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In search of a new MMORPG home

I've been a long time WOW player now for 5 years, played pretty much all aspects of the game from PVP to high end raiding, to becoming a guild leader/raid leader of a casual Australian guild. And I have to say I've enjoyed everything (Except TOC) that Blizzard have done with this expansion. The thing that keeps me playing above all else, is that all my friends play it. If my friends quit, there would be no reason to continue, and I also would stop playing.

I'm very curious to see where Blizzard takes WOW in Cataclysm, the Deathwing story in the universe is going to be very cool.

That said being the massive Star Wars fan that I am, i'm very interested to see the new MMO from lucasarts. The character classes they have in there are very cool looking, and the races within the Star Wars universe should provide a lot of variety. Have to hope that it's got a good story, like for example KOTOR. I'll likely give that one a good look when it's released and see where I go from there.

I know you have moved in and out of World of Warcraft over the years and I can understand looking for some new place to fulfill your RPG desires, but WoW is still best.

You don't have to PVP for gear anymore. Technologia has not run the arena in several seasons now. With the new Dungeon finding system, we have been spending a large amount of time running random dungeons in heroic mode. Lots of good drops and new emblems, which are essentially special currency you can use to buy high level items.

No more worrying about showing up on time. With the new system, you just need to have about an hour or so and it will populate a balanced party for you.

With regard to new MMORPGs and the inevitable migration, so far nothing has come along to supplant WoW. Some interesting competition is on the horizon, but it looks like WoW will still be the place to be through Cataclysm.

I tried a WoW-based game. It was not as much of a grind as I heard the real WoW is.

Plus, WoW looks...cartooney.

I played Darkfall too for about 4 months. That is a REALLY strung out grind. You have to play 12 hours a day to make any real progress.

I'm still waiting to see if Shadowbane makes its comeback in the form of a reverse-engineered emulator.

If that happens...well...I might take a couple days off from work.

Actually the fact that World of Warcraft is animation (cartooney to use your words) is actually a good thing. It means I can fight a 100 foot tall dragon breathing fire without having frame rates drop to zero.

I played Darkfall in 1600x1200 with all effects at full was fighting Oaklords and other mobs (with several other clan members) which look to be 30-40 feet tall...and I got no serious framerate slowdown.

In fact when I stood still in a hold, I would get 160-186 fps.

Of course, I'm running 2 5850s in SLi on a 3.7GHz OCed quadcore.

Best mmorpg (story and pvp wise) ever
worst graphics and buggiest 3d engine ever
I'd pay good money to play Shadowbane on a stable system.

SB emulator is being reverse engineered. There won't be any client improvements, but supposedly they are gonna beta the game at some point in the next few months and try to optimize the server performance.

I just wish Wolfpack/Ubisoft would let go of the license and let this team openly develop it.

As for the graphics, they are pretty good considering it was engined in what...2003?

And the bugs? I think a lot of that was from poor review and testing at Ubi. I had more issues with runtime faults than graphics problems. I think Ubisoft tried to push out patches too quick.

Been a lot of improvement since then.

I do miss you. And might be back
Mark, you are making a compelling argument.

Actually your enjotment of WoW can depend hugely on the guild you are in. Pugs are a toss up. Some are great and some are just repair bill sinks.

I really can't say whether another MMORPG would be better - I've haven't done more than dabble in any others, however, if you have a good guild (and it looks like you do) that's a big part of enjoyment of any game. Plus if you haven't played since before WOTLK, all the changes that came with it really changed the game play with the phasing and new areas.

WoW is going to be hard to replace on all aspects, and the new dungeon finder is great!!!!! It does make it much easier to get Uber gear.

I'm an occasional WOW player and have been since the final beta all those years ago.

My suggestion would be to attempt to get into a closed beta of Cataclysm.
The proposed changes are potentially massive and it will change the face of WOW completely. They should bring all the leasons learnt with the two expansions into the opening game content and help to avoid some of the repetitiveness often experienced by players leveling from scratch.

The best bit about the Beta will be that is a changing world. You are involved in development and that itself, with your past knowledge of the game, should keep the interest sparked for quite sometime.

If not I still recommend you give WOW another go on Catalysm's release at the far end of this year.

I think that Mark has expressed it well. I was a raid leader and ran a guild on one of the original servers. By time WotLK was about to release, it was no longer fun. WOW had become a second job that I was paying for.

I personally hate the "Expansion Release" model because it wrecks guilds. Suddenly, there are 10 levels to gain and 15+ new dungeons. Some people can grind up within a few weeks, while other people have lives/jobs/kids and will take months to level. The people who level fast get bored waiting for slow levelers. Some people move to new guilds so they can start raiding. Some people lose interest. Some people play mostly for the social aspects, and a new expansion tends to break up loose social groups and creates an "every man for himself" environment.

I think that instead of a huge expansion every few years, Blizzard should just raise the level cap by one level every 3 months and add a dungeon every 2 months. Instead of releasing a new world as a whole, new zones could be opened as a world every few months. Guilds would level together. There would be no enormous gap between player levels.

There would be peace on earth and everyone would eat pizza every day! /end tirade

I stopped playing before WotLK. In the last 2 years, I tried a bunch of different games, but nothing held my interest for long. Over Christmas vacation, I activated the 10-day trial and jumped back onto my WOW account after nearly 2 years away. I discovered that I could not level up my epiced-out 70's on the trial account, because I had never purchased WotLK. So I started a new level 1 on a (low-population) server that some of my old guild mates had moved to.

Changes in the game have made leveling easier. In my 10-day trial, between holiday parties and family get-togethers, I was in the Outlands at level 59 with a /played of about 2.5 days.

The quest are easier, and give more experience. The LFG/random dungeon tool works very well. Blizzard toned down most instances so that and 1 tank class with 1 healer class and any 3 dps can clear an instance, and you get bonus rewards for using the LFG tool. At lower levels, the "random" dungeon feature gives out some really good leveling gear. At higher levels, the random dungeons give tokens for tier gear.

My conclusion was that Blizz had made it easier to level and removed many of the most time-consuming requirements for raid preparation. I picked up the expansion, and less than a month from starting fresh on a new server, I have a lvl 77 flying around Northrend and am beginning to collect the gear I need to start doing the level 80 raids.

WOW is still the best MMORPG I have played, despite its flaws.

... is my favorite by a long shot

Runescape members' world- no challenge. Or maybe you could try Evony ... (yes I am joking)

It's addicting like WarCrack. Nice graphics, fun game play. I like it better than Warcraft.

http://www.perfectworld.com

FFXIV is definitely worth taking a look. The story has plenty of potential based on the "retrace" feature they announced. If anyone is interested in more friendly discussions on FFXIV, you can visit our niche forum at FFXIVCitadel.com

comments from EA's CEO imply that starwars the old republic won't be out till sprint 2011, so I'd take that one off the list, and having played Age of Conan, I wouldn't recommend it either, early levels great, late levels, massive amounts of boring grind.

btw, i'm currently playing aion and quite enjoy it, but have taken a break for a bit to play dragon age

I have also recently started playing Dragon Age, and am therefore taking my time about choosing an MMORPG. Dragon Age is great

Me and my friends have really been getting into DDO (Dungeon and Dragons Online). Its free to play which was a big selling point to us. I am also considering looking into Warhammer 40k online.

+1 for the DDo,

Decent Graphics and good gameplay. There are benefits to a pay subscription but not required. I found that there are always people ready to join a group so that you are mostly able to do just about any quest without too much trouble.

Have you thought about DDO? It's quite a bit different from WoW and it's free. I've been playing it for a few months now and really enjoy it.

There is City of Heroes / Villains and Champions Online.

I love CoH. The only issue is choosing a server as several have a low population at this time.

I tried Champions Online, but the rapid pace of patches and changes to powers have left a bad taste. I may go back later this year to see if things have stabilized.

I found the game play boring. I think it is a personal thing. One of the things I loved about WOW was that each area was drastically different than the next where as CoH was all city.

TheProfessorDan: When was the last time you logged into CoH?

The Shadow Shard zones are "space-y" and freakishly huge. The task forces (quests) in those areas are not for the faint of heart.

Cimerora is an entire zone based on an ancient Roman settlement. This is a coop zone where heroes can team up with villains.

The PvP zones are all thematic.

There are a few demolished city zones, the most popular being the revamped Rikti War Zone, where a crashed alien ship serves as a base of operations for the invaders. This is also a coop zone.

The entire city is undergirded by a sewer network filled with baddies... and leads into the Abandoned Sewers where... *shudder* Let's not speak of this.

There is a system in place (Ouroboros) where you can revisit every story arc you liked (or missed) and be able to face it at the appropriate level range.

Plus, if you're more interested in playing a villain, you can do so - with an entire new set of zones / missions / quests to do.

Teaming is never a problem, since sidekicking / exemplaring is now done automatically according to whoever is team leader. A new player at level 5 could very well participate in a level 30 mission and contribute to the team effort.

In late summer 2010, the next expansion named Going Rogue will introduce yet another zone where villains can become rogues, and heroes can become vigilantes. Top this with a graphics overhaul (applicable to the other zones as well). Praetoria will be very much like a mirror version of what players are currently accustomed too.

For me, CoH demonstrates the best of gamer communities, always ready to assist or answer questions. It has a dev team always on the prowl for user-suggested content (a few powersets and zones are direct proposals from players). And it is undergirded by a rich, complex lore that is consistent and entertainingly different.

Look for me on the Protector server.

... I found the avatar creation far too limited and the gameplay was so poor that I never got out of the beginner area. In short, I didn't even stay long enough to use up my introductory month.

On the other hand, Champions Online has been pretty good, offering several environments almost from the beginning, though getting extremely linear as you advance in level, unlike WoW which offers between two and three different paths for each faction. Still, Champions Online is only about 6 months old and is still growing.

Taking this into account, yes, CO did perform a lot of updates and power-changing during the first few months. This was due to some very visible balance issues between power sets that made certain avatars significantly more powerful than others. Some of this apparent imbalance is still visible, but now its due to the specific strengths and weaknesses of the power sets. CO still has a way to go, but even WoW has taken 5 years or more to get where it is now.

I would like to see more parallelism throughout the game, similar to the Desert/Canadian branches for the 5-15th level avatars. Once you hit around lvl 15, you're stuck with returning to Millennium City after which you go to Monster Island and beyond. Granted, you do get sent back out to D/C for a while, but the environments get old pretty quickly. Still, as your ability to travel improves, the distance between events seems to increase as well, giving you more feeling of truly traveling the world.

You found the Avatar creation *limited?* Oh dear, you really have to go look now. It's one of the things that makes it hard for me to go to any *other* game, since they're not AS customizable!

Going to COH from... well, anywhere else is going to be a culture shock. It will look empty, if you're used to everyone running around, competing for resources to mine/fish/beat on for quests. COH is heavily instanced. Yes, there are some hunt style missions, some raids and the like. But when you get into missions, you're inside (an office, warehouse, or cave.) The boss will always be there - no waiting for respawns because someone else killed them thirty seconds ago. Sidekicking (and exemplaring) are great (and automatic, now, making grouping even easier.) And hey, you can even make your own arcs in AE.

It's kept me around for five years and many, many alts.

My only "other" game is Aion, which I've been having a blast with.

Aion's slick, polished and great gameplay. The others are rubbish or pure PvE.

I've played WoW actively since July 2007. I have every class at a high level in the game; I've played both factoins; I've played just as much PvE and end-game raiding as PvP (BG's & Arenas). I've quested in every area in WoW and I've had every professoin in the game maxed; even almost every profession specializations. I've done everything possible to find an excuse to leave World of Warcraft. I've canceled my account, flirting with quitting for a long time now.. but something always brings me back.

Aion: 8 out of 10. I enjoyed my brief time on Aion, and I had around 20 people that came from WoW briefly to give it a try. All 20 ended up back on WoW.. It was kind of boring at max level.

Pirates of the Carribbean: 7 out of 10. I flirted with this game, and it was fun being a pirate. ARRGH. You get your own ship in this game but there's not enough content.. and obviously has it's own flavor not comparingly to WoW.

Age of Conan: 2 out of 10. I was absolutely estatic about this game and anticipated it's release. The character creation screen was the coolest part of the game, everything else was awful.

Warhammer: 9 out of 10 WAR was the first game that I actually gained much interest in. If I were to quit WoW tomorrow, I'd look back into WAR although when I last played it (November 2008), it was already on the decline and they were merging many of the servers due to low population. I don't understand why others didn't enjoy WAR all that much, as I find a lot of qualities I liked in the game.

I'm awaiting the much anticipated Star Wars MMO. If it doesn't work out, I may quit MMORPGs all together until Blizzard releases it's next-gen MMO (est 2017)

I flipped from WoW for about 2 months when Warhammer came out. The pvp and public quest areas are awesome when others were around. The 8-11, 18-21, etc. leveling spots are very fun and you can PVP your way through the levels. On the other hand, the 12-17, 22-27, etc leveling process was SLOW. It was enough after trying 3-4 toons into the teens, and my main to about 26, that I would flip back on WoW a couple days a week, eventually getting sucked back into raiding.

On the plus side, Warhammer has a play free until lvl 11 mode you can check out. You never level past 11, but it's free. And the lowest tier's PVP zones were spectacular.

Champions Online was a fun departure, but I can't see myself paying 15/month on two games. Can I, sure, will I, no.

Warhammer has improved alot since November 08.
Tier 3 at level 25 you can go to LOTD and since the server merges have made it actually pretty booming on servers I play on.
PQ difficulty level map indicators are a plus too.
It feels like a different game coming back to it imo. It's been enjoyable since I quit WoW for it.
You must love pvping tho.

EVE Online is probably the only MMO I am willing to go back to, I started with EQ in 2000 and never looked back, played WoW for an unhealthy ammount of time. Lots of time spent with City of heroes, DDO, Age of conan(first 30 levels fun after that it sucks). Warhammer was fun but people lost intrest because it was so buggy and hard to raid castles due to lag.

Currently I am having fun playing starcraft again(always go back to this game for a few months) but when I get tired of it I will be renewing my EVE online account, its a fun game, takes a bit of learning to get used to but once you get it down its lots of fun, try out the 15 day free trial and good luck!

Eve is a really nice game, don't get me wrong, but it has a big flaw that I just can't get past...

Once you get to the point that you're ready to really sink your teeth into the MMO part of the game it sucks. Everyone who's been on there for years is, by the design of the game, going to have their way with you. So far I have yet to see one person tell me how this can be avoided or how an EVE n00b can work their way to the top. The training system is neat until you start working the math and at that point you'll realize that you're hosed.

Still, it's worth the 15 day trial just to see the possibilities of a fairly unique MMORPG.

I don't think that a n00b is powerless in EVE. On the contrary, a carefully planned character can give 'experienced' players a hard time from early on. I suggest it's rather the real life player behind the character that makes the difference. In EVE the intellect and world wise savvy (and some competitive spirit) makes THE big difference and not pure virtual muscle. I've been beaten several times by people with less experience than myself, but I'm getting better at it, and seem to win now more than before. And that's satisfying.

Ouch.

Anyway, I have a character that I'm taking my time with, building skills (since work has me pretty busy and Avatar has killed any chance I had at being productive outside of work) that I will need later on. Laying the ground work for a Mercenary pilot. It takes a while, but after that first fight, oh man, it makes all the difference.

ive been playing eve for over 3 years now.. its the only MMO i have ever played that has kept my attention for longer thatn 6 months... no its not for every one.. but it is definatly worth looking in to and checking out.. the corp/people you play with will make or break the game for you..

Yep, if you're looking for an MMO that makes you think, EVE is it. No other game comes close in terms of planning and subterfuge.

True a noob can be Powerless against a more Experienced player. But it doesn't stay that way for long. A New player with less than 300,000 and Cheap EWAR Ship can neutralize a 30Million SP player in 200Million Battleship. (Sure he will need friends to kill the BS but it was YOU the noobling in a n ECM Ship that made his Guns go dark. Its not like WoW where a level 50 char is undefeatable no matter how many level 10 people attack him. Its hard to wrap your head around at first, but once you see what a properly trained and led group of noobs to can do to an experienced "pirate" it get more apparent.
Sure an older player may more breadth in Skills than a new player, but it doesn't take long for a new player to go Specialized in style that he could be equivalent to the Older play relatively quickly. Thats the Beauty of the system, it has more to do with YOU the player and how you play and what you decide to with what you got than how many Skill points you have.

I played for over three years, eventually building up a character that could fly and fight Carriers and Dreadnoughts in addition to being a major miner (no pun intended). The game has the best economic system of any game - bar none - and the graphics are downright startling. It takes a little time and dedication, but it really has something for just about anyone - from the best hardcore PvP to some pretty good carebear asteroid farming and mission running.

I have been playing EVE for about 5 months now and it is incredible for the wide open possibilities that are available for ALL players. You get to decide what and how you want to improve your character(s). There are no limits to what you can train to do (except for time). I would whole heartedly recommend it to anyone that would like to move up from WOW. The learning curve is pretty big, but definitely worth it. It took me about 4 hours to figure out the basics, about 2 weeks of steady playing to figure out what I was doing wrong after that and a couple of months to decide how I wanted to really build my character. Now I am moving along with a good corporation (similar to a guild in WOW) and improving myself daily. I like the ability to create a trial account and get a feel for the game before having to pay. Check with a current player if you really want to try EVE as they can get you a 21 day trial to the game instead of the standard 14 day trial.

There is Star Trek Online which is due out at the begining of Feb.

Really it boils down to what genre and what are you looking to get from the game. A lot of people I know play City of Heroes/Vilians (And soon to be Going Rogue) because of the Comic book aspect, along with the social aspect.

Aion is a nice game if you are into that genre. There is also Eve Online.

Yohoho Puzzle Pirates. Been over 3 years now! sheez.

It's nothing, I mean NOTHING like WoW or any of the other games y'all mention, but it's fun and addictive in its own right. The graphics are simplistic and not in 3D. It is also extremely easy to learn, as in my non-tech savvy SO was able to learn it and is still playing it regularly. There's no hand-to-hand combat or the like, but instead everything is done in a variety of puzzle type games. If you want a break from puzzles you can also play Poker, Hearts and Spades (betting game money of course). Three Rings is the developer. It'll probably fall short of any true gamers expectations but I like it. Oh - and it's FREE.

For kids - my girls prefer Angels Online, Perfect World and Furcadia.