size of the voxels, it would make it hard to do rails I
Re:I left them all behind for Minecraft (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm glad you enjoy thinking up complex projects and implementing them through lots of work, even though there is no point other than entertainment.
Personally I don't understand the mindset.
If I want to do something challenging and complicated and creative, I'll go write code. I find this entertaining AND the end result could be useful, and I learn skills along the way.
When I'm tired of programming, I want to do something that doesn't feel remotely like work, so I'll fire up a first person shooter and turn on god mode, and blow things away. Or I'll watch a movie or read scifi.
When creating something like a subway system in minecraft, what keeps you motivated through the boring/difficult times?
I feel that effort merely for entertainment is waste of time. If you have the energy to do something creative, then create something useful.
Keep on creating until you are too tired, then go do something passive for fun.
Go Tabletop (Score:2, Interesting)
Pathfinder.
Re: (Score:3)
Yup, between roll20 and Google Hangouts for the actual game and many awesome groups and collectives online you can be playing nearly every night a week if you want.
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 :)
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I found the combat in TSW to be incredibly boring, with most fights taking too long. It got to the point where it was taking 30-45 seconds to kill a mob, which wasn't fun at all. Especially since I was more or less just using one skill 5 times in a row, followed by two finishers (one for each weapon); rinse and repeat about 8 times. If you can get past the generally slow pacing of combat, though, the game is worth it for the story and atmosphere alone.
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I found the combat in TSW to be incredibly boring, with most fights taking too long. It got to the point where it was taking 30-45 seconds to kill a mob,
Fascinating. I blame modern MMORPG flaws on you then. lol. Just kidding of course, but I find the pace of modern MMO battles to be ABSURDLY fast paced.
I remember spending 30+ seconds solo killing level 5 rats in Everquest 1 back in the day, and the sometimes spending multiple minutes taking down a routine deep dungeon pull. And I'm not talking a tank or hea
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Not to mention that the world is very beautiful :)
The whole package is just well crafted and entertaining, and the fact that you can get all the skills and abilities but have to build your own "deck" from over 500 makes it very free indeed.
One of Them (Score:4, Insightful)
Wildstar (Score:2)
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)
WoW, ESO (Score:2)
I'd say WoW, even after all of these years. The Pandaria expansion, despite the corny Pandarian race, is still well done and fun to play, and there is no shortage of people to group with. I let my subscription expire recently though. I played Rift for a while, it is pretty fun, but the game engine performance really sucks which drove me away. SWTOR got boring pretty quickly and also suffers from performance problems. Both of the latter games come across as more somber/serious, which skews the players more m
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The less corny Blizzard games got, the less interesting I found them(even without never-going-to-buy-it DRM questions)
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ESO will be subscription only which I am very wary of. I'm also wary of it for other reasons (it is not built by Bethesda, the lore is screwy, and it has too much pvp in it).
World of Warcraft (Score:5, Funny)
It's a lesser known title, but with a very dedicated core of players.
Re:World of Warcraft (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
The WoW improvements just mean that you read EJ, follow their instructions for the class you are playing, select the talents they point out, play the rot they instruct, and gear up exactly as stated, or else you will lose your raid spot to someone who does do that.
What would be great would be Everquest 2's loot system (and augments, similar to having all items be socketed), Rift's soul trees, Everquest 1's AAs, and maybe a fairly short class selection like WoW's that is more than "Rift's "fighter/mage/cleri
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:World of Warcraft (Score:5, Insightful)
Basically all the single-button-click group matchmaking, and cross realms created an atmosphere where there was no sense of community anymore. There were no reputations to be worried about. There's way less of the "Multiplayer" in WoW as an MMO now. Yes...there are loads of other players. But they've taken away soooo much of the incentive to actually interact with those other players, that you might as well be playing a single player game with bots now.
Turbine (Score:2)
Yes, Path of Exile (Score:2)
Sure, it's basically Diablo 2, but with more multiplayer integration and a more fun IMO economy. Free, no pay-to-win, you can solo fine if you really want, and it's HARD if you play as intended instead of hanging back and farming (without being totally unforgiving; no item loss on death, no exp loss until your second playthrough). Which as an ex-WoW player is a super huge god damn plus. I am so sick of constant easymode MMOs.
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LotRO doesn't really have pay-to-win by many definitions. There is literally nothing you need in the store to play the game at all levels, all the items are optional. If you subscribe then you get enough point allowance to even purchase an expansion with the points every year as long as you don't waste points on extras. But subscribing is pay-to-win (also pay-to-play). You can drop that down and budget only $5 a month and get everything ala-carte and do quite well, you won't even need to grind out point
If you want to keep your setting try this. (Score:2)
World of Tanks/Warplanes (Score:2)
I've had a lot of luck recently with World of Tanks and World of Warplanes. They're not RPG's, but they are MMO. Not much investment needed for a playing either.
I recently played Neverwinter. I can't recommend it though. The leveling up is very fast (Which isn't necessarily bad on it's own) and when you hit end game there is almost nothing to do. The free to play formula is extremely expensive addons ($20 for a bag) that frankly make it not worth your time.
Other than that, there are literally dozens of
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
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Even Everquest has been made easier, and it is generally better, as the challenge is still there. If I could get over the relative antiquated UI and start back, it is a pretty decent game now. The days of losing all your gear are long gone (a trip to the Guild Lobby, a mash of a veteran's AA, or if gone for a while, a visit to Shadowrest would get one's stuff back.) With a merc, all classes can solo fairly easily.
Even though one can solo, the game is still a group game... there isn't much endgame that is
Stay away from World of Warcraft (Score:2)
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.
Star Citizen (Score:4, Insightful)
Which is about to reach $30M in crowd funding...although hurry as the ability to get life time insurance for your ships will be ending next week. Then LTI will only be on the grey market...
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The LTI is over. Only those who already have LTI can buy more LTI ships until next week.
I ponied up a few bucks for a digitial package. Looking forward to this one!
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".
====================
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.
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Some of us don't regard those last two as "Cons".
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Its subscription driven, but you can pay for your subscription with ingame currency.
Best crafting system and market in any MMORPG ever (probably).
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Some of us don't regard those last two as "Cons".
I don't regard the first one as a "con". What's wrong with paying for goods or services, with giving value for value in an honest transaction? If you want free stuff, you will either get something that is worth what you paid for it, or you will pay in some other way you weren't expecting, and probably won't like.
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Most of those aren't actually MMORPG's. They're just multiplayer games.
Thank you (Score:4, Insightful)
" gay game mechanics" (my emphasis)
Using the word "gay" as a synonym for "bad" isn't nice. I know it's common, but that doesn't excuse it, and you probably wouldn't use the descriptor for another minority group in the same way. Please consider not using the word gay this way. Thanks!
Surprise buttsecks (Score:3)
World of Warplanes [...] gay game mechanics (literally: get behind the enemy player so you can fuck him up)
Using the word "gay" as a synonym for "bad" isn't nice.
I don't think war4peace was using "gay" as slang for bad. I think (s)he was drawing parallels between a combat maneuver in that game and entering through the exit [wikipedia.org], hence the "literally".
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.
MMORPG plus Bitcoin (Score:2)
Lets do both.... an MMORPG combined with Bitcoins...
http://dragons.tl/ [dragons.tl]
Firefall is nice (Score:3)
Ive been enjoying Firefall recently. It's an MMO FPS with a complicated craft system. You run around in specialized battleframes and gain resources and xp through a variety of tasks, from mining to random encounters to special missions to outright invasions. It's in beta right now, free to play, and so far paying just gets you a few bennies for those in a hurry. I did pay $25 so I could get a motorcycle and a gliderpad, based on how much I enjoyed playing the first few days, but I could have worked to get the resources and build the bike.
Guild Wars 2...if it fits your niche (Score:2)
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If he left LotRO because the simplified the skills system, then GW2 is probably the last thing he wants.
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I second that.
For exploring / achieving GW2 is probably the best game I've played.
At least as good as WoW, which I played for many years (and will probably play it again some, come next expansion).
WvW (large scale PvP against other servers) is also fun, even though I'm not much of a PvPer.
Only thing that concerns me is how they're able to make money, considering there's no subscription once you've bought the game, and the real money store is mainly fluff.
But I guess enough people like funny hats to keep it
Dumb decision (Score:2)
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.
You've just robbed yourself of the perfect opportunity of having Stephen Hawking in your team, mate.
Sadly... (Score:3)
I have tried many MMORPGs. I have enjoyed some more than others, but it saddens me to say this: World of Warcraft is still the best choice.
- I tried LOTRO back in the beta, but it was so bad back then that I didn't bother with the real thing.
- I played through the first 24 levels in Aion, but then I started running out of content (the game expected me to grind the rest of the exp without content), so it also went into the blacklist.
- I enjoyed RIFT for a while, but although it has some interesting concepts, it always felt like just an attempt at copying WoW's style.
- I loved GW2's gameplay and event system, but it was too shallow overall.
- TERA's gameplay was not too bad, but it was unremarkable, it did not hook me in.
- I liked Neverwinter, but the paywalls made it annoying.
- I hated FF14, and I dislike FF14arr nearly as much. People seem to like it, but I did not manage to see how it is any better than the original.
I probably forget some, but that simply means they are not even worth mentioning.
Ingress (Score:3)
Get out, meet people, lose weight (i did, a lot of it) and see things you normally don't see. Every new place you go, you see things you probably would have missed.
Queen's Blade (Score:2)
Scarlet Blade
http://scarletblade.aeriagames.com/ [aeriagames.com]
Gotta love running around dressed like a ho. Go big or go home!
Final Fantasy XIV 2.0 (Score:2)
I don't play as hard-core as most, and at most a couple hours every other day. But I find there's enough content to do something whenever I'm on, and with the dungeon finder it helps finding someone to do whatever your looking for.
But whatever game you play of this type it comes down to the community. Having a core group for friends to play with can turn any game into fun.
Also... (Score:4, Funny)
Which is better: vi or Emacs?
RL (Score:3)
Go to work, earn coin, purchase upgrades, find partner, create alt chars, twink them until they become new mains.
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Can I recommend an MMO? (Score:4, Insightful)
Honestly?
No.
Since the closure of City of Heroes, there's nothing that I really want to play. I have no desire to play high fantasy games, I won't ever touch anything remotely connected to NCSoft again, I'm a casual player who can't devote massive tracts of time, and I'm utterly disgusted by P2W.
I'm hoping that the upcoming, community-driven, City of Titans fits into the hole that CoH left. But for right now, about the most I do is play Freecell.
Neverwinter is excellent (Score:3)
Impressions... (Score:3)
Rift: By far my favorite of the games. I don't play it, though, because they've basically abandoned even the pretense of enforcing any of their rules. Wanna tell everyone that "abbos" are basically monkeys and ought to be gassed? Talk about how you want to rape someone's kids? Spend your evenings making jokes about how much you hate gays? Go to the designated RP server just to stalk RPers around and harass them? Right now, Rift is your best choice. Particularly mystifying, because in basically every other category, Rift's devs strike me as among the most passionate and skilled in the field, and also some of the most engaged with their customer base. Except on this one thing. Unfortunately, social interaction is the biggest thing by far about MMOs for me. And yes, I'm aware that every game has some of that. What's different is that in Rift, the same person can be using the same character to do this for, quite literally, over a year without them being told to stop. One person I know once got into an argument and told another player he was going to rape them with a knife; he did get contacted by a GM, who apparently suggested that maybe he should tone it down a bit. F2P model is, thus far, surprisingly non-abusive. In particular, if you want to just play the game without ever paying a penny, that's actually viable. Performance not nearly as good as it should be, but they're actively working on it; until recently, the bulk of the game's rendering engine was not multicore-friendly.
FF14 ARR: The parts that are good are amazing. But in other respects, they have taken incompetence to a whole new level. It took them ages to solve the VERY challenging problem that their spam filter wouldn't notice that you were sending 2-3 messages a second to a channel as long as each message varied by a few characters, for instance. Rumor has it that they've had exploits which allowed malicious users to, for instance, sell a stack of 99 cheap items to a vendor, but inform the game that they had sold very expensive items. Or instantly level themselves to the level cap by handing in a single quest. Probably mostly fixed by now, but that these things were wrong in a game which is already a re-release from a company with prior experience is insane. On the other hand, very pretty, very atmospheric, good storytelling. But it is a Final Fantasy game; it is literally a few minutes from when you create your character to the first time you are able to move, and even then you simply aren't allowed turn around and walk the other way until you've talked to your quest giver. No, really. And yet, it's pretty fun. Sub-only. Performance is pretty decent, although the previous release was apparently bad. Special mention for the very deep and full-featured crafting system, which I personally find to be the most fun part of it.
D&D Online: F2P model a little harsher than, say, Rift. However, a sufficiently patient player can probably unlock all the restricted content through in-game activity. Or just sub for a while. This game is not really D&D -- if you are familiar with the 3.5 rules, it will screw you up as much as it helps you. It is, however, the minmaxer paradise. This is a game which absolutely, unconditionally, rewards people who are good at thinking out how to make their numbers stack for best results. Very unusual mechanics in a number of ways; for instance, you don't get XP from killing mobs, only from achieving objectives. No automatic healing just from not being in combat, and if you aren't playing with difficulty turned down (there's settings for that), you can run out of resources trying to do a quest. Graphics are sort of unimpressive compared to a lot of other games. On the other hand, has a native mac client, which can matter if you have a mac or have friends who prefer the mac. Runs well on older hardware. Insane depth of character creation, and after you cap out, you can restart the character as anything else, only with small permanent bonuses. Which stack.
TSW: Buy-to-play. Lots of stuff you might
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How about breaking in to PoFear only to have your whole raid wipe... and begging another guild to rescue you before your corpses rotted?
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EQ2 started off with a strong game but as soon as the exodus happened when WoW went online so much stuff got dumbed down. It was a shame because it was a great looking game, the zone were big and the play was fun. Today when I see it in a MMORPG I just expect that that's t
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.
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:Eve Online (Score:5, Funny)
> In short, EvE Online reminds me way too much of real life. And that's what I play videogames to avoid.
I hear you. Same with movies. Wife's choices are inevitably downers. I tell her, if I wanted to be depressed, I'd stay at work.
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AMEN! I'll never forget my wife suggesting I watch "City of Angels" before she returned the DVD.
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You should cheer yourself up by watching a lovely cartoon called Grave of the Fireflies!
Re:Eve Online (Score:5, Insightful)
You're doing it wrong. It's an MMO. If you aren't making it on your own, *JOIN* one of those corporations (or get a bunch of people together and create your own).
Or go solo. It's entirely possible. It's risky and requires a lot of skill, and you'll get blown up a lot at first... but if you're actually good (and combat is Eve is much more skill-based than a casual observer might think) you can easily find, and win, small fights all day long. Yeah, you'll need a good ship (which means money and training time), but the risks are also lower when you're starting out. Be a pirate. Be a mercenary. Take over a wormhole.
You make the rules, man. That's the essence of the game. It's like libertarian paradise. Would I want to live there for real? Hell no! But it's a fun thing, to go out and fight, solo or with a small gang or with a massive battle fleet.
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EVE is one of those old school "you must group up you evil scum sucking soloer, don't you know what the M stands for!" games. Thus it appeals heavily to some players while disgusting others.
Re:Eve Online (Score:4, Insightful)
EVE is one of those old school "you must group up you evil scum sucking soloer, don't you know what the M stands for!" games. Thus it appeals heavily to some players while disgusting others.
And the way the game works, and is designed, you can't trust any of the people you group with, your corp mates or pretty much anyone.
The only people in EVE who you can trust are ones who you can hunt down and beat the shit out of in REAL LIFE. If I were ever to get back into EVE I'd have to do it with a bunch of real life friends. And I'd have to have some good blackmail material on them as well.
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Libertarian paradise? I don't think there's anything in the libertarian credo that says you should rip off everyone who's weaker than you are, but that's the rule in EVE. The EVE universe is one of untrammeled barbarism; it's a sort of anti-society because there is no basis for trust or lasting cooperation.
I played EVE and then moved to a place that is actually like this in real life (without the gunmen walking the street and there aren't very many explosions, but other than that pretty much untrammeled barbarism).
After a while of playing EVE I thought "You know what? I have to watch my back every day just walking down the street here. I don't need to simulate this in a game."
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At the time I compared the PVP server there (Along with the model in Eve and even Ultima Online) to a mall in which a gang would hang out and anally rape anyone who went to that mall. And they'd tell people, "If you don't want to be anally raped, go to a different mall!" And th
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
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I second EVE Online. I've been playing it for better part of 10 months, and now I've gotten to the point where I no longer need to pay. in fact, I've bought the last four or so subscriptions out of in-game money I made working for the in-game empires. If you focus training, you can easily be self-sufficient in two months or so.
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I've done all those things and they're overrated.
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If the exodus is that great as of Helm's Deep, maybe by that time they'll have kneejerked their changes back into something more enjoyable, and then you do
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Yes, well, some people do enjoy grinding for boring and generic quests. Think of it like zoning out in front of a TV, except more interactive and social. If I didn't have good ways to numb my brain once in a while, I'd probably drink a lot more.
Not every player is an addict, it can be nice to just relax without going over the deep end.
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And that is what is nice about LotRO's payment models. You can do it for free, or just pay a little bit of money now and then. If you're playing a couple hours only on Saturdays then it is ridiculous to be asked to fork over $10-$15 a month for that. But if you pay $5 and get access to content that lasts you a couple months, then pay another $5 for another month of new content, then it fits very well with an occasional player. I do recommend subscribing at least one month to unlock things, then purchasi
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Clichequest would be nice if it ever gets released. The Plane of Cheese previews are mind-blowing.
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EVE is the only one I am considering joining. Did WOW thing for years.
Currently I can't stop playing DOTA2... which isn't an MMO, but it sort of is with the competitive and community part of it.
Likely when I tire of that, I will give EVE a serious go. I had a trial membership, however with the learning curve and busy life, hard to get into it in 14 days.
I only have so many available hours for gaming :(
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If you enjoy complexity and not completely burnt out on MMOs yet, take a look at EVE Online. Extremely complex and brutal.
It is not for everyone though: People either love it or severely hate it. Biggest factor is that everything you do is PvP in nature.
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Except there wasn't really alternate equally working set of abilities. There was pretty much one obviously best set for each trait tree.
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Yep. And several great free shards to play on these days too.
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Is it actually going anywhere? Last time I tried EL (some years ago), it had no meaningful story or gameplay hooks. Just another cookie-cutter fantasy MMO, without even the polish or breadth of other such games. The graphics were awful too, which didn't bug me much but certainly weren't a reason to play.
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Sounds like this is a change towards "Action MMO" design, with reduced powers and complexity, oriented for console implementation.
How can you blame this on consoles...when LOTRO or WoW or any of the other games that people say are "less complex than they were at launch" don't have console versions. And there are console MMO's like FFXI that give you multiple ways of handling multiple skills at once. The FFXI hot bar set has 20 skills in it, and you can have more than one hot bar set and flick between them. Even EQOA on the PS2 had 10 skill slots.
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The best way to get into Eve is to join a friend who already plays, who can show you the ropes and maybe give you an influx of starting cash (5M is nothing to a player who has been in the game for a year - a single gun on one whip may cost more than that - but it'll outfit a newbie for basically their whole trial without needing to grind). Ideally, that friend would also have a corp which is welcoming of newbies, so once you're past the basics of the game and have, for example, basic tackler skills (this ta
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I've been thinking of trying EVE, but was warned off when watching other people play and the antics done in various areas of space. It sort of reminded me of UO:
"thou hast left the protection of the guards"
"OoOoOoOoO"
Are you forced to join a corp or face constant podding in EVE, or is that hype?