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Ask Slashdot: MMORPG Recommendations?
An anonymous reader writes "Lord of the Rings: Online's latest expansion, Helm's Deep, involved cutting many skills for all classes, with a only a handful reclaimable through the new, 1-dimensional trait trees. If you're not an end-game raider, you're out of luck. And if you are, you can now play your character perfectly with only one or two buttons. Like many who preordered the expansion, I feel robbed and I'm joining the mass exodus. What do you folks suggest? How do Guild Wars 2, RIFT, World of Warcraft and all the other MMORPGs stack up these days? What else would you recommend looking at?"
really, nowadays I play a bit MMO around until mid level, then give up. They become repetitive and raiding is only a slightly less rewarding skinner box.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
I have just started Tera Rising, so far it seems fine and I like the combat system but it does seem tailored towards grinding although it does have the advantage that its free to play.
Being able to put my own stamp on the world ranks so highly in importance for me that I'm staying out of the fray until EQNext comes out.
Pathfinder.
Personally I find The Secret World very nice for my wife and me as we play casually. There is new content on a steady basis and lots of outfits that my wife loves. :)
It's set in a dark contemporary world where the secret societies are comming into the open due to paranormal events.
It's quite a horror style dark mmo
We also play minecraft multiplayer on a whitelist server, and my 2.5 year old daugher is starting to take very much interest in watching us feed cows or ride the minecarts :)
... seriously. There are so many MMOs now you really expect a single answer from /. that will make up your mind? Go do free trials, read some reviews. Sign up for some betas. I've played probably 20 or so MMOs since I first played Everquest in 1999 and they've all had upsides and downsides.
Final Fantasy XIV is currently my MMO of choice. As you have the freewill to spec as any class on the same character, it gives you a great deal of flexibility on how you want to play.
I just started playing EVE Online in February of this year after a long hiatus from all online gaming. It has a great community, and due to the way skill trees work and the variety of places to play in (hisec, lowsec, nullsec, wormhole) it can be as casual or as hard-core as you want it to be. I enjoy the heck out of wormholes at present!
Matthew P. Barnson
I learn what I think when I read what I write
I'd say WoW, even after all of these years. The Pandaria expansion, despite the corny Pandarian race, is still well done and fun to play, and there is no shortage of people to group with. I let my subscription expire recently though. I played Rift for a while, it is pretty fun, but the game engine performance really sucks which drove me away. SWTOR got boring pretty quickly and also suffers from performance problems. Both of the latter games come across as more somber/serious, which skews the players more male than WoW. I think it is more fun when there are some females around, seems to temper some of the raging.
I'm waiting for Elder Scrolls Online at this point. Can't wait until it comes out.
It's a lesser known title, but with a very dedicated core of players.
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
Don't get me wrong, I've spent the better part of my MMO experience playing WoW, SWToR, Rift.... unfortunately, none of them seem to sate my appetite.
MMO developers are dumbing everything down. When Everquest was big, the game was complicated and challenging. I actually miss that. When Warcraft came out, it seemed like a fine balance between playability, and challenge. Just my two cents, but companies need to stop dumbing the games down, and making them a more advanced playing experience.
I quit WoW before they did the tree updates that just ruined the game, and no... I won't give it a chance because honestly it isn't worth my time. Give us a complicated game. Give me a tree as big as path of exile, a crafting system like Fallen Earth, and the spell system of Everquest. Make crafting more complicated, and allow the rewards to serve the character's level.... not always being behind the curve (you craft an item that's considered "HARD" for your crafting level, and it's for someone 3-5 levels behind you).
Stop making everything Bind on Pickup. This will allow guilds to gear geared for endgame a bit more quicker. Stupidest system ever.
Oh, and stop letting whiny 15 year olds decide the direction of the game and class balancing. Seperate what the classes do, and what they contribute to the group. There needs to be more specific roles other than DPS, Tank, Heal.
Sorry, I'm bitter :P
While Everquest 2 is a older MMORPG it's one that has a huge depth and complexity.
There's good low level content and a reasonable player base (size wise). I have to admit it needs more people, but it's a really solid game and worth a look.
Which is about to reach $30M in crowd funding...although hurry as the ability to get life time insurance for your ships will be ending next week. Then LTI will only be on the grey market...
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
The best review I ever heard of EvE Online was from a guy who said that he wasn't going to pay $15 a month to be chased down and killed by some teenager with daddy issues in the Battlestar Galactica. Pretty much summed it up for me.
When I tried it out, it seemed like their were basically two modes to the game: either incredible boredom in safe space or getting constantly jumped and butt-raped in unsafe space. I guess there was some appeal in trading (kind of a much less satisfying version of the old trading routes in Elite), but it seemed like all the good routes were owned by the corporations and all that was left for the little guys were the scraps. In the end, it's even less rewarding than mining.
In short, EvE Online reminds me way too much of real life. And that's what I play videogames to avoid.
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
I've done all those things and they're overrated.
Well, I'm kinda addicted to http://worldoftanks.com/ at the moment.
Sure, it gets repetitive after "figuring it out", but it actually has pretty varied gameplay, and each battle lasts 15-minutes max.
I like it because it's not much of a stats or twitch game.... yes stats and twitch helps, but a lot of your success often hinges on finding a good rock (or teammate) to hide behind and playing the camouflage system. Still, it's a pretty detailed physics engine, so you can still score the occasional blind shot if you know what you're doing (and you're lucky with the RNG, but mostly by knowing where to aim).
I hate RPG-type battles like in EVE where you're basically playing rock-paper-scissors with dice... Vendetta Online is much more interesting where you can use physics and cover and stuff rather than just banging out options into the interface like you're playing DDR.
WoT is free-to-play, but there's not really anything worth paying money for that you couldn't get by grinding (via successful gameplay, not "menial repetitive tasks"). I only spend a small amount of gold to carry over expensive modules when upgrading tanks, and you can score enough gold for free by doing tutorials and various other things.
Bonus for actually learning things about physics, WWII-era tanks (which all looked the same to me before), various historical artifacts, etc. so I'd even call it mildly more educational than your typical fantasy clickfest.
Amateur!
I solo'd up to the last level with just one button. Picked up some sweet 'shroom upgrades on the way, that Bowser guy didn't even stand a chance!
> In short, EvE Online reminds me way too much of real life. And that's what I play videogames to avoid.
I hear you. Same with movies. Wife's choices are inevitably downers. I tell her, if I wanted to be depressed, I'd stay at work.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I think the skill revamp is a big change, but it's not the disaster people claim. Many other MMOs have even simpler play styles. People are really using the skill revamps as the excuse they were looking for to justify their pre-planned departure.
The real problem is that the game has gotten simple anyway and the developers are making leveling up be faster and combat simpler. The sooner you get to end game the sooner you feel compelled to spend money on an expansion. It is true we used to have a large variety of skills, even before the first expansion you could argue that some classes were overloaded, but there was more grouping involved from just getting together to defeat a tough opponent on the landscape up to doing a full raid. Later it was simplified so that casual grouping was never needed, as that would slow people down on their accelerated leveling schedule. If you only solo then you really don't need many skills, but this applies to all MMOs.
Part of the problem is with players too. They really don't want to do quests on the landscape as much, they don't want to explore, they're not doing any of the single player RPG style of play at all. Instead they want to get to end game fast. They'll feel powerful if they kill things with one shot while leveling but then at high levels that same play style makes them wonder why it's easy. Most new players focus intently on making a high damage build, choosing high damage classes as main preference, others will discourage new players from trying harder or more nuanced classes, etc. So don't blame just the devs, also blame players who want to turn the game into yet another generic MMO.
And for those players who left last year for the glorious offerings of new games, I've seen quite a chunk of them returning later saying how another game was even worse or that they couldn't stand the other players and so on. There's good stuff in this expansion: the epic quests are very good again compared to the last few updates, the landscape looks great, etc. Sure not as many raids but this was never a raid heavy game.
As for the original poster: you were NOT robbed. Every game out there changes mechanics along the way, this was just a bit larger than some. But it is in no ways similar to the massive change of NGE that some compare it too. And pre-ordering is always a bad idea for any game or product. It's just dumb. Always know what it is before you buy. And since there's not sub required, you can still keep playing. The game is not the pay-to-win so many claim when you compare it to other games; you can get everything for a much smaller cost than a traditional subscription game (being forced to subscribe to play is the very definition of pay-to-win).
Finally. Please, if you're going to leave a game then just leave. Don't stick around bad mouthing it. Don't go onto all the forums to bad mouth it. Don't go onto slashdot to whine about it. JUST LEAVE! This is not a popularity contest where you're required to drag others away with you when you leave. Getting bored and leaving because of that is natural; it's an old game so it is normal for people to leave. Just don't try to drag it down when you do go.
EVE Online:
Pros: player-driven game, space!, huge selection of ships, skills, development paths.
Cons: subscription-driven, scammers galore, some RMT, mandating long gaming sessions, a destroyed ship is a lost ship, steep learning curve.
World of Tanks:
Pros: Free-to-Play, one of the cheapest premium costs around, tanks!, PvP-only.
Cons: filled to the brim with retard players.
World of Warplanes:
Pros: Free-to-Play, airplanes!, PvP-only.
Cons: fledgling game, retard players galore, gay game mechanics (literally: get behind the enemy player so you can fuck him up)
War Thunder: World of Tanks and World of Warplanes combined, same pros and cons apply.
Mech Warrior Online:
Pros: mechs!
Cons: pretty much everything else...
LOTRO: screw it, it's discussed.
Path of Exile:
Pros: Free-to-Play, no P2W whatsoever, huge skill tree.
Cons: confusing trading system, too much crap loot, if you mess up your build you have to start over.
Firefall:
Pros: Future-based, apocalyptic setting, jumpjets!, battleframes! (and a nice selection too), PvE, nice graphics, original mining method.
Cons: forever beta, filled with bugs, weird mix of fluff and gloom, confused development path, durability hit on death, gets boring and repetitive very fast.
Warframe:
Pros: Nice space-based lore, battleframes, interesting idea behind the game.
Cons: confusing level design, in-your-face P2W, gets boring after a while.
Neverwinter:
Pros: great lore, nice graphics, good game mechanics, good skill tree, consistent development, web gateway with crafting.
Cons: one of the most P2W games ever!, end-game means you either do 5-man quests or nothing.
Planetside 2:
Pros: huge maps, has tanks, has motorcycles of sorts, has flying vehicles, pew-pew PvP, massive PvP.
Cons: P2W galore, rubberbanding massive fights, vast areas feel devoid of... well, everything.
Hawken:
Pros: F2P, mechs!, PvP
Cons: too complex to handle for a twitch-based game. I think game speed should have been 1/2x of what's now to warrant tactical thinking rather than just "the younger player wins by reflex skill".
====================
Some of the games I have only played very little:
Rift: horrible game mechanics. Enough said.
Vindictus: too manga. Could have been great but...
Tera: played the stress test limited open beta, didn't quite understand what was happening, I just didn't click with it.
Ryzom: played it a bit years ago, I heard it no longer requires subscription. IIRC it was good enough for a F2P MMO, but not good enough for subscription-based.
Disclaimer: this is my personal, subjective opinion on all these games. I played them all. YMMV.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Plain and simply, wow has the best boss and quest mechanics, and is essentially required to be fairly balanced. Few bugs. No mmo has come close to the wealth of mechanics they have, from riding vehicles, reverse gravity, several stages of fights, dual-phases where people teleport around, special abilities gained to help defeat a boss, etc. And they have some clever people who balance things out to make sure the challenge is appropriate.
GW2 has attempted to get away from the holy trinity of tank/healer/dps, and introduced working area quests. Yes, they're not the first, but it works. It also has many exploration quests, which I find awesome. Even unmarked platform jumping challenge "quests" of sorts.
Sad to hear about lotro. But as I've always said, "The best, and the worst, thing about MMOs is the people."
Your enjoyment might hinge on having a good social construct in-game. If you're moving with your guild, move to whatever game they go to. If you're off to solo, find a game that's soloable. If you have limited playtime, find a game that you can dabble in and still be successful. But just saying "I need a game that requires more than 2 buttons" doesn't give much insight on how you actually prefer to play. There are tons of different games out there, from things like group-oriented Puzzle Pirates to soloable Asheron's Call to Star Wars to Neverwinter. But it's not possible to make a good recommendation without better info.
You might even be happy playing a single-player game, depending what you want.
You're doing it wrong. It's an MMO. If you aren't making it on your own, *JOIN* one of those corporations (or get a bunch of people together and create your own).
Or go solo. It's entirely possible. It's risky and requires a lot of skill, and you'll get blown up a lot at first... but if you're actually good (and combat is Eve is much more skill-based than a casual observer might think) you can easily find, and win, small fights all day long. Yeah, you'll need a good ship (which means money and training time), but the risks are also lower when you're starting out. Be a pirate. Be a mercenary. Take over a wormhole.
You make the rules, man. That's the essence of the game. It's like libertarian paradise. Would I want to live there for real? Hell no! But it's a fun thing, to go out and fight, solo or with a small gang or with a massive battle fleet.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
Ive been enjoying Firefall recently. It's an MMO FPS with a complicated craft system. You run around in specialized battleframes and gain resources and xp through a variety of tasks, from mining to random encounters to special missions to outright invasions. It's in beta right now, free to play, and so far paying just gets you a few bennies for those in a hurry. I did pay $25 so I could get a motorcycle and a gliderpad, based on how much I enjoyed playing the first few days, but I could have worked to get the resources and build the bike.
I have tried many MMORPGs. I have enjoyed some more than others, but it saddens me to say this: World of Warcraft is still the best choice.
- I tried LOTRO back in the beta, but it was so bad back then that I didn't bother with the real thing.
- I played through the first 24 levels in Aion, but then I started running out of content (the game expected me to grind the rest of the exp without content), so it also went into the blacklist.
- I enjoyed RIFT for a while, but although it has some interesting concepts, it always felt like just an attempt at copying WoW's style.
- I loved GW2's gameplay and event system, but it was too shallow overall.
- TERA's gameplay was not too bad, but it was unremarkable, it did not hook me in.
- I liked Neverwinter, but the paywalls made it annoying.
- I hated FF14, and I dislike FF14arr nearly as much. People seem to like it, but I did not manage to see how it is any better than the original.
I probably forget some, but that simply means they are not even worth mentioning.
Get out, meet people, lose weight (i did, a lot of it) and see things you normally don't see. Every new place you go, you see things you probably would have missed.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
I keep my EQ1 subscription up, but the old UI just bugs me after being used to modern MMOs, so that gets in the way. However, for PvE content, bar none, EQ1 is king and emperor. There is a lot to do, although some of the more older content may not be worth the time (epic 1.0 quests for the most part.)
WoW is good with friends, but I just get bored there, especially when the mindless dailies have changed to goofing around on Timeless Isle where it feels like a playground... kick over this turtle, get a purple. Kick open a random chest, another purple. Jump in, toss some spells at one of the spirits, etc.
The next expansion announcement didn't help much, especially with flight (which previously was something you got once you hit top level) becoming apparently a months long grindfest similar to the artifact cloak [1]. WoW has a lot of cool single player intro quests (such as the Thunder King Isle quest arc), but once done, things can be really random. One night may be OK, another night can be a complete waste of time with pickup raids. Of course, chat in towns is banal at best.
For being able to tune stats and your exact DPS/heal/tank play style, Rift was great. However, since they put raid level gear for sale in their RMT store, I just lost all interest in the game whatsoever, even though I have bought a multi-year subscription. The fact that they are going to have an entire expansion that is like one big Kedge Keep doesn't help either.
These days, I've ended up on EQ2. Its population isn't huge, but people know what they are doing in groups/raids, and even the trolls in General chat are intelligent. The devs know how to make combat and such work in zones with flight, so each expansion doesn't take flight away from the players in order to have decent content progression. EQ2 also has a nice tradeskill faculty so one can actually wind up in endgame areas at a low adventure level, which can help later on.
The game that had so much promise, IMHO, was Vanguard. I wish that it could have been kept under development for at least a year, perhaps 18 months. That would have been a solid MMO, and a decent challenge for PvE. However, these days, even though EQ2 doesn't have the cool quests like rolling down the Great Wall, it has very good content all around from solo to group to raid. Plus, one can start at level 85, so one can hit endgame raiding fairly quickly, although there is a lot of interesting content to be seen at lower levels (Sol eye especially.)
I have some hopes for Everquest: Next, but the graphics are off-putting (it looks like a 1950s cartoon and a WoW character model had offspring.) However, gameplay is what matters, so I'm going to wait and see on that.
IMHO, I dislike F2P, because it implies P2W. EQ2 is probably the best balance -- other than starting at level 85, there are no raid level items (other than appearance stuff) that one can just buy. Gear still has to be earned to hit ToV or other endgame places. No chest and keys system either. What you loot is what you get.
Of course, there are other MMOs, but when you get PK-ed when you create your first character before you ever load completely into the newbie zone makes the games an instant turn-off, or even better, you keep getting killed repeatedly at the respawn point until you just kill the game client.
[1]: I'd hate to deal with the next expansion on a PvP server. Flight means being able to get somewhere versus becoming someone's HKs, so it just makes playing less worth it if one is on those realms.
AMEN! I'll never forget my wife suggesting I watch "City of Angels" before she returned the DVD.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
Which is better: vi or Emacs?
Word game?
Eve Online is the only MMO that has been able to keep me interested in playing for more than a few months at a time. It doesn't have any elves or dragons. It's not built around a film franchise or a beloved series of books. It is unique in that the content created by the game developers plays second fiddle to the content created by the players themselves. It has vibrant player corporations (guilds) based around third-party websites like Something Awful and Reddit (see also: Fweddit and Brave Newbies); which leads to in-game drama aka content creation. It offers high-stakes PvP, in that when you die; your ship explodes and the winning player loots your wreck (corpse) taking whatever valuables survived the explosions. It also allows you to scam your fellow players; which is fairly unique among games. It regularly makes mainstream news for it's large fleet fights and huge losses. And, you're allowed to use your money to buy in-game currency if you are so inclined. I should note that your characters do not level and you don't earn XP or experience points for killing stuff in-game. Instead, your characters earn points that apply to in-game skills in real-time whether you are logged in or not. Eve Online, because spaceships.
" gay game mechanics" (my emphasis)
Using the word "gay" as a synonym for "bad" isn't nice. I know it's common, but that doesn't excuse it, and you probably wouldn't use the descriptor for another minority group in the same way. Please consider not using the word gay this way. Thanks!
Free to play. Not rated the best, but if you're a trekkie it doesn't have to be. Two styles of gameplay- space combat with starships and RPG style ground combat with toons. "End game" takes a couple of weeks to get to and then you grind for gear. Or pay $$$ to get gear quicker. Missions against AI or PvP, but PVP is neglected. Again, free to play with the client from http://sto.perfectworld.com/download
I'm with you. I still have UO and Razor installed on this laptop, I wonder if Hybrid is still around. I stopped paying and playing on the OSI shards around my ~10 year mark.
FYI, Richard Garriott is involved in a new project called Shroud of the Avatar which he's gone on record as saying that if he could have bought the naming rights from EA, he literally would have named it "Ultima Online 2." (Ignoring of course the previous attempt/failure at a UO 2 from the EA sie of things.) It's being crowdfunded and there's progress being made, there's a nice demo reel at the official site. Actually now that I just looked, there's a new six-month progress demo that wasn't there a couple of weeks ago.
I'm not a huge fan of the 3D aspect - the 2D/isometric client is a big part of what hooked me into UO before they cranked out their 3D client. But I'm still very much looking forward to Shroud.
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
world of tanks is flat out 'pay to win'.
ammo you can pay for that will do BETTER than the free ammo. you can't even argue it.
but of course you will. everyone defends their drug of choice. no matter how terrible.
Go to work, earn coin, purchase upgrades, find partner, create alt chars, twink them until they become new mains.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
I've been subscribed for about nine years, and in that time I've been involved in some of the most famous and massive wars, advanced to become an accomplished solo pilot, and during that time started a business that pays my subscription and ship costs with minimal time investment. If you want to hang out in civilised space, it's going to be about as boring as a 9-5, but if you go out into the frontiers, then it picks up the fantasy aspects and player interactions that make it rewarding. What tuned the corner for me was naively venturing into dangerous space and the adrenaline rush of being shot at. One goes into many fights not knowing the outcome, and its that uncertainty and the element of handing my fate over to the haze of the battlefield that still gets my hands shaking and heart pounding at times.
Honestly?
No.
Since the closure of City of Heroes, there's nothing that I really want to play. I have no desire to play high fantasy games, I won't ever touch anything remotely connected to NCSoft again, I'm a casual player who can't devote massive tracts of time, and I'm utterly disgusted by P2W.
I'm hoping that the upcoming, community-driven, City of Titans fits into the hole that CoH left. But for right now, about the most I do is play Freecell.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Neverwinter is free and doesn't pressure you to use their in game currency buying system ever. It is sort of pay to win but you can also just get the gear in like 1 week of trying. The whales carry the company easily. I gave em $50 on principle and now I have a 110% run speed pig and some sick gear :-D It's very fun and you can level up quickly. Everyone's pretty nice for the most part, though not as much so as DDO. The #1 best part is that it relies heavily on realtime reflexes and strategy instad of grinding for the best gear in the game. At an 8000 gear score, my cleric outscored people with 13,000 gear scores. It's about actual talent and you don't see that in MMORPGs anymore. I'd recommend anyone pick it up and play it.
At the time I compared the PVP server there (Along with the model in Eve and even Ultima Online) to a mall in which a gang would hang out and anally rape anyone who went to that mall. And they'd tell people, "If you don't want to be anally raped, go to a different mall!" And then they'd act confused when no one came to their mall.
Eve people say "Oh, well just join a corporation!" but there really aren't that many successful corporations out there. The stoner corp I was in forgot to refuel their wormhole POS and got it, the carrier they'd had defending the place, and a hundred million or so isk worth of battleships I'd parked out there in case anyone needed to do station defense blown up. And even though they were apparently stoners, they were STILL more successful than a lot of the corps in Eve.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The best review I ever heard of EvE Online was from a guy who said that he wasn't going to pay $15 a month to be chased down and killed by some teenager with daddy issues in the Battlestar Galactica. Pretty much summed it up for me.
When I tried it out, it seemed like their were basically two modes to the game: either incredible boredom in safe space or getting constantly jumped and butt-raped in unsafe space. I guess there was some appeal in trading (kind of a much less satisfying version of the old trading routes in Elite), but it seemed like all the good routes were owned by the corporations and all that was left for the little guys were the scraps. In the end, it's even less rewarding than mining.
In short, EvE Online reminds me way too much of real life. And that's what I play videogames to avoid.
I may have been the guy who wrote that review—I certainly have passed up no opportunities to damn the game whenever the subject was brought up. Yet now I'm playing the thing again. Why?
Well, the number one reason is probably lack of something better to do. Also, I'm retired and now have a surplus of hostility that I can no longer vent on my boss. I had been playing the original Everquest from the day it started until about 9 months ago, except for the 3 or 4 year break I took to play Eve, World of Warcraft, and Aion. None of them held my interest, so I went back to EQ. Then one day, I just had my fill of EQ again. There's no attempt to keep the game improving or growing; Sony just wants to keep hold of the same few thousand players they have who stick around for the sake of nostalgia. I doubt whether Sony has more than one developer assigned to EQ, and his job is to create cut-and-paste "expansions" where the only differences are armor with higher stats that you have to do the same crap missions to get as every other expansions. Oh, and new spell levels that do basically the same thing as the old spells. Nostalgia is a powerful force, but it can only take you so far. Maybe some day I will feel nostalgic for EQ again.
So I popped back into EVE again just to remember how awful it was. And indeed, the awfulness is still there. To judge by the language people use, by the stuff they put in their character bios, etc. the players are still a bunch of 12 year old sociopaths with a fixation on anal rape. About half of them pretend to be girls, but you know they're not. Girls are too smart to play a game like this. (Besides, most females I've met have had a fairly limited interest in anal rape.) But I've been playing the game since early this year. Why in the world would I do that?
There are some very good things that have to be said about the game design of EVE and about the way it's run. First of all, the game is continually being improved, and the expansions are free. To get a new expansion, you just have to pay your monthly fee to pay, and that's it. There's no "free to play" BS where you get nickle and dimed to death for better sword models or whatever; you just pay your fee and you get the service you pay for. Some of the improvements have made the game more playable for me than it was before.
Eve has got a complex and fairly realistic economic simulation going (if you ignore the fact that the economy is propped up by the nightly re-seeding of minerals and NPC drops), so if you are one of those obsessive people with no other life who draw up complicated spreadsheets and calculate how to make money off manufacturing, and spend many, many hours buying and selling at the best prices, then you can be an EVE tycoon. I'm not one of those: I never did spreadsheets for work, and I'm certainly not doing them for a game. Still, it's a role some people like to play. The spaceship tech is well-thought out and complex enough to keep you working at coming up with a perfect "fit" for that cruiser or battleship you're flying. There's a lot of different kinds of things you can do in EVE, and the game doesn't force you to play one
Great men are almost always bad men--Lord Acton's Corollary
Maybe I saw different screenshots and vid caps but the character models in Everquest Next look great.
EQ1 had something other MMORPG's lack: element of danger and fear. And it was challenging!
You could be proud that you had a high level character.
EVE is one of those old school "you must group up you evil scum sucking soloer, don't you know what the M stands for!" games. Thus it appeals heavily to some players while disgusting others.
And the way the game works, and is designed, you can't trust any of the people you group with, your corp mates or pretty much anyone.
The only people in EVE who you can trust are ones who you can hunt down and beat the shit out of in REAL LIFE. If I were ever to get back into EVE I'd have to do it with a bunch of real life friends. And I'd have to have some good blackmail material on them as well.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Libertarian paradise? I don't think there's anything in the libertarian credo that says you should rip off everyone who's weaker than you are, but that's the rule in EVE. The EVE universe is one of untrammeled barbarism; it's a sort of anti-society because there is no basis for trust or lasting cooperation.
I played EVE and then moved to a place that is actually like this in real life (without the gunmen walking the street and there aren't very many explosions, but other than that pretty much untrammeled barbarism).
After a while of playing EVE I thought "You know what? I have to watch my back every day just walking down the street here. I don't need to simulate this in a game."
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Rift: By far my favorite of the games. I don't play it, though, because they've basically abandoned even the pretense of enforcing any of their rules. Wanna tell everyone that "abbos" are basically monkeys and ought to be gassed? Talk about how you want to rape someone's kids? Spend your evenings making jokes about how much you hate gays? Go to the designated RP server just to stalk RPers around and harass them? Right now, Rift is your best choice. Particularly mystifying, because in basically every other category, Rift's devs strike me as among the most passionate and skilled in the field, and also some of the most engaged with their customer base. Except on this one thing. Unfortunately, social interaction is the biggest thing by far about MMOs for me. And yes, I'm aware that every game has some of that. What's different is that in Rift, the same person can be using the same character to do this for, quite literally, over a year without them being told to stop. One person I know once got into an argument and told another player he was going to rape them with a knife; he did get contacted by a GM, who apparently suggested that maybe he should tone it down a bit. F2P model is, thus far, surprisingly non-abusive. In particular, if you want to just play the game without ever paying a penny, that's actually viable. Performance not nearly as good as it should be, but they're actively working on it; until recently, the bulk of the game's rendering engine was not multicore-friendly.
FF14 ARR: The parts that are good are amazing. But in other respects, they have taken incompetence to a whole new level. It took them ages to solve the VERY challenging problem that their spam filter wouldn't notice that you were sending 2-3 messages a second to a channel as long as each message varied by a few characters, for instance. Rumor has it that they've had exploits which allowed malicious users to, for instance, sell a stack of 99 cheap items to a vendor, but inform the game that they had sold very expensive items. Or instantly level themselves to the level cap by handing in a single quest. Probably mostly fixed by now, but that these things were wrong in a game which is already a re-release from a company with prior experience is insane. On the other hand, very pretty, very atmospheric, good storytelling. But it is a Final Fantasy game; it is literally a few minutes from when you create your character to the first time you are able to move, and even then you simply aren't allowed turn around and walk the other way until you've talked to your quest giver. No, really. And yet, it's pretty fun. Sub-only. Performance is pretty decent, although the previous release was apparently bad. Special mention for the very deep and full-featured crafting system, which I personally find to be the most fun part of it.
D&D Online: F2P model a little harsher than, say, Rift. However, a sufficiently patient player can probably unlock all the restricted content through in-game activity. Or just sub for a while. This game is not really D&D -- if you are familiar with the 3.5 rules, it will screw you up as much as it helps you. It is, however, the minmaxer paradise. This is a game which absolutely, unconditionally, rewards people who are good at thinking out how to make their numbers stack for best results. Very unusual mechanics in a number of ways; for instance, you don't get XP from killing mobs, only from achieving objectives. No automatic healing just from not being in combat, and if you aren't playing with difficulty turned down (there's settings for that), you can run out of resources trying to do a quest. Graphics are sort of unimpressive compared to a lot of other games. On the other hand, has a native mac client, which can matter if you have a mac or have friends who prefer the mac. Runs well on older hardware. Insane depth of character creation, and after you cap out, you can restart the character as anything else, only with small permanent bonuses. Which stack.
TSW: Buy-to-play. Lots of stuff you might
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World of Warplanes [...] gay game mechanics (literally: get behind the enemy player so you can fuck him up)
Using the word "gay" as a synonym for "bad" isn't nice.
I don't think war4peace was using "gay" as slang for bad. I think (s)he was drawing parallels between a combat maneuver in that game and entering through the exit, hence the "literally".
You should cheer yourself up by watching a lovely cartoon called Grave of the Fireflies!
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.