Most Immersive (and best) MMORPG?

I'm trying to find a really good MMORPG I could really get into. FPS get boring after awhile and then I stalk these forums in my free time lol. I have off all week so...

I've played WoW, which was a great and really immersive game (I had over 100 hours of game time), but it's too much of a drag and is too much of a life-waster once you get past the early 30 levels. I also played EverQuest II for awhile, but once you get past the island it got really disjointed for me and the server wasn't too populated. Age of Conan looks really good, but it doesn't look like it'll reach the the quality of WoW's immersive and addicting charm. I really want to start playing a game that I'll want to play every day and not feel like a drag to play like a lot of MMORPGs. So what MMORPGs do you guys find really immersive and addictive?

 

runescape.

 

Final Fantaxy (XI) online

 

WoW starts at lv 70. I love my druid; she tanks Kara and can also off heal it with +1712 healing. She is primary DPS with 42% crit and 2600 attack power. I'm not even that good.

World of Warcraft is a wonderful, balanced, beautiful game with 10 races and 9 classes with 3 specs each.

Enjoy,

Alaar, Twisting Nether

 

I really, really hope you're kidding. Runescape is the single worst game I've ever played by far.

 

Woah, it must've taken a long time to reach level 70. WoW was a lot of fun, but once you're in the early 30s level progression gets really slow and life-wasting.

 

It really depends on what class you play, and how you spec. But a lot of the classes get much easier in the early 30s and 40 and certain classes really fly by when you get the 41 talent points.

Of course if you are playing a priest spec holy progression is going to be slow. I recommend doing some research on leveling builds.

As for stating that it wastes time, you could argue any game is time/life-wasting. But if you are having fun, is it really so much different from reading a book, or going to the movies?

As someone had said, WoW really starts when you get to level 70.

Honestly is does not take long to get to 70, I got to 70 on my first char. in 6 days played. Many people are even faster than me, and have tons of level 70 alts who wisely make use of rested xp.

 

I was just looking at the Age of Conan site again and the game looks like it's going to be amazing. I don't think there's any reason to start a new MMORPG now, Age of Conan is going to be one hell of a game.

 

eve online is really really big and once you get set up with a corporation or alliance in-game, you'll find yourself addicted.

 

Perfect World is da best

 

I'd say guild wars is the most immersive in terms of story, since, well, it actually has a fluid storyline that the player is involved in as the main character. It doesn't hurt that it doesn't have a subscription fee and avoids the rather immersion breaking grind of most MMO's.

 

Thats bull, sure there are good quest chains that provide a steady flow of exp but getting a 70 in six days (assuming 5 or so hours of sleep a night) is absolutely ridiculous and I want proof (PS. I will bow).

 

I think he meant six days of total in-game playtime.

 

On that end, someone just beat the speed leveling record in WoW by getting to 70 in something like 28 hours. They played straight through to do it.

Back on topic... if WoW is the only MMO you've played, you're going to have problems with just about any other game. If you think the leveling in WoW is slow... well, it's pretty much the fastest leveling out of any game I've ever played aside from Guild Wars. WoW's leveling is fun and has a ton of quests rather than a mindless grind on monsters, and like was said previously, the game really does start at 70.

 

LOTRO

easy

 

WOW! lol...musta been some good money in that. Even if he didn't win anything for breaking the record, he could easily sell the account, and any other account he just manages to get that high in a 1.1 days

 

Yea, I got a mage to 70 in wow in around 2 weeks. It's really not hard, this was during the summer break, and I had to get there quick.

Once you hit 58, you should hit 70 in a couple of days, you can do 2 levels a day easy, sometimes 3.

Needless to say though, WoW is a huge waste of time (I do miss it sometimes, but that's part of the WoW drug, it's like tobacco), I might look into Age of Conan, we'll see.

 

Oh, besides WoW, http://www.warhammeronline.com/english/home/index.php looks VERY interesting.

And, yes when leveling in WoW, you need to have the right spec if you are just going to level. Like a priest would spec shadow and concentrate on building spell damage and stamina. A druid, feral, etc.

 

Ugh. WoW. Immersive? How, exactly?

And the community. The WoW community is absolutely full of what seems to be a bunch of rabid, slavering dogs. Especially on Alliance XD

 

Darkfall when it comes out.

Ultime Online! Back in the glory days...

 

oh if we're going back to the glory days... then EQ1 for sure. i remember on my Wood elf druid sticking to crushbone into my 20's cause the run across the karana's to highhold keep was too dangerous for me.... then the same when it came time for me to do the dreadlands sprint to hit the castle..... 15min+ of running through icy mountains chased by giants, then forests full of drachnids and drolvargs.....ugh. EQ1's story from original up to....SoL was spectacular. Once PoP came out... EQ1 went to the crapper.

 

I second that. The UO community was possibly among the most mature of that in any MMO I've played.

 

Aion - The Tower of Eternity.

I will definately be trying this when it releases. It looks stunning.

 

Darkfall wil probably be the best new coming MMO.

Right now its WOW, Perfect World and LOTRO

 

any decent MMORPG's that are free i was looking at guild wars any one know if its any good?

 

Its good but Perfect World is free and a lot better.

 

perfect world ive never heard of it, might look it up.

 

What about Phantasy Star Universe? I played Phantasy Star Online on my good ol' dreamcast (still playing on it after so many years ) and it was awesome! I'm hoping to get PSU sometime next month

 

Everquest 1, Ultima Online, City of Heroes/Villians, Planetside, and Eve have been the most immersive MMOs I have played. I enjoyed WoW, but even with its expedited leveling (you don't know slow leveling till you've played EQ1 past level 30) it was missing that special charm the above games had.

EQ1 was just so raw, it made you feel like you were really exploring and adventuring in a living world, Ultima was really the end-all "Do Anything" experience, City of Heroes gave me a cool "saving the world from real bad guys" vibe (though it did get repetitive before some of the extra content), Planetside is (and always will be) the best MMOFPS, and Eve is just mind boggling in depth and scale.

But World of Warcraft just takes all of the greatness out of each of these games and distills it into the McDonald's chicken nugget of MMOs. Yeah, sure, it tastes good, but something about real chicken breast or wings (with all the added complexity) makes them seem overly artificial.

So that is the problem with WoW, while fun, it feels overly artifical.

 

Well i used to be a Flyff fan...its not that bad of a game..looks quite childish but meh.. its ok.

Satyrion u have to mention that Perfect World is only for people in Asia... dont get their hopes up for nothing.

I have Guild Wars. Played for a year, got bored, waiting for Guild Wars 2.

Here are some other MMORPG's/

2Moons
R.O.S.E Online
Flyff
RF online

 

I said 6 days played as in a total of 24 hours X 6, for a total of 144 hours. When you do /time played, it displays the time you have spent in WoW in days, not real time. (I dunno if I am still being confusing) But there are people who do it in even less)

Quests and doing instances are your biggest decreases in XP, I do my best to avoid them. For instance I am leveling an pally alt right now, through AOE grinding I get upwards of 100-110K xp per hour, just grinding packs of 10-12 mobs.

Edit

My mistake, after checking my logs I got to 60 in 6 days played, and go to 70 with an additional 2 days played. (Would have been a lot less, if I didn't do all the new instances, and PvP, but if I did that it kind of defeats the whole purpose of playing)

But that was my first char., as I said earlier the pally alt I am leveling will be getting to 60, and to 70 in much less time than 6, and 8 days played respectively.

 

So you avoid the fun stuff to get to the higher levels faster because its fun? Or the fun stuff is at 70? Or What? I guess if it is an alt then you are sick of the level 1-69 content, right?

I hated the WoW endgame (when I got there years ago). The leveling experience + instances + quests were the fun part of the game. Raiding and all that BS PvP grinding is about as much fun (for me) as opening up a spreadsheet and doing my taxes.

The moment a game becomes more about efficiency calculations and races to max level than about having fun is the moment I stop playing.

 

I'd say Guild Wars, because of a bunch of reasons.

A con though is that it does get boring, but there are ways around it. Like I took 2-3 months off but since there's no subscription you can easily just get back on. Also if you lose the CDs, no biggie you can download the client off the GW website and just log back in (you'll need to remember your login).

You've got like 8+ classes that you can choose and there are secondary classes too. After all the quests and main gameplay, you'll start to feel bored and help out the newbies. However, the PVP in Guild Wars is just so much fun. It's easy to learn but very expansive. There are random battles you can do, you can make PVP only characters, Guild VS Guild battles, and many more. Guild Wars is the best MMORPG I've ever played and I've played a lot. Free and Sub.

And there are 4 different games, and the 5th, Guild Wars 2, coming out soon so you can expect new things.

GW 4 Life

 

I beat guild wars...nothing else to do but pvp. I conquered pvp in Guild Wars. Too many noobs. im waiting for Guild Wars 2 to come out

 

If you think it takes long to level now, then you would have hated WoW before the expansion. I made 3 70s in the time it took to make 1 level 60 pre TBC. WoW is a good game, arguably the best MMORPG but things have taken a turn for the worse. PVP is a joke, and raiding TBC content was done in about a month for the top guilds (the expansion was released in September 2007 in china and the top guilds finished all content in around a month). But it has alot of support and alot of expandability. You'll always have someone to play with for years to come.

 

Well when it comes for stuff to do I would say Ultima Online. Having a house, selling your wares and finds buy setting up vendors. Man those were the days!

WOW is definetly up there in my book, still log quite a few hours but could use some new content updates.

 

I'd wait... Conan looks like the next real MMO experience.
Gritty, adult, and in a world rich with lore.
The testers I know (who are also beta testing other things) say Conan is by FAR the overall winner.

Unless something drastically changes, Warhammer looks like a flop out of the gate.

WoW really isn't a bad game... its the community that ruins the game.
The whole "you can't tank, you aren't a protection warrior" or more precisely "you aren't a 70 prot warrior with X, Y, and Z gear" people are absolutely rediculous. The whole concept of challenge and trying something different have completely left the building when it comes to WoW.

We had enchanters (squishiest class in the game) tanking end-bosses and gods in the Plane of Time. (because we could) And you actually lost XP for dying in EQ1, and XP was immensely difficult to get by comparison to WoW!

 

1. Conan does look pretty awesome.
2. I like Warhammer, I really hope it doesn't flop.
3. A game like WoW all comes down to efficiency calculation in the end game. As I already said, it becomes more about spreadsheets and tabulation than any sort of expression or free experimentation (fun).
4. Do you remember before the enchanter mega charm was nerfed they could charm just about anything for a virtually unlimited amount of time provided it respawned somewhere? My group called those days the 'era of the enchanter' and I sorely miss that particular kind of awesome in the days of EQ.

 

Hey guys, First post on these forums. Anyways, I have some questions about FFXI. I use to play years ago and got rid of my windows laptop and had only a mac. so i played wow for years. now i'm waiting for my new windows lappy and thinking about getting back into ffxi. have they made any improvements to the game as far as travel time? economy? grouping and how long it takes to find a group? I miss the music, the graphics and the charm. these are things that ffxi will always do better than a western style mmo like w.o.w.

 

Eve-Online is a fantastic game, non sharded, harsh death penalty, player driven content and no elves or trolls ;-)

 

Holy crap! I used to play on TN!

Githane, The Steel Brotherhood (Alliance). Though I stopped playing a good while back and now play horde :-D

 

That is no longer the case. 20-60 bracket is leveled fastest by questing. Hence why no one grinds or does instances anymore.

Doing 3-4 quests can pretty much get you a level. Horde side, you can do about 10 quests in most level brackets and areas and get 2 levels. Thats inside of 2-3 hours.

I hit 50 on my pally with roughly 4 days play time (excluding farming and skill building). Hunter 47 with even less play time. On average I level every 2 hours or so.

Regardless, they're ruininig the end game by making it so fast to level. People need to start getting experience with how to work in parties so when they get to 70, they can perform half decent. On top of that, getting keyed to heroics is a freaking joke now. If you haven't grinded your rep high enough, you probably don't have the gear to do heroics in the first place.

 

I would recommend WOW even though its short on story. Its actually the only real MMORPG I've ever played and I find it very enjoyable. My only problem with it is the fact that there are so many annoying/immature people playing. I had to leave the trade channel because every time I would go into a city I would get mad if I started reading it. Its even more enjoyable if you play with people that you know in real life. Not to hijack this thread but are there any other Allerians out there (Bruciand here).

 

Out of curiosity, how can you possibly say it's short on story?

It has an extremely in depth lore with a TON of story behind it. I mean... it's HUGE.

But yeah... Trade sucks. They should have a general chat that spans cities. That way everyone can leave that when they start spamming murlock or chuck norris jokes >.<

And playing with people you know makes a HUGE difference. And it's great if you get into a guild with some really cool people.

 

I agree if you have played the Warcraft games there is actually alot of story to be found but you have to go looking for it, as far as everyday playing and beating quests there is really no story. The quests are there for expierence very few of them impact the game and the quests logs are so boring I haven't bothered reading them in a long time. I mean I don't know "why" I as a character in the game do any of what I do and in that respect its alot weaker than a tradtional RPG.

 

Well, I never much read the quest lines until recently. I find some of them very indepth and entertaining. Granted, they assume that you have pre existing knowledge of the world.

But gosh... some of the story lines are really killer. I love the whole Scarlet Crusade line (I got gear for my 70 pally so I could look like one ) and some of the duskwood story lines are amazing. Especially the one book you get there that talks about the worgen and the riders from Karazhan.

Yeah, if you skip over the quests then you will miss out on a lot. And I personally find it hard to read through all of them.

 

I dunno....the whole immersion thing in WoW quickly vanished for me when suits of armor and two handed swords drop from flying buzzards.

 

There are some great well fleshed out storylines in wow, unfortunately they are so diluted by "collect 50 of x" quests that you can easily miss them or just ignore the text as a lot of people do. Agreed on the Duskwood storylines, Stulvan is one of my favorite questlines.

Saying that, I feel if there is an area of improvement in wow it is more involving quest storylines - Id much prefer that to more raid content thats for sure (I dont raid). The Baldurs Gate series set a standard for storytelling that I would love to see a game like wow emulate, all they need need is decent writers. Blizzard certainly have the cash to employ them!

With respect to community issues, because the game is so accessable and popular, there are a lot of idiots, but you can ignore them or leave a channel.

If you manage to find a mature guild you can have a fantastic gaming experience.

 

1) WoW's lore is both tiny and paper-thin. WoW's predecessor EQ1 had storyline above and beyond anything WoW's tiny plotline had ever thought of... that and WoW keeps breaking its own lore from the previous games.
(yes, I know for balance in some cases... but alliance does NOT have shaman and blood elf paladins is just plain insanely stupid... the two represented differing ways to look at something) There ARE some nice storylines, but they do not come together to form a game world.

When walking through some ruins in EQ1, you actually had a feeling for how old they were when you read the lore behind it. If you dug far enough into the lore you could discover ancient plotlines of vampires and dark elven queens. In WoW, pretty much everything is "a hole in the wall with mobs in it". The stories are barely enough to explain why something exists now, let alone why it might have existed in the past. Timelines, legends and current plots don't add up and motivations for races are jumbled.

2) I honestly hope Warhammer turns it around... I have fond memories of Lineage2 and its 100vs100 sieges for battle-hardened and practiced PvP squads. (PvP at its best!) I truly hope another game can get PvP that much fun and maybe even get something like class balance somewhere near right.

 

As a tank I find myself doing more avoidance, mitigation, buff, and TPS math then I do actually playing the game. Even when I play the game I need to make sure that I have the right formula of gear on (tanking isn't getting one set or gear and forgetting about it) and whether to use my avoidance or mitigation or stamina or a mix set then actually having fun. Its a full time job not a fun factor anymore. Lets just say I really miss pre BC when WoW was actually fun and not me yelling at my computer because I didnt do my gear setup right for the encounter and took 200 more damage then I should have. Even if I dont die its still a frustration I dont want when Im gaming.

Ever since they lowered leveling time, lowered rep for heroics, removing keys and attunements (2.4), and handing out epics is when they ruined the game. Pre-BC when I got full t0 I was considered good, now having a full dungeon set means your bad and need to get more epics. Everyone and thier brother is epic'd out, and there are no real standards for doing hard content. For instance I entered my first heroic after lowering the rep requirement to honored, and as soon as I pulled the healer couldnt heal a normal instance. I armoried him and found lkess then 200+ healing and what looked to be the most retarded spec ever.

Basically Blizzard is gearing WoW so that even the bad players who dont try and dont care to learn how to play the ability to become epic. Now I fully understand a fresh 70 or a new player to WoW needs to have fun and all, but they need to some work before they can just jump into hard content.