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GrumpyCat @leminal.space

What are the best free mmorpgs for a beginner?

Not sure if this goes here or not?

Ive played a little bit of mmorpgs back int he day, that stars wars one to be exact, which felt more like walking sim more than anything. Im considering picking up old school runescape but im not sure if its good choice or not? What mmorpg that is free would you like to suggest to me a beginner?

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  • Warframe is an unconventional mmo, and there's actually a bit of rpg in there too, moreso than I would've expected coming in. It's great fun though.

    I will say the mandatory trading for weapon and frame slots is kinda annoying, but gets less annoying as you progress and get more access to better grinds.

    • Also not good if you get RSI, damn that game destroys fingers.

  • If you enjoy the old school vibe, City of Heroes has been revived through a community effort, and is free with all of the original content plus some new stuff. This has been given official blessing so it's not going to disappear suddenly.

  • Ffxiv has a lot of content available in the free trial but it is not really a "free mmorpg" since if you want to do content that released less than 6 years ago, or join/use FC guilds or linkshell chats, or trade, have any significant quantity of gil, get housing, or use player markets, then you have to buy the game and pay a subscription. Mahjong is free though and it's quite a good mahjong client.

    That said, it is a good way to figure out if you like the basic gameplay systems: the UI and menus which are very customizable, controls (switch to legacy if using M&KB), tab target combat and global cooldown, main scenario questing, instanced dungeons and normal mode bosses, unlocking multiple jobs to try out.

    All this with the caveat that basically all jobs at level 70 feel like an empty shell of the combat rotation of level 100, and high end content is only available and populated for the most recent patches + the 6 ultimate raids.

    • (cont.) Guild wars 2 is another mmo that is worth trying to see if you like the feel of the action combat. You can again play a whole lot free, but you do have to pay if you want the expansion content (which i feel is kind of diabolical to lock mounts behind max level expansion content). I also do not like that you can buy in game currency with real money, and then buy legendary (best in slot) weapons off the trading post with in game currency.

      Theres maplestory which is mainly singleplayer, just make sure you make your char on the reboot (non-p2w) servers. Scratches the itch.

      Honorable mention to private/classic servers like tera classic which i've been meaning to try out. The population being tiny is the most obvious factor but it is nice that the game has been preserved at all for people to play.

  • Old School Runescape i've had a decent bit of fun with and i'd recommend it. It takes a lot of reading, but there's a free option for you to try if you're unsure and it runs on damn near anything. Granted i'm not the target audience for MMOs. I usually hop in and dick around a little bit then pop out

  • I played Albion for a bit, it's quite fun and its free to play. I just started WoW Classic a couple of weeks back and I have never played it before, not too difficult and like some have said its free until level 20.

  • Unless you are playing purely for nostalgia, I would very much avoid runescape. It isn't a game for kids to play during typing class. It is very much an obnoxiously sweaty (set of) game(s).

    I think you can play the entire original campaign for FF14 for free? And FF14 is probably THE best theme park MMO out there. That said, my experience is "it is the best community on the internet" is very much marketing and you WILL have bad experiences during dungeons... which are mandatory for story progression. You can negate that if you join a clan but then you aren't really playing with The Community and are already into hardcore-ish play.

    I don't know where the free/paid demarcations are, but I would actually recommend Guild Wars 2 or Elder Scrolls Online for a newbie. The latter does suck if you want to do any crafting as a free player (and inventory management in general will be hell) but you are there for the overworld gameplay. And both GW2 and ESO are very much geared toward playing solo in a crowd. As in you'll walk around the overworld which is basically a single area with 10-20 other players. You'll do event quests together, see each other while you go to the store or walk toward an instanced area, and so forth. But you won't have to worry about someone telling you they are going to

    <REDACTED>

    your family because you didn't skip a cutscene or aren't holding aggro properly in newbie dungeon.

    If you get into those? You can maybe find a guild and play some of the higher level content. Or you can go pick up FF-MMO or WoW or even SWTOR (apparently it is still going).

    • As far as dungeons in FF14, at this point, I believe that basically every dungeon can now be done "solo" (that is taking 3 other NPCs with you to complete the dungeon). And the trials, I believe, mostly have that as well, though I'm 100% positive on all of them.

      But the point is: as far as dungeons go a player can get through them by themselves now. In fact, I think much of the main storyline content is now solo-able.

  • The cryptic mmos. Champions online, star trek online, and neverwinter are all fairly easy with it sorta getting harder along that list but even neverwinter is not super hard. They are free to play mmos and when I played it was completely possible to be competitive with mild grinding. In particular they have several events per year where mild grinding (10 or 20 minutes a day and maybe more like 2 or 3 if you don't alt) will get you high end stuff. Champions stuff is more about costuming to begin with and its top gear is easy to grind. You can make a support character where the passive effects are enough to help a team and I have pointed them out as good games for disabled (Can setup to not need fast reflexes or such) folks. The character does need to be well built but its not hard to learn and there are nice guides on steam. Star trek had an activer reddit community and guides strewn around. It gets a bit more complicated as it has space and ground which is sorta like two different games and your roles can change between them (sci is controllers and debuffers in space and ground but also ground healers, eng are space healers and buffers and ground pet masters and debuffers. honestly they all get mixed around. tac are dps ground or space. there are tons of generic modules that can be used across jobs). Your ship has more effect on your role to some degree and how its built. Fast tactical vs carriers vs behometh type and sci ships. I don't have allot with neverwinter but its made more arcadey. The mmo aspects go down as you go down the list to. champions has day/night cycles in the main area with traffic showing rush hour, ligths coming on as folks get home in their condos, and china town having nightly fireworks. Star trek had day/night on risa but got rid of it and by the time you get to neverwinter its sorta faux open world with most places being a series of trails. All the games allow you to grind for the in game currency but that is not the easy grind of the events and take more time but its a common enough award that if you do not pay attention for a few years you will find you had built up quite a bit from happenstance. Won't allow you to buy everything but eventually you can pick up some particular thing you may have wanted. Star trek also had events that gave away coupons to the store that pretty much would let you get almost anything without to much grind as long as you did not have to have the latest offerings. Now my experience with these where awhile ago. Not with champions you can choose a more comic book rendering or a more standard rending for game play. All are so old it should be practically impossible to have a machine that can't handle the requirements. I know folks complained it did not take enough advantage of gpu and did not require much of one but could hog cpu decently.

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