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Looking for a rich world to explore.
After an extended break from MMO's, I've been feeling the urge to delve back into the genre. What I'm really looking for is a rich and interesting world that I can explore.
I've sampled most major MMO's out there, other than some of the most recent ones, but I'm not opposed to giving anything another look. I don't really care if it's a newer or older game. While good graphics are nice, I'm more concerned with finding something with well developed environments and interesting lore and locations.
Some of the features that I'd prefer:
- Freedom to explore (i.e. not feeling too fenced in by invisible walls, etc. Ability to explore underwater is also a plus).
- Decent character customization.
- Decent crafting.
- Good community with a dedicated player base.
- Player Housing (not a must have, but a definite bonus.)
- No monthly subscription (I'd be willing to reconsider this fact if I really felt the game was worth it. However, in that case I'd at least want a decent free trial to figure out if that game is worth paying for.)
Like I said, I'm pretty open to trying just about any game out there, so any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Comments
Depends on the type of lore you like but if I was looking primarily for lore and exploration with decent crafting, decent character customization and so on as nice bonuses I would tend to think ESO might be the go for you. But may be because it's fresh in my memory. That said it's definitely not a poor quality game even if it didn't match peoples expectations for what an Elder Scrolls Online "should" be and they've started addressing that.
The other option I would suggest is guild wars 2 especially on the exploration part and the lore isn't bad either.
Well, Fallen Earth got a lot of that.
It has no invisible walls or zones that need to be loaded. You can travel into any direction at any point.
It has a deep crafting system. Nearly all items used are player crafted.
It has a decent character creation system.
No monthly fee.
The community was fine last time I checked, though that's already been quite a while.
You have a construction profession to construct tents and stuff. I'm not sure what that leads to. I think I read about construction farms or something? But I never got that far.
Let's play Fallen Earth (blind, 300 episodes)
Let's play Guild Wars 2 (blind, 45 episodes)
Archeage is a great game, so is Elders Scrolls Online and Final Fantasy ARR.
They all have there problems but i would say Archeage excited me the most with the sheer amount of things to do and work towards.
ArcheAge
Any mmo worth its salt should be like a good prostitute when it comes to its game world- One hell of a faker, and a damn good shaker!
If you like open world PvP then ArcheAge. Otherwise go with ESO* would be my advice.
* Which is also the far stronger candidate when it comes to Lore.
My SWTOR referral link for those wanting to give the game a try. (Newbies get a welcome package while returning players get a few account upgrades to help with their preferred status.)
https://www.ashesofcreation.com/ref/Callaron/
For a lot of it i would also champion AoC - Whilst funcom have /are having problems their world is awesome
The community is small but usually very good and just about in the world to keep you company along your journey, its free but a sub model is helpful
But thats about it.
FF14 - HAs to many invisible walls, for eg , cant jump of bridges to take a slightly shortened route... PITA
AA - Enjoyed the game pre-releaes but post release found it full of dicks, the community was aweful
, but it does offer a load of freedom to go where you want
Eso - good enviroment, good story but not so good gameplay imo
Wildstar - Enjoyable lots of freedom but the game is suffering since release
This post is all my opinion, but I welcome debate on anything i have put, however, personal slander / name calling belongs in game
where of course you're welcome to call me names im often found lounging about in EvE online.
Use this code for 21days trial in eve online https://secure.eveonline.com/trial/?invc=d385aff2-794a-44a4-96f1-3967ccf6d720&action=buddy
Correct on the housing. Although I'm not quite sure when it comes to character customization. ESO does pretty well on both skills (builds) and actual character customization (looks).
My SWTOR referral link for those wanting to give the game a try. (Newbies get a welcome package while returning players get a few account upgrades to help with their preferred status.)
https://www.ashesofcreation.com/ref/Callaron/
AoC was actually one game I was considering revisiting, along with a EQ2.
I played a trial of FF14 and I really enjoyed it, despite the invisible walls. I thought the game world was beautiful and detailed. I just don't know if I'm really at a point where I want to pay monthly for a game, though I may come back to it if I don't find anything else that piques my interest.
I am curious about ESO and GW2, but I would want to actually try them before shelling out any money, which doesn't seem to be an option at this point. As for ArcheAge, I remember being pretty interested during its early development, but what I've heard about the community is a bit deterring. Still, might be worth a look.
D&D Home Page - What Class Are You? - Build A Character - D&D Compendium
Perfect World International. it have huge map to explore and new added smaller maps. With new expansion will come out another map. It is old game, but still looks amazing in my opinion. You can fly and fight in air or swim under water to fight sharks.
You can fly, jump over walls, houses, go inside some, no invisible walls. Crafting is not needed anymore untill endgame, game gives good low level items for free these days, but you can max all craftings in endgame. It have good, active and helpful community. no housing. it is f2p with tradeable item mall gold, if want anything you can save up ingame coin and buy from item mall without restrictions. Very nice character customization and over 1000 fashion combinations, will be hard to find someone else looking exactly like you.
This is very very small part of landscape on low settings, in game on high settings it looks way better.
I'll go with GW2, though I've never played FF14 or ESO.
Freedom to Explore: I love this aspect of GW2, the maps are really big and detailed, and as far as I can remember the only invisible walls I've run into are in the zones that are surrounded by water, if you try to swim outside the zone you hit an invisible wall with a message telling you that the current is too strong and pushing you back, all other zone boundaries are usually disguised by mountains or other natural limits. There's a LOT to see in the world, I've been playing since release and from time to time I'm still finding new things and new events I hadn't seen before. Underwater environments are beautiful and you're not limited by oxygen like other games I've played (your head armor is replaced by a breather thing when you go underwater), but underwater combat isn't as good (IMHO) as land based combat. The world is zoned, though, to go from map to map you have to go trough a portal with a loading screen, and there are no mounts so it's running all the way, but the waypoint system lets you teleport to any waypoint in the world at anytime when out of combat. I also love how lots of NPCs in the world (specially in the cities) have their lines of dialogue they use that makes it feel alive, you can run around listening to the NPCs talk, but of course if you stay too long they start repeating their scrips. My favorite is following a grizzled corrupt police officer doing its round on the ruins of Lion's Arch (big city destroyed as part of the storyline last year) with a young newbie.
Decent character customization: I think this is a plus too. The character creator is good enough (IMHO) with plenty of options and different looks for your character (as long as you're not human, that is... all the male human faces seem to be of the "young pretty boy" style), and there are lots of different looks you can try as far as armor and weapons go. Check this website, for example, to see the different kinds of gear available:
http://argos-soft.net/GW2/ArmorGallery/
Decent crafting: depends on what you call decent. It's a lot like WoW crafting, with the added benefit that you also get XP and level up your character while doing it. You get your basic materials that you gather in the world, as drops from mobs, or bought off NPCs, refine them, use them to create components, then use the components to create the items. For example, if you want to make a sword, you refine the metal ore into bars and wood into planks, then create a sword blade with the bard, the handle with the planks, then use some metal, wood and cloth to create an insignia (tells you which stat combination the sword will have), then use the blade, handle and insignia to create the sword. It also has a discovery tab, for example, if you know a blade, handle and beserker insignia will give you a berserker sword, then you drop a blade, handle and assassin insignia you'll learn how to make an assassin sword.
It can be nice, but can also be repetitive sometimes, specially if you're leveling up, you usually create a bunch of blades and handles and all different types of insignias to "discover" all the sword recipes one by one, even if you're not interested in them, because discovering recipes gives you more crafting XP than crafting them once you know the recipe. It's worth noting, though, that the best gear in the game (ascended) when it comes to armor and weapons can only be crafted by yourself (they're account bound), not traded or bought, but there's not such a big difference in stats that no having them would make a big difference in your gameplay.
Good community and dedicated player base: check and check IMHO. Actually if you check the GW2 reddit, it's rather frequent that someone new to the game makes a post surprised about how friendly the community is. Of course, you run into the ocasional arsehole, but so far in my experience the community is one of the big pluses of the game.
Player housing: that's a negative one, no player housing so far. We'll get guild halls in the upcoming expansion, but still no news on how good or bad they'd end up being.
No monthly subscription: check, the game is B2P.
That came out longer than I anticipated. I do agree that I wish there was a way for you to try it before buying, honestly if I was Anet I'd make a trial version, maybe something where you can just create one character of one race and visit its starter area, but no such thing so far. Keep an eye for sales, they have done quite a few lately specially with the expansion coming, sometimes even as cheap as $10. Actually, they've done one anytime they've gone to a convention, and Anet just confirmed they'll be on E3 on june 15, so I'd keep my eyes open around that date.
What can men do against such reckless hate?
GW2 has the best world design of any game imho. It has everything on your list except housing.
Edit: All of what LOCOman said above.
I have bought the game for $10 while on sale, but right now it's $19.99 at Gamestop. No sub, just hours and hours of exploring.
Death is nothing to us, since when we are, Death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.
Age Of Wushu
Beautiful world with dynamic weather. Crafting seems deep with everything in game being player crafted. Housing was just added with the latest update. People in game seem nice and will actually respond if you ask them a question. Has a Free To Play model and a Sub model. I just started so I am still learning everything the game offers.
Both suck ass in terms of character customization. Archeage has like 6 viable builds, ESO has magika builds only. That's the problem with games that give you umpteen choices, 1/8th of them are actually useful.
I think they were talking about character customization in the creation phase, like the beginning of the game. I think you are talking more of character growth or development. /shrug
Death is nothing to us, since when we are, Death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.
Games like Age of Wushu and ArcheAge will probably tickle your fancy for a while. Depending on how much you play, you will shortly come to the realization that both are fatally flawed in some similar, but mostly different ways. Both are F2P for starters, and both have labor systems. Age of Wushu's wasn't quite as restrictive as ArcheAge's, which basically requires you to grind gold and gamble every few days at armor upgrades with a < 1% chance of actually getting the item you want. On top of this, the labor in AA is severely limited to encourage you to purchase more labor for $$ from the marketplace as well as other items that increase your chance of success in the process of crafting and upgrading items.
Age of wushu has time locked progression that may or may not annoy the shit out of you. The combat also is neat, but pretty terrible for mass PvP which seems to be what the game was designed around. It also requires you spend above the monthly sub to obtain things from the cash shop. Depending on how involved with a guild you are, and how many people are actually still playing the game (I couldn't imagine many are), you may miss out on a lot of the fun guild rivalries and fighting over prime guild cities that existed shortly after the game released.
I think it's safe to say that most of them have pretty cool worlds to explore. But, most don't have much depth in the crafting/housing department. Well, really, all of the offered games are lacking in some area, but great in another.
Character customization is a bit of a vague notion. Do you mean builds, looks, skills/stats?
FF14 -
...has a gorgeous world and pretty neat crafting system. But, like some others have said, the world feels very... confined.
The zones are gorgeous and the level of detail is fantastic(heat blur in the desert, wind blowing, etc.), but the world does feel a little cramped and claustrophobic. I don't think there are any actual underwater zones in this game... in fact, I don't remember if you could even jump or swim in this game?
The combat is a bit more slow-paced which seems to bother alot of people. Frankly, I found it pretty fun, but it might depend what class you are currently playing and how many skills you have.
It has a fun separate system for the crafting classes that separates it from the combat side. Even the fishing is somewhat fun compared to most games.
Dungeon groups seemed enjoyable when I played it and the community was solid. I do remember alot of complaints about elitism at the upper end though.
Being able to switch to all classes on one character is pretty great and convenient.
Levelling up was fairly grindy and tedious back in the beginning, but hopefully they've remedied that somewhat by now.
Not one of the cheaper, freer games. I don't know if you still have to pay the box price + a sub, but I assume you do.
I quit back before housing of any kind, so I don't have any useful comments on that. I haven't played the game since it was fairly new.
Additional note: You kind of get locked down by levels in this game... You have to complete certain quests at certain levels to unlock things like mounts/airships for travel, etc., unless they changed that later on.
GW2 -
...also a very gorgeous and deep world to explore. I mean, the environments are just bloody gorgeous, honestly. The character models aren't quite as nice, though. Tons of ways to alter the appearance of your character's gear though, which makes for some diversity.
Crafting is pretty mediocre once you figure out how it works(you "discover" recipes but it's really more of simply unlocking the same generic recipes all characters have.
The downside of GW2 is that once you've explored the world and seen everything, there's really nothing left to do other than grind, grind, grind one thing or another. Some of the holiday events and stuff were pretty cool and added some unique stuff from time to time.
There was a fair amount of underwater content in this game also. Quite a bit actually. It's a big world with tons of stuff to see and marvel at.
I'm not sure how enjoyable the lower areas would be now, but when the game was new, and everyone was packed into the zones teaming up, it was a blast. Last I played, most people just farmed the same few areas over and over though, except when there was some patch content in a different area.
No player housing at all. Though, I seem to recall them mentioning guild halls in their upcoming expansion this year.
Combat is more action-style, and you don't have very many abilities at one time compared to most games, but the classes are pretty distinct and fun for the most part. Changing weapons changes your abilities automatically to the ones tied to that particular weapon, which I didn't like very much, but it does give you alot of weapon choices.
I think there's still an upfront box cost, but there's no sub fee.
EQ2 -
... I think the drawback here is just the depleted population, honestly. There's just not that many people. And, frankly I hated the combat in this game, but the housing is fantastic. It's instanced though, but still some of the best housing out there, I think. So many customizations you can do to a house. This game still has pretty poor PC performance too(and always will) compared to other games. People often touted the crafting in this game, and it's not bad, but it's not amazing either from my experience. You can make a heck of alot of stuff, even furniture for your house, etc., but the crafting "mini-game" itself was kind of bland.
I never bothered with many of the newer games, so can't comment on those(ESO, AA, etc.).
Both GW2 and FF14 suffered from "event circling" where people would just run around in circles from event to event that would pop up to grind money/exp.
For a beautiful world to explore I'd definitely recommend either FF14 or GW2(no sub so you can pop in as often as you want after the box purchase). FF14's invisible walls might be a deal-breaker, but it really is a gorgeous, detail-rich landscape and great atmospherics. Both of those have healthy populations and decent enough playerbases, last I knew. Both also have a personal story quest type thing to add some background lore.
Also, LOTRO had a pretty neat world, but I didn't play it very much, so I don't know much about the depth.
How did GW2 suffer from that?
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Keyword>>>>Decent
You are not going to find a completely great well done exploration game.Every developer is cutting corners somewhere,nobody does it perfect.You also NEED to realize that the better graphics are not going to be seamless,almost impossible to do,so you will get zones and imo is a better way to do it anyhow.
You are instead are going to see some stupid ideas like getting free class xp for stepping on new pixels or some real nice buildings but they have no insides or working doors.All the developers are cutting corners somewhere in their games.
Now what i will say is i would not touch any of the cartoony looking games,that smells of lack of effort and corner cutting.I can't feel excited about looking at 8 bit textures pasted onto average looking structures.
I would say TESO,LOTRO,FFXIV,EQ2 Vanguard when it was alive.I cannot think of anything else right now,AOC was a good looking game at one time,but i swear the graphics were toned down big time to support f2p.TERA i guess looks ok as well after you get past the starting beach which looks awful.
Me personally i have always enjoyed Final Fantasy art and creatures,they usually look cool,so that might be an added factor,however FFXIV offers no water zones.So in that manner i might choose EQ2.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.