EverQuest has actually changed a lot in recent years. It is extremely duo friendly these days and free-to-play on top of that. There are somewhere around 19 expansions of stuff to do now. Free to play players have access to around 16 of those.
You can now hire NPCs known as mercenaries to fill needed group roles: tanking, healing, or damage. They open up tons of content to any duo. If your duo’s classes complement each other (Shaman / Shadow Knight), you can likely go through nearly all of the game’s group content.
On the downside, the game has a bit of a learning curve if you’re just starting out. It’s still light on story and tends to be more grindy than modern MMOs though nothing like the horror stories of the game’s early days.
It’s worth noting for The Secret World that while you can’t respec in the usual sense (remove all the points, put them into new spots), if you want to make a new spec you can just go back and redo some old missions, get more points, and make an additional build. It’s kind of a hassle but if you’re still pretty low level - or if you aren’t totally changing both specialization areas - you can make this extra spec in not too much time and effort, plus by doing the quests you’ll be getting gear for the new spec too. By the end of the game you’ll have filled all the spec points out anyway.
I found that when I hit around level 6 or so, it was harder to find Free-to-play quests, and when you get above 10, it gets increasingly harder to play through with 1-2 players. Now, there are people who DO it, but then again, there are people who can hit major-league pitching - it’s not easily done, and takes a lot of practice/experience. Hell, there are raids for groups of 12 people, and they have some of the best loot.
I’ll be reading this thread for suggestions, because I’ve had trouble grouping with people in Dungeons & Dragons Online (DDO). I’m not really an extrovert myself, and worse, the two groups I’ve played with ended up taking the game either less or more seriously than I did. Seems hard to find a balance. If I were more extroverted and played in larger guilds, there would be a larger pool of people to draw from, and could find people with the same level of interest more easily.
I miss DDO sometimes. Had a lot of fun in it, and I had several characters, mostly Sorcerers. Even reincarnated one of them.
One game I’ve found that isn’t duo-friendly, at least not at lower levels: Age of Conan. I’ve been dabbling at this game lately (it’s one of those that’s been sitting on my hard drive for years and now that it’s F2P I pop in every now and then) but the majority of the good quests from levels 1-20 are solo quests. You literally can’t do them with a friend–there’s a “day” and a “night” mode and the night mode is all you, baby. There are quite a number of daytime duo-able quests, but I believe that it’s not possible to get off the starting island until you’ve completed the solo quest chain, and it’s long. (My toon is currently level 17, and still stuck on Tortage.)
I think this is bad design on the part of Funcom, because frankly the AoC user interface sucks bigtime. It’s very unintuitive beyond the simple “hit a number key to hit stuff” bit. I’m just playing because I’m bored with WoW and I wanted something new to mess around with for a few days.
Tortage goes to level 20 and is by all accounts the best part of the game. I guess that wouldn’t apply to someone who really wants to duo though. After that the solo personal history quests happen once every ten levels. At least that was how it worked years ago when i played.
In evaluating whether a game is good for duo play, I tend to look at several factors:
travel time – how long does it take to get together?
ability to share quests and quest rewards – how much time am I going to spend tagging along but getting no benefit?
power differential by level – how much of a problem is it to have differences in levels between characters? Will I get killed if I’m 3 levels below?
flexibility of builds – can you solo and duo with the same build? If you’re exclusively duo, this is less of a problem.
The most annoying thing about trying to play MMOs with other people is keeping characters at the same level and in the same place. Dangerosa and I play WoW together, but she plays more than I do, so she keeps a stable of characters that are level-appropriate for the ones I have.
The king of MMOs for playing as a duo was City of Heroes, because it had very little travel time due to travel powers and because super-sidekicking automatically leveled all players in a group to the level of the leader. Sadly, it’s gone.
SWTOR is pretty good for duo play, at least by my standards. Dangerosa doesn’t care for it, so we play WoW.
Well, no one should HAVE to work that hard at a game. Hitting a baseball at the major league level is said to be one of the most difficult things in sports, so it was meant to illustrate that soloing high-level quests, when your character is at the same level, is not an easy, common task.
It’s of no interest to me either, but I’ve played with people who could do ridiculous soloing. When one guy gamed with us, we pretty much just followed behind and grabbed loot. There may be one thing in the quest we’d have to help with.
Travel time to “unite a party” is trivial. You either do or skip the instanced intros (i suggest playing them the first time through, they’re fun and flavorful, will level your character to around 5, and teach you about the game, but they’re not required.) and then you can get a “Quick Travel” horse ride from any starting region to any other starting region for pennies that even a virtually completely new character will be able to earn in minutes (If you did the instanced intro, you’ll already have more than enough money for your trivial travel fee.)
Shared quests are rewards: Aside from the very occasional “solo only” story instance, all quests can be done cooperatively, and can be shared if the recipient meets the pre-reqs (So if a quest is part of a line that goes Quest1->Quest2->Quest3, you won’t be able to have Quest2 shared with you until you’ve finished quest1). All rewards are per-person.
Level Power differential is…average to low. Levels make a good difference, but overall the game isn’t that HARD, so if you’re a few levels behind, it’s not a big deal.
Flexibility of builds - irrelevant. You can change your “build” any time by going to a bard (Which can be found in nearly all major quest hubs) and paying some silver to switch your traits around. Depending on your class and your traits you may not even care enough to bother retraiting since you might be perfectly fine soloing in your “group” build. (Again, the game is not hard.)
No game is really going to solve this without becoming hopelessly gamey, IMHO.
The CORRECT solution for this “problem” is just about always for the person who plays more to keep one character as the character they play with their friends, and another character the character they play when they’re solo.
Guild Wars 1 & 2 are both near-perfect for duo play. My wife and I run in tandem easily through nearly everything. The classes can also provide excellent duo synergy as well, so it really feels like a partnership. GW2 especially is wonderfully as a duo, although it has some “solo” quests and instances, your partner can still join for playing alongside even if they aren’t earning that particular solo quest reward.
City of Heroes did, but part of that was the convenience of having a precedent in the milieu - guest-starring in someone else’s comic and operating at the same power level is a recurring theme in superhero comics. Yes, it’s “gamey” to change power level, but it fit the superhero motif, so it worked.
I agree that other games don’t really have a good way to bring different players to the same power level. Which is too bad, because it makes teaming with your friends a lot easier.
There are still a few hours left in the Marvel Heroes open beta weekend. It’s from the guy behind the first two Diablos and will be free to play when it goes live so check it out.
Dangerosa and I started playing Neverwinter over the weekend. It’s like WoW (of course), but offers a lot more customization of character look, which is nice. And it feels more “super” at least through the first 14 levels. I think we may have found our new game to play together.
Up until last year, the question of “which MMO lets me play the way I want to play and rewards me for it?” was always best answered “City of Heroes.” We used to do solo, duos, and small groups through TONS of content quite happily. All sorts of “classes” and levels working together well.
Yeah, reading your list here I was mentally chanting “COH! COH!” and then I got to your last paragraph.
I keep thinking, “one day someone else will employ some of the superior COH solutions in their new MMO,” but so far new MMOs seem hopelessly locked into tired old tropes and tired old programming. Still, hope remains that years from now, someone might aspire to be as sophisticated as the “old,” closed COH.
It’s not an MMO, but Diablo III is a great RPG for teaming up with partners and friends. I’m not sure what exactly you are looking for in the MMO experience (I don’t play them) but I am an introvert like you and don’t really care to play with strangers. My husband and I play Diablo III together very often, and frankly I think it’s a masterpiece. It will last a long time.
The missing one is the ability to team across levels - CoH’s super-sidekicking, with the whole team automatically adjusting in level to the level of the mission owner, was fabulous. I’m still not sure why it’s not being done in other games.
Update on Neverwinter - through 25, it’s still fun. There are a lot of touches that remind me of CoH, which isn’t too surprising, since Cryptic was the original designer of CoH - although there are some things that feel drawn from later years of CoH, post the departure of Emmert and company. We’ve played a couple of the “Foundry” quests, which are user-generated and a nice way to extend the life of the game.
I’m interested in a way that I haven’t been interested in an MMO since CoH closed. This is a good thing.
I’m glad to hear that LotRO is doing so well. I played very seriously from release until maybe Lorien when my life became less MMO-friendly. My wife was joking around with me the other day about playing again now that our son is getting older and I just laughed it off. But if it has maintained the high level of quality it had from years ago, I am definitely giving it another thought.
