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LF a story-based/non-grinding MMORPG
I'm looking for a new MMORPG to play, preferrably fantasy but not exclusively. I played WoW for a little over a year and like aspects of it, but I eventually got bored. What I liked about WoW was the ability to solo, the chance to just explore many areas, and Blizzard's sense of humor. What I didn't like was the excessive grinding, the lack of story depth, and the feeling that I wasn't really affecting the world at all (though this is hard in a MMO). And here's what I would like in a new MMORPG:
1) A good story that is actually a part of the game.
2) Things to do besides fighting (ex. exploration, crafting).
3) The ability to solo at times would be nice.
4) Not grind based.
5) And if possible, a game that allows players to create quests.
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Comments
Try Mabonigi, although there is level up you'd hardly realize you actually are. It's got a lot more than just grinding, and is pretty cool.
I know you can make your own quests and dungeons in Holic online but that game has alot of grinding in it. Then there is Mabinogi with some kewl skills and you got runescape that wich has many things to do in the game besides of Combat training !
GreetzZz
Lord of the RIngs Online has the best story and is now free to play. It is never a grind it is just quests, and once you hit level 20 (Max 65), you can do skirmishes which are randomized instances with objectives etc. It also has everything you could ever want like crafting and pvp, (The pvp is optional and you must be a subscriber), but it is the best, and the lore is great.
I'd say give Uncharted Waters a shot it's definately not your usual grindy kinda game more strategy involved than many Mo's,With a good solid backbone of quest lines and it's F2P.
There really isn't a game that matches your needs. Pretty much todays formula of MMOs are to add a sens of grind to keep the players player for longer time. Also without something you have to work for it's little sens of accomplishment when you get your reward.
HOWEVER with that being said there are some games coming out with less focus on leveling and more on skill and lore, "Guild Wars 2" and "The Secret World" comes to mind. I can't promise that they are good games because they are not out yet but I believe Guild Wars 2 is pretty much a safe card since Guild Wars 1 was so popular and in the second they added more story elements too it. The Secret World supposedly doesn't have levels at all but i'm still curious as to how they will solve character progression, my guess is that they will have some other time consuming mechanic which will replace leveling and end up pretty much the same anyway.
I don't want to recommend MMOs already out because when you play a game for a long period you become loyal to it and doesn't look upon it in the same way as a new player would. You become loyal to your own game so to speak and will always think of it as better than others.
Thats my tips
+1 vote for UWO
Then GUild wars 2
PS - All mammals have nipples.
Get over it already.
dude i must know, have you ever found that game, i wanna join too!!
Allowing players to create quests is pretty rare. If you're willing to give that up, you could try Uncharted Waters Online.
1) There is a main storyline. Or arguably six main storylines, one for each country. But they intersect a lot, and a lot of characters appear in the storyline of multiple countries. The way it's presented is that when you get enough fame, some events happen and you can go deal with them to advance the storyline. You can get fame from doing lots of different things, so you go play the game and do whatever, and after a while, events happen to move the storyline along. The main storyline is actually pretty good, too, and not an incoherent mess like WoW.
2) I probably spend less than 5% of my time in combat. How's that for having non-combat things to do? Also, I don't craft at all, which is one of the non-combat things to do.
3) There are some situations where you'll need a group, usually for combat. And there are other situations where there are substantial advantages to grouping. But most things are soloable.
4) It's as grindy as you want to make it. If you get up one day and say, I'm going to level spice trading today, or I'm going to level accuracy today, or I'm going to level theology today, then you can make the game incredibly grindy. But if you just go out and play the game, you'll slowly level a bunch of things at once (rather than quickly leveling one thing and not leveling anything else at all), and that's perfectly viable, too.
If you want exploration, then you really have to try UWO. In WoW, you can wander around for a bit, but it doesn't take long before you've seen everything there is to see. In UWO, there are thousands of discoveries built into the game for you to go find. So you wander around off in the middle of nowhere, and then suddenly find something like this:
And most players will never see that, because it's way off in the middle of nowhere.
Don't worry, GW2 will be out soon and then your problem will be solved ^_^!
@Quizzical but dude i've heard that is very item shop depended, meaning that it leads to balance issues for those who don't spend real money. Could you tell me what boosts can give you in average the items in the shop?
Don't. I played that game for two years. If you craft, anything that becomes popular with the players gets put into the cash shop... After you've wasted millions of gold and spent hundreds of hours crafting. I was a high-ranking blacksmith. My friend a high-ranking tailor. All the high-end stuff we made that was popular became cash-shop items. Destroyed our professions. We went on to other professions. Same thing happened again. I quit, she still plays a little. She even took up another profession... And Nexon is starting to destroy it... She'll never learn, the Mabi-addict that she is....
Also, it s cheating and modding hell. Well over seventy percent of the population mods on a regular basis. This includes item duping, etc. So while my friend and I were in a no-mods guild, most every guild was either 100% modders or close. About the only people who don't mod are the computer-illiterate and the noobs... One clown, named "Diasama" in-game literally broke the Tarlach server with his modding. He had some way that it would crash the server-channels because he'd given himself GM power through his mods. Plus he was a major item duper. He duped BILLIONS AND BILLIONS of gold. And he's done the same thing with unique items, hard-to-get items, cash-shop-lottery itiems.
His punishment? Perma-ban? Nope. One-week temp ban. Think about it. He crashed a game. A whole server. He caused a three-day roll-back. He destroyed the economy. Nexon had to remove items from the game. And all he got was a week off...
It's the biggest joke game on the Internet. Pay-to-win cash-shop. Rampant cheating. Something is always broken. It's buggier than hell. You'll have long periods of time where your game won't let you log in a character or two... The male giants are horrbily broken in animation... And have been for years and they do nothing...
Stay away. It's just a trash game.
Ok. I'm to the point now where I think you're an employee. You're everywhere trying to generate interest. Bottome-line the game is a pay-to-win game with an explotive lottery-based cash-shop.
There is ALOT of grinding in Lotro.
Not while levelling ,but at so called 'end-game' there is lots.
I know I played it for quite a long time.
So there is no way to be good at it without paying? and what is this lottery based cash shop?
There are a lot of different things in the item mall. Some are basically junk, or things that are easy to get through normal gameplay, so let's ignore those.
Otherwise, there are five main categories of things in the item mall.
1) Item mall ships. These come with a small probability from the "treasure box". You pay $2-$3 or so, and get an item at random. The item has a small probability of being a ship. If it doesn't give you a ship, then you get some other consolation prize, which might be anywhere from mildly nice to have to basically worthless.
The item mall ships are alternate versions of ships that can be obtained by normal gameplay. The difference is that the item mall version has a lower level requirement.
For example, you can get a "Custom La Royale" with level requirements of 3/10/16. This lets you use the ship when you're pretty low level. Or you can get a "La Royale" through the normal shipbuilding process, but it has level requirements of 10/41/62. Thus, you can't use the latter ship until you're pretty high level. (For comparison, the level cap is 65/65/65 today, and will soon increase to 70/70/70.)
Item mall ships thus can make you somewhat competitive for pvp purposes a lot sooner (though a high level ship won't save you from losing due to low level skills). But once you can get the normal version of the high level ship, you don't particularly need the item mall version anymore.
2) Things along the lines of experience boosts. There are items for +30% experience gain, +30% skill rank gain, +30% fame gain, and +30% sailing speed outside of combat. There are also other versions of them from other sources, with effects ranging anywhere from +10% to +50%, and wildly varying lengths of time.
3) The best gear in the game for certain ship upgrade slots. This might sound horribly unbalancing, but I don't regard it as such for two reasons. First, it's not the best by much. Second, it's very expensive, so hardly anyone gets it. If I were to pay about $60 for modified full rigged sails from the item mall, I could make my ship about 5% faster--until the sails wear out, which they inevitably will. Also, that only affects the top speed, and not acceleration. If you try to use the sails in combat, you could wear them out in a few days, so don't get ideas about buying (or needing!) them for pvp purposes. If you avoid combat, they could last months.
4) Various convenience items that aren't essential for gameplay. One item completely disables disasters at sea other than storms for a day. Another makes it so that you can't attack or be attacked for a day. There is something to automatically sail from one port to another, but I don't know how it works, as I'm not aware of anyone who has used it.
5) Special shipbuilding permits. This is the one that you kind of need to get, or else you'll eventually be rather gimpy. But it's also very cheap. Upgrading low level ships is a waste, because you'll replace them so soon, and won't be able to afford the ducats (in-game money) to upgrade, anyway. Upgrading a higher level ship only costs perhaps $2 or so for the ship (depending on how far you want to upgrade it), and the upgrades last forever. If you sell the ship to another player, it keeps the upgrades.
If you're the sort of person who insists that you'll never spend a dime, then special shipbuilding permits could be a real problem for you, as they make a huge difference. If your concern is that paying $15/month will leave you crippled as compared to someone who pays $50/month, then that's not a problem. I've spent $10 total in about five months. If I play for long enough, then I'll eventually spend another $10 to upgrade some end-game ships that I can't get yet.
If you're worried about getting ganked by people who buy a bunch of stuff from the item mall, then that's not such a big concern, either. I've been attacked in PVP five times in total, over the course of about five months. That's not "attacked five times and had no hope because the other person had item mall stuff"; that's attacked five times, period. Of those five, I was able to run away twice. In two others, I could have gotten away if I had been smarter about what to do, but I was so new to PVP that I messed up. In the last one, my problem was going directly into headwinds while sailing in a ship that is terrible in headwinds--and that the pirate attacking me had a high level (not item mall) ship and I had a low level newbie ship.
If your goal is to be a pirate yourself, and to get into piracy as quickly as possible, then yeah, that could get expensive. You'd want an item mall ship (category 1) and the boosts in category 2. But if you're more interested in doing other things first, and only want to get into piracy eventually (once you're high level with high rank skills) or never, then you'll still want the special shipbuilding permits, but that's all you'll need.
There wasn't, isn't, and never will be a MMORPG without grinding. It wouldn't be a good MMORPG if didn't have a timesink. Timesinks are grinds, and if those grinds don't offer anything to do them, then it wouldn't be a timesink because no one would spend the time to do it. If the timesinks do not offer progression, then it loses RPG elements, which just turns it into a MMO.
If you want a story, then you're going to have to deal with a grind. Some people believe that the story itself is a grind. I guess it's all about perspective. What do you find fun? Figure that out, and come back with more specifics. That's my opinion.
If I'm a Netmarble or Gpotato employee, then I'm surely a bad one. For starters, I have no interest whatsoever in any of the other games that either of them are associated with. I often recommend games that neither of them have anything to do with (Guild Wars, Spiral Knights, A Tale in the Desert, Puzzle Pirates, less commonly Champions Online or Wizard 101).
And look at my post count. A large fraction of those posts were in the hardware forum, which would be strange as a way to advocate games that will run on nearly anything. (Of the games I mentioned above, Champions Online is the only one with substantial system requirements.) Why would Netmarble or Gpotato hire someone to mostly post in the hardware forum? Maybe you should try something more plausible, like accusing me of being an employee of Intel, AMD, Corsair, Antec, Crucial, or some other company whose products I frequently recommend.
Though if any of those companies wanted to pay me, I wouldn't refuse it.
If you are into the Lord of the rings story. Lord of the rings online (LOTRO) is really good. Its pretty well made and quite enjoyable to play. The community is pretty nice as well. Many older players play
@Quizzical i am very thankful for writting all these stuff (if not copy-paste :P), i got the point. Another question, do all the those classes that exists needed in the game and if you aware of which is/are in lack (meaning that is/are not commonly taken by many ppl)?
The UWO class system is very different from that of any other MMORPG on the market. Loosely, a class is a collection of skills that will level twice as fast, and go up to a rank cap of 15 rather than 10. But you can and should change your class often.
I'd recommend reading this thread:
http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/game/555/view/forums/thread/332238/Well-this-is-different-a-review.html
@Quizzical It's funny you recommending your own thread....lol, thanks anyway!
there is something i wanna add about uwo, its fun if you can get a good guild. With the amount of time you spend sailing on the sea doing just about nothing, i mean sure disasters happen but at high level.....they arent an issue anymore. so anyway i played uwo for just about 4 months and for the last 2 months i was basically just shipbuilding for guild mates and helping em with leveling either thru partying or by giving advice. seriously i think that without a nice active guild, i think i would have quit after 1 month cuz sailing around doing stuff got real old real fast.
Best story based MMO out is The Old Republic.