Meaning absoulutely no money. No “Starcraft is only $20”, as I’ve already discovered that most online players are cheaters who make it impossible to get better.
Preferable if they aren’t RPGs, but I imagine their are some good RPG MMORRPGs among the crap that I’ve played in the past.
Also, what are these MUDs that I’m hearing about, about?
If you don’t mind a text-only one, try out Achaea. It’s a completely free MUD (though I must admit I don’t know what “MUD” stands for). You can pay for some things, if you like, but they’re by no means essential elements to the game and you can do just fine without them.
The game very heavily emphasizes society–complete with politics, merchants, guilds, etc–instead of the usual formula of “Kill monster, get gold, buy weapons.” Plenty of races, too, which is ultimately what drew me in.
(And if you’re concerned about more-skilled players trashing you, don’t worry. It’s very newbie-friendly)
I played a MUD for a couple of years. They’re massively multiplayer (well, varying degrees of “massively”, but it’s not limited to just 8 players or anything like that) and online, and some of them want you to role play, but some don’t care.
The main difference is that it’s text-only. “You are standing next to a small stream deep in the woods,” that kind of thing. More detail in the better MUDs. Imagine Multiplayer Zork, if you remember Zork.
Oh, and MUD stands for Multi-User Dungeon. And the one I played was called Medievia. http://www.medievia.com
Mud stands for “Multi-User Dungeon”, “MMORPG” stands for “massively multiplayer online role playing game”
I do like some text based games, but I’d rather have a graphical reprenstation of something. It makes the world more real to me. Thanks for the link.
Hehe…
Try Progress Quest or the other joke MMORPGs.
They are about the same thing.
I don’t think any graphical ones are free.
MUDs are your best bet.
Let’s see, some free mmorpg’s out right now are:
And that’s all the ones I know about right now. I recommend trying out A Tale in the Desert, it’s a nice change from your typical power leveling mmorpg.
Hey, Ragnorak is fun, if just for the horrible translations. Yeah, it’s boring, overpoplated and lame, but something about it is just so cute!
They are having a three day trial starting tonight at eleven, but normally it is now pay-for play.
I’m not sure if it’s still free right now, but there was a game I found a couple of weeks ago called Priston Tales, which you can find here: http://www.pristontale.com/
It’s pretty much your classic hack’n’slash game, but set it in persistent, massive-multiplayer world. It’s almost exactly like Diablo II, except about 150 times slower. Judging by your OP, I’d say it wouldn’t be for you, but for anyone else who comes wandering in here looking for a decent mmorpg might want to check it out. I’ve been searching for these sorts of games for a while, and this is the best one I’ve come accross lately.
I think a good starting place for you would be mpogd.com. It lists a huge number of online games, and if you just go to the View Games menu and select by price, and after that, select completely free, you should have quite a list to work with, and hopefully you’ll find something that fits your tastes.
Good luck finding a free - and decent - MMORPG. If it’s gonna have any graphics at all, it’s gonna need bandwidth… and a Massively Multiplayer yadda yadda is gonna need, obviously, massive bandwidth. And that costs money.
Just wait a few years. None of 'em are worth the time investment right now, anyway. Although I like the step that SW:G is taking…
Anyway, in a decade or two, when they’ve got super-broadband with thirty gigabit per second downloads, then you’ll start getting the hugely MMORPG’s, for free. Until then, stick with single player. It’s the superior mode of gaming, anyway.
There’s also City of Heroes, which may turn out to be pretty good. It would seem that superhero comics provides a good jumping-off point for MMORPG gaming.
Another text-based morpg is Valheru MUD. www.valheru.com
Very nice starting point for mudding as the online amount is on average about 60 people (players are from all over the world though, so sometimes 20 sometimes 100). Not just for starting actually, I’ve been there full time for over 5 years now.
I’ve tried Planeshift. It’s currently in a very beta state. Don’t bother running it unless you’ve got a fairly decent computer. It’s somewhat choppy on my athlon 700, 384 mb ram, Radeon 8500. There’s not much to do in the game at the moment, but the designers seem to be doing some good work on it. It probably won’t be quite ready for primetime for another year or so.
If you can dig up a copy of ultima online, there are any number of free shards out there you can game on (e.g. game servers not hosted by Origin’s servers that don’t charge monthly fees). Those are usually pretty fun, although they’re also not always as polished as the official servers (Origin, understandably enough, won’t release the source for their server code, so the server had to be reverse engineered by enthusiasts). I understand there’s also similar work being done on Everquest.
Is Ultima Online, the game, free?
No, its not. All games cost 12-15 dollars a month to play, a pitance for all the entertainment you get from them.
Well, TheEndIsNear, a lot of critics of MMORPG’s complain about monthly fees. “I bought the game, why should I have to pay more?!?” Frankly, I think those kinds of people complain too much… lost in their selfish haze, they forget that a mere fifty bucks will HARDLY cover the cost of the bandwidth they’re gonna soak up.
I meant, does the actual game cost money? Ragarnok was mentioned as a free purchase, but paying a montly fee to play it.
And someone did mention free shards(servers, I think) in UO. I’d be willing to pay for it, if I had the money. Which I unfortunately don’t. Also, my computers pretty much useless when it comes to games after the year 2001 or so. UO is about 6 or so years old, so it would be nice to play a game that is apparently so much fun and wouldn’t crippl my system.
http://www.planeshift.it - Totally Free MMORPG