The most unique cool MMORPG that I can think of is probably Secret World Legends.
I got into the original incarnation back in beta almost 15 years ago, and even got a lifetime subscription (which was only available to get prior to release). And I certainly got my money’s worth. The game is free-to-play and still running despite its age.
Here is my breakdown of the game, but it’s a bit long and certainly a tangent to this thread, so I’ll hide the details:
Summary
If you aren’t familiar with it, the game takes place in the modern day real world, with the premise that many conspiracy theories and legends are actually real, just hidden. Fringe science is real, magic is real, monsters are real, etc. You don’t pick a class, you choose a secret society to join… The Illuminati, based out of New York, the Templars, based out of London, or the Dragons, based out of Seoul. You then take on missions for your faction and work your way through the storyline in various parts of the world. The main social hub of the game is actually within the “Hollow Earth”, called Agartha.
Instead of classes you learn weapons. Three kinds of melee weapons… Sword, hammer, or claws which are a sort of martial art with hand claws. Three kinds of firearms… Dual pistols, rifles, or shotguns. Three kinds of magic… Blood (which is like a vampiric voodoo magic), chaos (which bends reality) and elemental (which is your classic fireball/lightning bolt type stuff).
A build involves combining any two weapons and picking between available active and passive abilities for each weapon. There are easily thousands of potential builds. And each weapon plays very differently, and each has different mechanics so that you can synergize between the two in different ways. You can also learn and work your way through leveling up every weapon in the game if you spend enough time doing it (and of course I’ve done that). I used to spend hours coming up with my own builds. Combat is very action-oriented; you have to dodge around, maneuver, and there is no auto-aim or tab-targeting.
The world is very unique. The overall theme is like a mix of HP Lovecraft, Stephen King, and the X-Files. You start in a New England town besieged by a zombie outbreak (but with a fairly unique spin on the source and purpose of the zombies), then move on to taking on demons coming from portals to Hell, cultists and old gods in Egypt, zombies and werewolves in Transylvania, a kind of post-apocalyptic Tokyo haunted by ghosts and plagued with mutants, and then the last area is a savage wilderness in South Africa.
Missions are interesting… There is your standard “kill 10 bears and collect their teeth” sort of mission, but that’s only a fraction of what you have. You also have “sabotage” missions which feature little-to-no combat, but instead involve trying to stealth your way through an area solving puzzles (like disarming and/or avoiding traps, stealing something while an enemy isn’t looking, getting past security cameras). There are also what I consider to be the most unique which are “investigation” missions and require you to solve wide-ranging puzzles, which might resemble a scavenger hunt all over the map, or deciphering morse code, and some even require you to go to web sites outside of the game to solve them. (I think this is the only game I ever played that actually has a web browser built into the game so that you can look things up without having to leave the game.) There are also missions that feature a lot of cutscenes and play out almost like an interactive movie. I remember one that involved fighting on top of a train, and you not only have to deal with fighting enemies but not getting knocked off the train as you work your way through it.
And another unique aspect of the game is that you aren’t really a “good guy”. You represent a secret faction trying to gain power and beat other factions. You do good things along the way, such as defeating evil things and saving lives, but everything is still done with the goal of advancing your particular secret society’s aims to control the world.
Everything feels like it should be a single-player game, and you can solo for most of it, but there are guilds you can join (called “cabals”) and lots of content that require grouping up. World bosses, dungeons (which usually aren’t literal dungeons, just long instanced areas filled with strong enemies and bosses), raids, most of the standard stuff you’d expect from an MMORPG. And there is PvP between the three factions in battlegrounds, though I never found it particularly interesting, it’s just there if you want PvP. I always felt like they slapped that in the game so that people who need it could do it, it isn’t a big part of the game in any way, just something else to do. They also have regular events around the holidays like a typical MMORPG, but with a unique spin on it.
I do really think this might be the most unique MMORPG ever made. The only real problem is the last content update to the game was in 2018. They keep the game running, but they don’t really add anything of substance to it. And the storyline for the game ends somewhat abruptly, almost like watching a TV series that was canceled mid-season on a cliffhanger. But if you’ve never played it before, I strongly recommend checking it out.
