This is a repost of a response to a thread I made a couple days ago, but for my blog, since that post is probably gonna get buried and I dont want to have to ever fish it up. It took me a long time to write it all and later on I will re-format the list and include additional details that I didnt really have the time to embellish on.
<b><u><!--sizeo:4--><span style="font-size:14pt;line-height:100%"><!--/sizeo-->Free (North American Released) MMORPGs that I've Played<!--sizec--></span><!--/sizec--></u></b>
<i>Categorized by Distributor</i>
1. <b><u><a href="http://www.nexon.net/" target="_blank">Nexon</a></u></b> - One of the biggest distributors of free to play MMO style games internationally. Their game currency cards are available in every convenience store north of antarctica.. mostly due to the popularity of MapleStory as one of the earliest free-to-play MMO's. In my opinion, their games are the most playable without any cash investment.
- a. <i>Mabinogi</i> and its unusual rebirth system and persistent world environment is worth having a look at if you like to have many different options about what you can do to progress your character. Unfortunately now that it has several expansion content patches out, it's very hard to decide on a single character type progression as a new player with having different racial options. This wasn't a problem when the game originally went live for NA.
- b. <i>Dungeon Fighter Online</i> is a really fun 2d-ish hack and slash with some progression but I couldn't convince any of my friends to play it with me so I didn't get very far.
- c. <i>Vindictus</i> is more demanding on the PC than the other two popular Nexon games. It has a pretty nice 3d graphics engine for combat, cities, dungeons, etc, but it is all instanced gameplay in the vain of Guild Wars, although there's even less overworld environment.
- d. <i>MapleStory</i> is a 2d platformer that is pretty fun and characters are surprisingly customizable. The only thing I couldn't stand about this game was its fixed resolution and I think I <strike>wasn't able to play it in windowed mode</strike> was too stupid to figure out how to use windowed mode so I never really got further than around level 20.
- e. <i>Dragon Nest</i> is something that just recently went into open beta for all players with a Nexon account. I haven't started playing my character yet because I've spent too much time formatting this post!
2. <u><b><a href="http://www.gpotato.com/" target="_blank">gPotato</a></b></u> - Another distributor that's been around for quite a while, their first offering for NA players that I tried was Rappelz back in late '06. Since then they've released a few more of varying styles.
- a. <i>Rappelz </i>has a great 3d graphics engine, beautiful character equipment designs, early use of mounts, customizable skill/point distribution, pets, and a fairly decent interface for a game that seemed like it could've done so much better if not for two things. It needed to offer WASD/strafing movement as a PVP optional game, (it is click-to-move navigation) and it needed to have an engine that supported Widescreen full-screen resolutions. It did not do this the last time I tried to play it, sometime in (I think?) 2009, so I gave up on it permanently.
- b. <i>Allods </i>was their other major "realistic-style" 3D offering. It is plagued by a very high experience curve (it's too grindy, or quests reward too little so the progression is too slow) and certain necessities are enhanceable only by cash items. On the other hand, it's got a fantastic 3d engine, a level of quality that would surprise you from a WoW clone.
- c. <i>Iris Online</i> is a somewhat recent 3d-anime stylized standard "Kill X amount of Y, talk to person at Z" MMORPG that I enjoyed but my ex bf didn't so I didnt play it much. I'm too old to make friends in a new game just because I like it and my existing friends don't get into it.
- d. <i>Aika Online</i>, I installed, thought was graphically a great WoW clone, and I'm not certain but it seemed to make it apparent very early how very Cash-shop supported this pretty game was and I was deterred by that. It reminded me of a game called Zu Online that was very currency-trade dependent, which is all I recall for sure.
3. <u><b><a href="http://igg.com/" target="_blank">IGG (Internet Gaming Gate)</a></b></u> - This company has distributed a few well known ports of popular Chinese MMORPG's and one of their bigger successes is Tales of Pirates.
- a. <i>Zu Online</i> is a REALLY pretty cel-shaded style, but employs so many development shortcuts that it plays like a halfassed wow clone that's absolutely designed to encourage you to part with real money because it destroys the depth. When I played it, i was genuinely enchanted by character designs and armor designs and felt the quests were decent, but modes of transportation were weakly explained/graphically achieved.. and some of the gameplay sound effects were directly taken from World of Warcraft such as the looting sound. What i mean about the transportation being stupid is that your character was flown on an invisible path to other places and it just seemed so plain and halfassed. It's a shame that such a potentially immersive game was flawed in some of the aspects that wind up being a significant part of an MMORPG experience.
- b. <i>Angels Online</i> is adorable but not my style and it didn't seem to work out well for a high resolution display if I remember correctly.
4. <u><b>Perfect World</b></u> - All around great distributor of Chinese MMORPG's, also very easy to find game currency cards for them at convenience stores, drug stores, and such. Several of them have very similar interfaces and features but strongly different themes.
- a. <i><a href="http://eso.perfectworld.com/" target="_blank">ESO (Ether Saga Odyssey)</a></i> may be too "cute" for most but I found it pretty fun, it was so colorful and the starting music didn't suck, so I kept at it and snared my friend into levelling a dragoon up to play with my caster. It's got a really intricate character stat system right from the very creation when you choose its birthday and stuff, a lot of which isn't well-explained by the Wiki due to lack of willing and helpful translators. Or so it was a year ago ish? It has a strong PVP element, and though the level cap is a very high number (over 100) people of fairly broad level ranges PVP effectively. Guild systems in this game have limited membership, but they can band together to form permanent alliances which are fairly interesting. Their handling of Real Money Trade (i.e. RMT, Gold selling) is a very clever in-game system through which you can sell a secondary currency used for the purchase of Cash Shop items (mostly costumes, mounts, etc) back to other players for in-game currency. So higher level players who can farm the in-game currency easily can earn cash shop items by selling to lowbs that just want the money for player shops/trades/etc. --silly note-- Also, near the first main city, there are these strange monsters that look like cheerios with tongues. I actually figured out that they are chinese coins with tongues. But before I figured that out my friend started calling them Soviet Cheerios (In soviet russia, cheerios eat YOU!)
- b. <i><a href="http://jd.perfectworld.com/" target="_blank">Jade Dynasty</a></i> has all of the things I loved about ESO gameplay such as auto-walk-to-quest-objective and good music to go with the lovely environment. Sadly my friend was so frustrated with the wall he hit as a Dragoon in ESO he refused to try it with me and so I gave up. This game's art style is completely different from the "Cutesy" of ESO, and if I was starting fresh in both I'd go with Jade Dynasty over ESO.
5. <i><a href="http://www.ragnarokonline.com/" target="_blank">Ragnarok Online</a></i> by <u><b>Gravity Interactive</b></u> - Highly recommended, there's also a Ragnarok-themed DS game (single player) and I'm looking up RO 2 myself now.
6. <i><a href="http://luminary.ndoorsgames.com/center/default.asp" target="_blank">Luminary (Rise of the Goonzu)</a></i> by <b><u>nDOORS</u></b> - I played this a bit when it was originally launched as Goonzu, very interesting style but I got sucked into Mabinogi very soon after I started. They had a pretty cool crafting system and the isometric 2d graphics. You can literally gain political influence and have leadership over part, or much of the populace in this game.
7. <i><a href="http://www.lotro.com/" target="_blank">Lord of the Rings Online</a></i> by <u><b>Turbine</b></u> - Great game, I had purchased it when it was a Pay-to-play release in 2007. My head hurts too much to go into great detail, it's a mostly PVE game though, obviously has a strong storyline with its theme. It has a great 3d engine that scales beautifully with good hardware. It's definitely possible to get plenty out of the game while spending very little, but I would just recommend looking up a guide on earning Turbine Points through gameplay. Features the standard "wow-clone" interface and class options but only one player faction. My favorite part of this game is player housing but because I stopped actively playing I went bankrupt on the upkeep of my home <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/frown.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid="
" border="0" alt="frown.gif" />
8. <i><a href="http://cloudnine.netgame.com/" target="_blank">Cloud Nine</a></i> by <u><b>Netgame </b></u> is a really nice anime-styled wow clone with decent classes, PVP, and mounted combat.. zero complaints about it, it's everything I could ask for in a "Cute" MMO. I just play pay-to-plays or non MMORPG games more often nowadays.
9. <i><a href="http://ghostx.gamekiss.com" target="_blank">GhostX</a></i> by <b><u>GameKiss</u></b> is a strangely styled game, very fun, game. Your weapon is your pet, if I remember correctly, in this futuristic (post-apocalyptic?) game.. it also has rather low system requirements as far as free MMO's go, this is a game I've seen as "Playable" on most netbooks.
Last but not least, I must list this, of all the games I've listed this is the only one that isn't around for making profit. It's a fan supported private server.
<u><b><a href="http://schtserv.com/" target="_blank">Schthack Server</a></b></u> <i>Phantasy Star Online Blue Burst</i> (originally developed by Sega, of course). If you're as good at reading through a forum system as I'd hope you are, being here, it's easy to get the proper game package downloaded for any windows since XP, and get it working. They also permit players with older versions of Phantasy Star Online to use their server to play online mode (Dreamcast, Gamecube, XBOX original, PC PSO v1/v2) but it isn't possible to interact cross-platform. Cheating is allowed on all platforms except for Blue Burst itself since they can't really monitor older versions.
<b><u><!--sizeo:4--><span style="font-size:14pt;line-height:100%"><!--/sizeo-->Free (North American Released) MMORPGs that I've Played<!--sizec--></span><!--/sizec--></u></b>
<i>Categorized by Distributor</i>
1. <b><u><a href="http://www.nexon.net/" target="_blank">Nexon</a></u></b> - One of the biggest distributors of free to play MMO style games internationally. Their game currency cards are available in every convenience store north of antarctica.. mostly due to the popularity of MapleStory as one of the earliest free-to-play MMO's. In my opinion, their games are the most playable without any cash investment.
- a. <i>Mabinogi</i> and its unusual rebirth system and persistent world environment is worth having a look at if you like to have many different options about what you can do to progress your character. Unfortunately now that it has several expansion content patches out, it's very hard to decide on a single character type progression as a new player with having different racial options. This wasn't a problem when the game originally went live for NA.
- b. <i>Dungeon Fighter Online</i> is a really fun 2d-ish hack and slash with some progression but I couldn't convince any of my friends to play it with me so I didn't get very far.
- c. <i>Vindictus</i> is more demanding on the PC than the other two popular Nexon games. It has a pretty nice 3d graphics engine for combat, cities, dungeons, etc, but it is all instanced gameplay in the vain of Guild Wars, although there's even less overworld environment.
- d. <i>MapleStory</i> is a 2d platformer that is pretty fun and characters are surprisingly customizable. The only thing I couldn't stand about this game was its fixed resolution and I think I <strike>wasn't able to play it in windowed mode</strike> was too stupid to figure out how to use windowed mode so I never really got further than around level 20.
- e. <i>Dragon Nest</i> is something that just recently went into open beta for all players with a Nexon account. I haven't started playing my character yet because I've spent too much time formatting this post!
2. <u><b><a href="http://www.gpotato.com/" target="_blank">gPotato</a></b></u> - Another distributor that's been around for quite a while, their first offering for NA players that I tried was Rappelz back in late '06. Since then they've released a few more of varying styles.
- a. <i>Rappelz </i>has a great 3d graphics engine, beautiful character equipment designs, early use of mounts, customizable skill/point distribution, pets, and a fairly decent interface for a game that seemed like it could've done so much better if not for two things. It needed to offer WASD/strafing movement as a PVP optional game, (it is click-to-move navigation) and it needed to have an engine that supported Widescreen full-screen resolutions. It did not do this the last time I tried to play it, sometime in (I think?) 2009, so I gave up on it permanently.
- b. <i>Allods </i>was their other major "realistic-style" 3D offering. It is plagued by a very high experience curve (it's too grindy, or quests reward too little so the progression is too slow) and certain necessities are enhanceable only by cash items. On the other hand, it's got a fantastic 3d engine, a level of quality that would surprise you from a WoW clone.
- c. <i>Iris Online</i> is a somewhat recent 3d-anime stylized standard "Kill X amount of Y, talk to person at Z" MMORPG that I enjoyed but my ex bf didn't so I didnt play it much. I'm too old to make friends in a new game just because I like it and my existing friends don't get into it.
- d. <i>Aika Online</i>, I installed, thought was graphically a great WoW clone, and I'm not certain but it seemed to make it apparent very early how very Cash-shop supported this pretty game was and I was deterred by that. It reminded me of a game called Zu Online that was very currency-trade dependent, which is all I recall for sure.
3. <u><b><a href="http://igg.com/" target="_blank">IGG (Internet Gaming Gate)</a></b></u> - This company has distributed a few well known ports of popular Chinese MMORPG's and one of their bigger successes is Tales of Pirates.
- a. <i>Zu Online</i> is a REALLY pretty cel-shaded style, but employs so many development shortcuts that it plays like a halfassed wow clone that's absolutely designed to encourage you to part with real money because it destroys the depth. When I played it, i was genuinely enchanted by character designs and armor designs and felt the quests were decent, but modes of transportation were weakly explained/graphically achieved.. and some of the gameplay sound effects were directly taken from World of Warcraft such as the looting sound. What i mean about the transportation being stupid is that your character was flown on an invisible path to other places and it just seemed so plain and halfassed. It's a shame that such a potentially immersive game was flawed in some of the aspects that wind up being a significant part of an MMORPG experience.
- b. <i>Angels Online</i> is adorable but not my style and it didn't seem to work out well for a high resolution display if I remember correctly.
4. <u><b>Perfect World</b></u> - All around great distributor of Chinese MMORPG's, also very easy to find game currency cards for them at convenience stores, drug stores, and such. Several of them have very similar interfaces and features but strongly different themes.
- a. <i><a href="http://eso.perfectworld.com/" target="_blank">ESO (Ether Saga Odyssey)</a></i> may be too "cute" for most but I found it pretty fun, it was so colorful and the starting music didn't suck, so I kept at it and snared my friend into levelling a dragoon up to play with my caster. It's got a really intricate character stat system right from the very creation when you choose its birthday and stuff, a lot of which isn't well-explained by the Wiki due to lack of willing and helpful translators. Or so it was a year ago ish? It has a strong PVP element, and though the level cap is a very high number (over 100) people of fairly broad level ranges PVP effectively. Guild systems in this game have limited membership, but they can band together to form permanent alliances which are fairly interesting. Their handling of Real Money Trade (i.e. RMT, Gold selling) is a very clever in-game system through which you can sell a secondary currency used for the purchase of Cash Shop items (mostly costumes, mounts, etc) back to other players for in-game currency. So higher level players who can farm the in-game currency easily can earn cash shop items by selling to lowbs that just want the money for player shops/trades/etc. --silly note-- Also, near the first main city, there are these strange monsters that look like cheerios with tongues. I actually figured out that they are chinese coins with tongues. But before I figured that out my friend started calling them Soviet Cheerios (In soviet russia, cheerios eat YOU!)
- b. <i><a href="http://jd.perfectworld.com/" target="_blank">Jade Dynasty</a></i> has all of the things I loved about ESO gameplay such as auto-walk-to-quest-objective and good music to go with the lovely environment. Sadly my friend was so frustrated with the wall he hit as a Dragoon in ESO he refused to try it with me and so I gave up. This game's art style is completely different from the "Cutesy" of ESO, and if I was starting fresh in both I'd go with Jade Dynasty over ESO.
5. <i><a href="http://www.ragnarokonline.com/" target="_blank">Ragnarok Online</a></i> by <u><b>Gravity Interactive</b></u> - Highly recommended, there's also a Ragnarok-themed DS game (single player) and I'm looking up RO 2 myself now.
6. <i><a href="http://luminary.ndoorsgames.com/center/default.asp" target="_blank">Luminary (Rise of the Goonzu)</a></i> by <b><u>nDOORS</u></b> - I played this a bit when it was originally launched as Goonzu, very interesting style but I got sucked into Mabinogi very soon after I started. They had a pretty cool crafting system and the isometric 2d graphics. You can literally gain political influence and have leadership over part, or much of the populace in this game.
7. <i><a href="http://www.lotro.com/" target="_blank">Lord of the Rings Online</a></i> by <u><b>Turbine</b></u> - Great game, I had purchased it when it was a Pay-to-play release in 2007. My head hurts too much to go into great detail, it's a mostly PVE game though, obviously has a strong storyline with its theme. It has a great 3d engine that scales beautifully with good hardware. It's definitely possible to get plenty out of the game while spending very little, but I would just recommend looking up a guide on earning Turbine Points through gameplay. Features the standard "wow-clone" interface and class options but only one player faction. My favorite part of this game is player housing but because I stopped actively playing I went bankrupt on the upkeep of my home <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/frown.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid="
" border="0" alt="frown.gif" />8. <i><a href="http://cloudnine.netgame.com/" target="_blank">Cloud Nine</a></i> by <u><b>Netgame </b></u> is a really nice anime-styled wow clone with decent classes, PVP, and mounted combat.. zero complaints about it, it's everything I could ask for in a "Cute" MMO. I just play pay-to-plays or non MMORPG games more often nowadays.
9. <i><a href="http://ghostx.gamekiss.com" target="_blank">GhostX</a></i> by <b><u>GameKiss</u></b> is a strangely styled game, very fun, game. Your weapon is your pet, if I remember correctly, in this futuristic (post-apocalyptic?) game.. it also has rather low system requirements as far as free MMO's go, this is a game I've seen as "Playable" on most netbooks.
Last but not least, I must list this, of all the games I've listed this is the only one that isn't around for making profit. It's a fan supported private server.
<u><b><a href="http://schtserv.com/" target="_blank">Schthack Server</a></b></u> <i>Phantasy Star Online Blue Burst</i> (originally developed by Sega, of course). If you're as good at reading through a forum system as I'd hope you are, being here, it's easy to get the proper game package downloaded for any windows since XP, and get it working. They also permit players with older versions of Phantasy Star Online to use their server to play online mode (Dreamcast, Gamecube, XBOX original, PC PSO v1/v2) but it isn't possible to interact cross-platform. Cheating is allowed on all platforms except for Blue Burst itself since they can't really monitor older versions.
