I don't currently have a job, so every now and then, I hop into a F2P MMO. When my sister, who is in a breif period of unemployment thanks to her previous employers laying her off with no warning (literally, halfway through a day, she got called into a meeting and that meeting was the first she heard about it, and she was layed off during such meeting), she has time and I decided we should play a F2P MMO together, and I suggested a few, she told me to pick between Neverwinter and Dragon Prophet. I chose Neverwinter.

Parts of the game are good, but the overall quality of the game seems to be lacking. NPCs most of the time read out their quests to you, and often the voice acting is bland, the quality fluctuates between NPCs, quests the NPC gives, and sometimes between paragraphs in one dialog. Variation in weapons and armors seem to be minimal, and a lot of the NPC just look off. On top of that, they have an enchantment system that just drops loads of enchantments into your bag that you seem to get constantly, and if you are going to use them to increase the power of the ones you use, it requires extra items that you may or may not be able to find; that on top of the minimal bag space they give you makes it insanely frustrating at times. Also, half the interactibles seem to have line of sight issues, causing me to have to stand on things to interact with it. They even have a class that they've not bothered to balance, the "Hunter Ranger" which my sister is playing seems to often do massive amounts of damage, often. The gold in the game seems to be useless, because the one place I've seen in which you are going to spend the most money would be the auction house, which uses "Astral Diamonds" that you get from a variety of other activities or can use real money to exchange for. This also seems to lead to an economy that looks ridiculous at the moment, because I know I can only "refine" 24,000 rough diamonds (which is how you earn the diamonds to begin with) per day, and there are a lot of things that cost hundreds of thousands of diamonds. To really get anything without having to save for a month, you would need to be saving on as many characters as possible, and you only get 2 free slots, and the only way to get more is the premium money.

This all leads to the question, what happened to the quality of F2P MMOs. It seems all they do anymore is see how many they can crank out as quickly as possible, and only a few are actually worth playing. If you make a MMO F2P, it ought to be good enough where one is likely to spend money to enhance their experience, not have to spend money to make the game even palatable. When I played SWTOR (Star Wars the Old Republic), I enjoyed enough to buy the expansion early on, and that granted me a number of other bonuses attachted to spending more than $5, but I had fun with the variety of different things going on and the stories. I don't feel that in Neverwinter. Neverwinter feels like a lot of it was rushed, and not all of it was thought out. I will admit I had a few frustration in SWTOR, but at least you could buy the character slots with the basic in game cash.

I guess this comes down to the question, what good, quality, fleshed out F2P MMOs are out there?

1 decade ago*

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1 decade ago
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I would recommend you Lord of the Rings Online :)

You can get everything in the Itemshop without paying one cent (even if it costs a lot of time) and it has a very nice atmosphere :)

But even If I have played it for more than 200 Hours until now, I can'T say much about the Endgame, because I have never reached it xD
I'm more some kind of explorer than someone, that rushes through the content :D

1 decade ago
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The MMOs i played and are F2P are: Rift,Aion,Tera,LineAge 2 and yesterday I played LoTR for a while.
I have to say though that none of them could fulfill that need for MMO that i have since the old good LineAge 2 times so i would suggest you to see some gameplay videos and decide what you think you would like the most.

1 decade ago
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I know only one decent F2P MMORPG (which is still in fact buy to play) Guild Wars 2. This game kinda lacks pve endgame content but it's still cool if u enjoy pvp and it's imo best looking MMO atm. I also liked RIFT a little bit but i stopped playing when i seen how pvp is done in that game (but that's maybe becouse i played wow before). I liked LOTRO but when i heard how grindy and restricted it is in higher levels from all kind of reviews i lost all my interest in keeping playing that game. I also played neverwinter and swtor but i got kinda lost on low level so i just stopped playing :D Aion and Tera doesn't interest me becouse all playable characters looks kinda creepy. Sometimes i play dragon nest which is fun casual MMO but i can't stand playing it for too long for some reason :( I was expecting wizardry online to be great hardcore MMO which pernament death and since i played all 8 singleplayer games before but it's just way too easy and that game is not even done by SIRTECH which can be clearly seen in every aspect of that game :( Everquest 2 was great game till it went f2p. Now it's just another milkmashine. I tried even more f2p mmos... such as maple story, runescape, lineage 2 (which i think would be much better game if it has better keyboard controls), age of conan, champions online etc. I must say i don't like how big whole gaming industry became. All MMORPGS gaming companies i know of are trying to milk their customers way too much imo... even mighty blizzard is trying to implement cashshop into world of warcraft. This and all that DLC bullshit in every half-decent game done in the past few years. Sometimes i wish i just could play ultima online or doac but those games (which are btw around 15 years old and can't keep up with today gaming standarts) still have monthly fees for some reason :( Maybe this site will help you decide what MMOPRGS to play: http://mmohuts.com/ I tried to play many of those games and i think they all suck :D

1 decade ago
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Closed 1 decade ago by crazyalan1988.