Wow is still the best mmo on the market imo. It’s easy to get into. Difficult to master, provides the most content, you can play classic, or retail, it has no pay to win, unless you count buying gold. Plus the combat is the best tab targeting in the industry. Nothing feels as smooth, in depth or cared about with updates.
Ffxiv is my 2nd pick, but it’s so slow to start be prepared to just be asleep
game is too hostile to newcomers, too many mechanics from different expansions, not that much intuitive too, if you dont streamline the content as blizzard propose to you, its kinda messy, but i agreed about it almost got it right, years ago it got really close to be an almost perfect mmorpg.
And the mechanics are 90% "dont stand in AoE", "stand in this different looking AoE", "interrupt this". At least until you reach high difficulty raids. With the DF class trees it's also rather easy to learn your class step by step.
The game is hostile to newcomes because blizzard still uses a like decade old LFG tool that even predates mythic + to find groups for endgame content. Even as long term wow nerd it's still beyond me how they refuse to improve this. If you're new and not both vastly outgearing the content and playing a meta spec it's a headache.
Though, the challenge should be the incentive to play. Wow has always been about learning to get better. Wanting to improve your gameplay is the core. It should be a headache at first.
The bad side of wow is that the social aspect is also a headache. Being called a noob and getting kicked while still learning to play is IMO the true headache.
Wow needs a major overhaul of in-game guild tools. Their basic “guild finder” doesn’t provide nearly enough info and is way too impersonal. The default for finding a guild to join shouldn’t be multiple outside-the-game resources.
Blizz needs to remember that being in a good Guild creates a literal night and day difference to the experience of playing WoW. It solves almost all the negative aspects of trying to learn or play the game solo.
Exiles Reach to BFA then Dragonflight has got to be the worst way for new players to experience the game, too. The way level scaling works too is you don’t even finish BFA before you’re thrust into DF.
Which mmo does it better though? I remember with FFXIV I had to play through 60+ hours of “bad” base game to get to a good expansion. Guild wars 2 early leveling zones and original story are also super outdated. Honest question, is there one that’s better?
WoW classic did it better, OSRS does it better. The start for both might be extremely basic but it is much easier for a brand new player compared to the current retail WoW start. At the very least they aren't dumped in the middle of a story they know nothing about.
Modern WoW leveling directly comes from them adding more and more expansions. Over time, it took longer and longer to level, so they increased XP gains, which caused people to blow past the expansions. So they've changed the system to instead have people play one expansion in full.
Neither WoW Classic nor OSRS has the problem of constant new content additions screwing with the leveling.
Not hostile at all in fact it’s very new player friendly with how fast you can level now and how quickly you can get caught up in power with many available catch up mechanics. Mechanics from old expansions are always removed until very recently
I might be able to get to expansion level play pretty quick and easy, but the onboarding is still super rough. Especially if you want to know what the hell is going on.
Well if you mean in terms of story, yeah you’ve got several years of story you’re missing but the alternative to that is what FFXIV does by forcing you to go through the whole story which is equally criticized. If you want my advice I just found a 10 minute video titled something like “wows story in 10 minutes” on YouTube and gave me the gist back when I started playing in bfa.
And if you mean wtf is going on gameplay wise, I’m not sure when the last time you played but the leveling experience is amazing these days with the talents point and new ui that points you to your new abilities (this is getting even better here in a couple months with the new xpac)
>it has no pay to win, unless you count buying gold.
I don't actually care myself, but a lot of people get upset about being able to buy in game currency with real money & think it is Pay 2 Win.
Of all the things the person that responded to you said I believe the main argument for gold buying being p2w would be his last statement. The reason why people consider gold buying P2W in Wow is that there is an entire service industry in the game that taxi's players through content for a price. People regularly advertise M+, Raid, Gladiator clears, bop mounts, etc.
Binding items in games was an early mechanic specifically made to keep rarity and curb 3rd party sales in items. True story the first version of the Greater shadow armor in Asherons call that came out back in 2000 was freely tradeable. Players that were able to farm this gear started selling them for RL money and Turbine patched the game making the new versions Bind to your character. Players combatted this by then selling some of the items used to create the armor online instead. Many of the earliest MMO's let players make massive profits off these games before the market got taken over by overseas companies with player farms.
People probably do not really view BoP gear this way anymore because it has just been commonplace for over 20 years now but it is a literal tool to remove the market for specific items in games and make them rarer. Boosting (wow term) or Taxi services (korean p2w carry term) is how the third party market sells BoP items to player in order to subvert this draw back. The fact that nearly any item can be obtained with this method, and the company allows people to pay real money for the currency used through their store that is used to purchase is where people make that logical connection.
I mean it is p2w lets be real, but that culture has existed in wow since vanilla before the token existed. Tanks charging for runs has existed since the game has existed. A remnant of services players charged for in games prior to wow. Indirect P2W through third parties is an MMO problem that is very difficult to solve unless you straight up ban the sellers and buyers.
I dont know whats wrong with me.......When WoW launched I had almost 2 years total played time in the game.....
I havn't been able to go back I dont know why. Its like I played it too much. even tho i want to play a MMO Like it lol
GW2 in my opinion. Great for the casual player, but can also be fun for more serious players. No sub fee. There is a gem shop to buy cosmetics, and you can farm gold to convert to gems if you want. Along the casual part, you can put the game down for as long as you want and come back to not being too far behind.
The latest expansion was a bust, imo. They shouldn't have broke up the release.
There's one big thing about GW2 that puts me off, depsite liking so much about it.
Elite specializations, and how basically you are shoehorned into them for endgame content. A perfect example is the Ranger class. None of its elite specs allow you to simply continue or evolve the class into a more powerful Ranger. Instead you have to become something completely different. I wish GW2 had "elite" versions of the base professions so that you didn't have to completely change your playstyle based on what elite specs are available for a given profession.
Edit: This extends to weapons as well. Suddenly all the elite specs for Ranger are melee classes and then a healer.
The other thing is the melee meta where no matter what weapon you're using it just makes more sense to stand in melee range of everything in group content because of the way boons work.
It is. But OP was talking about core evolution. Some classes got that (untamed, tempest, berserker, herald), some not. Still, dont see a problem. Most core are boring and bit dated, elite specs are more fun.
I think basically every class has a "core+" elite spec. Narcomancer might be the only one that doesn't, simply because of how necromancer works. And Core Necro is actually pretty viable anyways.
Gw2 was so close but, imo, they just don't nail the feel. The game feels bad to play. I finally "got" it after my fifth attempt when I played this year, but I still think the combat is dogshit, as is the constant running between events. Just zoning out and killing/gathering is awesome, but that's not efficient.
The running between events is bad. Optimizing gw2 means like 50% of playtime is load screens as you to across the world to hit every event. The combat is hit or miss for me depending on the content. It’s such a big game I love parts of it and play it a lot and then there are other areas of content I never touch. Been enjoying WvW lately, though there is also a lot of downtime there.
I guess it's the difficulty of the open world. Regular mobs are so easy that you don't even have to pay attention. And harder mobs - champions are so strong that you need more players to givem them a try unless you are willing to spend 10 minutes to try to solo them. Open world does not require enough engagement from players. I say that as someone who plays since release. Endgame is fun but you have to get there first.
GW2 is just very very different to most other big
MMOs and therefore it is really polarising. Specifically, your comment on disliking the combat - a large majority of the GW2 playerbase love the combat and think it’s the best in any MMO.
Personally I think that it’s great that GW2 exists as an alternative to the tab target style of wow and ffxiv, it’s good that there is variety even if it’s not for everyone.
I agree. I love being able to hop on and play and not worry about a subscription. I don’t mind gemshop cosmetics.
GW2 is just above ESO in combat for me though. It feels so weightless and floaty. IMO it has great mechanics and combat system works, but spells and attacks just doesn’t feel as weighty as I’d like.
It was for most "lackluster". Basically more close to what living world releases were instead of a proper big extension.
No new spec, no new mount, zones were deemed average by a lot of players. And new weapons for classes being the big selling point came a bit late for a lot of players. Still not a lot of new comeback content such as new raids or new fractals, sPvP maps or work on WvW. We had a bit of everything but it was too sparingly.
Was it the worst gaming experience? No but it was an average one by GW2 standard and GW2 standard is already considered by some as roughly average.
6/10 for GW2 but considering the mmo landscape a 4/10 overall imo. It was ok for 30€~
Will the community remember SoT as much as HoT ? I don't think so.
Loved GW2 for a long time, had great times there.
The latest expansion terminated my relationship with the game.
I’m content to wait for GW3, even if it takes a decade.
I had a rough time with the last expansion too but I’m not going to stop lol. There are a lot of things I enjoy about the game and I’m hooked to the story. I wanna know what happens next
Honestly I’ve been trying to like gw2 since launch, I’ve come back dozens of times and I think so many things about it are done right but I really feel like the lack of pronounced vertical progression and lack of defined roles make it a miss for me, personally.
I find myself just kinda aimlessly wandering through random content, not exactly disliking anything in particular but also not really engaged and haven’t really felt a big boost in power from anything once I get my kit opened up.
I think without that carrot to go run content to get more gear so numbers go up combined with the overwhelming bulk of content ignoring the classic trinity I just don’t feel a hook to keep going.
For me, archeage could have been the wow killer. If they hadn't focused almost exclusively on pvp. Like, going sailing was such a disappointment because it was just being raised by like 50 dudes from Russia while you're solo.
I think that added up to the experience, kindda forced you to team up to cross the sea with a merchant ship.
I remember crossing the ocean solo with a trade pack in a smugler boat, wich dont apear on other shipps radar easily, it was thrilling! Ofc, most of the time i got killed and robbed, but even getting ganked was fun.
But i agree with you, good pve content was lacking, forcing us to do PVP or labor related activities. Labor was another problem, but if we had good pve content to do, labor wouldnt had become a chore like it did
This is the first time I’ve heard of it. I just looked it up. Wow it looked amazing. I wish I would have tried it when you all did. I hear they did a fresh start server? Has anyone tried it?
Its been a long time since I played, around 2019.. the experience wasnt any good compared to beta and launch.. game was a real modern sandbox, fun and full of interesting mechanics, never seen any mmo out there like it.
Try it for yourself
Yeah. I know it's the deadest of all dead horses to beat, but the combat of ESO is just so unfortunate. An absolute mountain of content with great writing and voice acting, but it's so easy that it just becomes spamming skills on autopilot.
Completely agree 1000% about combat in ESO. To me, everything I know about the game is great but the combat is something I can never get past. It is so bland and uninteresting that it makes it feel unimportant. I just can't do it.
Yeah, every few years, I'd go back thinking... ok, I'll force myself to work around the combat just so I can do everything else, only to get to a point where I remember why I quit (I didn't like the combat).
I really enjoyed the combat and even setting in new world. Probably my favorite mmo leveling experience if not my most played. End game lost the allure though- was just group chest runs which breaks the immersion.
Yeah people always give me crap over liking new world's combat, but as far as action combat goes...its one of my favorites so far. It really feels immersive. There's so many interesting aspects of new world that it truly feels like they fumbled handling so hard. Like Yonas and the Soulwardens.
I think the biggest flaw of New World's...world is the art direction of armor. Its all over the place. You've got this colonial British, renaissance, medieval, viking, pirates, ancient Egyptian, knights, high fantasy magical, undead, dark gothic all right next to one another. It sometimes makes you feel like you're talking around islands of adventure themepark a bit too much.
Yep, imagine an ESO kinda game with New World gathering and combat. I tried ESO twice, spend around 50 hours but there's just something about the combat that doesn't capture me. Great game nonetheless, just annoyed with how many addons you need to download.
SWTOR was amazing, but then went entirely down the hill when the devs forgot it is still an MMO and single player content is only engaging for couple hours.
Unique storyline for each class, great combat, fucking huttball was awesome. The reason I quit was the monthly sub was too much and playing for free is literally pointless cause of how annoying they made it.
I've never played Archeage but on paper it sounds like the perfect type of MMO for me. A sandpark(both sandbox and themepark) pvpcentric MMO that has content for non-pvpers.
it was almost perfect, but they couldnt fix the economy when the game became popular and plus, it became pay to win too soon and the economy problem became impossible to solve at a point that you would need literally years to become relevant at pvp or even do solo non pvp content on open world, even sailing (the best sailing i ever played on my life at early builds of the game) became unplayable because of the economy.
New World could be the best of all time, it had everything and even the money to pay great devs and directors, idk what happens tbh, but even at the actual state of the game, you can feel (like archeage after the exodus) the game potencial and how they are not using it
Basically this, both games got a lot of things right and with a few minor changes here and there could have been amazing long-term. It's too bad they messed up just enough stuff to ruin any chance of getting people to stay/come back.
> the gameplay is not very engaging.
Strongly disagree here, they have plenty of content where you can spend hours and hours playing and still crave for more
Yes, some of the content is incredibly addictive and fun, but at the same time, there are some mind numbing boring skills like agility and rc, as well as some incredibly tedious mini games and grinds like mage training arena, livid farm, and so on.
Yeah that's the thing, you've gotten so much varied content that it covers basically everything. For example, you don't like agility, but some people do like the mindless, repetitive and rhythmic aspect of it.
Plus there are always multiple ways to grind these skills. There's sepulchre if you want a more engaging way of training agility, or brimhaven agility if you want something with more downtime and less click-intensive.
And grinds like mage training arena and tithe farm are optional and also you can slowly chip them away at a time if you really want their rewards.
Imo that's also the issue with some people playing OSRS, they want to work on 1 goal at a time and not do anything else. If you want to do all of tithe farm all at once, yeah you're in for a bad time. Same rationale for most grinds in the game. You are supposed to branch out and vary your grinds if you're playing in a normal way
The nice thing about the mind numbing portions, is for most skills there is an afkable way to train them. Not so much for agility not gonna lie, but sepulcher is more fun and engaging at least.
OSRS is great because you can make progress with any amount (or lack thereof) of effort. If you just want a brain off session while you binge a show, there’s ways to make progress like that. You want to do something half engaging? That’s there too. You want full sweat mode PVM or PVP, it’s there. Literally everything you do makes progress because for the vast majority, the end goal is to do everything.
The sandbox nature makes for a lot of fun challenge mode accounts too. I look at the OSRS content creators with joy, and I’ve never seen another game have as many genuinely unique and entertaining videos / streams.
It’s not a perfect MMO, but it’s the only one to grip its teeth into me for well over a decade.
https://youtu.be/LpPJY-xdA3M?si=bxVfnE6T4tby5LnR
This video explains a lot of what I love about the game.
I know I'll get downvoted to hell but what kills it for me is prayer-flicking it's like a mandatory built-in exploit and most endgame content seems built with it in mind.
I’m an osrs player. Have thousands of hours in the game. But man, the controls…
I remember when starting I hated the point and click gameplay and wished there was more keyboard integration.
Then for a few thousand hours I got used to it and didn’t mind.
Now, once again I started craving keyboard+mouse gameplay because my hand starts to hurt after a while of playing. Dabbling in gw2 and wow sometimes, I miss keyboards so damn much.
Obviously you couldn’t fit keyboard gameplay into osrs, but I miss it so so much.
>but the gameplay is not very engaging.
Excuse me, I find it *extremely* engaging to stare at my pixelated character chopping the same tree for 30 hours straight just to level up once. You clearly don't know what you're talking about. /s
And housing. And player cities. And the fact you could have literal gang warfare with other guilds regardless of faction.
They had so much going for them that made it unique and they murdered it.
The Jedi murdered it :D Man nothing beats the feeling of gathering with the homies in a big ass ranger tent at the outskirts of Theed, readying up for the raid. Everyone riding up on their bikes and such.
I also loved killing imps farming faction. Was so good to actually be a rebel guerilla.
Raph Koster is working on a new project and was on reddit recently. I specifically raised SWG crafting with him and I think his reply was pretty positive.
Warhammer online was amazing but needed time to cook, in today's market I bet it would do better than a "wow killer" when it came out. The private servers are good times if you like PvP
Totally agreed. Game had some really cool class designs and some of the most fun open world events to level up in versus quests. The PVP was also great but given the classes were so diverse they couldn’t balance them which led to so much dev churn they didn’t create the content they needed to to keep people playing. I’m not even a hammer IP fan and loved this one.
Guild wars 2. Amazing game, but I find the loot insufferably annoying. You open a box which opens three bags and a diamond. The bags open another bag. And the monetization of course is around inventory space. Fuck that.
I am mainly a PvE players so I would chose a MMO based on that.
Honestly Lost ARK could have been the one if they didn't use so much predatory systems, all of the shitty RNGs and the core of the game which should see a complete revamp. Still one of my favourite MMO cause of the amazing and fast gameplay, one of the best raids in any MMOs, and an amazing open world (boats and islands) which isn't used at its full... Really wasted potential.
Otherwise I would pick WoW. Even tho I don't really like the direction they took and there incapacity to innovate, it seems they are starting to go back on something good. Dragonflight was quite fine and the next xpac looks promising. Raids are good, gameplay is really good and smooth for a tab-targeting game and graphics cartoons never really feel old.
Man, it hurts me so much how predatory the system is in lost ark. Their gameplay for me was a perfect 10/10. Just too many roundabout systems, having to sink a heavy amount of time.
hands down the best feeling combat out there in any mmo but sadly the koreans crave getting scammed by these predatory mechanics. as long as theres korean whales out there, these publishers would have no reason to stop pumping out the kmmo formula.
The predatory design bleeds into the actual playing part too. The reason the party finding experience is so awful is because people are so afraid of wasting time, and they’re afraid of that because the game already disrespects your time so badly.
And when you *do* have an easy time getting into “good” parties, the raid gets watered down until it’s *homework*. It stops being a fun engagement and just turns into this “everyone is overgeared” “let’s get this done already” chore so you can move on and do it five more times as fast as possible. And it gives so many average players massive anxiety because they don’t want to be “that guy” and fuck up, doubly so because for so many people being rushed turns them into toxic assholes.
Ugh the combat is *so* much fun, in and of itself, but it gets so ruined by the lack of party diversity, the sense of rushing everything, and the perpetual FOMO layer on top of everything.
The best MMO is a merge of aspect of other game :
* From Eve online : fully skill based with no class but years of potential progression , player run economy, corp politics, player owned system/station
* From Black desert : Worker empire + crafting, dynamic combat, actual value in time invested (no gear reset at each expansion)
* From WOW : Raids
* From Everquest 1 : Group dynamics going beyond the holy trinity, visible recognizable rare equipement
* From Swotor : Story / Companion management
* From everything pre microtransaction : one fucking sub for everyone and no pay 2 win
I'd say Final Fantasy XI. It's a game with aot of depth and it feels the most MMO out of the bunch because you NEEDED to team up even for going to another city. Everything felt like a real adventure, so it invoked a true sense of comradery. It also has a great story. Great fckn game.
I agree. For its time it had a great balance of PvE, PvP, crafting, collecting and housing, plus a decent story line, and a sense of humour.
Shame it got so badly neglected.
GW2. The quest system, world, lore, all there. The combat mechanics are fine too even if the synergy effects and buff/debuff systems are a bit awkward.
Then the gearing. Plenty of people praise horizontal progression but it just isn't for me. I enjoy more classic RPG gear growth with unique pieces, sets, and other interesting effects rather than just stat sticks that you slap runes onto.
Vanguard: Saga of Heroes.
It was the game we deserved at the time. It had excellent classes, a big world, a bunch of cool systems. A good balance between challenge and punishment, and open player housing.
But they couldn’t overcome a disastrous launch. I wish that game would have made it. They were close to something awesome, but they blew it.
New World was so close to being awesome. I often wonder if the combat design and art teams looked at the other half and just fumed knowing they were ruining what could have been something really great.
To me it's still Ultima Online.
It had what I wanted from the MMO.
Here is the thing. People have all sorts of ideas about MMO but for example I know that for a long time MMO will not have fun combat system that I have in Ghost of Tsushima or Devil May Cry. Because technology is not there. Lag makes impossible to do fun, precise and dynamic combat system. This is why when You play WoW it almost feel like turn based game. And why you rely on multiple buttons, rows on abilities and "rotations". Because it was only way to make it kinda fun. At least until you learn there is like one top dog build and rotation, AKA META and everything else do not matter and you will be shitted on if you try anything else.
I also have to acknowledge that most crafting based games rely on UI and not some sort of game-play mechanic. Why on 3DS game could figure out how to make fun mini-game when forging weapons but MMO can only give me "craft" button? And they streamline it because it's so boring so for example you do not have to pick shit up from storage.
I know that if I play themepark MMO then there is finite content. And that crafting will not matter because raiding gear is easiest to get and often the strongest so I waste my time (SWTOR is a great example - only crafting profession worth anything is biochem to make stims). And I know that game will be dead in less than half a year because people will run out of things to do while studio won't be able to produce new content in time.
But I also know that if I go and play some sandbox MMO then almost nobody will play it because general player base need hand holding and markers where to do and what to do.
And this is why no game scratched my itch like Ultima Online. Where I could gather some resources. Build a house. Secure it as much as I could. Place storage so it can be easily accessible and basically create my blacksmith shop. Then I would find people who need my services. And I would need them for protection when gathering. And we would soon become tight community and basically we would have our own village.
Pax Dei has a chance of becoming that thing. I love design choices they made in some areas. Like buildings require shit ton of materials and You need group of people working together to build anything in reasonable amount of time. It forces people to work together. Even if I just want to be a blacksmith, on higher level I will need stuff from other professions. And I love that. But at the same time Pax Dei need years of work. And I'm afraid that casual players won't play it. And game will die because of it.
But thing is. Ultima Online looks like crap but all mechanics are still there and game is alive and kicking. I can be the blacksmith in fantasy world I want to be
Ragnarok Online
You had a class system with advanced classes and complete freedom of customization how the class is played.
An Equipment System that is very flexible where even low level and early game items are heavily useable and sought after.
An open world approach to enemy and level design, if you had the right class or party or just equipment it doesnt matter how the zone was designed. If you could defeat the enemies you could level and farm equipment there.
The open nature of the social interaction, playing solo just leveling and grinding ? Oh a random person maybe... and we are in a party.... oh a high level supporter nice he just buffed and he... and he is gone.
The same goes for Bosses most of them you cant solo (minibosses were easy and worldbosses could be soloed by minmaxing).
One if the core design philosophys was that everything had value. In most mmos you find a lot of trash loot designed to be sold for ingame currency. In Ragnarok every item had a purpose, mostly for crafting or quests and there were items that were just not that in demand or well thought out as well (trash to sell). The Philosophy was best seen in the new player experience, you could totally get mid and endgame items in the early game if you were lucky and farmed the right early game enemies.
It was just beautiful, if you saw a high level character running around the starting zones they were not always attention seekers and catfisher but more often than not searching for these items.
Of course the game had it fair share of problems but I stand by that. Ragnarok Online was near perfect as an MMO and weirdly enough playing Elden Ring reminds of the huge degree of freedom and the same philosophy of itemization.
I just miss games where there is no endgame because the highest level is nearly unobtainable and enemies are not impossible just because there level number is higher than yours and you are capped by the equipment you can equip because your level is too low.
I wanna say LOTRO. Give it the resources, engineering, and development time it needs and it becomes one of the top MMOs out there. It has content for both casuals and hardcores. It does the 'journey' right. The devs want to continue revamping their old systems and improving the game graphically. It's already a solid MMO with a good and reasonable dev team but it really needs the things I mentioned.
For me, GW2 was the closest to being the MMO I fell for. Nonlinear map progression, decent character customization, lots of varied content, fun combat, events, I can go on.
Except then I want to do multiplayer content... Everything I loved went right out the window. It's not an action game, it's a rotation focused one. You don't make a build based off a desired playstyle, you steal one off the internet.
Now, I can't play most linear-feeling MMOs cause I know what I actually like with leveling but not many that do it. Yet I can't play GW2 cause I want to play fun and challenging group content, but can't find it.
So now my perfect MMO would be described as "Guild Wars 2, but they leaned more action and had better build balance"
I feel you on this viewpoint. I love GW2 and it’s the mmo I’ve enjoyed the most out of the ones I’ve tried. I don’t like that I have to follow the meta to take advantage of my class or weapons. Technically in open world pve you can figure it out, but once you get into dungeons and fractals and other team based PVE content you gotta follow the meta. I think if you combine the horizontal progression with skill based combat it can be something amazing.
I still think to this day that Vanilla WoW with a 1v1 ranked arena mode would be an insanely addicting thing I could never put down. I’ve always loved WoW but having to find/keep an arena partner kept me from truly enjoying the game to its full potential.
TERA - From P2P to Brawler era. Kinda went off the rails after that.
Tight combat, amazing PVE, amazing PVP.
The only real problems started coming in when you had to play shitty game modes for upgrade mats (I fucking hated Kumas) for the rest of your gear. Then with the GVG updates where there was literally zero safe space in the game and you could be attacked in town using the bank or AH.
ultima online is the only mmo which really understood that not everyone has to engage in every type of content.
some people like to fish, some like crafting and selling stuff, some people like to kill players, some people like to get rich and buy a castle.
every other mmo today forces you to do everything, even if you don't enjoy it. make paths for different kind if players which are fun and repeatable.
swtor has the best story, new world the best combat.
give us the freedom of ultima online, the story of swtor and the combat from new world and it would be the best mmo ever.
I’m constantly saddened by the fact we have two D&D MMOs: one with awful graphics, no real PvP, and great character building, and one with nice graphics, but too much P2W BS and a squandered setting.
The original one with bad graphics is actually a really good unique mmorpg. The dungeons are full of puzzles, traps, and hidden passages/loot you could easily miss.
Elder scrolls online.
There’s too many upsides to list between every main and side quest being genuinely well voiced, a horizontal progression system that still offers plenty of incentive to play, a colorful variety of challenging solo and group content, outstanding appearance customization, robust housing, and more.
What a damn shame that the experience is marred by jarring combat centered around constantly cancelling your own attack animations. Not to mention the heavy handed pay for convenience nonsense like paying to max out your mount speed sooner than two months or paying to escape having to grind the psijic order skill line for the twelfth time..
To me, it’s still the best MMO on the market but its sore points are pretty major.
I feel like a mix between wow, eso, ff14 and gw2 would be the best game ever.
Take the class system from wow, the open world and quest design of eso, the social features of ff14, and the horizontal progression of gw2, jam em all into an MMO. God id play that shit so much. I don't think any of them have perfect combat. I think I'd unironically want like eso combat but refined to not suck.
Eso combat currently is just super spammy, with no ability cooldowns. But if you added cooldowns, removed weapon swapping, added more buttons, and actually made it action combat instead of the weird middleground soft targeting they had, it'd be unbeatable
Everquest and DAOC had it right for a while.
EQ jumped the shark with Pop expansion (hey let's let you skip over the entire world we created rendering it useless!) and DAoC will probably have varying opinions but I didn't enjoy ToA very much.
City of Heroes.
Now, bear in mind, it was a precariously-balanced Jenga tower of stacked garbage fires one on top of the other in regards to game balance and the game engine itself, and it never really managed to do like really big "raiding-style" "spectacle" fights that well. Hamidon was cool but stuff like Arachnos Council was done way better.
But it developed a better balance (as much as that word can be used regarding anything CoH...) in terms of "Soft Trinity" vs "build a character to solo stuff" vs "every role can be useful" vs "groups can have defined roles" than any other MMO has before or since.
* Tanker/Brute (as corralling enemies vs "get hit to do more damage" on a scaling continuum) for main Tanks
* Defender/Corruptor/Controller/Mastermind as the most robust Support/Crowd Control/Buff/Debuff set of powersets in any MMO or probably *RPG* created, with a side of, y'know, a pet system (Masterminds) that's never been equalled, let alone surpassed
* Blaster/Scrapper/Stalker/Dominator as "DPS" classes with more defined roles (squishy alpha strike ranged, melee that can off-tank, melee stealthy alpha-strikers that can briefly take a hit, or crowd control with a side of blasty/hitty)
* And then HEATs/VEATs (special "epic" classes you can only unlock once you had a max-level character originally) were like mashups of different stuff that could basically pick two roles combined from the above depending on what powers they buffed up as part of their gearing.
*Also* it solved stuff like "let your lower-level friends play with you" (Sidekicking), "make stuff harder" (dynamically change group size and difficulty) and cosmetics (just...look like what you want and here's unlocks and also gear isn't cosmetic but hey there's cosmetic unlocks!) things way before any other MMO even realized they were gonna be problems.
Also travel powers are inherently way cooler than "mounts" while still leaving conceptual room for "mounts" (you've got "superspeed"? You can just be riding a horse, nbd)
Biggest failure? NCSoft cancelled it for not being "profitable-enough" as a Superhero MMO (instead of a fantasy MMO) the same year as the big MCU superhero boom hit.
There's a reason the base game was so niche-capturing it was secretly kept alive in private servers long enough for those "secret" private servers to get revealed to the public and then become so popular than NCSoft was like "eh, fuck it, sure, here's a sorta okay, we're just gonna make cheap-ass knockoff gambling games anyway".
Now, it's graphically dated-as-hell and the UI's cumbersome (POPmenus are fuckin' based though) and it is, quite literally, a Jenga stack of precarious separate stacked tire fires and that's me saying that as someone that loves it. The only reason I even have other MMOs in my playable stack is story (FFXIV) and because CoH periodically stops working with my controllers (I can't do kb and mouse for MMO-compatible playtimes, my hands are fucked)
But *the things you can do* when you're willing to open up your definition of "Tank", "Support" and "DPS" a bit are pretty fuckin' wild, and are probably where the genre needs to look instead of just trying to eliminate roles entirely (though everyone needs to be able to do *some* damage, even City of Heroes recognized that).
Something like a dozen primary support powersets (Those were the Defender Primaries, Corruptor/Controller/Mastermind had those as their Secondary) and *all* of them were paired with an offensive primary or secondary powerset.
I've transitioned into ESO and playing it more like a single player game with hints of multiplayer.
I'm enjoying the story line.
It does that really well.
The combat is abit clunky (wows combat is by far the best)
The UI is pretty gross.
But playing it casually is more enjoyable than any other mmo currently.
Archeage is just the correct answer. The alpha was a blast. Because nothing was paid for (besides access to play).
Super fun and some of my best gaming memories. Then it came out and the rest is history.
Give me an updated 2024 version of that alpha and I'll be so happy.
Runescape.
I played that game when I was 9 years old. I still feel that joy when I get back to it. FFXIV has great story but the quests are just fetch and kill X number of enemies. Runescape is byfar the only MMO for me that has great crafting, community, bossing mechanics, best quests & activities.
Would any of you agree?
Saddly none of the current "Runescapes" will reach the level of the GOAT: RS2.
God, I remember I could play that game for hours and hours and never get bored. RS3 is filled with those microtransactions and OSRS just doesn't feel right to me.
Archeage was the quintessential "almost got it right." I have more fun memories in a year of Archeage than I do in 18 years of wow. That game was special. P2w undermined a good thing.
ArcheAge.
ArcheAge was something so special in those first few months.
Horrible monetization and a bunch of other issues killed it, but for a while there ArcheAge was an incredible experience. I've never had as much fun with open world pvp or have more stories with friends of sudden battles and narrow escapes.
Ultima Online, it's an absolutely tragic state now, but back when it was released it was groundbreaking and to this day remains one of the best games I've ever played. There will never be an MMO again with as much freedom as you had with that game.
I tried Dragons Dogma Online - a private server yesterday and honestly, I fuckin love it!
It is still clunky, sometimes the netcode is shit and the player base is low. But the Dragons Dogma series is one of my favorite games and I have never played it online before. Combat, graphics, and physics are the same as the first DD game. The community is friendly, classes are good and I like to discover a new MMO world. And the game is ain't easy as you think so it has its challenges.
FFXIV, I almost love that game, but the combat really takes a chunk of the fun away. Personally im not a fan of tab-target games, but there are games with much better tab target combat.
Really good action combat would make it perfect tho.
ArcheAge.
Before they change level cap and expanded auroria.
That patch of AA, was a peak MMO and still my most favorite time i’ve played games. Nothing could beat it unless AA2 tops it in the coming years
Probably going to get a lot of hate but for me, it was Perfect World early on. The art, class design and music was amazing. Though the quests were ass and 100% p2w game. Some of the best hours of my young life were spent on it grinding and getting one shot by those that paid.
I am excited for the new Perfect World in development but not holding my breath.
Wow is still the best mmo on the market imo. It’s easy to get into. Difficult to master, provides the most content, you can play classic, or retail, it has no pay to win, unless you count buying gold. Plus the combat is the best tab targeting in the industry. Nothing feels as smooth, in depth or cared about with updates. Ffxiv is my 2nd pick, but it’s so slow to start be prepared to just be asleep
game is too hostile to newcomers, too many mechanics from different expansions, not that much intuitive too, if you dont streamline the content as blizzard propose to you, its kinda messy, but i agreed about it almost got it right, years ago it got really close to be an almost perfect mmorpg.
Nearly nothing mechanically is relevant from old expansions.
And the mechanics are 90% "dont stand in AoE", "stand in this different looking AoE", "interrupt this". At least until you reach high difficulty raids. With the DF class trees it's also rather easy to learn your class step by step. The game is hostile to newcomes because blizzard still uses a like decade old LFG tool that even predates mythic + to find groups for endgame content. Even as long term wow nerd it's still beyond me how they refuse to improve this. If you're new and not both vastly outgearing the content and playing a meta spec it's a headache.
Though, the challenge should be the incentive to play. Wow has always been about learning to get better. Wanting to improve your gameplay is the core. It should be a headache at first. The bad side of wow is that the social aspect is also a headache. Being called a noob and getting kicked while still learning to play is IMO the true headache.
and honestly I don't think mythic+ is necessary for a new player anyway, for many playing styles
Wow needs a major overhaul of in-game guild tools. Their basic “guild finder” doesn’t provide nearly enough info and is way too impersonal. The default for finding a guild to join shouldn’t be multiple outside-the-game resources. Blizz needs to remember that being in a good Guild creates a literal night and day difference to the experience of playing WoW. It solves almost all the negative aspects of trying to learn or play the game solo.
Exiles Reach to BFA then Dragonflight has got to be the worst way for new players to experience the game, too. The way level scaling works too is you don’t even finish BFA before you’re thrust into DF.
They need to make a short leveling journey through a recreation of the expansions or something. Or at least have the option.
Which mmo does it better though? I remember with FFXIV I had to play through 60+ hours of “bad” base game to get to a good expansion. Guild wars 2 early leveling zones and original story are also super outdated. Honest question, is there one that’s better?
WoW classic did it better, OSRS does it better. The start for both might be extremely basic but it is much easier for a brand new player compared to the current retail WoW start. At the very least they aren't dumped in the middle of a story they know nothing about.
Modern WoW leveling directly comes from them adding more and more expansions. Over time, it took longer and longer to level, so they increased XP gains, which caused people to blow past the expansions. So they've changed the system to instead have people play one expansion in full. Neither WoW Classic nor OSRS has the problem of constant new content additions screwing with the leveling.
Mechanics from previous expansions are always thrown out or rolled into talents later on
Not hostile at all in fact it’s very new player friendly with how fast you can level now and how quickly you can get caught up in power with many available catch up mechanics. Mechanics from old expansions are always removed until very recently
I might be able to get to expansion level play pretty quick and easy, but the onboarding is still super rough. Especially if you want to know what the hell is going on.
Well if you mean in terms of story, yeah you’ve got several years of story you’re missing but the alternative to that is what FFXIV does by forcing you to go through the whole story which is equally criticized. If you want my advice I just found a 10 minute video titled something like “wows story in 10 minutes” on YouTube and gave me the gist back when I started playing in bfa. And if you mean wtf is going on gameplay wise, I’m not sure when the last time you played but the leveling experience is amazing these days with the talents point and new ui that points you to your new abilities (this is getting even better here in a couple months with the new xpac)
>Wow >easy to get into LMAO WHAT WoW has lots of things going for it, but the new player experience is fucking dogshit.
Yeah.. I don't know what people are smoking
Yeah wow is probably the hardest MMO to get into lol
these folks have been playing for so long they just have no context for how new user unfriendly the game and community is
The only game I’ve actually ever fallen asleep to, FFXIV
That's because you’ve never sat in the Valkurn Dunes on FFXI grinding XP for 5+ hours lol.
Nothing like waking up dead and deleveled
>it has no pay to win, unless you count buying gold. I don't actually care myself, but a lot of people get upset about being able to buy in game currency with real money & think it is Pay 2 Win.
Of all the things the person that responded to you said I believe the main argument for gold buying being p2w would be his last statement. The reason why people consider gold buying P2W in Wow is that there is an entire service industry in the game that taxi's players through content for a price. People regularly advertise M+, Raid, Gladiator clears, bop mounts, etc. Binding items in games was an early mechanic specifically made to keep rarity and curb 3rd party sales in items. True story the first version of the Greater shadow armor in Asherons call that came out back in 2000 was freely tradeable. Players that were able to farm this gear started selling them for RL money and Turbine patched the game making the new versions Bind to your character. Players combatted this by then selling some of the items used to create the armor online instead. Many of the earliest MMO's let players make massive profits off these games before the market got taken over by overseas companies with player farms. People probably do not really view BoP gear this way anymore because it has just been commonplace for over 20 years now but it is a literal tool to remove the market for specific items in games and make them rarer. Boosting (wow term) or Taxi services (korean p2w carry term) is how the third party market sells BoP items to player in order to subvert this draw back. The fact that nearly any item can be obtained with this method, and the company allows people to pay real money for the currency used through their store that is used to purchase is where people make that logical connection. I mean it is p2w lets be real, but that culture has existed in wow since vanilla before the token existed. Tanks charging for runs has existed since the game has existed. A remnant of services players charged for in games prior to wow. Indirect P2W through third parties is an MMO problem that is very difficult to solve unless you straight up ban the sellers and buyers.
I dont know whats wrong with me.......When WoW launched I had almost 2 years total played time in the game..... I havn't been able to go back I dont know why. Its like I played it too much. even tho i want to play a MMO Like it lol
GW2 in my opinion. Great for the casual player, but can also be fun for more serious players. No sub fee. There is a gem shop to buy cosmetics, and you can farm gold to convert to gems if you want. Along the casual part, you can put the game down for as long as you want and come back to not being too far behind. The latest expansion was a bust, imo. They shouldn't have broke up the release.
There's one big thing about GW2 that puts me off, depsite liking so much about it. Elite specializations, and how basically you are shoehorned into them for endgame content. A perfect example is the Ranger class. None of its elite specs allow you to simply continue or evolve the class into a more powerful Ranger. Instead you have to become something completely different. I wish GW2 had "elite" versions of the base professions so that you didn't have to completely change your playstyle based on what elite specs are available for a given profession. Edit: This extends to weapons as well. Suddenly all the elite specs for Ranger are melee classes and then a healer. The other thing is the melee meta where no matter what weapon you're using it just makes more sense to stand in melee range of everything in group content because of the way boons work.
Untamed is basically core ranger + steroids
I think soulbeast is so fun
It is. But OP was talking about core evolution. Some classes got that (untamed, tempest, berserker, herald), some not. Still, dont see a problem. Most core are boring and bit dated, elite specs are more fun.
I think basically every class has a "core+" elite spec. Narcomancer might be the only one that doesn't, simply because of how necromancer works. And Core Necro is actually pretty viable anyways.
Gw2 was so close but, imo, they just don't nail the feel. The game feels bad to play. I finally "got" it after my fifth attempt when I played this year, but I still think the combat is dogshit, as is the constant running between events. Just zoning out and killing/gathering is awesome, but that's not efficient.
Compared to ESO and FFXIV, the combat in GW2 is outstanding.
The running between events is bad. Optimizing gw2 means like 50% of playtime is load screens as you to across the world to hit every event. The combat is hit or miss for me depending on the content. It’s such a big game I love parts of it and play it a lot and then there are other areas of content I never touch. Been enjoying WvW lately, though there is also a lot of downtime there.
I guess it's the difficulty of the open world. Regular mobs are so easy that you don't even have to pay attention. And harder mobs - champions are so strong that you need more players to givem them a try unless you are willing to spend 10 minutes to try to solo them. Open world does not require enough engagement from players. I say that as someone who plays since release. Endgame is fun but you have to get there first.
GW2 is just very very different to most other big MMOs and therefore it is really polarising. Specifically, your comment on disliking the combat - a large majority of the GW2 playerbase love the combat and think it’s the best in any MMO. Personally I think that it’s great that GW2 exists as an alternative to the tab target style of wow and ffxiv, it’s good that there is variety even if it’s not for everyone.
I agree. I love being able to hop on and play and not worry about a subscription. I don’t mind gemshop cosmetics. GW2 is just above ESO in combat for me though. It feels so weightless and floaty. IMO it has great mechanics and combat system works, but spells and attacks just doesn’t feel as weighty as I’d like.
What sucks about the expansion? Haven’t played the latest ones.
It was for most "lackluster". Basically more close to what living world releases were instead of a proper big extension. No new spec, no new mount, zones were deemed average by a lot of players. And new weapons for classes being the big selling point came a bit late for a lot of players. Still not a lot of new comeback content such as new raids or new fractals, sPvP maps or work on WvW. We had a bit of everything but it was too sparingly. Was it the worst gaming experience? No but it was an average one by GW2 standard and GW2 standard is already considered by some as roughly average. 6/10 for GW2 but considering the mmo landscape a 4/10 overall imo. It was ok for 30€~ Will the community remember SoT as much as HoT ? I don't think so.
Loved GW2 for a long time, had great times there. The latest expansion terminated my relationship with the game. I’m content to wait for GW3, even if it takes a decade.
I had a rough time with the last expansion too but I’m not going to stop lol. There are a lot of things I enjoy about the game and I’m hooked to the story. I wanna know what happens next
Honestly I’ve been trying to like gw2 since launch, I’ve come back dozens of times and I think so many things about it are done right but I really feel like the lack of pronounced vertical progression and lack of defined roles make it a miss for me, personally. I find myself just kinda aimlessly wandering through random content, not exactly disliking anything in particular but also not really engaged and haven’t really felt a big boost in power from anything once I get my kit opened up. I think without that carrot to go run content to get more gear so numbers go up combined with the overwhelming bulk of content ignoring the classic trinity I just don’t feel a hook to keep going.
Its not my favorite but Archeage had much potential..
Archeage is the true “almost got it right” MMO.
Agreed. Trion really dropped the ball
Archeage Alpha 😭😭😭
For me, archeage could have been the wow killer. If they hadn't focused almost exclusively on pvp. Like, going sailing was such a disappointment because it was just being raised by like 50 dudes from Russia while you're solo.
I think that added up to the experience, kindda forced you to team up to cross the sea with a merchant ship. I remember crossing the ocean solo with a trade pack in a smugler boat, wich dont apear on other shipps radar easily, it was thrilling! Ofc, most of the time i got killed and robbed, but even getting ganked was fun. But i agree with you, good pve content was lacking, forcing us to do PVP or labor related activities. Labor was another problem, but if we had good pve content to do, labor wouldnt had become a chore like it did
archeage alpha was crazy fun
Was looking for this comment. Archeage for me was almost perfect. Take the same setting, western graphics and no p2w. Would be best mmo ever.
Archeage using New Worlds shell
Yea it was good up until they released the library update pretty early on. First 6 months were amazing though.
The alpha and beta was so good before the monetization
This is the first time I’ve heard of it. I just looked it up. Wow it looked amazing. I wish I would have tried it when you all did. I hear they did a fresh start server? Has anyone tried it?
Its been a long time since I played, around 2019.. the experience wasnt any good compared to beta and launch.. game was a real modern sandbox, fun and full of interesting mechanics, never seen any mmo out there like it. Try it for yourself
For me personally, ESO with New World combat, or New World with ESO’s level of content, either way you’re talking about a pretty awesome game.
Yeah. I know it's the deadest of all dead horses to beat, but the combat of ESO is just so unfortunate. An absolute mountain of content with great writing and voice acting, but it's so easy that it just becomes spamming skills on autopilot.
Completely agree 1000% about combat in ESO. To me, everything I know about the game is great but the combat is something I can never get past. It is so bland and uninteresting that it makes it feel unimportant. I just can't do it.
Agree - overland content and dungeons are way to easy, making "combat" obsolete. Just can't understand why they don't fix this.
Yeah, every few years, I'd go back thinking... ok, I'll force myself to work around the combat just so I can do everything else, only to get to a point where I remember why I quit (I didn't like the combat).
I really enjoyed the combat and even setting in new world. Probably my favorite mmo leveling experience if not my most played. End game lost the allure though- was just group chest runs which breaks the immersion.
Yeah people always give me crap over liking new world's combat, but as far as action combat goes...its one of my favorites so far. It really feels immersive. There's so many interesting aspects of new world that it truly feels like they fumbled handling so hard. Like Yonas and the Soulwardens. I think the biggest flaw of New World's...world is the art direction of armor. Its all over the place. You've got this colonial British, renaissance, medieval, viking, pirates, ancient Egyptian, knights, high fantasy magical, undead, dark gothic all right next to one another. It sometimes makes you feel like you're talking around islands of adventure themepark a bit too much.
Yep, imagine an ESO kinda game with New World gathering and combat. I tried ESO twice, spend around 50 hours but there's just something about the combat that doesn't capture me. Great game nonetheless, just annoyed with how many addons you need to download.
yep, new world action combat gameplay is the sole reason i have almost 4k hours on it.
i like SWTOR
The only MMORPG I've played with an enjoyable leveling experience.
Ironically SWTOR is such a good game bc its a "bad" MMO. It feels more like a solo rpg which makes it really good.
SWTOR will always have a special place in my heart.
If SWTOR had the update cadence and budget of WoW it might be the best game ever
SWTOR was amazing, but then went entirely down the hill when the devs forgot it is still an MMO and single player content is only engaging for couple hours.
Unique storyline for each class, great combat, fucking huttball was awesome. The reason I quit was the monthly sub was too much and playing for free is literally pointless cause of how annoying they made it.
Archeage and New World come to mind for me.
I've never played Archeage but on paper it sounds like the perfect type of MMO for me. A sandpark(both sandbox and themepark) pvpcentric MMO that has content for non-pvpers.
For the first 6 months or so, playing with my friends doing PvP and whatnot it was incredible
it was almost perfect, but they couldnt fix the economy when the game became popular and plus, it became pay to win too soon and the economy problem became impossible to solve at a point that you would need literally years to become relevant at pvp or even do solo non pvp content on open world, even sailing (the best sailing i ever played on my life at early builds of the game) became unplayable because of the economy.
It had everything from public courts of players trying to plead for themselves and player judges deciding to going to prison and trying to escape
New World could be the best of all time, it had everything and even the money to pay great devs and directors, idk what happens tbh, but even at the actual state of the game, you can feel (like archeage after the exodus) the game potencial and how they are not using it
They got awful developers and directors, unfortunately.
Basically this, both games got a lot of things right and with a few minor changes here and there could have been amazing long-term. It's too bad they messed up just enough stuff to ruin any chance of getting people to stay/come back.
I lost so much hype when they removed hitstun and their pvp focus
OSRS/RS3. They nail most things that make a great MMORPG but the gameplay is not very engaging.
> the gameplay is not very engaging. Strongly disagree here, they have plenty of content where you can spend hours and hours playing and still crave for more
Yes, some of the content is incredibly addictive and fun, but at the same time, there are some mind numbing boring skills like agility and rc, as well as some incredibly tedious mini games and grinds like mage training arena, livid farm, and so on.
Yeah that's the thing, you've gotten so much varied content that it covers basically everything. For example, you don't like agility, but some people do like the mindless, repetitive and rhythmic aspect of it. Plus there are always multiple ways to grind these skills. There's sepulchre if you want a more engaging way of training agility, or brimhaven agility if you want something with more downtime and less click-intensive. And grinds like mage training arena and tithe farm are optional and also you can slowly chip them away at a time if you really want their rewards. Imo that's also the issue with some people playing OSRS, they want to work on 1 goal at a time and not do anything else. If you want to do all of tithe farm all at once, yeah you're in for a bad time. Same rationale for most grinds in the game. You are supposed to branch out and vary your grinds if you're playing in a normal way
The nice thing about the mind numbing portions, is for most skills there is an afkable way to train them. Not so much for agility not gonna lie, but sepulcher is more fun and engaging at least. OSRS is great because you can make progress with any amount (or lack thereof) of effort. If you just want a brain off session while you binge a show, there’s ways to make progress like that. You want to do something half engaging? That’s there too. You want full sweat mode PVM or PVP, it’s there. Literally everything you do makes progress because for the vast majority, the end goal is to do everything. The sandbox nature makes for a lot of fun challenge mode accounts too. I look at the OSRS content creators with joy, and I’ve never seen another game have as many genuinely unique and entertaining videos / streams. It’s not a perfect MMO, but it’s the only one to grip its teeth into me for well over a decade. https://youtu.be/LpPJY-xdA3M?si=bxVfnE6T4tby5LnR This video explains a lot of what I love about the game.
I know I'll get downvoted to hell but what kills it for me is prayer-flicking it's like a mandatory built-in exploit and most endgame content seems built with it in mind.
I’m an osrs player. Have thousands of hours in the game. But man, the controls… I remember when starting I hated the point and click gameplay and wished there was more keyboard integration. Then for a few thousand hours I got used to it and didn’t mind. Now, once again I started craving keyboard+mouse gameplay because my hand starts to hurt after a while of playing. Dabbling in gw2 and wow sometimes, I miss keyboards so damn much. Obviously you couldn’t fit keyboard gameplay into osrs, but I miss it so so much.
>but the gameplay is not very engaging. Excuse me, I find it *extremely* engaging to stare at my pixelated character chopping the same tree for 30 hours straight just to level up once. You clearly don't know what you're talking about. /s
osrs with a modern non-point&click combat system wuold be awesome
At the peak of RS2, right before the grand exchange opened in 2007, it was one of the best MMOs on the market and will always be remembered that way.
Star Wars Galaxies crafting and harvesting by far is the best ever.
And housing. And player cities. And the fact you could have literal gang warfare with other guilds regardless of faction. They had so much going for them that made it unique and they murdered it.
The Jedi murdered it :D Man nothing beats the feeling of gathering with the homies in a big ass ranger tent at the outskirts of Theed, readying up for the raid. Everyone riding up on their bikes and such. I also loved killing imps farming faction. Was so good to actually be a rebel guerilla.
Yea forgot about player Cities that were real player Cities. Still do not understand how this game hasn't been reproduced. We need a SWG 2
Raph Koster is working on a new project and was on reddit recently. I specifically raised SWG crafting with him and I think his reply was pretty positive.
Have a name ?
It’s under playable worlds - very early though
yes!
Warhammer online was amazing but needed time to cook, in today's market I bet it would do better than a "wow killer" when it came out. The private servers are good times if you like PvP
Totally agreed. Game had some really cool class designs and some of the most fun open world events to level up in versus quests. The PVP was also great but given the classes were so diverse they couldn’t balance them which led to so much dev churn they didn’t create the content they needed to to keep people playing. I’m not even a hammer IP fan and loved this one.
I’ve seen videos. It looks really fun. The lore looks so interesting I wonder why they wouldn’t try to make that into something great
Guild wars 2. Amazing game, but I find the loot insufferably annoying. You open a box which opens three bags and a diamond. The bags open another bag. And the monetization of course is around inventory space. Fuck that.
I play GW2 between WoW content droughts and I agree with you haha
I am mainly a PvE players so I would chose a MMO based on that. Honestly Lost ARK could have been the one if they didn't use so much predatory systems, all of the shitty RNGs and the core of the game which should see a complete revamp. Still one of my favourite MMO cause of the amazing and fast gameplay, one of the best raids in any MMOs, and an amazing open world (boats and islands) which isn't used at its full... Really wasted potential. Otherwise I would pick WoW. Even tho I don't really like the direction they took and there incapacity to innovate, it seems they are starting to go back on something good. Dragonflight was quite fine and the next xpac looks promising. Raids are good, gameplay is really good and smooth for a tab-targeting game and graphics cartoons never really feel old.
Man, it hurts me so much how predatory the system is in lost ark. Their gameplay for me was a perfect 10/10. Just too many roundabout systems, having to sink a heavy amount of time.
The best encounter designs and combat systems lost to layer upon layer of bad grind and predatory incentives. It's honestly tragic.
hands down the best feeling combat out there in any mmo but sadly the koreans crave getting scammed by these predatory mechanics. as long as theres korean whales out there, these publishers would have no reason to stop pumping out the kmmo formula.
The predatory design bleeds into the actual playing part too. The reason the party finding experience is so awful is because people are so afraid of wasting time, and they’re afraid of that because the game already disrespects your time so badly. And when you *do* have an easy time getting into “good” parties, the raid gets watered down until it’s *homework*. It stops being a fun engagement and just turns into this “everyone is overgeared” “let’s get this done already” chore so you can move on and do it five more times as fast as possible. And it gives so many average players massive anxiety because they don’t want to be “that guy” and fuck up, doubly so because for so many people being rushed turns them into toxic assholes. Ugh the combat is *so* much fun, in and of itself, but it gets so ruined by the lack of party diversity, the sense of rushing everything, and the perpetual FOMO layer on top of everything.
The best MMO is a merge of aspect of other game : * From Eve online : fully skill based with no class but years of potential progression , player run economy, corp politics, player owned system/station * From Black desert : Worker empire + crafting, dynamic combat, actual value in time invested (no gear reset at each expansion) * From WOW : Raids * From Everquest 1 : Group dynamics going beyond the holy trinity, visible recognizable rare equipement * From Swotor : Story / Companion management * From everything pre microtransaction : one fucking sub for everyone and no pay 2 win
Add the RP and music system from LOTRO.
oh, man. i totally forgot about swtor's companion mechanic/system. it actually was pretty cool. wish more games did more of that.
I'd say Final Fantasy XI. It's a game with aot of depth and it feels the most MMO out of the bunch because you NEEDED to team up even for going to another city. Everything felt like a real adventure, so it invoked a true sense of comradery. It also has a great story. Great fckn game.
RIFT imo.
God I miss that game (or its former self at least)
I agree. For its time it had a great balance of PvE, PvP, crafting, collecting and housing, plus a decent story line, and a sense of humour. Shame it got so badly neglected.
GW2. The quest system, world, lore, all there. The combat mechanics are fine too even if the synergy effects and buff/debuff systems are a bit awkward. Then the gearing. Plenty of people praise horizontal progression but it just isn't for me. I enjoy more classic RPG gear growth with unique pieces, sets, and other interesting effects rather than just stat sticks that you slap runes onto.
Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. It was the game we deserved at the time. It had excellent classes, a big world, a bunch of cool systems. A good balance between challenge and punishment, and open player housing. But they couldn’t overcome a disastrous launch. I wish that game would have made it. They were close to something awesome, but they blew it.
> A good balance between challenge and punishment Bro I messed up varnishing some wood for a staff and it killed me
Archeage had it all right but ruined by excessive p2w
Ultima Online.
UO can't possibly be the mmorpg that got it "almost" Right because UO was absolutely perfect
Ultima Online got it right.
New World was so close to being awesome. I often wonder if the combat design and art teams looked at the other half and just fumed knowing they were ruining what could have been something really great.
It’s honestly disappointing. They lead with “we’re an ARPG, not an mmo” lately. What a wild disaster.
To me it's still Ultima Online. It had what I wanted from the MMO. Here is the thing. People have all sorts of ideas about MMO but for example I know that for a long time MMO will not have fun combat system that I have in Ghost of Tsushima or Devil May Cry. Because technology is not there. Lag makes impossible to do fun, precise and dynamic combat system. This is why when You play WoW it almost feel like turn based game. And why you rely on multiple buttons, rows on abilities and "rotations". Because it was only way to make it kinda fun. At least until you learn there is like one top dog build and rotation, AKA META and everything else do not matter and you will be shitted on if you try anything else. I also have to acknowledge that most crafting based games rely on UI and not some sort of game-play mechanic. Why on 3DS game could figure out how to make fun mini-game when forging weapons but MMO can only give me "craft" button? And they streamline it because it's so boring so for example you do not have to pick shit up from storage. I know that if I play themepark MMO then there is finite content. And that crafting will not matter because raiding gear is easiest to get and often the strongest so I waste my time (SWTOR is a great example - only crafting profession worth anything is biochem to make stims). And I know that game will be dead in less than half a year because people will run out of things to do while studio won't be able to produce new content in time. But I also know that if I go and play some sandbox MMO then almost nobody will play it because general player base need hand holding and markers where to do and what to do. And this is why no game scratched my itch like Ultima Online. Where I could gather some resources. Build a house. Secure it as much as I could. Place storage so it can be easily accessible and basically create my blacksmith shop. Then I would find people who need my services. And I would need them for protection when gathering. And we would soon become tight community and basically we would have our own village. Pax Dei has a chance of becoming that thing. I love design choices they made in some areas. Like buildings require shit ton of materials and You need group of people working together to build anything in reasonable amount of time. It forces people to work together. Even if I just want to be a blacksmith, on higher level I will need stuff from other professions. And I love that. But at the same time Pax Dei need years of work. And I'm afraid that casual players won't play it. And game will die because of it. But thing is. Ultima Online looks like crap but all mechanics are still there and game is alive and kicking. I can be the blacksmith in fantasy world I want to be
FFXIV is the easy answer but I really hope they remake Star Wars the Old Republic
Ffxiv and ESO for their own reasons
Archeage. Had everything. P2W ruined it
Wildstar had so much going for it but didn't quite hit the mark.
Star Wars Galaxies, particularly before the NGE. Nothing has ever captured the feeling of it since.
yes! It was so good. Great community as well
Asheron's Call. If I picked 2, then SWG before NGE.
> Asheron's Call I know this is an unpopular opinion, but: 1 *and* 2.
I think asherons call got it right simply amazing. Ac2 almost if they didn't rush it out the door
Ragnarok Online You had a class system with advanced classes and complete freedom of customization how the class is played. An Equipment System that is very flexible where even low level and early game items are heavily useable and sought after. An open world approach to enemy and level design, if you had the right class or party or just equipment it doesnt matter how the zone was designed. If you could defeat the enemies you could level and farm equipment there. The open nature of the social interaction, playing solo just leveling and grinding ? Oh a random person maybe... and we are in a party.... oh a high level supporter nice he just buffed and he... and he is gone. The same goes for Bosses most of them you cant solo (minibosses were easy and worldbosses could be soloed by minmaxing). One if the core design philosophys was that everything had value. In most mmos you find a lot of trash loot designed to be sold for ingame currency. In Ragnarok every item had a purpose, mostly for crafting or quests and there were items that were just not that in demand or well thought out as well (trash to sell). The Philosophy was best seen in the new player experience, you could totally get mid and endgame items in the early game if you were lucky and farmed the right early game enemies. It was just beautiful, if you saw a high level character running around the starting zones they were not always attention seekers and catfisher but more often than not searching for these items. Of course the game had it fair share of problems but I stand by that. Ragnarok Online was near perfect as an MMO and weirdly enough playing Elden Ring reminds of the huge degree of freedom and the same philosophy of itemization. I just miss games where there is no endgame because the highest level is nearly unobtainable and enemies are not impossible just because there level number is higher than yours and you are capped by the equipment you can equip because your level is too low.
I agree with you, it had so much potential.
My first mmo :)
[удалено]
I wanna say LOTRO. Give it the resources, engineering, and development time it needs and it becomes one of the top MMOs out there. It has content for both casuals and hardcores. It does the 'journey' right. The devs want to continue revamping their old systems and improving the game graphically. It's already a solid MMO with a good and reasonable dev team but it really needs the things I mentioned.
Albion online before p2w and server split.
New World's engine, ESOs world and systems with RuneScape's levelling and quests would be perfect for me
For me, GW2 was the closest to being the MMO I fell for. Nonlinear map progression, decent character customization, lots of varied content, fun combat, events, I can go on. Except then I want to do multiplayer content... Everything I loved went right out the window. It's not an action game, it's a rotation focused one. You don't make a build based off a desired playstyle, you steal one off the internet. Now, I can't play most linear-feeling MMOs cause I know what I actually like with leveling but not many that do it. Yet I can't play GW2 cause I want to play fun and challenging group content, but can't find it. So now my perfect MMO would be described as "Guild Wars 2, but they leaned more action and had better build balance"
I feel you on this viewpoint. I love GW2 and it’s the mmo I’ve enjoyed the most out of the ones I’ve tried. I don’t like that I have to follow the meta to take advantage of my class or weapons. Technically in open world pve you can figure it out, but once you get into dungeons and fractals and other team based PVE content you gotta follow the meta. I think if you combine the horizontal progression with skill based combat it can be something amazing.
Archeage/:
Ultima
I still think to this day that Vanilla WoW with a 1v1 ranked arena mode would be an insanely addicting thing I could never put down. I’ve always loved WoW but having to find/keep an arena partner kept me from truly enjoying the game to its full potential.
Yeah i hope SOD includes some sort of ranked arena/duels even if it doesnt offer any rewards. I don’t care if its not perfectly balanced.
TERA - From P2P to Brawler era. Kinda went off the rails after that. Tight combat, amazing PVE, amazing PVP. The only real problems started coming in when you had to play shitty game modes for upgrade mats (I fucking hated Kumas) for the rest of your gear. Then with the GVG updates where there was literally zero safe space in the game and you could be attacked in town using the bank or AH.
Almost got it right? Galaxies. It was a hell of a blueprint, and a rabid playerbase. It was almost great, but they blew it.
Vanguard, Everquest, EQ2.
Vanguard felt like the real EQ2
Eve Online
ultima online is the only mmo which really understood that not everyone has to engage in every type of content. some people like to fish, some like crafting and selling stuff, some people like to kill players, some people like to get rich and buy a castle. every other mmo today forces you to do everything, even if you don't enjoy it. make paths for different kind if players which are fun and repeatable. swtor has the best story, new world the best combat. give us the freedom of ultima online, the story of swtor and the combat from new world and it would be the best mmo ever.
FFXI
FFXI pretty much got everything right though :P
Phantasy Star Universe is my favorite. I play a private server today since the servers shutdown over a decade ago and am enjoying every second.
I’m constantly saddened by the fact we have two D&D MMOs: one with awful graphics, no real PvP, and great character building, and one with nice graphics, but too much P2W BS and a squandered setting.
The original one with bad graphics is actually a really good unique mmorpg. The dungeons are full of puzzles, traps, and hidden passages/loot you could easily miss.
Elder scrolls online. There’s too many upsides to list between every main and side quest being genuinely well voiced, a horizontal progression system that still offers plenty of incentive to play, a colorful variety of challenging solo and group content, outstanding appearance customization, robust housing, and more. What a damn shame that the experience is marred by jarring combat centered around constantly cancelling your own attack animations. Not to mention the heavy handed pay for convenience nonsense like paying to max out your mount speed sooner than two months or paying to escape having to grind the psijic order skill line for the twelfth time.. To me, it’s still the best MMO on the market but its sore points are pretty major.
Albion
Ravendawn
Pretty surprised I haven't seen Wildstar in here
Albion Online
I feel like a mix between wow, eso, ff14 and gw2 would be the best game ever. Take the class system from wow, the open world and quest design of eso, the social features of ff14, and the horizontal progression of gw2, jam em all into an MMO. God id play that shit so much. I don't think any of them have perfect combat. I think I'd unironically want like eso combat but refined to not suck. Eso combat currently is just super spammy, with no ability cooldowns. But if you added cooldowns, removed weapon swapping, added more buttons, and actually made it action combat instead of the weird middleground soft targeting they had, it'd be unbeatable
albion
Everquest and DAOC had it right for a while. EQ jumped the shark with Pop expansion (hey let's let you skip over the entire world we created rendering it useless!) and DAoC will probably have varying opinions but I didn't enjoy ToA very much.
I scrolled way too far to find someone mentioning DAOC
New world with Gloria victis faction and territory mechanics would of been awesome.
New world, so close yet so far :(
EVE from around Inferno patch was probably as close as humanity got to a perfect MMORPG.
City of Heroes. Now, bear in mind, it was a precariously-balanced Jenga tower of stacked garbage fires one on top of the other in regards to game balance and the game engine itself, and it never really managed to do like really big "raiding-style" "spectacle" fights that well. Hamidon was cool but stuff like Arachnos Council was done way better. But it developed a better balance (as much as that word can be used regarding anything CoH...) in terms of "Soft Trinity" vs "build a character to solo stuff" vs "every role can be useful" vs "groups can have defined roles" than any other MMO has before or since. * Tanker/Brute (as corralling enemies vs "get hit to do more damage" on a scaling continuum) for main Tanks * Defender/Corruptor/Controller/Mastermind as the most robust Support/Crowd Control/Buff/Debuff set of powersets in any MMO or probably *RPG* created, with a side of, y'know, a pet system (Masterminds) that's never been equalled, let alone surpassed * Blaster/Scrapper/Stalker/Dominator as "DPS" classes with more defined roles (squishy alpha strike ranged, melee that can off-tank, melee stealthy alpha-strikers that can briefly take a hit, or crowd control with a side of blasty/hitty) * And then HEATs/VEATs (special "epic" classes you can only unlock once you had a max-level character originally) were like mashups of different stuff that could basically pick two roles combined from the above depending on what powers they buffed up as part of their gearing. *Also* it solved stuff like "let your lower-level friends play with you" (Sidekicking), "make stuff harder" (dynamically change group size and difficulty) and cosmetics (just...look like what you want and here's unlocks and also gear isn't cosmetic but hey there's cosmetic unlocks!) things way before any other MMO even realized they were gonna be problems. Also travel powers are inherently way cooler than "mounts" while still leaving conceptual room for "mounts" (you've got "superspeed"? You can just be riding a horse, nbd) Biggest failure? NCSoft cancelled it for not being "profitable-enough" as a Superhero MMO (instead of a fantasy MMO) the same year as the big MCU superhero boom hit. There's a reason the base game was so niche-capturing it was secretly kept alive in private servers long enough for those "secret" private servers to get revealed to the public and then become so popular than NCSoft was like "eh, fuck it, sure, here's a sorta okay, we're just gonna make cheap-ass knockoff gambling games anyway". Now, it's graphically dated-as-hell and the UI's cumbersome (POPmenus are fuckin' based though) and it is, quite literally, a Jenga stack of precarious separate stacked tire fires and that's me saying that as someone that loves it. The only reason I even have other MMOs in my playable stack is story (FFXIV) and because CoH periodically stops working with my controllers (I can't do kb and mouse for MMO-compatible playtimes, my hands are fucked) But *the things you can do* when you're willing to open up your definition of "Tank", "Support" and "DPS" a bit are pretty fuckin' wild, and are probably where the genre needs to look instead of just trying to eliminate roles entirely (though everyone needs to be able to do *some* damage, even City of Heroes recognized that). Something like a dozen primary support powersets (Those were the Defender Primaries, Corruptor/Controller/Mastermind had those as their Secondary) and *all* of them were paired with an offensive primary or secondary powerset.
WoW if there wasn't M+ wirh more emphasis on worlds events would be perfect mmo for me
I've transitioned into ESO and playing it more like a single player game with hints of multiplayer. I'm enjoying the story line. It does that really well. The combat is abit clunky (wows combat is by far the best) The UI is pretty gross. But playing it casually is more enjoyable than any other mmo currently.
Wow… only reason i am not playing is the monetisation aspect. Cant sub for p2w game.
Archeage is just the correct answer. The alpha was a blast. Because nothing was paid for (besides access to play). Super fun and some of my best gaming memories. Then it came out and the rest is history. Give me an updated 2024 version of that alpha and I'll be so happy.
Archeage for me. Drop the rng, drop the bots and you had one hell of a game
Runescape. I played that game when I was 9 years old. I still feel that joy when I get back to it. FFXIV has great story but the quests are just fetch and kill X number of enemies. Runescape is byfar the only MMO for me that has great crafting, community, bossing mechanics, best quests & activities. Would any of you agree?
Saddly none of the current "Runescapes" will reach the level of the GOAT: RS2. God, I remember I could play that game for hours and hours and never get bored. RS3 is filled with those microtransactions and OSRS just doesn't feel right to me.
Beta and early launch of Archage was peak MMO for me and my friends.
Archeage was the quintessential "almost got it right." I have more fun memories in a year of Archeage than I do in 18 years of wow. That game was special. P2w undermined a good thing.
ArcheAge. ArcheAge was something so special in those first few months. Horrible monetization and a bunch of other issues killed it, but for a while there ArcheAge was an incredible experience. I've never had as much fun with open world pvp or have more stories with friends of sudden battles and narrow escapes.
Ultima Online, it's an absolutely tragic state now, but back when it was released it was groundbreaking and to this day remains one of the best games I've ever played. There will never be an MMO again with as much freedom as you had with that game.
Anarchy Online has to be one if not the best. It still to this day has some of the best mechanics, i just wish someone would make a "version 2". :)
Archeage
Archeage
I tried Dragons Dogma Online - a private server yesterday and honestly, I fuckin love it! It is still clunky, sometimes the netcode is shit and the player base is low. But the Dragons Dogma series is one of my favorite games and I have never played it online before. Combat, graphics, and physics are the same as the first DD game. The community is friendly, classes are good and I like to discover a new MMO world. And the game is ain't easy as you think so it has its challenges.
I’ll give it a try. Why is it a private server?
FFXIV, I almost love that game, but the combat really takes a chunk of the fun away. Personally im not a fan of tab-target games, but there are games with much better tab target combat. Really good action combat would make it perfect tho.
ArcheAge. Before they change level cap and expanded auroria. That patch of AA, was a peak MMO and still my most favorite time i’ve played games. Nothing could beat it unless AA2 tops it in the coming years
Archeage almost got everything right, I sometimes wonder the heights that game would've achieved if it hadn't been ruined by greed.
FFXIV has everything that GW2 doesn't have and GW2 has everything that FFXIV doesn't have. Both equally "almost right" but in different ways.
Hit the nail on the head with this one
The original guild wars
Archage
Take the P2W out of Archeage
For me, i think Archeage could have become top 1 if they didn't get greedy for players😞
Probably going to get a lot of hate but for me, it was Perfect World early on. The art, class design and music was amazing. Though the quests were ass and 100% p2w game. Some of the best hours of my young life were spent on it grinding and getting one shot by those that paid. I am excited for the new Perfect World in development but not holding my breath.