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Recommend us an MMORPG
Kate of Lokys
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
wasted pixels and I have always enjoyed playing together, but we've recently grown somewhat tired of our old standards. We played a browser-based mmorpg for a good couple of years, but the game creator methodically stripped away everything we liked about it over the course of a few major updates, so I stopped playing. We also did the Ragnarok Online private server thing for a while, but we got sick of months of work being wiped out because the 13 year old server admin threw a temper tantrum and deleted everyone's account.
So, we are looking for a new game we can get into together, and our strong preference is for an MMORPG - we both enjoy the feeling of accomplishment from levelling up, we both love exploring new areas and experimenting with new skills, we both derive solid satisfaction from learning the mechanics of a game, and I'm also a total lootwhore.
The trouble is, we've both been out of the MMO scene pretty much forever - aside from RO, the last game I played in that vein was EverQuest, which I was heavily into for years - so we have no idea what's good, what sucks, what will still be around a couple of years from now, etc. So, we have come here for personal recommendations.
Here's what we're looking for in a game:
So, what's fun? What's boring? What looks awesome at first, but rapidly devolves into a soul-crushing grindfest? Any and all input is welcome. And, of course, if any PA-based guilds want to make a pitch for their specific game and group, go for it. We're open to anything at this point, especially if the game in question has a trial period.
So, we are looking for a new game we can get into together, and our strong preference is for an MMORPG - we both enjoy the feeling of accomplishment from levelling up, we both love exploring new areas and experimenting with new skills, we both derive solid satisfaction from learning the mechanics of a game, and I'm also a total lootwhore.
The trouble is, we've both been out of the MMO scene pretty much forever - aside from RO, the last game I played in that vein was EverQuest, which I was heavily into for years - so we have no idea what's good, what sucks, what will still be around a couple of years from now, etc. So, we have come here for personal recommendations.
Here's what we're looking for in a game:
- Art style: World of Warcraft is probably going to be the first, second, fourth, fifth, and ninth suggestion we get, and with good reason, but neither of us are terribly attracted to it visually. It's just too bright and colourful and stylized; we prefer a more realistic, traditionally medieval-fantasy aesthetic. City of Heroes/Villains shares this flaw too, from what I've seen. Visual style isn't a make-or-break factor, so we're not ruling anything out based solely on this, but if we're going to be playing something for hours, it would be nice if we enjoyed looking at it.
- Minimal grinding: our time is limited, both by necessity and choice. We're not interested in spending a minimum of four hours per day grinding exp on witchaloks to reach level ten so we can start spending five hours per day grinding hagalocks to get to level twenty and maybe after five weeks we'll be high enough to try running the level thirty shamanalocks instance. We want to feel like we're actually progressing in the game even if we can't treat it as a full-time job. If I had to guess, I'd say we'll probably be spending maybe 10-15 hours per week playing, total, and it would be kind of discouraging to not accomplish anything during that time.
- Active community: we want the server (and the game!) to still be there in a year. We want to be able to find a guild to join, if we choose to do so. We want robust player economies, and amusing interpersonal drama to watch from the sidelines, and people to hang out with.
- Easy or optional grouping: nothing makes me ask myself "why the fuck I am even playing this stupid game" like sitting down to play for a scheduled, time-limited three hour block, putting the LFG tag on, spending two hours and fifty minutes trying to get something organized, then getting an invite to Velks ten minutes before I need to leave. In EverQuest, a few classes could solo effectively by kiting mobs around, but us tank types didn't have a chance of that. Do any games lend themselves particularly well to duoing or soloing, or are there any that make the process of finding a group as quick and painless as possible?
- Setting: our strong preference is for fantasy. I kind of have a thing for hitting stuff in the face with an axe.
- Interesting PvE content: we don't have time to get into the PvP game; it tends to be very un-fun unless you already have all the leet gears, and honestly, if I want to ruin another human being's day, I'll play Team Fortress 2 on a pub server. (And if I want to get my day ruined, I'll play TF2 on one of the uber-competitive Toronto-based servers). Both of us just want to kick the shit out of some unfeeling NPC mobs.
So, what's fun? What's boring? What looks awesome at first, but rapidly devolves into a soul-crushing grindfest? Any and all input is welcome. And, of course, if any PA-based guilds want to make a pitch for their specific game and group, go for it. We're open to anything at this point, especially if the game in question has a trial period.
Kate of Lokys on
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The game is very PvE/story focused. Even after you hit the level cap, with each major patch comes a new part of the storyline. Theres very few raids, mostly 6man groups at the most. Check out the LoTRO post in the MMO forum.
I tried EVE online for about a month, and while the PA/goonswarm community is amazing, the problem is that the gameplay is just not fun in and of itself.
If you're looking for a fantasy grindfest, you should actually try Dungeons and Dragons online. The exclusively quest-based gameplay is actually ideal for more casual players, since you simply play through a (semi)story-based mission for an hour or so at a time, with a group of friends, ideally - but you can get NPC helpers if you don't want to track down 6 people to work with, or just go through the quests on solo difficulty.
Seconded. Though, my view is somewhat biased, as I have been playing Guild Wars for the past 3 years now. Anyways, to address your list:
Guild Wars works similar to a card capture game. Think of each skill as a card. When you buy (from a skill trainer) or capture (from a boss) a skill, it is added to your "deck" of cards. When you leave outposts to start a mission or quest or wander, you can only have 8 skills equipped at once. Out of those 8, you can only have 1 elite skill equipped at once. You are limited to what skills pertain to your primary or secondary profession. You can freely change your secondary later on in the game.
Naturally, the game quickly becomes about what skills you and your group are using. It is also important to bring skills to counter your enemies or to not bring skills that can exploited by your enemies. (for example, do not bring lots of enchantment skills in areas where enemies will strip enchantments or deal damage based on you being under the effect of enchantments) This is both a nice and bad thing. It's good in that the game is about skills and your use of them versus grinding up to really high levels and/or having tons of money for lots of gold. It's bad/annoying because you have a total of over 1,100 skills spread across 10 professions. It can be a bit of a pain if you don't what the skills are. Luckily, by hitting F11, you can bring up the help menu which will tell you what skills have been used against you, what skills you have equipped, and has links that will take you to the page for that skill at Guild Wars' official wiki.
Unfortunately, in order to try out Nightfall or Factions you'll have to either get a hold of a Trilogy Trial DVD or you'll have to request a trial/buddy code on a forum, like in Guild Wars Guru's request thread. You can get a trial key of Prophecies (the 1st campaign) from ANet by going here. Keep in mind, Factions and Nightfall campaigns are much more robust than what you will experience in Prophecies and they will also have a lot more players doing the lower level missions/quests.
Steam ID - BewilderedRonin
Age of Conan was great for those first 20 levels, at which point the personality completely left it(after you got out of the initial island) and it turned into a bunch of terrible grind quests. However, the developers have had some time to add more content, so perhaps it is better now.
I agree wholeheartedly that if you don't Like WoW, you probably won't like LoTRO. You probably also won't like FF XI or a lot of other MMOs. Thing is, WoW was built off a very specific formula. Essentially, grind-based Korean MMOs. Blizzard just happened to do a very, very good job with it and provided a very solid experience. It's the best out there, if you like that kind of gameplay. But if you don't, then you probably won't like most MMOs that try to mimic that approach.
I haven't played Conan, so I can't really offer any introspection on whether it's good or not or even how the gameplay feels. I will say that I have heard a bevy of good things about it and that I know it does play differently than WoW and its clones. However, this Kotaku piece should also be taken into consideration since it pertains to your "active community" requirement. (full piece in spoiler tags if you don't want to click the link)
Funcom have announced that during the week, the total number of servers for the game will be reduced from 49 to just 18, with the biggest losses due to strike North America and Oceania.
There, 16 servers are closing, leaving only six behind. Europe will fare slightly better, with 12 servers to be left open so as to cater to the all major language regions equally.
Funcom's line is that this will improve player experience, with busier servers meaning busier, more enjoyable worlds. And in a small way, they're right. But in a bigger way? Going from 49 servers to 18 shows just how quickly and how savagely this game has tanked.
Keep in mind, this doesn't mean that the servers are dead or that the game is shutting down, just that the player population has decreased and server restructuring was necessary. According to others, AoC is still very active on the remaining servers. I'm not trying to steer you away from AoC, you should consider giving it a try as it is different from WoW (which seems like what you're looking for), but I remembered reading this and thought it important enough to bring up.
Also of note: Thanatos mentioned getting to level 20 and then hanging it up. Apparently, lvl 20 is the magic number. fallaxdraco's point of the decline in quality after lvl 20 is supported by another AoC Kotaku article. (again, full piece in spoiler tags)
Writer Nelson Williams over at Vox ex Machina gives a detailed takedown of how an MMO goes from 700,000 subscribers to nearly zilch in six months. The short answer, after level 20, everything becomes visually dead and unfun, catering only to those who enjoy antisocial MMO behavior and all of the genre's most tedious tasks. [Edit: I changed the headline, perhaps a bit late, because it suggested this MMO was dead and no longer being played. It is, they're just not having much fun.]
Funcom's made an effort to shore up these problems and spiffy the experience. But the article points out the game's producer and director, Gaute Godager, left his 16-year career with the company over how the game was handled after its release. That absence further hurt efforts to save the franchise.
Again, I'm not posting this to try and steer you away from or to talk smack about AoC, but thought these pieces to be important for you to take into consideration. On the same merit, you shouldn't let these completely sway you away from AoC. As I said, AoC plays differently enough from WoW that it might be of interest and it just might wind up being exactly what you're looking for.
Steam ID - BewilderedRonin
WoW is still the most entertaining.
And Age of Conan was indeed great. For 20 levels.
edit: and there's an active PA guild for LotRO that can surely toss you some trial codes.
Actually, you don't need trial codes anymore. You can download the client and sign up for a free trial by going here.
Steam ID - BewilderedRonin
If it takes a year and a half to reach maximum level in a game, but there are a wide variety of quests that can be done for exp and multiple zones to grind in for each level range, that will be just fine. It's the journey we're interested in, not so much the destination.
Aside from that, what sprung to mind is city of heroes. That fills basically all your criteria except the high fantasy setting, but you can still make a beefy dude who "arrests" people with his axe.
edit: oh, you don't like CoH's stylings, either
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
Ah, I didn't know that. Thanks for the correction.
Ah, I thought you guys had played WoW and didn't like it. Well, maybe you should give WoW a try. There is a wide variety of quests and areas for respective level ranges. It is very well done, has a lot of character to it, and the overall experience is very well polished. I personally really didn't like WoW and its clones, but it does appeal to a lot of people for all sorts of various reasons. I would also recommend posting in one of the WoW threads and asking some of the people there to show you and your friend some of what to expect, as you may not get to see too much if it's just you and your friend farting around in the newbie zone. As I said, WoW doesn't appeal to me, but it is popular for a very good reason.
Steam ID - BewilderedRonin
A lot is personal preference I guess. I hate grinding with a passion.
There's a lot to do, you can quest your way to the max level and the lower levels become easier (less XP required to level up) as more expansions come out.
For me, having played many characters this is a big thing as I spend less time doing repeat content.
For you, as a new player, it will be a fast and progressive journey.
You'll really notice how your new abilities help with various situations.
I would say that WoW is EASILY the most ungrindy MMO out there. By far.
45 zones, 19 5 player dungeons, and 6 20/40 person raid zones for levels 1-60.
7 zones, 16 5 player dungeons, and 9 10/25 person raid zones for levels 61-70.
10 zones, 12 5 player dungeons, and 4 10/25 person raid zones for levels 71-80.
Each of those zones is worth anywhere from 30 minutes to 3 or 4+ hours of solo and small group oriented questing. Each of those 5 person dungeons can take anywhere from 30 minutes to 1+ hour to finish, though it's worth noting that you may have some issues finding necessary groupmates for the 1-70ish stuff because it's legacy content. But they're there if you can find the people. The raids are of less importance to someone starting out, but they can provide weeks of content to work through at the level cap, and based on those numbers you can see Blizzard is comitted to continually making more available.
It just has a foolish amount of PvE content, and the quality of it increases as you level. Outland (60-70) is leaps and bounds beyond any of the vanilla content. And Northrend (70-80) makes Outland look silly.
If you just can't get over the stylistic choices, give LOTRO a try. It plays very much like WoW, with a large amount of content, some interesting character and combat systems, and a nice set of overarching storylines to work through as you level. It always treats its source material with respect, and does a good job of using it for inspiration without leaning on it for support.
Both of those would suit all of your criteria, and are by far some of the friendliest games for new players. Both of them support a PA community (in WoW's case, several communities) on populous servers.
Beyond that, I wouldn't reccomend any of the other fantasy MMOs out there. The rest are buggy, lacking in content, too pvp oriented, or too dated.
Right now I'm playing Runes of Magic (open beta!) and I'm -really- enjoying it. Yeah it has a few flaws (I mean, beta, c'mon), but so far it feels a bit like WoW without all the grinding (I did a 14 day trial of wow once and felt like I was grinding after like a week only, that was... not good). It has 6 classes, a bunch of crafting stuff, and overall I'm really enjoying it. Plus, free open beta = you can test it out and if you hate it, uninstall it and not be out any cash
I would give WoW a shot, with a few qualifiers:
1) Assuming you aren't interested in RP, roll up on a PvE (Normal) server. There is no PvP unless you flag yourself for PvP or go into the other faction's starting area.
2) The races with the most muted starting areas are Undead (Horde), Draenai (Alliance, expansion required), or if you like little people and lots of snow, Dwarves and Gnomes (both Alliance). The thing is, those are just starting areas, and after that there are a ton of other places to go. So even if you don't like the way your starting area looks, you won't be there forever. There are lots of choices after you leave it. Also worth noting is that most every area has a story reason that it looks the way it does, so you can try a few different things to see what strikes your fancy.
3) Any class can solo in WoW, though some have an easier time of it than others. Paladins and hunters probably have it the easiest right from the start. Paladins get damage and heals, and hunters are like being in a little party because at level 10 you can train a pet to tank for you. If you and WP play together a lot, you should be fine with whatever you pick.
4) WoW is doing a Refer-a-Friend program right now. Basically, it can work one of two ways. I can explain how it works in more detail if you want, but basically you link your account to someone's else's who has the game (even the basic game). For 90 days, any characters the two accounts have that are within about 4 levels of each other can get triple XP when they group, and the linking account gets a bunch of neat perks as well. The downside is that if you don't know anyone who plays on a normal server already, one of you actually has to buy the game to get this. The other downside is that if you don't upgrade from 'trial' by the end of the period you really only get 10 days.
Server-wise, I find the RP and RP-PvP servers have the best atmosphere. There isn't much actual RP, but there is a higher degree of respect towards other players. Although it's still the internets, so a few idiots will be present no matter where you go.
I agree with others.. WoW and LotRO are great choices. You might consider giving a try to EQ2, as well. There's a shitload of content, it's solo and small-group friendly, and the graphics are far less stylized than WoW.
I admit, however, that I don't know how the community is these days. Give the trial a try?
https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197970666737/
At first it was a kinda hard transistion to WoW, and I resisted for a long time because of my RO friends. Then they all switched to WoW so i had no excuse XD After giving it a fair shot, I enjoyed it a lot. We started on a fairly new server, so there were a lot of people playing through the low level PvE content. A couple of friends that started playing last August are around lvl70 now - they're slow-but-steady, casual gamers, and have made it through most of the 1-70 dungeon material solely on pugs.
Guild wars seems to be another popular choice after coming off of RO. I've never played it, but I "LOL'd" when my brother came over to use out internet and yelled "1, 2, 3, SPIKE! 1, 2, 3, SPIKE!" over vent for an hour and a half while killing some boss.
Just my .02... Good luck in whatever you choose!
The Best in Terms of Pants on JCCC3
Agreed. Well agreed for the PvE. People complain about PvP being "the same builds" but that's just because they have no imagination to find new team builds. (e-denial Sin shutdown in AB? don't mind if I do) The endgame of Guild Wars, undeniably, is meant to be PvP or bust. There are people who love the PvE and have stuck with it for years on end, but I honestly don't know how they did it. While there is a decent amount of variety to the enemies and skillsets they use, PvP really is the star and main focus of GW.
Steam ID - BewilderedRonin
If you go with WoW, I heavily suggest making characters on a PvE server. I was on PVP servers for the last 4 years and I have no idea why I kept doing it. I don't enjoy ganking, and I certainly don't enjoy being ganked.
My Backloggery
Oh dear Lord Ao... Yeah. Although, to be fair, that is common for most MMOs. (check this for WoW guild leader hilarity (NSFW!)) But I can't really think of what boss he must've been fighting that took that long other than maybe Mallyx (who is crazy tough). People try and do this crap in PvP too, but that's usually when the team is ful of tools that don't know wtf they are doing. Personally, in the 3 years I've been playing GW, I have never had to deal with that crap, and I don't really want to.
Steam ID - BewilderedRonin
Once there though, things change and grouping for instances becomes the only way to progress.
Anyway, it's not like those trials are hard to get, so you guys should do that before you say you hate the art style. For me it wasn't about the art style so much as the game looked old, the kinds of things I had to do in the first 20 levels made me almost suicidal ("you must keel 10 snow moose" anyone? the game would be complete with a "/suicide" emote), the amusement park gameplay model killed immersion ("hey, look at everyone else doing the same epic quest in this world that seems more artificial with every passing minute!"), and running quickly taught me to try and plot straight line courses between everything on the map and go make a sandwich. More rant if you want it:
Being on a PvP server was a lot of laughs sometimes though. I once explored into the other side's territory and some high level players were like :whatthechrist: and started following me around and laughing.
Here is the thread for the PA guild in Lord of the Rings Online. I'm not able to tell from skimming the thread if The Barrovian Society is still around, but that thread is still active.
This is the thread for PA guild I recently joined in December called Clawshrimp & Co. It's a relatively new guild full of good people. I'm sure you'd be welcome to join us.
My Backloggery
*runs away*
It's actually not that bad.
I don't think it's much of a lasting game though, unless you just make characters to kill other people with.
XBL
I'm actually going to buy either a PS3 or a PC for that game.
You can get a downloadable installer from the WoW website. It takes about 6-7 hours to download the whole thing and both expansions on a decent connection. At least it did for me on my 3Mbs DSL. Which is about as long as it would take to do a full install off the discs. You can also download a trial installer, but that streams a lot of content so if you actually buy it you'll have to install the full one anyway.
Buy a trial disc for 2-3 bucks. Full vanilla WoW client, though behind on patches. Still saves plenty of time for stuff you won't have to download.