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An impossible request...
I'll finally be getting my cable back on at home within the week, and I want to decide in advance which game I should try next. Currently, I tend to bounce around between games, being extremely active in the first week after resubscribing, with activity drifting off to other things over the course of one or two months before unsubscribing and picking up another MMO. I still play free-to-play games often, specifically Counter Strike (for which I donate $10 a month to a server for a reserve slot), Football Superstar, Puzzle Pirates, and Pangya. I also make an effort every once in a while to find something to do in Second Life or There, but without gambling in Second Life and entry barriers to buggy racing leagues in There, I tend to drift away from those quickly.
Other games I have played and why I tend to leave :
Everquest - Played since two weeks into launch, subscribed for over seven years cumulatively. Too many places to go and not enough people to populate them. I want to go back and do all the zones and quest lines in expansions that I missed, but I've never found a guild that does that. Every time I go back, I manage to level cap my original main character, but never find enough pick up groups, raids, or a new guild as good as my old ones that make me want to stick with the game long term again.
Everquest 2 - Lack of pick up grouping and lack of me having a level cap character makes it hard for me to find things to do with other people as often as I'd like. Easy to get into really great guilds on the server I play on, fortunately, but they all only tend to run high level events. I hate games with no solo options, but when you make it too easy to solo too much of the world and path to the level cap, people tend not to group often enough for me to enjoy the game. This leads into...
World of Warcraft - Got boring soloing or grouping too much too often. Never gotten a character past level 45, even since all the modifications that make leveling insanely fast now. I generally don't last more than a few days with this and waste the rest of the month that I resubscribe.
City of Heroes - A good balance of grouping and soloing, where it gets somewhat harder to do missions as a group, but the reward scales more than the difficulty. Small problem with the small population, unfortunately, and I have no interest in PvP in that environment. This is one I frequently resubscribe to, however, and never feel bad about it for the few weeks I play.
Anarchy Online - There was a time when I led my organization's PvP events in a fairly large organization, but I had to stop for a while for money reasons. Never found that again any time I tried to come back since. Soloing gets boring in a hurry, crafting is not what it should be, and finding a group tends to be more effort than it's worth.
Asheron's Call - Had fun with this when my roommates played, but I no longer live with roommates. Not sure how much the game has changed in my seven or so years off, but I won't go back until I can get my characters back, even if I won't use them. (Darn conversion from Microsoft billing...)
Lord of the Rings Online - Same problems as many above, I get bored too quickly doing the early level solo missions, and never get a character high enough to find groups, so I don't know how much it exists. The way the lore is used to make an MMO in general is irritating in a way I can't describe (to give you an idea of how without putting it directly, I think all of the movies are too short. Yeah.)
Auto Assault - Almost the perfect crafting system if you didn't have to collect 100 separate piles of crap in your inventory. Game was fun enough to play, but the performance and population killed it.
Vanguard - I can usually find groups, but it's odd how little conversation will go on in most groups, even more so than WoW. Not too tough to find a decent guild, but I've never been in one with better events than PvP contests among members and group screenshots. The crafting system is excellent in its current form, as is its resource management relative to the inventory system. A little tedious to level by soloing, and travel can be a pain. Not really sure what it is that makes me ever stop playing it, but it wears off like most others.
Planetside - I play it like I play Counter Strike whenever I have my All Access subscription for SOE games, whenever I feel like shooting something. Hard to make any comparisons to other MMO styles or genres, and there's nothing about it that specifically drives me away from it over time, I only ever leave when I can't afford to keep subscriptions to however many games I have at once.
Jumpgate - If the population was larger and much more active, as well as having active GM events again, this post wouldn't even be necessary - I'd be playing it right now! Another unfair comparison to fantasy RPG styled games, and I do like flight simulators. Kind of a wait and see situation for Jumpgate Evolution...
Dungeons and Dragons Online - I love Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms stuff, I like AD&D 2nd Edition, 3.0, 3.5, and d20. I first played tabletop RPGs (D&D specifically) when I was 4 years old, with my older sister's group at the bowling alley while my parents were bowling. DDO fails at giving you anything close to the tabletop game experience (Everquest in 1999 did a lot better job of that), doesn't use any of the tabletop systems well, has a horrible setting, and instanced dungeons instead of a world proper is just lazy. It doesn't deserve to have the D&D name attached to it. (Oh, if only there could be Neverwinter Nights Online...)
EVE Online - Even with as populated as space is with both other players and NPCs, it feels empty. The skill system is atrocious - if they want to let players train them while offline as they do, that's fine, but they should increase through use while playing even faster. I hate not being able to directly fly my ships. It's hard to find anything interesting to do, in a large PvP corporation or otherwise, if you're not a combat character, and then rarely even if you are. I like almost everything else about the design of the game, but I just can't get into it.
Star Wars Galaxies - Loved it before the NGE, but never developed a character enough that I was actually interacting with other players on a regular basis. I was told by a support staff member of another MMO (privately, of course), that it had improved since I'd last tried it, but I find it hard to believe that it's anything close to the game I remember or would want to play.
Other games I have played and didn't dislike, but didn't play enough to describe as above and don't really intend to try again :
ACE Online
DAoC (beta)
Exteel
Guild Wars
Lineage 2
Maplestory
Pirates of the Burning Sea
Priston Tale
Ragnarok Online
Roma Victor
Voyage Century
Wizard 101
Games I Have Tried And Denied :
2Moons
Age of Conan (beta)
Atlantica Online
Dungeon Runners
Rappelz
Scions of Fate
Silkroad Online
Vendetta Online
Wonderland Online
Xiah
So, if you're still reading this and haven't fallen asleep yet, you can see that I've played a lot. Now for the list of features I want in a game :
Excellent character customization. Too many games have newly created character that look like one of a dozen or less combinations in their "naked newbie" form. I'm not asking for Second Life levels of face and body features, but more than nothing would be good.
Excellent item visual variation. There should be as many texture and model combinations as there are items in the game, and user customization of said items should be more than a simple tinting of the texture. (Full pallete swap and then tint maybe, but more models and textures is better.) Basically, like character generation, clones should not happen by accident.
Excellent skill system. I actually prefer d20 feat style characters or even level-less systems (like Darkfall was supposed to be, for instance.) Everquest's system of both levels and individual skills that increase as you use them was pretty good as well, but I've never seen a 3-D MMO that got anywhere close to the complexity, variation, and balance of the designs of many MUDs.
Excellent crafting system. For this, I point to an old RPG add-on made into a DOS game in 1990 - Renegade Legion Interceptor. You can attempt to min-max when building custom ships, but the somewhat punitive cost and balancing of weapon requirements and engine output on ships made it impossible to make something that instantly killed any ship it fired at, and impossible to make something invincible. (A combination of the creation system and game rules, I suppose.) More so, the items that can be crafted by characters should be equally viable for regular use in PvP and PvE as items acquired from PvE. The components to create something as powerful as items dropped by the most powerful NPCs in the game would, obviously, come from the most powerful NPCs in the game, and be functionally equivalent. There should be as many potentially crafted items in the database as dropped items, and they should be customizable in Diablo slot fashion or something similar in function both during creation and afterward. Vanguard comes pretty close to this. Also, per item visuals above, you gotta have the armor dyes...
Large persistant world, preferably without instances of any kind. Instant travel should be special, but foot travel should not be insanely dangerous between most largely populated areas, and not take more time in travel than time in actual play during a session.Somewhere in between Everquest/Everquest 2 and Asheron's Call/Anarchy Online in this respect. Lots of cities, lots of lore, lots of NPCs, lots of questy things to do at all levels.
No forced grouping. No soloing so easy that no one wants to group.
I am not opposed to perma-death for my characters.
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...so. Having listed all that, am I asking for something impossible, or is there a game out there that I have somehow missed that covers all of the features I like while alleviating most or all of the problems I have with the existing MMOs I list above?
Comments
Been a couple weeks, so I'll bump the thread to see if I still don't get replies, proving the impossibility of my idea.
Well i guess you should check Mortal Online out, it seems to meet your criteria very well.
Possibly Aion. Otherwise, maybe you are going to have to wait till next year, when TOR and Final Fantasy XIV release. Not saying those fit your requirements but considering the sheer number of games you've played you would certainly be good at evaluating them. One last one to think about would probably be Heroes of Telara (also for next year.) Characters can switch to any class amongst other features. Not sure yet about crafting though, game world does look pretty good. Good Luck!
FFXI?
or wait for aion
Way too many people are comparing Aion to Lineage II at me to think I will like it at all. Everything I've heard about Final Fantasy MMOs has made me think I'll be better off sticking to MUDs.
Mortal Online looks pretty good from the early feature descriptions, but there's no way I'm preordering for full price now to maybe have access to the beta servers in over a month, only to have the characters wiped at launch, and then not be able to get a refund if things turn out bad and the forums fill up with posts describing the horrors (kind of like Darkfall, but MO doesn't look like it will go that way.) I'll definitely keep an eye on it and check into it again near launch, if I'm not too busy by then with Forza 3 and Jumpgate Evolution.