My MMO existential crisis

[Talgurin]

I only really have time to play p99, but I'm trying to figure out if there are any MMOs out there that I can poke out of my little bubble and try out. Can any MMO exist to match the glory of taking down a dragon with 70 other players and winning a piece of loot that, if RMT was allowed, would probably be worth hundreds of dollars? Yeah, people complain a lot about P99 but that's still some glorious shit that I'm not sure anyone else can duplicate.

Archeage

I heard good things about Archeage being a "sandbox". Installed it and quickly found myself following an incoherent story to solve quest, after quest, after quest--with mobs that are so easy to dispatch I just yawn my way through it. I also discovered about zero player interaction. I don't see how there can be any glory here. Uninstall.

Black Desert Online

So I was told if you didn't like Archeage, try out BDO instead, another so-called "sandbox". What I found was another Korean mis-translation-fest and lots of people in general chat going "kekekekke ^_______^" who are probably not Koreans but white kids pretending to be Koreans.

Actually, firstly the graphics are way better. Yes, it's some Korean kid's fantasy of big titted wizard women, but they look really damn good. The combat system was superior to Archeage, although still a lot of button mashing. The world seemed decent. Also you can pay like $10 for full access to the game and no monthly subscription or pressure to pay to win, so far so good.

Quickly discovered some of the same issues, though. 1.) No player interaction, 2.) As I approached level 20, I still never lost more than 5% health from ANY fight. In other words, easy to a point of being DUMB. 3.) An incoherent quest-based system, where instead of exploring the world and making your own adventure and storyline (as 'sandbox' should be), you follow an uninteresting series of plot points that I can't even figure out, involving NPCs I don't give a rats ass about.

I finally talked to another player who informed me, "This game is just questing and button mashing until you're level 50, when it becomes more interesting and harder, and you have to work with other players for some of the content." There's a lot of people who put time into houses and trading and caravans and all that kind of shit, but the existential crisis quickly returned as I thought "What's the point of it all?". Maybe the PvP is pretty good later on, but I don't want to endure dumb quest after dumb quest with absurdly easy encounters just to decide if I like the game or not. Uninstall.

Guild Wars 2

I heard Guild Wars 2 didn't use a questing system but a "waypoint" system, so it's more focused on world exploration. Sounds interesting.

Quickly found myself actually interacting with other players in the little tutorial fight. As I entered my newbie town, I encountered a bunch of players in their underwear rolling around on top of each other as they performed an in-game "orgy". Okay, so far things seem interesting.

Going out into the countryside, I found the Waypoint system a lot better than the prior two MMOs and their shitty, incoherent, badly translated quests. You can just sort of go out and kill things and find adventure. And grouping with other players is as easy as just walking up and helping them kill things. This is so far more "sandboxy" (e.g.: EverQuest-like) than the last two.

Definitely the winner so far, but some issues: The fights are also easy to a point of being dumb. Like, where's the challenge when everything just dies in a couple clicks? What happened to being afraid of skeletons and bats?

Leaving it installed for now.

Mortal Online


The opposite extreme. I've gone back and forth a lot with MO. It's basically first-person Ultima Online circa 1999. That means insane PvP with fully lootable corpses. You get thrown into a city with no idea what to do, with limited guides or resources available online. It really is a "sandbox" for better or worse.

Dungeons are dark and scary (I don't know the extent of PvE but I am impressed by what I see). You need a team to survive, and you WILL die a lot.

The problem is like any game such as this one, it's you vs. players who devote their lives to PvP. It's the same reason I don't last long on classic Ultima Online shards. It's kind of like being thrown into prison, going up against lifers who've been there for 25 years already ahead of you. Good luck getting ahead.

So it's just dying a lot from PKs ultimately. A lot. And also a weird system of needing to pay for multiple accounts / mules to build a character up to being even partially playable.

If MO was more PvE focused it might be perfect. But I don't feel like the slaughter, so I never keep playing it.

Elder Scrolls Online

I didn't bother shelling out $60 for this. At first I was pretty excited since like many I love Skyrim / Oblivion. Then I read some answers on the ESO Reddit about what the game is like.

So it has a level scaling system. All the content is immediately scaled for your level, at all times. A player said "Because of this, there are no easy or difficult zones, it all stays the same, essentially."

WTF? That's the MMO equivalent of a communist country. As someone who's actually been to North Korea, I'm not excited to recreate it in Tamriel.

To be fair, regular ES games scale for your level, too. But it's not quite the same... there are still the weaker monsters running around, and the earlier content is leftover, but by higher levels dragons and things start swooping down, so it's a nice blend. Apparently, ESO is setup so that there isn't really progression that you can notice, it's more like an endless treadmill. In other words, you can't go back and kill mobs from your old newbie zones, because you live in a phantom version of those areas, disconnected from the other players as you fight high level monsters instead.

I was also told players hardly interact with each other, for most ESO is a single player experience. Hooray.

Consensus

Back to leveling my alt on p99 and waiting for Pantheon.

[AzzarTheGod]

tagged

[Whirled]

Elysium WoW servers seem over loaded with peoples if you dont mind waiting in queue when it gets real bad. Plenty of folks to group up with though and new friendly faces to explore or PvP.

[Priceline]

Pantheon is going to be terrible and you are going to be super disappointed.

1000% this

though i doubt it releases at all

[Barkingturtle]

http://www.wurmonline.com/

Here's an actual sandbox filled with autists.

Good game; zero point to it; horrifyingly addictive. Checks all the boxes, imo.

[Wiley]

I had the exact same issues with BDO, though I didn't even make it to lv20. Combat felt pointless, just mash face and everything around you dies.

[EQBallzz]

You pretty much nailed it OP.

Archeage - tried it. Hated it. Just seemed like garbage.

BDO - looks amazing. Has some interesting elements but ultimately the combat is button mashing boredom. No holy trinity or class interdependence. Mostly single player game until 45 when the focus changes to toxic PvP that is forced on you at end game. Cash shop insanity and everything I hate about F2P/B2P games. Not wasting my time or contributing to that shite.

GW2 - tried it. Liked the leveling and game world but again..no holy trinity or class interdependence. Every class feels almost identical but with different weapons and spell effects/animations. Everyone gets self heal, utility, DPS. So fucking boring. Quit after trying to do the first major dungeon several times and it was nothing more than ppl zerging the bosses and dying and running back over and over. Worst group experience in an MMO ever. It's like everyone is playing single player games along side each other. Ironically, people try to load out their characters to form "tanks" and "healers" even though they were expressly trying to remove that requirement. Should be an indicator of how that failed miserably.

MO - never tried it for the exact reasons you mentioned. Not a big fan of PvP-centric games anyway.

ESO - played a lot of this. Game had great potential but it was changed and morphed into a pile of shit..including the conversion to B2P with more fucking cash shop bullshit. The game was actually quite hard in beta and at release so the challenge was high. It was eventually nerfed to shit and became mostly trivialized. ZOS are a bunch of manipulative, lying dbags. Don't waste your money.

Pantheon *might* suck but it's one of the few MMOs on the horizon to look forward to. Only others you might want to look into would be Saga of Lucimia (explicitly being created in the model of EQ like Pantheon and on a similar release schedule) and maybe Chronicles of Elyria (different enough that it could be interesting but also ambitious enough to fail miserably or just not meet expectations).

[this user was banned]

Ever tried Anarchy online? This has the be the MOST complex, highly customizable MMO I've ever played and has massive potential if you like to twink alts. Quests are few and far between, instead there are randomly generated mission zones you can create for yourself or a team, but they are all pretty generic - kill shit and do something trivial to complete it near the end. There's sereral dungeons to play around in too if you can manage to find them.

It's "free" to play for the classic content, but the recent expansions require a subscription. You can multibox an entire free team if you want though which makes up for the dead community in the free parts of the game.

[Baler]

All of the games mentioned in the OP are fun. The first time you play them. Their replay value quickly decreases. The classic magic of EQ and UO just can't be replicated or remade.

Ever tried Anarchy online?
I still play AO as a froob, fixer. It's like sifi EQ. It's not for everyone though.

[skarlorn]

"existential"

[maskedmelon]

"""existential"""

[Burk]

I really liked GW2 world vs world. However, I'm not fan of their pve content and wvw looses its fun after awhile. Good game though.

[this user was banned]

I really liked GW2 world vs world. However, I'm not fan of their pve content and wvw looses its fun after awhile. Good game though.

You mean you got bored with running around with a bunch of idiots flipping ownership of towers for hours on end?

[AzzarTheGod]

WoW has 10million+ subscribers

lol the only game with the balls and clout to charge a subscription apparently while simultaneously running a successful cash shop.

These competitors must be green with envy.

[Ahldagor]

lol the only game with the balls and clout to charge a subscription apparently while simultaneously running a successful cash shop.

These competitors must be green with envy.

Blizzard learned a lot with The Death and Return of Superman.

[Ahldagor]

Try Darkfall

[Dullah]

Your assessment is pretty accurate OP. If you actually like the open world PvP aspect, I recommend the new Darkfall New Dawn coming out. Not to be confused with the other indie Darkfall: Rise of Agon, which will essentially be a more polished version of the fatally flawed original Darkfall.

New Dawn intends to make a more authentic sandbox world out of Darkfall, more in line with something like classic UO or Eve where a player can actually succeed and enjoy a niche within the world without having to become a full-time PvP player. It has potential on paper; it's just a matter of whether they can deliver.

Also, it's pretty obvious at this point that Pantheon will be what most of us have hoped and dream for in another MMORPG. I did not think they would be able to pull it off at the launch of their kickstarter, but anyone who watches the most recent streams, it's clear that they are more than capable with a solid team now, and are on track to bring us an EQ for the modern era.

[Swish]

WoW has 10million+ subscribers

lol, no

[Tecmos Deception]

Eve Online is as great as EQ was, just in a very different package... Sci-fi and PVP focused instead of fantasy and PVE focused, but the harshness and depth and breadth and social nature are all there.

Only downside to it imo is the world is generally empty as a world. The world itself is just the place where stuff happens 99% of the time instead of something worth experiencing in and of itself. Not that there isn't a lot happening or that it isn't fun stuff, but the whole "player-driven awesomenessssss" line the Eve devs love to throw around is as much an excuse for not developing PvE content as it is a true description of great player-driven shenanigans.

[Swish]

I tried Guild Wars 2 briefly. It's actually not bad, but you find yourself asking why you're endlessly running around trying to "complete" zones... plus its not very social, but then where is these days other than p99?

[skarlorn]

I find overwatch more social if you run with a team in competitive. There's not much chit chat but lots of team work and comm.

[Tecmos Deception]

its not very social, but then where is these days other than p99?

Eve Online

You can even play for free now with their "aloha clone" thing... it just limits you to relatively basic (but still useful) ships and stuff unless you start subbing via the ingame item or normal monthly charge

[R Flair]

I'd say if someone tried ArcheAge and didn't make it past their pretty horrible linear quest progression portion, you really missed the meat of the game. The leveling process is like a 1 week tutorial that shows you combat, trades and all the other major systems. After that, the game it completely open.

The only drawback was that PvP was heavily gear dependent, and gear was heavily credit card dependent. I hear the new server they just launched a few days ago actually removes the majority of the P2W. Not entirely, but I guess the worker potions are out. Stuff like worker potions and regrade materials were the worst part, and I guess they're gone.

Wasn't enough to bring me back, but I believe if ArcheAge had a purely subscription server, I'd probably play it faithfully until Pantheon (which is looking amazing, despite what haters say).

[Pullyn]

I'd say if someone tried ArcheAge and didn't make it past their pretty horrible linear quest progression portion, you really missed the meat of the game. The leveling process is like a 1 week tutorial that shows you combat, trades and all the other major systems. After that, the game it completely open.

The only drawback was that PvP was heavily gear dependent, and gear was heavily credit card dependent. I hear the new server they just launched a few days ago actually removes the majority of the P2W. Not entirely, but I guess the worker potions are out. Stuff like worker potions and regrade materials were the worst part, and I guess they're gone.

Wasn't enough to bring me back, but I believe if ArcheAge had a purely subscription server, I'd probably play it faithfully until Pantheon (which is looking amazing, despite what haters say).

Archeage was a pretty amazing game for the first year or so. Trion really fucked it up in a variety of ways though, even the fresh start servers were and still are a disaster. The P2W gear gap at this point is insane for new players. A guy on my server before i quit supposivedly dropped over 100k in the game. I'm with you though, if they put out a sub based non p2w server I'd come back. I would gladly deal with the awful regrade system again if that happened.

[R Flair]

Archeage was a pretty amazing game for the first year or so. Trion really fucked it up in a variety of ways though, even the fresh start servers were and still are a disaster. The P2W gear gap at this point is insane for new players. A guy on my server before i quit supposivedly dropped over 100k in the game. I'm with you though, if they put out a sub based non p2w server I'd come back. I would gladly deal with the awful regrade system again if that happened.

Supposedly they've really changed the way regrading works. I heard a lot of the RNG was removed with downgrading or breaking items, but at the cost of being harder to get the upgrade mats. You still fail and I guess can downgrade at the top few tiers, but until that point it's just grinding for mats.

I just don't have the time for it, and really I was never that impressed with the guild competition aspect. There are only a couple castles to compete over for thousands of people, and only a handful of contested raid mobs. You look at things like Eve, Darkfall or even Age of Wushu, there were always a lot of guild achievements by way of territory, bigger ships, a fortress etc. In Wushu, they had like 30 guild territories on every server, and they required extensive resource and time commitment to build out. In AA that aspect is limited to only a few zergs, and everyone else are just bystanders. Like I said, just doesn't offer much in the longterm.

[Pullyn]

Supposedly they've really changed the way regrading works. I heard a lot of the RNG was removed with downgrading or breaking items, but at the cost of being harder to get the upgrade mats. You still fail and I guess can downgrade at the top few tiers, but until that point it's just grinding for mats.

I just don't have the time for it, and really I was never that impressed with the guild competition aspect. There are only a couple castles to compete over for thousands of people, and only a handful of contested raid mobs. You look at things like Eve, Darkfall or even Age of Wushu, there were always a lot of guild achievements by way of territory, bigger ships, a fortress etc. In Wushu, they had like 30 guild territories on every server, and they required extensive resource and time commitment to build out. In AA that aspect is limited to only a few zergs, and everyone else are just bystanders. Like I said, just doesn't offer much in the longterm.

Regrading was changed a little bit like you said but it's still absolutely soul crushing. High risk high reward. It is what it is. The castle system never really did much for me though. I participated in a few sieges as hired muscle for the most part but I spent most of my time on the water, windscour, or in hellswamp. I ran with a small 20 or so person green pirate guild that was like 80% 5kgs+ darkrunners and 6kgs+ healers lol. We probably stole 10k gold worth of stuff a week.

[Priceline]

I tried Guild Wars 2 briefly. It's actually not bad, but you find yourself asking why you're endlessly running around trying to "complete" zones... plus its not very social, but then where is these days other than p99?

yea the connect the dots and do all the things on the map leveling got old fast. It still basically has quest hub to quest hub grinding but its hidden under the heart quests, map completion, and "random" events that happen over and over again.

still log in on occasion, freaking beautiful game world

[Talgurin]

Black desert online gets ALOT harder at 30ish ( just like everquest did )

i never made it past 35 because exp was too slow, but you can make money very interesting ways, the ideas of workers that you hire and send to farms to harvest vegetables or mine / craft was amazing

you can be a crafter and you dont craft, your slaves do it

game is gorgeous too

Great, now I have to go download the 60 gb file again and reinstall it :p sounds better than I thought.

[R Flair]

Black desert never gets harder. It was a total spamfest jump around snoozer. Does have a great looking world and the expansive cities and busy npcs felt very immersive. Rest was awful. Hands down the worst execution and waste of high quality art assets in the history of the industry to have a totally shallow and uninspired turd come out the other end.

Far as "sandbox" goes, both ArcheAge and Age of Wushu were closer to making a game and world that felt livable.

[entruil]

Ric, maybe consider pausing more to emphasize strut. Sometimes I think you are serious and other times ... wWOOooOOOOOoo(sp)!

[Talgurin]

Okay, so I decided to take a gamble and use the Christmas discount for Elder Scrolls Online to wrap up my MMO exploration. Here's my review.

In a couple words: "Not shit." Compared to Oblivion and Skyrim, it suffers in some areas. Compared to Archeage, Black Desert, and GW2... Well, there is no comparison.

The Good:

1.) NPCs with good voice acting who are actually interesting, similar to other ES games. The story isn't shit, either. No more bizarre Korean mistranslated garbage to deal with.

2.) A good combat system. Superior to other 'semi-twitch' MMOs, like the horrendously boring combat in Guild Wars 2. Here there's combat where I thankfully feel like my sword is actually connecting with an enemy who can fight back. In some ways I may EVEN say it's better than combat in Skyrim, because it's more dynamic and has some of the good MMO elements of long-term skill advancement.

3.) Like other MMOs I checked out, I'm also going from quest to quest, which bugs me in other games (including even WoW), but this time it's okay, because it's ES style quests that are, generally speaking, interesting and fun to discover. It still feels more like exploration compared to just looking for big exclamation points over heads and then finding enemies and mashing buttons.

4.) I heard player interaction can suffer in the game. Yes and no. I'm happy to see players do have a presence of sorts. I found myself getting "kill stealed" (sort of), and competing a bit for some spawns, which other players bitch about, but because i'm an EQ player and not a pussy, I was really happy to see players affecting the world in some ways.

5.) Better difficulty... A little mini boss near the beginning almost killed me until another player took some hits at it. Even bears can drop my life a bit making it necessary to dodge their attacks. Still not quite as hard as i'd want so far, though.

6.) Progression: played a lot today and i'm only level 6 and wearing clunky iron armor, which is also nice to see. If I were playing BDO i'd already be level 35 and flying a unicorn or some shit.

7.) The world seems huge. With alliance restrictions taken off, I'll be able to go anywhere, which is sweet. Edit: In addition, although i'm still new to the game, it SEEMS like the game puts a focus on travel. I heard people saying things like "Can anyone help me travel to Cyrodill?" -- this is really refreshing. Instead of fast travel in other ES games, there's waypoints--but they cost gold to use. In the end, it seems people actually do travel the old fashioned way.

The Bad / Unsure Of:

1.) I was worried most about the level scaling. Well, it's similar to the level scaling in Oblivion, except it seems to affect ALL enemies and I don't think it means harder enemies spawn in easier areas, either. On paper, it seems bad, but for creating an "adventure" game where you can travel and explore anywhere and always be challenged, it makes sense, I guess. Without this feature, I suppose you could level past the point of challenge in your home starting area WAY too quickly.

Basically, every level is a new instance of the game, and you'll only see other players running around at that level. I am unsure though how I'll feel in 45 levels if the skeletons on my newbie island can't be killed in 1 hit. I'm told though after level 50 there's a kind of post-50 AA-style system, and when you get to like 160 of them you're now progressing beyond the scaling system and you can start having the end-game God like powers you'd expect.

2.) The world is NOT fully interactive like Skyrim and Oblivion, this means no "asshole physics" of being able to pick up items and boot them around the game (Whyyyy?). I know there's limitations because it's an MMO, but if they can instance everything, why can't they instance that, too? For that matter, I can't sit in chairs or walk into someone's house and sleep in their bed like in Skyrim (their solution is a command /sitchair that spawns your own chair, I guess they just could not integrate this into an MMO any other way.) It's not a complete mess, though... Like in other ES games, you can pick items off the ground, steal items in towns (apples, carrots, soul gems laying around, etc), pick up armor or other goods in dungeons, etc. So it's "somewhat" interactive, just not like Skyrim, Oblivion, etc.

Long story short, it's a bit less immersive than my favorite ES games, but WAY, WAY more immersive and interesting than BDO, Archeage or GW2.

[TanDemain]

FFXIV and ESO are both fantastic games imo.

FFXIV is the best subscription-based MMO out there at the moment. Amazing classes (and job-system), gorgeous zones and graphics, great crafting and harvesting, helpful non-toxic communities, second expansion coming out soon, great meta-story, great dungeons and 'end-game' and so much more. I always felt stupid for not being a part of FFXI as it developed over the years. I did not want to make the same mistake twice, and am glad I'm here for FFXIV's ride. It's been fantastic.

Just started ESO ($9 bucks on sale) and it really has my attention. The quests are fantastic (no "kill x rats") and the phasing of the zones are great (things change based on your quest decisions). By the end of a zone, you know many of the key characters and have helped shape the lore/land. Very minimal on class-selection though, but you can diversify pretty well. The graphics are amazing, the maps are interesting (lots to explore that is hidden) and the gameplay is tight/responsive. Time flies playing this game.

Also, Warframe ~ not what one would call an MMO, but has all the elements of what I love about MMO's; co-op, guilds(clans), grinds, trading/market, crafting (new classes, weapons, companions, ships etc), gameplay (amazing freedom of movement) and so much more. Every time I log on I don't know where to begin because I can pick from so many things to do (Sorties, daily syndicate missions, fissures/relics, grinding resources for crafting, grinding experience, testing out new weapons/classes, amazing cinematic quests etc etc).

[Airdefier]

I'm in the same boat as you, OP. I seem to keep rotating through all the usual suspects of MMOs only playing them for a few months. From Aug to Earlier this month I played legion, then I subbed to live and leveled on phinny for a while.. and past few days I jumped back on ESO on ps4. Now ive never subbed to ESO...I just hang in cyrodill and do pvp. In my opinion it's the best MMO that you can jump in (as far as pvp) and have some fun pretty easy. I've been a EQ player in some form live or p99 since 00. Started wow in 04.. I can't seem to stick to one and I'm in the same rut. One of the biggest fallbacks of wow now is none of my RL friends play anymore... Maybe one or two. EQ/p99 and ESO are the only MMOs I can seem to play with out RL friends no problem. I've even thought of dropping MMOs altogether and started playing mobas and stuff but MMOs are my favorite genre..

[Whopperfoo]

Try out Shards of Dalaya, similar mechanics and world to classic/eq, but entirely different and more advanced content.

https://www.shardsofdalaya.com/intro.htm

[georgie]

Eq >sc2>wow>age of empires > strong hold 2> eq> ffx



Has been my game hopping for the year