Non-monthly MMOs

Balrog · Post by **Balrog** » 2006-12-13 10:19am

Paying $15 a month to smack an Orc in the head just won't cut it anymore (financial situation notwithstanding). Any good MMOs out there (or coming soon) that don't require one to hand out thier credit card number?

Isana Kadeb · Post by **Isana Kadeb** » 2006-12-13 10:30am

Guild Wars is an obvious recommendation. I'm playing it at the moment, very enjoyable.

General Zod · Post by **General Zod** » 2006-12-13 10:31am

Er, Guild Wars? Barring that, I can't think of any offhand.

Zac Naloen · Post by **Zac Naloen** » 2006-12-13 10:36am

Guild wars,excellent game.

I'm just getting back into it. Slowly. Need to get the new expansion.

Post by **Beowulf** » 2006-12-13 10:41am

Nightfall adds some nice features to GW. Heroes is the biggest.

Post by **Kuja** » 2006-12-13 12:09pm

I played Guild Wars for a week before I uninstalled it and never looked back. The amount of kiddies, language butchering, and jackassery in that game is unbelievable. At least the 15-a-month WoW payments keep some of the frigging brats out of my hair.

brianeyci · Post by **brianeyci** » 2006-12-13 01:19pm

If you like grinding, difficult level ups, a highly immersive story, paying cold cash, hunting for the +1 whatever that'll make you 0.00000001% better than others and spending 8 hours doing it, GW is not for you.

If you're a casual gamer and like starting right away as powerful as the most experienced players and focusing on tactics and intelligent use of skills rather than item hoarding, GW is the way to go.

Vyraeth · Post by **Vyraeth** » 2006-12-13 01:42pm

Balrog wrote:Paying $15 a month to smack an Orc in the head just won't cut it anymore (financial situation notwithstanding). Any good MMOs out there (or coming soon) that don't require one to hand out thier credit card number?

What exactly do you want out of your MMO experience? Guild Wars is definately one of the more popular no-monthly fee alternatives, but there are dozens of MMOs that are in beta and can be played at no cost (just Google search them).

One such MMO is Gunz, which involves alot of sword and gun play and has a very "Matrixy" feel too it. The focus of the game is to gain levels and money, and you do so by killing people and winning rounds. It's not really the same kind of game as WoW, but it's fun for abit, and can be quite a challenge.

There's also Neverwinter Nights 2. I haven't played it yet, but I used to play Neverwinter Nights, and the multiplayer component was astounding. Depending on what vaults you played on, you could get an MMO experience (albeit with only 50 people on at a given time) without the cost. While again, I haven't played NWN 2, from what I've read I believe it's maintained the same multiplayer capability as NWN and so it should provide similair experiences.

Sharp-kun · Post by **Sharp-kun** » 2006-12-13 01:44pm

Guild Wars' main problem is that once you hit lvl 20 it can get old fast - other than pvp, there's not much.

JLTucker · Post by **JLTucker** » 2006-12-13 01:45pm

Ultima Online is a good one.

Mad · Post by **Mad** » 2006-12-13 02:09pm

Sharp-kun wrote:Guild Wars' main problem is that once you hit lvl 20 it can get old fast - other than pvp, there's not much.

The better elite skills are usually much further into the game. Once you reach level 20, you get into the balancing act of finding the right skill combinations (and finding the skills you don't have yet) and refining your builds.

In the Factions and Nightfall expansions, you're supposed to reach level 20 at about the time you leave the starting area and get into the real part of the game.

Tasoth · Post by **Tasoth** » 2006-12-13 06:47pm

Guild Wars for starters. NCSoft, the makers of Guild Wars and City of Heroes/Villains is also at work on a series of free games such as Dungeon Runners, a diabloesque 3d game in which you traipse around randomly generated dungeons, I think Exsteel which is a giant robot third person shooter, a tennis game and a soccer MMO. Link to dungeon runners. The other games can easily be reached from that site.

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2006-12-13 06:56pm

Kuja wrote:I played Guild Wars for a week before I uninstalled it and never looked back. The amount of kiddies, language butchering, and jackassery in that game is unbelievable. At least the 15-a-month WoW payments keep some of the frigging brats out of my hair.

GW is sure full of retards (it's free, after all), but WoW doesn't seem to be that much better. Chat channels are still full of garbage, 70% of players are incompetent, etc etc. GW towns (the shared areas) are fucking horrible, though. It does make it hard to work in PUGs with GW... but I finished the game with henchies mostly, or one or two of my mates helping out, so that's not essential. Since it doesn't cost, I'm fine with not interacting with the hordes of retards that much.

People who think a game gets old once you reach max level are retards. Damn GW for actually having an endgame! It's not like it's built from the ground up for PvP or anything. 'Max level' in GW just means you finished the tutorial part: you've got shit skills and little experience. I *like* that there's little level grinding, because level grinding is the worst game padding ever.

Post by **Ghost Rider** » 2006-12-13 06:58pm

Stark wrote:
Kuja wrote:I played Guild Wars for a week before I uninstalled it and never looked back. The amount of kiddies, language butchering, and jackassery in that game is unbelievable. At least the 15-a-month WoW payments keep some of the frigging brats out of my hair.
GW is sure full of retards (it's free, after all), but WoW doesn't seem to be that much better. Chat channels are still full of garbage, 70% of players are incompetent, etc etc. GW towns (the shared areas) are fucking horrible, though. It does make it hard to work in PUGs with GW... but I finished the game with henchies mostly, or one or two of my mates helping out, so that's not essential. Since it doesn't cost, I'm fine with not interacting with the hordes of retards that much.

People who think a game gets old once you reach max level are retards. Damn GW for actually having an endgame! It's not like it's built from the ground up for PvP or anything. 'Max level' in GW just means you finished the tutorial part: you've got shit skills and little experience. I *like* that there's little level grinding, because level grinding is the worst game padding ever.

It's an easy comparison if you think of it this way.

WoW has retards because it has a mammoth player base.

GW has retards because it's free.

My difference is that on both sides I've seen shit playing skills, and it's just sad all around given one is primarily PvP, and the other gives time to learn your class.

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2006-12-13 07:04pm

GW has an entire singleplayer campaign to 'learn your class'. I certainly didn't just make a PvP character and jump into the arenas.

Oh wait, you mean how there's no excuse in either game for being crap? I agree. WoW eases you right into it, GW is all about PvP (so you'd think people would not suck so bad at it)... and EVE - which is more expensive and scares away many retards - has some STUNNINGLY incompetent pirates. How can people play a game so much and still suck at it? On the few run-throughs I've done in the GW arenas, I've been really surprised how much these guys that hang around the arenas all day PvP'ing suck at it.

Turns out grinding for weeks to level doesn't actually make you a better player.

Post by **Beowulf** » 2006-12-13 07:09pm

3 entire single player campaigns, actually. And it's not as if you can't play each campaign with one character. You just miss the tutorial sections if you jump an existing char into a campaign. I've been perfectly happy playing GW without doing much of any PvP.

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2006-12-13 07:14pm

Yeah, since it was like AU$40 and has no fees, I was fine playing it as a mainly SP game, just playing with my mates when they were on. It's not like EVE, where it's all about the MMO part.

And the class and skill system is neat. All builds are both flexible and adjustable, and you can totally confuse your opponents just by respeccing inbetween fights. Also, my first character was a Mesmer, and it turns out almost nobody can play a Mesmer properly. Interrupts and shutdown for the win.

It lacks the 'I win' buttons WoW has, though... so the SP parts are actually fucking hard sometimes.

Post by **Ghost Rider** » 2006-12-13 07:19pm

Stark wrote:GW has an entire singleplayer campaign to 'learn your class'. I certainly didn't just make a PvP character and jump into the arenas.

Oh wait, you mean how there's no excuse in either game for being crap? I agree. WoW eases you right into it, GW is all about PvP (so you'd think people would not suck so bad at it)... and EVE - which is more expensive and scares away many retards - has some STUNNINGLY incompetent pirates. How can people play a game so much and still suck at it? On the few run-throughs I've done in the GW arenas, I've been really surprised how much these guys that hang around the arenas all day PvP'ing suck at it.

Turns out grinding for weeks to level doesn't actually make you a better player.

Oh fuck yeah. I've seen people in WoW who say shit along the lines of

Warrior: Defense Stance?
Priest: I can shield others?
Paladin: I can Bless others?
Mages: What do you mean aggro?
Druids: I have to heal?
Hunters: Feign Death, why?
Shaman: Drop what totem?
Rogue: Feign?

Thast list above are skills learned early on...and in sixty levels I've seen each of those and worse. It amazes me how stupid people truly fucking are. They descend into a level of stupidity that when playing an MMO, you're either frightened that they are your teammates, or that you've seen worse.

Though with harder games(EVE and such) it truly makes me wonder how these people getting their asses handed to them constantly do not fucking learn. I mean even a fucking cat or dog realizes that if they are doing something wrong, maybe just maybe it time to try a different approach.

GuppyShark · Post by **GuppyShark** » 2006-12-13 08:29pm

It is of course hardly limited to MMOs. I've seen more than a few times that someone will be camping a spawn point in Battlefield and rather than spawn somewhere else, people will keep spawning there hoping to kill the guy.

Last game I played we had at least two squads spawning in the open under the guns of a gunship and snipers. So I shot the gunship down with a missile launcher, got sniped, respawned back at our base and single-handedly kept our two back field flags from being swiped. Only to be asked wtf I was doing

Back in MMOs, it's really depressing watching a higher level hunter get killed by Harvest Watchers when I'm farming them and Defias on autopilot while chatting in guild. FFS, you can't even pull single roaming mobs and not get killed as a hunter??

Jawawithagun · Post by **Jawawithagun** » 2006-12-13 09:16pm

Back on track and responding to the OP: Archlord. I have no idea what or how that game is. I've just seen a news item on one of the gaming blogs about it now becoming free to play. So you might want to have a look.

lPeregrine · Post by **lPeregrine** » 2006-12-13 09:20pm

Stark wrote:and EVE - which is more expensive and scares away many retards - has some STUNNINGLY incompetent pirates. How can people play a game so much and still suck at it?

I really, really would love to know the answer to that question. Well, not really, I'd hate to have my victims actually learn to fight well. Cuts the profit margins, you know. But the perfect example:

I'm at war with this guy's corp (started by this guy being a moron), doing very well at killing him. So I randomly get this message from him: "I'm 11 jumps away coming home from a shopping trip, are you going to fight when I get back?" Not surprisingly, a quick jump to my locator agent later, I ambush him on the gate into his system, and blow his ship and new toys to scrap metal.

I mean really, how painfully stupid do you have to be to tell the guy who's going to kill you "here I am, could you come kill my defensless cargo ship"? You'd think that EVE's high cost of PvP screwups (lose a ship, it's gone, period) would keep the usual retards away, but it doesn't for some reason.

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2006-12-13 09:30pm

Even worse is people who try to kill you but can't, drop webs in the middle of combat, get owned by what they apparently decided was an easy target, and best of all, firing bragging 'loller i killzored you' emails when in fact, they did not kill you. Because... you disappeared. You must be dead, right?

bilateralrope · Post by **bilateralrope** » 2006-12-13 09:42pm

One thing that really annoyed me about GW Prophesis was that people could be run to the later missions, meaning that they skipped the lower areas where they were expected to learn how to play. This caused Thunderkeep to be a hard mission because of the number of retards that reached it without actually doing anything to get there.

At first I thought that this was just people who had played one class, so now were skipping parts without learning how to play the class of their new character. But after a while I started to notice people looking for runners, while giving away clues which showed that this was their first character to reach that town (like one guy who spent an hour at Denravi looking for a runner to the next mission, when it can be reached in 20 mins with henchs and probably isn't runable as each player must talk to an NPC out there).

Factions had locked gates to prevent people getting ran there, meaning that if someone was in a mission town, you knew he had beaten all the previous missions with that character. This vastly improved the quality of players in the later missions. But I'm not kidding when I say that on the first day after Factions release I saw people wanting to be run through it.

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2006-12-13 09:46pm

Yeah, I didn't mind the idea of runners taking people places, but it just means people never actually learn how to play. Even worse, in Prophecies, the campaign is quite easy and I got through to Lions Gate in the time it would have taken me to grind away and save for a runner. People are just lameass cowards, I guess: ZOMG GET TO DROKKS loller.

Then beg for money.

I haven't played GW in ages, but I've been looking at Nightfall. Maybe I'll get back into it.

Post by **Beowulf** » 2006-12-13 10:06pm

Sure, I had my monk run to Droks. Then I bought the armor, and continued the storyline missions/quests.