f13.net

I've been getting bored recently and would love to pick up an old MMO, but I can't afford the monthly fees right now (Starving college student and all). So, I'm wondering if anyone knows of a free MMO that's actually good. I went looking and only came up on some crappy Korean ones. Of course I found this gem while searching:

(http://www.perfectworld.com.my/downloads/screenshots/002-11.jpg)

That's a fucking panda man riding a giant hawk. :drill:

He isn't just riding it! He's surfing it. No reins!

...

I can't make out what's going on in that picture.  Too ... much ... bloom!  That's worse than a Barbara Walters interview.

Shadowbane is 100% free and they are about to re-set whole world, giving everyone fresh start. It is guild PvP mmorpg, so soloist get shat on.

There are literally hundreds of pirate lineage 2 servers, generally with slightly (or drasticly) increased XP/money/etc gains so instead of an awful, soul crushing grind, it can actually be fun.  They don't always have the super new shit on the official site, but it's pretty damn good for free, always lots of pee vee pee too.

I'd reccomend a class here, but they're all really fun and for the most part useful in PvP, so it's all just personal choice.  I will say that it's a damn good idea to make 3 or 4 characters at once and level them up simultaneously for uber buffs that make you unstoppable in pvp.

Hawkeye (Archer)
Swordsinger (gets a song that doubles crit rate)
Bladedancer (Gets a dance that doubles crit damage)
Prophet (buffs everything else, including another crit buff, and another damage buff)

With that setup you crit 50-75% of the time and can drop anyone except tanks in a couple shots.

Hi Nerf.








What just happened?

(http://www.f13.net/grief/fdsfgs.jpg)

Absolutely, Samwise. Abso-fucking-lutely.

HIGHWAY,

TO

THE

DAAAANGERZOOONNNNNEEEE!

I'll put in my usual, I think Sword of the New World/Grenado Espada comes out ahead of almost anything else in the free to play non-pirate games.

The game is really cool. Except for the fact there is NOTHING to do but grind.

I can't remember if they've put in colony wars or not? Those sounded interesting and the few duels I fought were pretty interesting. But you still have to eternagrind to be useful in a colony war.

Well once WoW finally includes the Pandareans there'll be plenty of that...  :oh_i_see:

On topic dunno, Anarchy Online is old, there's option to play it for free and it's pretty good all things considered. So maybe fits the bill, or at least worth a try.

Whoops, sorry, when I get into l2 mode I really can't stop, which is why I avoid it so much.

Really though, people with addictive personalities shouldn't play MMOs, at least if I stay up for days on end playing a console game it eventually tells me its over.

(http://i100.photobucket.com/albums/m20/r3dknight/MAPLESERIOUS.jpg)

 :uhrr:

I don't know if Mythos counts as an MMO, but it's free (though still in beta). If you can grab a beta account it's fun in small doses. It's not old though, if that's what you really want.

An Adventurer is You! (http://www8.kingdomofloathing.com/)

I think there is a (defunct) wing of Bat Country in there somewhere, someone might still have access and be able to set you up with some meat.

So I just uninstalled Anarchy Online. So far L2, AO and Granado Espada have all dissapointed. I'm seriously contemplating trying the silly MMO I posted up above.

What didn't you like about Grenado Espada?

The whole party deal actually turns out to be annoying and the grind was brutal. The total time spent playing that Perfect World junk: 5 minutes. I created my character, logged in, did a quest and promptly logged out to uninstall it. Maybe I should just play KotOR or some Black Isle RPG.

Give Eve a try?  The first 2 weeks are free, and you can pay for your subscription with in-game currency.  With the space we hold down in 0.0 you could make enough money for a months subscription following people around and skinning/looting the corpses they leave behind in a week or so.

Subspace

http://www.subspacedownloads.com/  (download Continuum 40)

You will get brutalized by vets for a while, but its a damn fun game once start scoring a kill or two.

There was a great free MMPORG called Space Cowboy that I used to play a hell of a lot. Sadly it shut down a few months ago due to some crap involving the holding company being sold (don't know the details). It was a real pity, but yes, good free mporgs can and do exist. You can check out some vids from space cowboy if one is curious http://sco-forum.gpotato.com/viewtopic.php?t=5754 (http://sco-forum.gpotato.com/viewtopic.php?t=5754)

There is a new game thats pretty like it I believe at http://airrivals.net/ but I haven't played it, so cant comment on it.

Goal Line Blitz (http://goallineblitz.com)

I know it's a bit of a stretch, and there's not much to do in the game anyway (especially if you don't own a team, and ATM you can't get one no matter how hard you want it and how much you are willing to pay for it). And it's browser based.

But it's free. And it's so darn addictive.

I could be wrong, but this is going to be the best hidden next big thing (as much as a browser based game can be)

Check out what they're doing with Mythos.


http://forums.mythos.com/showthread.php?t=18245 (http://forums.mythos.com/showthread.php?t=18245)

Cliffs:

Greenreach is now one contiguous landmass, with hills, mountains, forests, valleys, rivers, bridges, and lakes. You’ll be able to remember where things are and return to them. Instead of traveling down an ‘alley’ in a random chunk of wilderness to get to a location, you may stumble across unexpected things, or dungeons to explore. The overworld is made by hand, and as such, it is much more purposeful, with settlements, farms, outposts, and much more interesting areas. Stonehill quarry looks like a Quarry. Gussen Farm looks like an actual farm.

We are HOPING to have from 150-200 players in an overworld at a time. That means it is still ‘instanced’ – but with a MUCH higher population than any of our other shared spaces. You’ll run across other players on the road, or on the way to dungeons. Your first moment in the game at Greenreach Priory will be shared with other players. We’ll just see how high we can push this.

Seconded! Although you will have to do some squinting to really see it as multiplayer.

Should that been in green?  It reminds me exactly of Space Cowboy in everything but the name.  (And they had a notice on the front page the name is different because of copyright.)

Yeesh, yea, the ships are almost exact.

Wasn't that Japanese furry rape game free?  :ye_gods:

This one looks interesting, 14 day free trial and only a two step download to get it working. (http://starwarsgalaxies.station.sony.com/)

You forgot to mark that as "NSF*".

You pay in an entirely different and eternal way.

Which one?

This made me giggle a lot.


I liked Lineage2 except I couldn't justify running bent over at the waist.

All the time.

That was just game saving you trouble of manually bending over before each random pvp encounter.

I like Lineage II, too.  I hear they added solo content but I'm not sure how that would work in this sort of game.  I also wonder about that Hellbound Expansion because of this feature:  • Enhanced pet system, featuring pet evolution, ridable wolf pets and more.  That SO sounds like something I'd enjoy.

It's an outright lie. Stick to that "but".

And this comes from a known Lineage 2 lover.

Pet evolution!

That reminds me, when is the PokeMMOG coming out?

Hasn't L2 had a dragon-growing fucking crazy kekegrind endgame for quite some time now?

Yeah, you can do a long, annoying, grindy quest to get a baby dragon.  Then you get to level that baby dragon up at a painfully slow rate (and get no xp for yourself in the process).  Then you do yet another long grindy quest to turn it into a strider and ride it.  Then you level it up even more, this time at an exponentially slower rate, do another really really long, really grindy quest and turn it into a wyrm and have a ridable mount.

Play L2 for awhile and you'll understand why the Korean war ended in armistice, there just isn't an amount of pain that you can inflict upon koreans to make them surrender.

There's always The Endless Forest(http://tale-of-tales.com/TheEndlessForest/ (http://tale-of-tales.com/TheEndlessForest/)).

It's a game where you are a deer with a humanoid face and so is everyone else. There's no chat so you just emote to each other. The potential for griefing is enormous.

We'll soon find out!

I just received this from Gameforge.  It seems they have a game for every genre.  Or maybe it's the same game with a slightly different script each time.  The screenshots cracked me up.  From an email that I received


I played Ikariam for a little bit - it was like playing a half finished game.  In fact, I still play it and shuffle resources around despite the fact that really, I'm done with it.  I'm afraid to try another one of their games.

It's a shame it looks so shitty, a game that lets me oppress mexicans AND indians? Sign me up!   :drill:

(http://www.wildguns.co.uk/art/background/bg_index2.jpg)

Wow.

Did they really, REALLY need to put a tequila stain on the mexicans shirt?

Or have a tiny yellow chubby poking out from his pants right below the popped button?

This is the kind of attention to detail and humour that gave Blizzard its 10 mil subscribers, y'know.

Normally I'd be down for any game where character classes correspond to real-life ethnicities, just for the lulz, but this doesn't even look like a real MMO from the screenshots.

Battlefield Heroes (http://www.battlefield-heroes.com/) looks like it could be fun. It isn't out yet but they should open public beta pretty soon.

It's more of "massive multiplayer turn based strategy". You get your base, build the infrastructure and troops, get into alliances to conquer the territory. Sort of EVE with quantized rather than random lag.

Ugh I ran the L2 Radio station for like five minutes and was subjected to the game itself. 5000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 bots can't be wrong.

He speaks the truth.

Reminds me of why I quit playing Grenulo Espada. One of the quests involved you having to kill the main boss of a dungeon. Now the main boss spawned on every room in sequence so if you ran round the dungeon you would get him eventually especially if someone else got to him before you.

HOWEVER this one required you to kill him in one particular room. With 5000 other characters that had left their characters on autoattack.

So you had to wait for this asshole to spawm then fight with the other asses that were around him and if you didn't get him you had to wait for him to cycle around again which could take up to 2 hours.

And again.

And again.

I would rather have my teeth extracted than face that again.

You forgot to mention that the reward for that robotically insane task was batshit on a broken stick.

I knew there was some memory my brain had deleated for the sake of my sanity.

I used to play with this kid called exxon, a dwarf bounty hunter. We're in a pvp clan and got quite a list of enemies who won't flag against us, but we always try to screw them over. While we were grinding we noticed a rival clan dude grinding his pet. Trying to mess around, exxon went and stun the pet. The pet hit back automatically, flagging it for pvp. 3 whacks later it died. The dude was pissed it was quite hard to lose 10% exp, luckily he had rez scrolls to recover some exp back and prevent it from perma-death. Yeah, 'luckily' but exxon wasn't finished yet.

The scroll casting takes time, while the dude was spinning and glowing, exxon stunned him. Scroll went poof. He panicked and cast again. Exxon stunned him. By the third time, the little dragon corpse decayed. I think a forum flame-fest ensued for a week after that.  :awesome_for_real:

That is fucking awesome. I hope he cried.

yeah there was an awkward silence on the clan vent and in-game general chat for a moment. Then the dude's clanmate said 'that's not very nice exxon'
 :uhrr:

and we burst out laughing on vent.  :drill:

The dannyb post was mine, i've been drinking heavily and forgot to log myself in.  I don't think dannyb has the intestinial fortitude to play l2.

That's exactly why I never ever thought about getting a pet in L2.

/lurk mode off

A not-so-grindy Korean free MMO is Bloodymare, at level 10/50 is still pretty fun and has boobs+gore, currently in final stage of open beta. If you're not in the AoC early access or have time or whatever: sign up, download the client and try if u dare  :drill:

http://www.playrequiem.com/index.aspx (http://www.playrequiem.com/index.aspx)

(http://img.playrequiem.com/Imagefiles/Screenshot/requiemSS57_800.jpg)

/lurkmode on!

I was in the Bloodymare beta (I guess it was a closed beta because it was some time ago) and it wasn't too awful but for some reason it made me depressed.  It wasn't very horror-y, either.  Night time was kind of almost sort of very nearly cool.

Hey Sig.. I want to give you this. I made it for something else but I can't help but to notice your affinity for Hello Kitty.


(http://www.asylumdevelopment.com/images/bloodyhellokitty.jpg)

I show my love for hello kitty.

Yeah, how can it be horror when shits standing around in fields?

At this point in my gaming 'career', just seeing that ONE FONT that all Korean games use is pretty horrifying.

So I was bored this weekend (travel plans got canceled last minute), and decided to give the free Shadowbane version a shot. Yeah, yeah, I know--masochist.

Well, I was actually amazingly surprised. Sure, the game is still relatively ugly (amazingly ugly if you require teh shiney in your games), and people don't like point-click movement, but:

--after about an hour of checking the tech support forums, I figured out how to get it working fully with no crashes on Vista (compatibility mode off, not on as stated in the official Vista thread, and using the sb installer config screen --not the in game one--, turn off "cache models to hardware"). After I did those two things, I haven't had a crash, ever.

--it's taken me one weekend (of pure catassing I'll fully admit, like I said was totally bored and needed some mindless distractions) to get a confessor to 59, and a scout to 56, on the lore server (for those that don't remember/know, that means there are like 3 guilds total in the server that even allow fessors)--in full gear for PvP. The only thing I'm missing is a 30 int rune and he's totally specced out (for that level), and that's only because the server is only 2 months old and no one has them stockpiled really.

--the server population on the lore server is pretty damned low, but that's not that bad. PvP isn't hard to find at all--there are roving solo/duo/small group teams all over the place. Of course, they are level 75 (effectively max) super gankers, but being heads up and track equipped and you're fine.

--the game itself is still pretty fun, although some changes have made PvP a bit harder (no more blue dots on your mini-map makes situational awareness difficulty during the heat of battle). Of course, your definition of fun is probably different, but since a majority I'd say here on f13 hate the grind, and the "grind" for two high R5 characters was a total of -maybe- 20 hours /played, the grind is just about nothing compared to what it used to be.

--configured properly (which may be a chore if you read the wrong messages), the game is very stable. Still has many of the bugs (terrain flattening code still horribly broken from what I can see), but overall no crashes. I did have one period where I kept getting disconnected for about 20 minutes, but I think that was a comcast thing since no one else was.

--a bigger guild is definitely a must. My particular lore guild is quite small, plus Cleansing Flame charter is pretty restrictive, but even so we won about 40% of our fights this weekend.

--for me at least, the PvP beats Eve hands down. For whatever reason, people actually like to fight, and losing a fight doesn't hurt the wallet so damned bad as it does in Eve. My 8 or so PvP encounters in Eve over 2 months resulted in myself getting on the killmail for exactly one ship (as a capsule no less), the loss of 6 ships totalling more than 170 million in assets (3/4 of my bankroll and at least 3 weeks worth of grinding isk), and endless hours of being mostly bored trying to convince others to engage. I'm not giving up on Eve (training long run skills at the moment), but I have no motivation at all to login right now, while I'm itching to go get some PvP in SB right this second. I've already killed more, died for less agonizing resource loss, and fought more in 3 days than in 10 weeks in Eve.

Moral of the story: If you can handle pretty bad graphics, totally outdated GUI (although fully customizable, I've found many of the windows don't let you adjust their size, and on a large monitor are postage-stamp sized), a stable but still buggy in some ways game, yet love fast action PvP and hate grinding to get to the "end game", I'd give it an "eyes open" shot.

And yes, it's totally free--in fact, I haven't even seen any of the in-game adds or movies mentioned last year.

But the end game for Shadowbane large scale sieging.  Low population sort of makes that unpossible, no?

Also, if you want something COMPLETELY mindless and disgusting, Postal 2 is free and disgusting.  Really disgusting.

You forgot to add

"and no one ever got nerfed playing a SOE!"

At the risk of asking a question I shouldn't probably ask, how does one go about getting on these?

Google "Lineage 2 Private Servers"?

God knows they are out there en masse.

Why you'd ever want to put the time into googling it is beyond me..

Course some people would say the same about my EQing..

well if u really want a lineage fix, just go load up www.playrohan.com

it's heavily modified, but at least the skill set feels fresh. Graphic wise, no difference.

Thanks (sarcasm noted)

Perhaps I should have been a little more specific, do I need a genuine retail client (which I have already) and are there any servers people would recommend?

Not sure if a patched retail clients or not, we always had to download the c4 client and then edit the .ini file, most severs had strict "DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES TRY TO PATCH THIS CLIENT" instructions.

Theres an l2toplist website, check out the ones at the top of the list, servers that just launched have the best populations, as they generally start to stagnate and people move on to another new server in a few months.

If l2paradise is still around, they've always been fairly stable.

Vampires!

http://www.bitefight.us/ (http://www.bitefight.us/)

Everquest 2 right now. I'm not sure if its for new subscribers though, but its definitely worth it if you have missed it somehow.

http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=13353.0