MMOs are my favorite genre of game by far (I even make them). But my work and family life make it hard to commit anywhere near the time I used to have for gaming. I get little chunks of a few hours here or there, but they aren't consistent and are prone to interruptions.
So I need to play very solo and casual friendly MMOs (even though I play them kinda hardcore when I'm actually playing).
I prefer F2P as that is most forgiving for sudden long breaks where I can't play, and lets me try things out for a while to decide if I like the game. But when I am playing, I am happy to spend $ on the game.
The last MMO I played was Skyforge, which ticked a lot of those boxes but eventually became pretty much required grouping
. Before that I played Tera which did the same thing.
What are some of your favorite solo/casual friendly MMOs right now?
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It's new. Also AA could work, its F2P.
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Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
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I played Archeage in beta and it felt like a wow clone quest grind.
I played Skyforge too and felt pretty much the same way. It was fun but don't like pugging and not committed enough to the game to be a good guild member.
ArcheAge is not about questing. If you just quest, yes, it's boring. If you want to pvp and/or farm and craft you might get more out of it. But I don't think it's really a casual solo-friendly game if you think about "endgame." I think you would find the same thing you found in Skyforge -- if you really want to get anything done, you need to group. ArcheAge is a pvp-focused game from what I can tell.
Start out with imperial side, sith warrior or imperial agent class. They're the best stories in the game imo. GL.
Did Marvel Heroes. Enjoyed it for a while, but its done for me. Same deal: a good suggestion. I agree it was a fun, solid game.
ArcheAge: not interested in questing, pvp, crafting, and sounds like it is indeed a game I want to avoid.
If there are other games that have similar solo-friendly fun, I'd love to know about them.
EQ1, EQ2, SWG, SWTOR, GW, GW2 CoH, CoV, FFXI, WoW, CO, War,TSW and a slew of free trials and beta tests
Are the classes really good? Also, I burned out on GW pretty hard (enjoyed it though) which was part of why I avoided GW2.
I went ahead and grabbed a copy of ESO but haven't played it yet. Hope that wasn't a mistake.
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ESO will be what you're looking for
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First: First Person Perspective? WTF? That's garbage. And even when you switch to 3rd person, its gimpy as heck. Your character is weirdly off to the left and the controls are all janky.
Second: What's with having to click for every swing? This doesn't feel like an MMO at all. This feels like a crappy version of Skyrim.
Third: Is this another quest grind game, where you just do one boring ass quest after another?
Fourth: Really ugly game. Not the graphics quality, but the art style. Yuck.
Fifth: Skill/stat/advancement system looks needlessly and insanely complex. Right off the bat, absolutely no idea what to do or pick. Heck, I had to read wikis for 30 minutes to even figure out race/classes to pick.
What a bummer.
This didn't feel like an MMO. This felt like a terrible version of Skryim with MMO elements hacked on. I hated Morrowind and Oblivion, and only slightly tolerated Skyrim.
Is Guild Wars 2 more like a real, 3rd person, MMO? With a world to explore, mobs to grind, cool abilities, etc?
Because honestly, right off the bat, combat looks crappy as heck in ESO.
To find an intelligent person in a PUG is not that rare, but to find a PUG made up of "all" intelligent people is one of the rarest phenomenons in the known universe.
Is GW2 more like an actual MMO?
-3rd person perspective (can't believe I have to actually list this now!)
-solo and casual friendly
-cool classes that feel strong/epic early without grossly complicated trees/builds
-easy to get into
-good controls
-fun pve
-no forced grouping
-don't care about pvp or crafting
Guild wars 2 (probably). You will need some support there, since your toon auto-scales to area. If you are lvl.50 in lvl.25 area - you become lvl.25. No "Me Hulk, Me Smash". Bright side: you will run into other players groups. Nicely done graphic and cool created characters (I really enjoyed my Asura, even though almost everything with their inventions went wrong).
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ESO isn't a bad game but you will get more for your money with GW2 then ESO. Of course trying ESO could also be worth your time, maybe you could download both games and give each a weekend before deciding which one fits you best. FF XIV might also be worth a try for you.
In any case, good luck. Watching a few youtube videos don't hurt either.
Oh, and here is a link to Angry Joes GW2 review. Yeah, he is very positive about the game so you might want to watch a negative one as well (just search that one at youtube) to get a different opinion but the game is really worth trying at least.
One warning though is that the combat and group dynamics isn't exactly the same as most MMOs. In fact more than a few people don't believe that it have any group mechanics since the game is pretty casual (after the difficulty nerfs it got in the beta weekends) and you can do a large part of the content without actually understanding how grouping works. It is there though and those people fail the harder content badly. As a casual player you don't have to understand group mechanics, particularly if you mostly solo and stay away from dungeons and fractals but it certainly don't hurt learning them anyways.
Learning positioning, timing and moving while you fight is a must though, particularly if you play classes like thief. Unless of course you just do the really easy content, like in any other modern MMO a chimp can learn completing that in fifteen minutes.
Good luck anyways.
Uhm, yes. The difference between GW2 and most other MMOs are basically the following:
Dynamic event based: You don't use a questlog but basically either go around the world and do whatever pops ups or you do hearts which is close to regular quests but tends to give you a few options.
Scaling content: Gw2 don't lock combat, instead it scales so if more people try to stop bandits from burning a village (and they will if you fail) more and tougher bandits will spawn the more player there are. Everybody gets personal loot, no need or greeding or ninja looting.
Less gear focus: The best gear in the game is grindy to get, real grindy for legendary items but you don't actually need to get those since the difference between them and ascended just is a flexibility (you can change the stats to fit you between combat but it will be the same stats as a compared ascended weapon will have). Ascended still takes some work but they are not that much better then the regular orange stuff which you will have enough money and karma to get or craft when you reach 80, easily.
Moving and dodging in combat: You can't stand still and skill rotate in GW2, certain classes like warrior and ranger doesn't need you to focus so much on this though but other classes like thief lives on that.
Also, there is the massive PvP with 3 different servers facing off. Rather fun casual PvP (there is small group harder as well) but it have a tendency to become zergy like any other massive PvP. You don't have to play PvP at all if you don't want to but it is rather fun.
More skill customization: Half your skills depends on which 2 or 2 handed weapon you are wielding. The rest you pick from a ls from your class and to a lesser degree from your race.
Besides those points, GW2 is certainly a regular MMO and while it presents the content in a rather different way (you for example never have to turn in quests) you play it like other MMOs. Exploration gets rewarded and the game is also filled with jumping puzzles of different difficulty for explorers.
Well anyways, worth a shot.. One of the few mmos in the past 5 years that I have enjoyed, although only for awhile.
The other one is gw2 which I absolutely hate conceptually, but it is just so damn slick with always keeping the carrot of greatness just out reach behind its bad design decisions.. But damn you look good while doing it.
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