f13.net

It seems the current MMO staples are in take-new-chars-to-max-lvl-asap mode. Are there any MMOs currently worth starting as a noob and doing the low level content or do I just have to deal with fast forwarding through content to catch up to the existing playerbase?

Edit: sorry, fixed a bit from mobile post

What?

GW2, Secret World, and SWtOR are all fun at low levels in my opinion. 

FF XIV has good low-level content which you have to do cause it gates your progress :awesome_for_real:

Yeah, was about to say... FFXIV also has incentives for high-level players to run low-level dungeons, so the runs tend to be fairly painless. Well, unless you're a tank or healer, in which case you're expected to know every fight by heart and you'd better have decent gear for your level.  :awesome_for_real:

I'll second GW2, really enjoyed that for a few weeks.

TESO is a good option. Solid, good looking, with a huge amount of content, especially as a solo player. Lots and lots of stories if you care about that. Hard to just rush through without reading. But the unmissable to me is The Secret World. So good you'd wish it was a single player game. Heh.

With Final Fantasy XIV, which I enjoy as a "mental screen saver", your mileage may vary. Up to level 20 there is so much FedEx-ing and irrelevant kill ten rats quests that you might want to kill yourself, unless the soothing music and catchy sharp visuals mesmerize you as they do to me.

I'll second that.  Hands down the best single player MMO I've ever played and definitely worth a run through if you're a fan of story/the occult/conspiracy theories or just general craziness.  Although if you're a fan of quest hubs and using 20 abilities in a single rotation I'd steer clear.

Yea, I just started playing Secret World again with a friend. Latest big patch focused heavily on improving the new player experience and making the game more viable to play solo.

Hmm... I might have to give TSW another go.  I really did enjoy playing it when it came out.  I keep flitting from one game to another these days.  I'm still hoping something brand new comes out relatively soon.  I LOVE starting a brand new game. 

Thought about GW2, but it seems the established players are by-passing the noob stages with insta leveling potions. Are there enough other players at the lower levels or are you basically soloing until you get towards the top? (Not that I mind soloing, I just prefer being able to run into at least a *few* PCs while running around).

How quickly do you get through the level 20 content?

Well I think it was last year that I played it (might even be longer ago... ) and I was playing with a friend, but there were always other people in the zones we were in. Plus the event things that were running at the time were basically open to all level characters so there was always a mad zerg you could join if you craved company :-)

Within the first weekend if you have people helping you and have a general idea of what to do and don't just do every single quest you run across.  You're mostly meant to follow your main story quest the first run up to max level.

I suppose I should also note that leveling is fairly fast in general in this game, partially due to the fact that you pretty much have to level multiple classes.

Level 1 to 20? Ten hours, I'd say. Fifteen maybe? Nothing to write home about though, and if it weren't for that unique Final Fantasy vibe and the very polished implementation, it would be quite unacceptably boring content these days.

I'm not fond of the art or mechanics, so the grind from 1-15 in FFXIV felt like exactly that... a grind.

TSW is the only game, whether soloed or not, never felt grindy.  SWToR while great, definitely had a repetitive vibe to it after a while.  I'd have to say TSW is the game.   

I played TSW when it launched, but I might go check it out again.. need to try a different character anyways!

What about this Marvel Heroes game? Is it just another version of CoH or is there something interesting there to check out?

I burnt out on TSW when I got to the zone with all the moth monsters. One of the few MMOs I played that I didn't make it to max level.

It's Diablo with super heroes.  It's good, but only if you're in the mood for Diablo.

It's also not an MMO.

My burnout ocurred when the game went crickets due to the next best shiny that got released. I cant recall which game caused it.  I was stuck in Trans, soloing.  Not fun.  There are a great many games I would pick up in a heartbeat if I had a dedicated gaming group to play with.

TSW never did it for me; I don't know why.

I sorely miss CoH.

Yeah, playing SWTOR i felt like i had to do a lot of "filler" quests in between the fun stuff, TSW was all fun stuff.  Both games should've flashed a "game over" screen and rolled credits when you finished the story though.

I never liked TSW because the player models were ugly and for some reason that turned me off. But tons of people (as seen here) love the game. It's worth checking out.

FFXIV is probably the best diku-based tabtarget game out there next to WOW.

GW2 is amazing if all you care about is playing at your own pace and exploring and dipping your toes into several different places at once. There will be an expansion some time this year, probably Q3.

SWTOR is an excellent choice in a few days. From what I've read subscribers will get the 12X bonus again on May 4th. Essentially you get a 12x experience bonus which allows you to do just the story/planet quests and skip all the bullshit kill 10 rat quests. It actually makes the game very enjoyable if you like that sort of gameplay. Costs ya $15 bucks though. Worth it imo if you haven't played the game before.

They had the 12X bonus back in November I think. I played around with it for a few days and it was actually fun. When all you have to do is follow the plotline of the game, you actually enjoy the game. Why they don't turn this on permanently I don't know.

I intentionally made and dressed like a hobo in that game.  I think that helped for me for some reason.

I think missing CoH is why I play DCUO sometimes.  It feels enough like CoH to satisfy my superhero/villain urge. 

Tera is great at low levels, has great combat, It's horrid once you hit max level though.

PC MMO's are flat lining but the good news is, its a good time for single player games.

Besides popping into SWTOR every couple weeks, I just don't have any interest in any current mmo's.  I can't even name an upcoming MMO I am looking forward to.  The only thing I am really hoping doesn't suck is The Division.. but that's not really an mmo.

Elder scrolls online has a massive amount of content to go through before max level, especially if you like to explore.  You go through your starting faction's 1-50 levels, then once you beat that you go through the other two factions' areas with a ramped up difficulty.

If you just want to see and enjoy the content it's actually easier to play three different characters from 1-50, then 1-45 twice.  The last five or so levels are the same for all factions.

Edit: All though they changed the post level 50 level system after I left so it might have be different than I did.  Hopefully it got easier.  In any case you have three huge faction story arcs and zones to go through.  After feedback they let each faction skip their newbie yards, you should do that content though because it's great if you aren't rushing to max, they can all be done by going to the docks and talking to an npc to travel there.

I'm also a fan of TSW but back when I finished it it was not a user friendly experience, you had to do a lot of research and I imagine most of the best sites for that are long dead by now.

I stopped playing SWTOR because I outlevelled the story-missions and found myself unable to (easily) join the operations/flashpoints or whatever it was that would let me continue the story. I think. Been a while.

Edit: Other than that I'm waiting for the next bunch of MMOs to launch with hype and then fail spectacularly. Part of the fun of MMOs.

Which ones?

I've been doing one of the SWG emu servers.  Some of it is nostalgia, but honestly it's better than anything out right now, which is sad.

I still say MMO's are dead.  The future is console shooters that will probably be playable on the PC but not much fun.  Its hard to believe that not only was there never a WoW killer, but WoW actually killed the genre.  The King is dead, long live the King!

The wow killer is already called league of legends.

It even has Ghostcrawler!  :awesome_for_real:

Having just started TSW I can confirm that at least 2 sites the TSW wiki and a site called unfair are not dead and are very helpful in research missions. The TSW wiki is strangely not complete in some areas though, like specific areas and monsters and so on. Its good enough to help with missions though.

Uninstalled TESO so I now have no MMO to play.  Which is a good thing because it's summer and I need to be outside more.  Plus look for work.  So, until SWTOR drops their xpac, I'd say there is no MMO worth starting.

I recommend DarkFall Rise of Agon and Pantheon (in the future).  DfRoA is in beta and the last wipe should be end of next month.

Oh, I don't know.  Dark and Light seems to be coming back.  WHAAA??? (http://store.steampowered.com/app/529180/)

I tried giving WoW another go recently after an eight-year absence, and I couldn't even play two days. Cancelled.

I own TSW but my Aussie guilt has left it. They recently did a hardcore burst of an official EQ1 progression server for a few months, which I didn't join due to lack of time, but I occasionally play Project 1999 (high population EQ1 emu that stops at Velious era). If P1999 did a full restart or a progression server I'd ride that for a bit, but FFXIV will probably be the next thing I'll try and fail at. At the moment I'm dicking around in The Witcher 3 instead. It does feel like MMOs are dead, or my will to devote enough time to them is dead.

They are dead. WOW did a pretty successful job at just goddamn killing the whole thing. None of them ever got past the hurdle of making them sticky without a PVE content grind that couldn't make enough content to keep the hardcore sustained and subscribed without also pissing off the casuals. PVP wasn't ever sticky enough in enough numbers to make it worthwhile, and MOBA's and the like seem to have taken most of those players.

The costs are just too high and there's too much other gaming goodness for people to subscribe to this shit, and F2P doesn't seem to be the money maker that is needed to support a giant WoW-like MMO budget.

idk if the devs have no clue or the gamers but id say both. the problem is simple, the games are too fucken easy, ever since ffxi, these games require no player interaction, can reach level cap in a week and so what used to be a huge part of a mmos overall content, the journey has now been discarded for reasons i cannot understand. 

The fact that aside for P1999 and maybe some prog servers, there isnt a real mmorpg out there. MMORPGs are meant to be HARDcore not solo half assed quest grind dumpster fires we have now.  I mean shit, i would dare say the PVP crowd has won the long age fight, with games like DarkFall and EvE requiring actual player interaction, i would say those games have more REAL mmorpg PVE content than the WoW and such. 

I mean, a game like Path Of Exile is actually more of an MMORPG than these crap games we see now. People want to see the genre come back? support games like Pantheon, Darkfall and maybe, just maybe there will be a niche for what used to be the mmorpg genre.

is the genre dead? Almost, Pantheon is the only game i see that could bring it back... and thats really sad that i have to put the fate of a genre in the hands of crack whore.

I need to find some SunnyD bottles.

Wait... I have finally figured it out. grunk is Brad McQuaid when he's missing his oxy.

These read more like he's strung out on psilocybin. Unless that's the same thing  :why_so_serious:

Oxy is an opiate. Psilocybin is a hallucinogenic. I think enough oxy can give you some hallucinations (or withdrawal can).

Enough of anything can give you hallucinations.  :drill:

And yes, enough Oxy can create visual and aural hallucinations.

I don't entirely disagree with Grunk. I'm playing Secret Word atm and really, it should have been a single player game. Pretty much every mmo I've played since EQ has been a mostly single player affair. Only in FF14 and Swotor did I do any grouping, and that was all grinding out endgame currency with silent, instant-disband-at-the-end pugs from the group finder. I've followed Pantheon a little and am guarding against nostalgia fueled hopefulness given who's making the game, but I like the idea of it. I also hope lighting strikes one of those CoH replacer dream projects and I can super-jump again.

WoW did kill annihilate the whole genre, didn't it.

And I guess PvP players did gravitate to the MOBA scene. (Though I'd much rather play a MMO than a MOBA that seems more in flavor of RTS than MMO).

Eve, Ark, ESO seem to have niche following. I haven't tried any of those.

Still waiting for a Wild West themed MMO.

MMO content is expensive to produce, and the worst part of MMOs is the other people.

If content can be produced cheaply enough (leverage the player base? lean on procedurally-generated stuff?), an MMO may be somewhat viable. Otherwise, it's too expensive to support more than a few developers without having a massive subscriber base.

If you invest in cheap content production, you may be better off churning out thinly-reskinned versions of your game to try to capture different audiences for a few months until they get bored and leave. I think there are a few studios doing just this, based on what shows up on Steam every so often.

Asheron's Call is the best example I know of where they invested in cheap content production. They sure churned out new dungeons and quests on a regular basis, and had so many world-changing events it's still impressive. It had a good run.

The Secret World originally was far more group oriented, but like all MMO's rapidly bowed to player pressure to ease the progression. It's not just that everybody wants it easy, it's that it is danged hard to progress groups of friends evenly, so you might as well make it quick for everybody to get to the "end game" where they can all raid if they want.

I really don't have any answers, except to get in on MMO's early, and not expect too much. They aren't virtual worlds, they are just virtual passtimes, a place to be part of a video game fantasy while not feeling *totally* separated from the rest of humanity.

I have always treated MMO's as nothing but a fancy chat interface.  It has served me well. 

You could have a big open world when the content was relatively cheap (Like EQ or Eve), expectations were lower and being online was enough of a thrill in itself. WoW just pushed the bar up to the point where the chance of failing in comparison and the cost of entry just became too high. There's still a lot of Asian MMO's but I think some of that is about the social aspects of playing a shared game in a shared space (e.g. a PC bang) and wanting to strut your virtual achievements. I was reading a Chinese manga (Master of Skill) about this man forced out of his pro PvP team who gets a job at a PC cafe so he can awe everyone online and in real life with his unearthly skill (/laugh) when a new server opens (and smoke constantly while playing). It's hard to imagine any western MMO capturing that sort of ego drive on a large scale.

Or in the case of Japan loving the game lore so much they want to live in that world perhaps?

But for a lot less effort than an MMO you can pop out an Overwatch or a Destiny and make some good money with less downside risk if it goes all Division on you.

The core of the mmorpg is that it is a social experience.  I dont think non PVE raid content is at all "more" expensive to make if you make a game that relies heavily on the journey; for example ffxi, unless you had a static it would have taken around six months to reach cap pre-zilrat and that bought square enough time to get zilrat and sky out.  

We need to bring this shit back, back to when a six player party was required, when you had to GASP go explore and find camps and compete against other groups for spawns... people dont realize, this shit was FUN.  What happen? simple, all of those assholes that stood around at highpass and Jueno hating on my sick gear and skill level, WoW gave it to them for free.  

We are dealing with grown children and guess what, thanks to the millennials this shit will only get worse. Fuck those people, Fuck them in their lame gaping cleft assholes.

Ahhhh, that good old grunkosity. It's like crunching up pure blue and snorting it, while shooting the same thing directly into your dick.

The answer is to let people group and progress together no matter what level any of them or the content is.

Sounds like the answer is to not have levels.

Welcome to my brain in 1999!

Or just allow people to scale up or down at will, like City of Heroes.

I suppose that removes the level-difference issue via addition instead of subtraction.

What can I say, I love me some Ding, Gratz.

This.  I love games that are inclusive rather than exclusive.  GW2 also did a great job at allowing people to work together without anyone feeling cheated. 

GW2 was also clever in that it kept those extremely expensive pieces of content, fully fleshed out and populated zone maps, viable even into end-game. There might still be reasons to visit them and you could create events to renew interest and extend the depth of the event.

Though they then squandered that opportunity thinking that what people really wanted was a bad story and one off events because ...  they're thick I guess, and much better at art and environment than they are at game design.

 UO. Still the best.

Not for the last 18 years.  :awesome_for_real:

I didn't see a thread for it, so

Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues (Richard Garriott) is now offering a free trial (https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/?page_id=69568) for one week starting yesterday.


It says 22GB hard drive space required, and you need to open specific ports to launch it.

That's... kind of weird?  Strange marketing ploy, seems to me.  "Come one come all, to see the unfinished, pre-alpha build which sucks and you should only buy if you want to seriously get in to bug hunting!  Marvel, as your first impressions of a game are completely wasted on an unfinished product that you don't even have to pay to be disappointed by!   Gaze in wonder, as future customers are turned away by an unfinished build and we gain tons of negative word of mouth for no real benefit!"

I mean, am I (and the store page) wrong?  Is this going to hook a lot of people?  Or what is the point of doing something like this while the game is so early in development?  Has anyone here played it to know if it's worth checking out?

I think you are correct. It's bad marketing. Why would you free trial an early alpha early access game? That's just asking for people to never come back.

Its desperation, they need money NOW and any people they convince to pony up now matter more than the ones you turn off forever.

Yeah, but it's free.

Maybe they're trying to generate metrics that there's enough interest in it so that they can win investors, but it's not the usual "bleed the rubes" we've become accustomed to.

I've tried to play a few times but I find it very cumbersome.  I don't last more than a few minutes.  I think I just don't have enough patience anymore.  They are good, though, at keeping in touch and offering up information.  I appreciate that, especially since it's so hard for me to play.  For my MMO desires, I've gone back to ESO.  I still think they do every aspect of the game very well, from pricing to gameplay. 

Guild Wars 2 scratches my MMO itch when I feel like it.

I would play this again, if I could.

Ditto, or Marvel Heroes if it even counts as an MMO.

Me, too.

I'm playing Everquest again (dabbling).  It's sad that even as clunky as it was, it's still controls better than shit like Shards Online.  Why actually make a functional game when you can sell the idea of a game that will never exist?

Thats one of my big problems with "early access." There is more money in NOT finishing a game and just floating a concept, than finishing a game and selling nothing.

I play Project 1999 (high-population EverQuest emulated server that doesn't go further than Velious era) with the Velious era UI installed.

It's EQ as it was in 2001. I've only made it to level 18 Enchanter in several years, but you know how much time you have to spend to get anywhere and I have no intention of doing so. Just spending a while doing stuff scratches the itch.

The drought is real... if their was a FFXI CoP locked server id be their and never look at another fucken mmorpg again. I do like what i have seen from Pantheon tho but alas i have broken down and gone back to ESO...

I tend to focus mainly on Starcraft II and my never ending quest to NA Masters... fuck this genre.

Fucken, say I am huge fan of SCHUMPS, lets also say im a cool kid and i only really like vertical shooters and think the other one is fucken nubz, no new vertical shooters? fuck it i dont care, i'll go back and play my old shooters to fill that void BUT if you like old school hard mmorpgs your fucken DEAD; its at a point ill have to make a retro gaming pc because if you want to play what you liked, well... go play P1999 or fucken angmar server... FFXI? square killed that shit so other than time locked or emulated EQ, got no damn choice.  Why on earth is this genre even still alive is beyond me, when you only offer one kind of ruleset or playstyle... people will get fucken bored of this TRASH.

New cool AAA shooter sucks and has loot boxes? well fuck it, back to C:S... were you go if your into mmorpgs?

(https://i.imgur.com/fRFMxtT.gif)

grunk says: "All the MMOGs are the same and are shit - what else is on offer? Nothing? Fuck it."

Edgy as fuck.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WHsCyEmnec

FFXIV IS TEH UBAH