MMORPG

Anyone is into massively multiplayer online role-playing games? Sometimes they also feature strategy elements (territory conquest, PvP battles, city building, player-driven economy) and that's the kind I prefer. Crowfall, Camelot Unchained and Dual Universe are upcoming strategy MMORPG, all currently in Beta. One of them at least should become a great game!

I'll weigh in, but my MMO experience is kind of old.

I've played a lot of them, but only played a couple of them seriously. I did WoW raiding for a while, as a Night Elf Hunter and a Draenei Shaman, from WoW classic up to Mists of Pandaria. At that point, I was kind of burned out and quit. I've started it up a couple of times since then, but without the raiding and the friendships it was kind of boring.

I played SWTOR for a while, and once again was raiding. An unfortunate health problem made me drop it for a while, and when I returned a few months later the guild had collapsed.

I've also played these quite a bit, mostly to be with friends and coworkers; GW2, FFXI, and City of Heroes/Villains.

For all of those, I've hit the point in my gaming life where the people I play with is what makes the game, and I've not really been in the mood to make new MMO friends with total strangers.

I looked at the games you listed. I'm a bit skeptical when I read, "sandbox world created by the players," because there's enough asshole players out there to spoil people's fun. I seem to recall Darkfall, where people would get ganked stepping out of the newbie city. But I'll keep an eye open for those games, just in case.

ETA: Sindragosa isn't a particularly memorable fight, but I loved her starting shout when we started the fight.

Many of the games you mention received pretty good critics. The only one I've played in the lot is WoW and fortunately I've stopped playing before getting irremediably hooked.

In the games I named, only Dual Universe is truly a sandbox game : very little restrictions, freedom to do whatever players want. In Crowfall there are quests, limitations in the campaign world and a goal to win the campaign. In Camelot Unchained, construction is limited by rules, the general goal is winning the RvR war and there's also the daily reward that give a general orientation to the game.

francisbaud wrote: Many of the games you mention received pretty good critics. The only one I've played in the lot is WoW and fortunately I've stopped playing before getting irremediably hooked.

In the games I named, only Dual Universe is truly a sandbox game : very little restrictions, freedom to do whatever players want. In Crowfall there are quests, limitations in the campaign world and a goal to win the campaign. In Camelot Unchained, construction is limited by rules, the general goal is winning the RvR war and there's also the daily reward that give a general orientation to the game.

I'll keep a closer eye on those other two then.

I saw that Camelot Unchained is from the DAoC designers. I played DAoC for a bit, but never got a guy to level cap, which was where the RvR really kicked in. DAoC was old school. If you died, you had to hunt up an NPC and pony up some gold to get your stats back. A friend of mine loved it, but it didn't grab me. That might have made me tar Camelot Unchained a little bit unfairly.

There was one coming out a couple of years ago*, where some old-time EQ designers (that should be a warning right there) wanted to do an MMO that took you back to the good old days where there were such things as XP penalties on death, and you couldn't level more than a third of the way to level cap without putting a group together. It's like that Monty Python skit. "You ran back to your body? Sheer luxury! We had to crawl! And if you levelled down from the penalty you couldn't pick up your own gear!"

*Found it. Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen. My nephew was really into it, as well as the original EQ. He was all stoked about it, described it to me, and I said, "Sounds miserable." Same designer of EQ (RIP), and it has an old-school EQ flavor. If you're an MMO masochist, look it up.

About ten years ago, two different social circles were trying to recruit me into joining their favorite MMORPG. My original gaming group back in Indianapolis had an opening in their WoW guild and wanted me to join. My old larp crowd here in the Twin Cities included a lot of Eve players and they were trying to get me to join their group. I took a close look into both games and asked a lot of questions of friends that played in either game. In the end, I declined, because both groups seemed to be offering me the equivalent of an unpaid part-time job in terms of time commitment and duties.

Shellhead wrote: About ten years ago, two different social circles were trying to recruit me into joining their favorite MMORPG. My original gaming group back in Indianapolis had an opening in their WoW guild and wanted me to join. My old larp crowd here in the Twin Cities included a lot of Eve players and they were trying to get me to join their group. I took a close look into both games and asked a lot of questions of friends that played in either game. In the end, I declined, because both groups seemed to be offering me the equivalent of an unpaid part-time job in terms of time commitment and duties.

WoW raiding before Blizzard added pick-up raids was definitely a commitment. If it turned out you liked raiding but didn't want to waste your time, then you almost had to commit to a schedule. DPSers are more or less interchangeable, but you had to have a tank (sometimes 2) that knew what they were doing, healers that knew what they were doing, and a raid leader that sort of knew what they were doing. If the tanks didn't show up, or the healers didn't show up, then the raid didn't happen unless dying repeatedly was your thing. Sure, you could attempt to pick up a tank or a healer off the streets, but chances were pretty good that they wouldn't be up to the task.

When I was playing, we ran from 9-11pm, T-W-Th. And we didn't mess around too much. My guild was mostly 'older' players (they were in their 20's, I was the old geezer in his 40's) with jobs, and we didn't grabass too much during raid. That schedule wasn't going to get us Server First kills, and we knew it. But we killed everything.

These days you can do pickup raiding. Blizzard put it in towards the end of my WoW days. You tell them if you're a tank, a healer, or DPS, and they put together a 25-man raid. Back in the day, our guild would sometimes go knock one out on a weekend to get decent gear for our alts. Blizzard nerfed the bosses for those, but not so much that you can't die; you still have to know the fight. So if you want to see the fights without a huge commitment, you can do that these days.

As for Eve, I played it a little, but it wasn't for me. From what I heard, Eve doesn't really take off for a player unless they're playing some kind of espionage/betrayal metagame. Join Company A, get high up as an officer, then sell it out to Company B.

Their company, CCP, has done some interesting things with RMT, where limited buying and selling ISK (Eve money) is allowed. You can buy a month's subscription with ISK, so if you're sitting on a ton of ISK you can effectively play for free. I bet you have to bust ass to get that much ISK though; you'd better love space mining.