I hate to break it to you, but you have to compromise somewhere. You will not find an MMO because your being way too picky. I thought I was picky, but damn!
I have to agree with this. He's already tried some of the best MMO's out there and if they don't like those, they won't like anything. They're all great games that are very enjoyable. No game is perfect but nothing in life is and you need to look past things that really aren't a big deal and let yourself have fun.
As is so often the case gamers build their own walls to finding something fun to play.
Hell, Im extremely picky yet have two solid options and if they didn't work out I'd revisit ESO and BDO, maybe even Exiles.
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
He mentioned GW2 and said he wasn't interested. I hate to break it to you, but you have to compromise somewhere. You will not find an MMO because your being way too picky. I thought I was picky, but damn!
FFXIV is what I'm playing now and have loved it, but I'm stuck in the end game grind right now which does kill some of it, but new expansion coming out soon and I'm sure I'll be diving in for multi-hour gaming sessions.
Elder Scrolls Online is another excellent game. It was quite honestly the most immersive MMO experience I have ever partaken in. You felt bombarded from information? I never felt that way at all. Just stick to grabbing up quests and just move through the story at you own pace. It's really not difficult at all. Feels nebulous? Well, it is a fairly big open world so yeah that should be a good thing. Not really a negative connotation there.
Really the way you described Elder Scroll Online is how I describe Black Desert. I'm surprised you even tried that game cause if ESO confused you then I'm surprised you were abel to get passed the character creator in Black Desert.
I really think you and your partner need to either reevaluate your checklist for MMOs and what your looking for out of them or just take a break from gaming for awhile and go hiking and canoeing or something because it seems you may be too jaded on MMOs. Which I must say in understandable. We are kind of in the "amazing MMO" drought right now.
My only suggestion to you would be to try the Vanilla Private Servers. Right now that has given me that sense of exploration and WOW (no pun intended) factor that I rememeber. then again it could all just be nostalgia for me, but I'm loving the complexity of original WoW. It's definitely a nice break from FFXIV.
when it comes to FFXIV sub fee though or just sob fees in general I have never complained about paying a sub fee. I would rather pay a sub fee. Here's the big caveat though....as long as they keep updating the game. When a dev does like Blizzard and goes for an 18 month content drought while charging 15 bucks a month I will never contribute money to them ever again. At least with FFXIV your seeing updates every 3 months roughly.
Anyways, long story short. Elysium WoW Private Server. That's your best bet. Thats what my wife and I are playing currently when not playing FFXIV.
i don't think he or she is being to picky he or she is asking for something reasonable and stable and i agree with there point of view because atm i to also find myself in that position as well the problem is as we all know here video game company's have forgotten long ago how to stop making mind blowing out of this world quality games
even now it still feels like yesterday back in the early 2000's when i was working i could not stop thinking about a game i was playing at the time thinking how i was going to over come this and that, how i was going to build the money up to get this or that, what i needed to grab faster so i can shorten my time to get this or that crafted so i can help so and so in this dungeon or that very hard field boss mob sooner rather then later
when i was going to work on a 2hr or 4hr sleep schedule i mean let me ask you all this when was the last time you had that huge exciting thrill that got your boss screaming at you to focus better so your work was better quality for him or her?
i also think its us customers fault for allowing these company's to get out of control with this laziness they love doing so much now and days, we are also allowing ourselves to be bullied by the silly TOS nonsense system that's there way of saying you will do it our way or else, we customers have also forgotten what a wonderful game is suppose to be all about, we keep allowing ourselves to get conned about accepting more and more lower quality concepts as well as more non stableness, at some point sooner or later we customers are going to have to remind these company's about the old rule of the customer is always right just because they have TOS and these company's feel that grants them diplomatic immunity from any and all of us customers exceptions does not grant them diplomatic immunity from reality remember this well everyone at the end of the day they are the ones needing our money not we needing there's..
So we gave LotRO a try... Sad to say it just didn't grab us, the combat and overall gameplay just felt far too chunky and outdated, and the combat was just boring.
I think I've been spoiled by more modern MMOs in that respect, I don't mind tab-target systems, but the combat in LotRO just felt far too floaty and unresponsive. Paired with the lacklustre character creation and the dated graphics, it didn't really feel fun to play. I appreciate the suggestion, but I don't think that one is for us.
Might give WoW a go, but correct me if I'm wrong... @Wizardry are you saying there are private servers for FFXIV that don't require a sub fee? Because I might actually be interested in playing that game if there's a free version available. It was pretty cool (minus the godawful elf customisation options, I mean holy crap...) but the whole monthly sub thing was a massive turn-off as we tend to be a bit sporadic when it comes to our MMO playing.
Revelation looks interesting, but it being in beta is annoying. Same goes for Bless Online, which has no scheduled release for western audiences yet.
i disagree with your spoiled by mmorpg's your asking for something reasonable and stable and i don't think that's to much to ask your asking for something on the basic lv
and your making sense i feel at the end of the day... don't stop with your thinking your more on track with your common sense thinking more then you know
I have no idea what you mean by being bombarded with information in ESO? It's one of the least intrusive UIs and game experiences in the genre.
I do get what you mean by "floaty" - but I think it's the best overall MMO on the market.
After One Tamriel, it's also incredibly convenient to coop in, because there's no such thing as outleveling each other and it's perfect for playing alone on the side, even with the same character.
So, my better half and I are desperate to find a game to play together. And sadly, there aren't many decent co-op games out there these days (at least, not ones we haven't already tried) so we've decided to try and find an MMO to get into together. We've played a few in the past, and some we did get into but later left for one reason or another (see below) but in a nutshell, here's what we're looking for:
1) Something at least somewhat established. Beta MMOs and new releases are probably not going to do it for us. 2) Good character customization. We like to make pretty boy characters together, so something that accommodates that. 3) No forced-PvP. We've tried games with open PvP in them and they always seem to create unnecessarily hostile environments. 4) Not grindy. We don't want a game that will mostly consist of us killing the same enemy fifty three times in a row, if possible.
Apart from that, some other nice bonuses would include player housing, possibly a marrige system, and generally just a nice-looking, nice feeling MMO we can just zone out to together.
Here's some we've played in the past and why we're no longer playing them:
TERA: Wonderful visuals and character creation and fun gameplay, but once you've had your fill of the combat, that's pretty much it. No player housing, no detailed crafting, not even a solid resource gathering system. It's all combat, all the time. Also, the focus has been shifting more and more towards highly sexualised female/loli characters, which isn't what we want.
ArcheAge: This game would have been perfect... Great world design, decent graphics, tonnes to do, almost entirely seamless and a lot of content being added fairly regularly. But sadly, the incredibly pay-2-win nature of the cash shop and subscription model, paired with a very hostile and toxic community with open PvP (even including inter-faction murders) after level 30 made it a chore to play. Not to mention that it has a very heavy focus on huge, large-scale guild things. We tried revisiting this a month or so ago, but our level 50 characters were now so obsolete that our only option was to grind for hours on end, which wasn't appealing.
Black Desert Online: We downloaded the free trial of this because we'd both heard a lot of hype for it. But it was just... too strange. Not to mention that the supposedly "great" character customisation was still very, very limited - If you wanted to be a wizard boy, you had to be an old man, no exception. Not to mention it also features open PvP after endgame and ultimately was too difficult for us to wrap our heads around.
Final Fantasy XIV: Again, we tried the free trial of this game, and at first it seemed promising... But the very strange character customisation system (giraffe elves!?) and incredibly slow-burn combat system that saw a single enemy taking ages to die put us off initially. We probably would have stuck with it, though, had it not been for the forced monthly sub fee. We hate games that constantly charge us money whether we play them or not, and while we went in with an open mind, this game just didn't deliver enough to keep us there.
Elder Scrolls Online: The both of us literally just stopped playing this. We've so far given this game two chances to hook us but neither time have we been engaged by it. The game feels far too nebulous and bombards the player with buckets and buckets of information all at once. Feels far too floaty and unfocused, neither of us could actually get engaged with it. We need some direction in our games.
The Secret World: I got into this by myself back when it first came out and did enjoy my time with it for a month or two, but then they released the "Aegis" system and that essentially killed my interest in the game... Until my partner suggested we give it a try together. So we grabbed a copy of the game on sale and jumped in together, but even after a few months away, I soon realised just how irritating a lot of the little nuances of this game can be: An atrocious UI system, unintuitive and uninspired character creation and very little to do outside the quest zones and combat.
So, with that list done and dusted, does anybody have any recommendations? There are so many MMOs out there these days, its very difficult to actually find one that's worth sinking significant time into...
Looking forward to seeing your suggestions! Thanks.
have you tried the pc game never winter nights 2 or the online version from arc? have you tried shaiya? have you tried rappelz and before you start downloading games might be best to go before youtube and check out whats inside a game how its interface acts and combat system and anything else that interest's you and your other half of your body what your requirements seek
I think I ought to clarify something in regards to my initial post:
When I say "grindy" what I mean is games like Tera, where once you hit a certain point in the game, it starts to give you tasks that literally just amount to killing literally hundreds of the same enemy, meaning your next several hours of gameplay are going to consist of repeatedly hitting the same buttons in your attack rotation, listening to the same sounds and watching the same animations ad-nauseum. As fun as Tera's combat is, the fact that it seems to be its only selling point (outside the visuals) means it gets old fairly fast.
This is what happened to us in regards to Archeage, which I as I mentioned, we stuck with for quite some time. We actually played this game together for almost a year, joined a guild, bought a house, got to the (at the time) level cap of 50... And then we just ran out of things to do. After that point, everything in the game consisted of doing stuff in the northern continent of Auroria, which was literally nothing but large-scale PvP. By this point, our guild had sadly disbanded (the guild leader had been picking fights with larger guilds so we were literally getting murdered in safe zones by our own faction-mates.)
Without a big guild to back us up, we had basically no options left. Trade runs were out of the question because the seas were basically owned by giant privateering pirate guilds, and all the trade ports had been effectively blockaded by enemy faction members. Literally all of the housing plots were taken (most of them got claimed by hackers within seconds of them becoming available.) And huge plots of land were owned by land barons who charged absurd prices for even the smallest sections. When we eventually did get a house, it cost us an arm and a leg and it was in the middle of an active war zone.
We still would have stuck with the game, however, had it not been for the ridiculous price-gouging nature of the publishing company. They pulled every dirty trick in the book: Loot crates with exclusive items, stat boosting gear available on the cash shop, a heavily restrictive energy system that essentially required a sub fee to make late-game crafting and resource gathering to be viable and plenty of other dirty little tricks.
it's such a shame, too, because if Archeage had just been a little more welcoming, we'd probably still be playing it...
In terms of other games, I consider "Grind" to be the artificially lengthened nature of some mission and quest areas. See again Tera's mid-late game enemy kill-a-palooza or Archeage's "Library" area, which was the only non PvP content we had access to after we hit the level cap.
I'd love to get back into FFXIV and give it another try, but I'm afraid I just can't justify the subscription fee. I struggle enough with money as it is and having a constant, monthly drain on my account would make me and my partner essentially feel obligated to play, and I don't want to deal with that. I know you can just cancel the subscription and restart it whenever you start playing again, but that brings up the problem of essentially needing to fork over a payment when you decide you want to play again.
A sub fee makes it so that you can't just "pick up" or "put down" a game. Like, sometimes I'll be in the mood to play Dark Souls, or Dishonored, or TF2, right? And I can just open those games up and play them whenever I want. With a sub-fee game, I can't do that, I either pay it monthly and then feel like I'm wasting money if I decide to take a break, or I cancel the sub fee and then am forced to re-pay the sub fee just to start playing again.
Same goes for games like Black Desert: We probably could have gotten into that if we'd had enough time to get to grips with it, but the fact we were running on a limited-time trial made us feel like we had to rush through content, so information just kind of sleeted past us and our screen progressively got filled with more and more menu items that we didn't understand.
In terms of games like Guild Wars 2, LOTRO and ESO... I don't know, I can't really explain why these games didn't grab us, they just didn't. Not the way that games like Tera or Archeage did. I mean, ESO should have been a winner, with fully-voiced dialogue and a big world that you can explore at your leisure. But we found ourselves just... losing our focus. We made a pair of Breton wizards and before we knew it we were running around exploring a Dwemer ruin and fighting robot spiders and wolves without being entirely sure as to why we were doing any of it...
LOTRO just felt too antiquated, I suppose. I got into my tutorial fight and found myself staring at two characters slowly waving swords in the air next to eachother while a bunch of numbers floated around, then one of them fell over. And then I stopped, because I couldn't see myself enjoying that sort of game for any length of time.
I really don't know what it was about GW2 that turned us off, we did the first area, explored around, did some quests... Then we got to the big main city area and our motivation to keep playing vanished soon after.
I'm sorry if we come across as picky or hard to please, but I feel like we've tried and been dissapointed by so many games now that even looking at new ones is tiresome. I always look up videos of MMOs before we try them, and a lot of them look appealing. But then I have to spend hours downloading them, and patching them, and signing up to whatever publishing company and so on and so forth. Then we get in game and find out that it doesn't work exactly how we were expecting, and then it tells us to go and kill 75 Giant Cave Bats because [insert obligatory wall of text quest screen] and before we know it we're out of energy and out of motivation.
I'm sure there's a game out there somewhere for us, but finding it has been causing us undue amounts of stress. It doesn't help that nobody seems to make co-op games anymore, for whatever reason.
I think I ought to clarify something in regards to my initial post:
When I say "grindy" what I mean is games like Tera, where once you hit a certain point in the game, it starts to give you tasks that literally just amount to killing literally hundreds of the same enemy, meaning your next several hours of gameplay are going to consist of repeatedly hitting the same buttons in your attack rotation, listening to the same sounds and watching the same animations ad-nauseum. As fun as Tera's combat is, the fact that it seems to be its only selling point (outside the visuals) means it gets old fairly fast.
This is what happened to us in regards to Archeage, which I as I mentioned, we stuck with for quite some time. We actually played this game together for almost a year, joined a guild, bought a house, got to the (at the time) level cap of 50... And then we just ran out of things to do. After that point, everything in the game consisted of doing stuff in the northern continent of Auroria, which was literally nothing but large-scale PvP. By this point, our guild had sadly disbanded (the guild leader had been picking fights with larger guilds so we were literally getting murdered in safe zones by our own faction-mates.)
Without a big guild to back us up, we had basically no options left. Trade runs were out of the question because the seas were basically owned by giant privateering pirate guilds, and all the trade ports had been effectively blockaded by enemy faction members. Literally all of the housing plots were taken (most of them got claimed by hackers within seconds of them becoming available.) And huge plots of land were owned by land barons who charged absurd prices for even the smallest sections. When we eventually did get a house, it cost us an arm and a leg and it was in the middle of an active war zone.
We still would have stuck with the game, however, had it not been for the ridiculous price-gouging nature of the publishing company. They pulled every dirty trick in the book: Loot crates with exclusive items, stat boosting gear available on the cash shop, a heavily restrictive energy system that essentially required a sub fee to make late-game crafting and resource gathering to be viable and plenty of other dirty little tricks.
it's such a shame, too, because if Archeage had just been a little more welcoming, we'd probably still be playing it...
In terms of other games, I consider "Grind" to be the artificially lengthened nature of some mission and quest areas. See again Tera's mid-late game enemy kill-a-palooza or Archeage's "Library" area, which was the only non PvP content we had access to after we hit the level cap.
I'd love to get back into FFXIV and give it another try, but I'm afraid I just can't justify the subscription fee. I struggle enough with money as it is and having a constant, monthly drain on my account would make me and my partner essentially feel obligated to play, and I don't want to deal with that. I know you can just cancel the subscription and restart it whenever you start playing again, but that brings up the problem of essentially needing to fork over a payment when you decide you want to play again.
A sub fee makes it so that you can't just "pick up" or "put down" a game. Like, sometimes I'll be in the mood to play Dark Souls, or Dishonored, or TF2, right? And I can just open those games up and play them whenever I want. With a sub-fee game, I can't do that, I either pay it monthly and then feel like I'm wasting money if I decide to take a break, or I cancel the sub fee and then am forced to re-pay the sub fee just to start playing again.
Same goes for games like Black Desert: We probably could have gotten into that if we'd had enough time to get to grips with it, but the fact we were running on a limited-time trial made us feel like we had to rush through content, so information just kind of sleeted past us and our screen progressively got filled with more and more menu items that we didn't understand.
In terms of games like Guild Wars 2, LOTRO and ESO... I don't know, I can't really explain why these games didn't grab us, they just didn't. Not the way that games like Tera or Archeage did. I mean, ESO should have been a winner, with fully-voiced dialogue and a big world that you can explore at your leisure. But we found ourselves just... losing our focus. We made a pair of Breton wizards and before we knew it we were running around exploring a Dwemer ruin and fighting robot spiders and wolves without being entirely sure as to why we were doing any of it...
LOTRO just felt too antiquated, I suppose. I got into my tutorial fight and found myself staring at two characters slowly waving swords in the air next to eachother while a bunch of numbers floated around, then one of them fell over. And then I stopped, because I couldn't see myself enjoying that sort of game for any length of time.
I really don't know what it was about GW2 that turned us off, we did the first area, explored around, did some quests... Then we got to the big main city area and our motivation to keep playing vanished soon after.
I'm sorry if we come across as picky or hard to please, but I feel like we've tried and been dissapointed by so many games now that even looking at new ones is tiresome. I always look up videos of MMOs before we try them, and a lot of them look appealing. But then I have to spend hours downloading them, and patching them, and signing up to whatever publishing company and so on and so forth. Then we get in game and find out that it doesn't work exactly how we were expecting, and then it tells us to go and kill 75 Giant Cave Bats because [insert obligatory wall of text quest screen] and before we know it we're out of energy and out of motivation.
I'm sure there's a game out there somewhere for us, but finding it has been causing us undue amounts of stress. It doesn't help that nobody seems to make co-op games anymore, for whatever reason.
It doesn't sound like your too picky.
At first I / We assumed you haven't played all the main titles, but you have. So this puts you in the same sinking boat were all in. Add that your on a budget, this makes it harder. Add that you want to play as a duo and all mmos are so easy their not very enjoyable.
A few post here mentioned the problems of the rut were in. Some here refuse to admit were even in one, but we clearly are. Anyone of us could make a post asking the same as you thinking;
" is it possible, we missed one ".......No you haven't !......It's bad !
For the past 10 years we got short three weak games with all the lack luster things to do packed into a small space where you never ever need any help, or Asian grinders complete with cash shops.
I would suggest Vanilla WoW.....I sent you a PM a few days ago. If not no big deal.
And if you find something we all missed let us know
Comments
Hell, Im extremely picky yet have two solid options and if they didn't work out I'd revisit ESO and BDO, maybe even Exiles.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
even now it still feels like yesterday back in the early 2000's when i was working i could not stop thinking about a game i was playing at the time thinking how i was going to over come this and that, how i was going to build the money up to get this or that, what i needed to grab faster so i can shorten my time to get this or that crafted so i can help so and so in this dungeon or that very hard field boss mob sooner rather then later
when i was going to work on a 2hr or 4hr sleep schedule i mean let me ask you all this when was the last time you had that huge exciting thrill that got your boss screaming at you to focus better so your work was better quality for him or her?
i also think its us customers fault for allowing these company's to get out of control with this laziness they love doing so much now and days, we are also allowing ourselves to be bullied by the silly TOS nonsense system that's there way of saying you will do it our way or else, we customers have also forgotten what a wonderful game is suppose to be all about, we keep allowing ourselves to get conned about accepting more and more lower quality concepts as well as more non stableness, at some point sooner or later we customers are going to have to remind these company's about the old rule of the customer is always right just because they have TOS and these company's feel that grants them diplomatic immunity from any and all of us customers exceptions does not grant them diplomatic immunity from reality remember this well everyone at the end of the day they are the ones needing our money not we needing there's..
and your making sense i feel at the end of the day... don't stop with your thinking your more on track with your common sense thinking more then you know
I do get what you mean by "floaty" - but I think it's the best overall MMO on the market.
After One Tamriel, it's also incredibly convenient to coop in, because there's no such thing as outleveling each other and it's perfect for playing alone on the side, even with the same character.
have you tried rappelz and before you start downloading games might be best to go before youtube and check out whats inside a game how its interface acts and combat system and anything else that interest's you and your other half of your body what your requirements seek
When I say "grindy" what I mean is games like Tera, where once you hit a certain point in the game, it starts to give you tasks that literally just amount to killing literally hundreds of the same enemy, meaning your next several hours of gameplay are going to consist of repeatedly hitting the same buttons in your attack rotation, listening to the same sounds and watching the same animations ad-nauseum. As fun as Tera's combat is, the fact that it seems to be its only selling point (outside the visuals) means it gets old fairly fast.
This is what happened to us in regards to Archeage, which I as I mentioned, we stuck with for quite some time. We actually played this game together for almost a year, joined a guild, bought a house, got to the (at the time) level cap of 50... And then we just ran out of things to do. After that point, everything in the game consisted of doing stuff in the northern continent of Auroria, which was literally nothing but large-scale PvP. By this point, our guild had sadly disbanded (the guild leader had been picking fights with larger guilds so we were literally getting murdered in safe zones by our own faction-mates.)
Without a big guild to back us up, we had basically no options left. Trade runs were out of the question because the seas were basically owned by giant privateering pirate guilds, and all the trade ports had been effectively blockaded by enemy faction members. Literally all of the housing plots were taken (most of them got claimed by hackers within seconds of them becoming available.) And huge plots of land were owned by land barons who charged absurd prices for even the smallest sections. When we eventually did get a house, it cost us an arm and a leg and it was in the middle of an active war zone.
We still would have stuck with the game, however, had it not been for the ridiculous price-gouging nature of the publishing company. They pulled every dirty trick in the book: Loot crates with exclusive items, stat boosting gear available on the cash shop, a heavily restrictive energy system that essentially required a sub fee to make late-game crafting and resource gathering to be viable and plenty of other dirty little tricks.
it's such a shame, too, because if Archeage had just been a little more welcoming, we'd probably still be playing it...
In terms of other games, I consider "Grind" to be the artificially lengthened nature of some mission and quest areas. See again Tera's mid-late game enemy kill-a-palooza or Archeage's "Library" area, which was the only non PvP content we had access to after we hit the level cap.
I'd love to get back into FFXIV and give it another try, but I'm afraid I just can't justify the subscription fee. I struggle enough with money as it is and having a constant, monthly drain on my account would make me and my partner essentially feel obligated to play, and I don't want to deal with that. I know you can just cancel the subscription and restart it whenever you start playing again, but that brings up the problem of essentially needing to fork over a payment when you decide you want to play again.
A sub fee makes it so that you can't just "pick up" or "put down" a game. Like, sometimes I'll be in the mood to play Dark Souls, or Dishonored, or TF2, right? And I can just open those games up and play them whenever I want. With a sub-fee game, I can't do that, I either pay it monthly and then feel like I'm wasting money if I decide to take a break, or I cancel the sub fee and then am forced to re-pay the sub fee just to start playing again.
Same goes for games like Black Desert: We probably could have gotten into that if we'd had enough time to get to grips with it, but the fact we were running on a limited-time trial made us feel like we had to rush through content, so information just kind of sleeted past us and our screen progressively got filled with more and more menu items that we didn't understand.
In terms of games like Guild Wars 2, LOTRO and ESO... I don't know, I can't really explain why these games didn't grab us, they just didn't. Not the way that games like Tera or Archeage did. I mean, ESO should have been a winner, with fully-voiced dialogue and a big world that you can explore at your leisure. But we found ourselves just... losing our focus. We made a pair of Breton wizards and before we knew it we were running around exploring a Dwemer ruin and fighting robot spiders and wolves without being entirely sure as to why we were doing any of it...
LOTRO just felt too antiquated, I suppose. I got into my tutorial fight and found myself staring at two characters slowly waving swords in the air next to eachother while a bunch of numbers floated around, then one of them fell over. And then I stopped, because I couldn't see myself enjoying that sort of game for any length of time.
I really don't know what it was about GW2 that turned us off, we did the first area, explored around, did some quests... Then we got to the big main city area and our motivation to keep playing vanished soon after.
I'm sorry if we come across as picky or hard to please, but I feel like we've tried and been dissapointed by so many games now that even looking at new ones is tiresome. I always look up videos of MMOs before we try them, and a lot of them look appealing. But then I have to spend hours downloading them, and patching them, and signing up to whatever publishing company and so on and so forth. Then we get in game and find out that it doesn't work exactly how we were expecting, and then it tells us to go and kill 75 Giant Cave Bats because [insert obligatory wall of text quest screen] and before we know it we're out of energy and out of motivation.
I'm sure there's a game out there somewhere for us, but finding it has been causing us undue amounts of stress. It doesn't help that nobody seems to make co-op games anymore, for whatever reason.
It doesn't sound like your too picky.
At first I / We assumed you haven't played all the main titles, but you have. So this puts you in the same sinking boat were all in. Add that your on a budget, this makes it harder. Add that you want to play as a duo and all mmos are so easy their not very enjoyable.
A few post here mentioned the problems of the rut were in. Some here refuse to admit were even in one, but we clearly are. Anyone of us could make a post asking the same as you thinking;
" is it possible, we missed one ".......No you haven't !......It's bad !
For the past 10 years we got short three weak games with all the lack luster things to do packed into a small space where you never ever need any help, or Asian grinders complete with cash shops.
I would suggest Vanilla WoW.....I sent you a PM a few days ago. If not no big deal.
And if you find something we all missed let us know