With all of the subscription based MMO's out there today, you're quite limited to which you can play. Which is your favourite and why? Personally i'm tempted to say WoW. Mostly because even though it's a tedious grind, it's still some amazing fun with friends. But what would you guys say is best and why?
I don't like WoW. The fact that I can right click a same level mob, then go AFK and come back to the dead mob... just shows how incredibly easy the game is. It's like a happy meal MMO for the whole family, so I might recommend it to my little nephew or something, but it's not for me. My favourite MMO would either be DAOC or Everquest, but they don't really exist anymore sadly. EQ tought me how painfully difficult games could be so compelling. It's wierd because at first glance, EQ and WoW are the same genre and even look the same, but they work totally differently. With EQ for example, there are hardly any 'passive' mobs. Even at level 1, you can't just wander in to the forest and start picking off mobs one by one from a distance. Instead, everything is aggro, and there are higher level creatures wandering around looking for newbies to kill. Also the battles themselves are far more difficult. Even a mob a level lower than you, even if you fight it as best you can, the best you can hope for is to only 'just' win. Often though, you can still die, because of resists and fizzles. And if another mob wanders up behind you and attacks you too, you are dead meat. And you can't even run away either, because the mobs will chase you forever, and once they smack you down to low health, you slow to a crawl, and then they happily finish you off. Oh and when you do die, you don't come back as an invisible and invincible ghost. Instead, you come back as yourself, only completely naked... and you have to somehow find your corpse of where you died and fight your way back there, otherwise you lose all your characters gear forever. It's just a totally different experience, and it extended like that through all the levels. Dungeons were not only not instanced (so there was often all kinds of mayhem going on in there), but they were just far harder. Mobs didn't attack in little pre-designed groups of 4 or 5 or whatever. You would attack what looked like one mob, and seven more would come flooding through the walls at your group. If someone panics and does the wrong thing, they will die instantly. There is also no easy peasy crowd control like turning stuff in to a sheep or whatever. The best we had was mezmerise spell which an enchanter could use, but there was a chance it would hit the enchanter too.. and a very high chance it would be resisted by the mob. And even if it did land, it might only last a few seconds, and the mob would just be dazed but wouldn't look any different. So other group members had to actually watch what was going on and be very careful because if they attacked the mezmerised mob, they would wake it up, and it would then kill the enchanter very quickly. Also, there was little in the way of easy peasy 'taunting'. There was a limit to how much hate a tank could build up, so all the other classes had to get a good sense for how much damage they could do or nuisance they could cause, without stealing the aggro. And sometimes it was just unavoidable, as healing created aggro, so did sitting down to recover mana, and so did rooting an additional mob or whatever. In other words, no matter what you did, there was a chance that a group of mobs were going to end up beating up almost everyone in the group. Fights were often not structured and ordered and therefore they were not predictable. Some groups of mobs were too big for any group to take on, so you had to pull and split the mobs. Either by using harmony/lull, which was risky, or by using feign death pulling which was an "emergent tactic" (ie: Something the developers didn't even expect that players would do). But this took a lot of skill and was also dangerous. The feign death could fail at any time etc.. and if the group didn't have perfect timing when "tagging" the mobs from the feign death puller, they would end up having to fight the entire lot of them. It was basically a serious game and everything since then has been such a huge anti-climax in comparison. The makers of WoW were fans of Everquest but obviously wanted to make their own version of the game that was far simpler and easier and had cartoon graphics that let anyone play it, even on their dad's laptop or whatever. So they did an amazing job at bringing that kind of game to the masses, but they butchered the gameplay in the process. And sadly, because they were so incredibly successful, every other MMO ever since, has tried to replicated WoW's way of doing things. So we have never had another Everquest since. Even Everquest 2, is little more than a wierd half EQ half WoW mutation. Vanguard was a close call. Made by some of the original people from EQ, and had the backing of Microsoft early on. But then it all went horribly horribly wrong. Asheron's Call 1/2 were pretty good but didn't last all that long, same goes for Shadowbane. Minions of Mirth was extremely promising but was too indie to have any longevity, and nobody had ever heard of it. LOTRO is worth trying if you haven't already. Currently I'm just waiting for GW2, hope that works out ok. But the one I am mostly interested in is called ArcheAge. No idea if/when that might arrive though.
WoW by far, it's had time to mature and develop content wise and thus is just further then every other mmo. I'm playing Star Wars TOR at the moment whilst waiting for the new WoW expansion. Wow is my 'challenging' game, I play it because it's god dam hard to be a progress guild ( Sure gaining levels is easy in the game but its also the most tedious part IMO raids are where the games heart lies). Tor is a game I actually enjoy leveling in at the moment I'm only 28 so I can't say much for the end game. I enjoy dungeons (aka flashpoints) they're a challenge ish at this level but I need to see more of the game before I make my decision. One major aspect of Tor is the lack of people for how many servers they have, they need to cut it down and condense so people can actually find people to do quests with its terrible at the moment.
I think the opposite of WoW, I think vanilla was best. With each expansion gear became easier and easier to get. Leveling was a real chore in vanilla, and raiding required real coordination. Now, haven't played Cata. but LK you could pug a lot of the raids and be just fine. I've had the most fun with DAoC, I think having 3 factions really adds a lot, and end game was more pvp based. Having 3 factions in giant scale pvp was awesome fun. Lots of castle and tower sieges, as well as ganking parties. Still play it occasionally when they offer the free 14 days, but it's lost a lot of the community. I'm looking forward to GW2, friend tells me a bunch of the developers and people from DAoC are working on GW2 so I'm hoping they can add some great value to the pvp side of the game.
Vanilla WoW was arduous and rewarding both, very true Mansueto. My favourite MMO of all time is the original incarnation of SWG, with skill tree's, player housing and true sandbox gameplay. Damn that **** was good. Right now, I've given up on MMO's, SWTOR was an absolute failure. It's even more theme-park than WoW and it's like a single player with chat features. It's coffin nail was the PvP. Looking forward to Diablo 3 right now for my Hack and Slash, RPG, MMO'ish fun.
Some friends and I changed from PnP D&D to DDO. We really like the fact that the adventures are instances, so they just involve our party and we can go at our own speed. I also feel that both the gameplay and rules are a good interpretation of PnP D&D. We also gave Runequest a go, but found it to be too complex.......or we're too simple!
I never got into eve but I hear it requires a lot of time and it's very unforgiving for new players without any assistance. I wish newer mmo's were more "hardcore" so to speak, most mmo's are easy mode.
Ultima Online is the only one I've played beyond the trial period, but I didn't play it all that much.
With MMOs I always play a fair amount for 2-3 months then drop, haven't had one yet which would stand out favourite. if you're playing with a few friends or in a good friendly guild it makes any MMO very run really I have returned to WoW 3 times, so in terms of game hours that would take up the most. Most fun I had was actually with Cabal Online, it was a total grindfest, but it was summer hols so i was playing with a few friends throughout day, I racked up so many hours in a few weeks I couldnt believe it I am hoping GW2 will be the first MMO to stick with me more than a few months
DAoC still, however SW:ToR is fun with friends. One I'm looking forward to is Dominus, and if you're a DAoC fan I'd take a look!
It's hard for me to give a definitive favorite MMO answer as they're ever evolving beasts and various things can change how much a person enjoys the game regardless of the game's actual quality. A good MMO can be boring alone, a bad MMO can be fun with friends. WoW has to get an honorable mention for being the MMO I spent the most time with. It was great when I first played in BC, possibly favorite status, but over its entire life so far has gone downhill fast. Warhammer Online was also a lot of fun. A lot of nifty features like dual targetting (still my favorite MMO innovation) and some epic PvP. It was a lot of fun, but the fun was short lived as it just got too repetitive and lacked the polish that WoW had. Mortal Online... now that was a unique game. I played since quite early in the beta and for awhile after launch, they were really trying some new things as well as trying to keep some things from older games like Ultima Online which were being lost in the MMO world. Any game where you start out with a rag and a hatchet and nothing else is great to me. But over time it just got to be too much. A simple act of crafting became an extremely time consuming process requiring an entire character dedicated to it to get the best results. If only a bigger name developer was to make a game like this it could probably do well. Not my favorite, but it comes to mind quick. Dungeons and Dragons Online is a nifty one, and switched to a F2P model which is kind of cool. The combat is something fresh with a mix of activated abilities and direct control of attacks and the dungeons are unique with various traps and challenges. My biggest complaint is that my friends never really got into it, so I got bored and quit a little while after they did. Seems like it'd be a lot of fun if you had a good group to play with, just like real DnD. Rift was kinda neat. I didn't play long, just a few months before release and a few after. It had some nifty ideas but generally lacked uniqueness. I was most excited about the class system where you choose one of four basic classes and then selected three subset classes from a list of seven or so, effectively like a WoW talent tree where you can also choose which trees you have. Awesome idea, but poor implementation. As one can expect it quickly becomes apparent that certain combinations work better than others. Furthermore, each of the subset classes are fairly well locked into their roles. This was the killer for me in what could have been my favorite MMO because everything else was actually pretty good (and surprisingly polished). Final Fantasy XI, I never really got far enough to get a good opinion. Played it to say that I had, that's about all. It's slow, it's very old now... A friend who played for years loves it but nowadays it was just too outdated to get into. Which brings me to Final Fantasy XIV! Possibly my least favorite MMO. I was excited for it early on, played in the beta and things were at first awful but actually looked to be improving with player input. Then it was released. And it was still bad. More crafting classes than combat classes, barely any quests, terribly UI, all sorts of problems. Just tried playing again a month ago and it's gotten a bit better but it's still just too bad for me to play. Levelling is all about grinding out daily quests which wouldn't be so bad if the combat didn't put me to sleep. An offensive class is lucky to have three combat abilties by level 20 (what I got to) and a healer like I played had a whopping one heal and one buff. Cast Protect every five minutes, spam Cure to heal. Maybe it gets better later on, I don't want to know, it'd be too painful levelling any more. EDIT: Almost forgot I've played Guild Wars. Bought it on sale, got to 20 to say I have, then quit. Don't even remember what I played or hardly anything about the game. That said, I don't remember much bad about the game either.
Lord Of The Rings Online for me, specifically before the Moria expansion. It had the lure of Tolkiens world (with things in there just because they should be), the best chat functionality and UI of any MMO ever and at the end game some damn, damn hard stuff. That game has special stuff for me though, I had my one and only first playing Lotro, server first kill of Thrang in The Rift and won the armour!! To my knowledge it's possibly a European first but it was not an all guild group. I'm actually proud of it because I played a Guardian(maintank) and the tanking of that fight can be a nightmare lol(Can't be World first as the US always had stuff a week or two earlier than us), a very pleasant moment which I doubt I'll ever repeat. In fact that highlights one of the joys of it. The end game content was hard. Before moria it was really hard (Thorog at Level 50 anyone? lol) and extremely rewarding. It's just a shame that the expansions were the downturn, even tough some decent innovation was shown it just slowly became nothing but a mass DPS race with no tactics or skill required. They got some of the fun back with the Ost Dunhoth raid but the magic had already gone. Guild Wars I loved but was sadly a little too late to the party and it was already largely dead thanks to the atrocious Grind Wars patch with all the stupid, stupid exploration titles. WAR was a great laugh but felt empty and dull after a week. Aion tried to copy GW's multiclassing system and failed miserably. SWTOR is keeping me nicely entertained but I have a feeling thatI'll just end getting one of each class to the cap and then having nothing to do, maybe 1.2 will bring new fun to the table. Guild Wars 2 looks awesome and the only game I've been looking forward to longer is Diablo 3.
Only played Lineage 2 and wow. Wow was fantastic when I played properly. The current iteration (which I tried recently) is like alcohol free beer. Same taste without the fun.
Silly me, I must've been really tired when I wrote that. With that said, I never dabbled with MMOs just because of sheer investment time. Although I did love those two mentioned games. I feel like a proper idiot now.
I didn't get into Eve Online first time around but played Star Trek Online for a few years because... well, Star Trek. Unfortunately, released too early, not enough content at endgame and not really that challenging. Went back to Eve after some friends re-subbed and actually find myself liking it. It's unforgiving if you're prone to derp and it's definitely not something to be played alone, but those are good things.
