I’d like a new (not WOW or SWTOR) MMORPG to play with my daughter.
Maddy is 12, highly skilled at things videogamish. She is very literate, not good at math.
Madz is hitting puberty and it’s hitting back. She’s going through a lot right now and at times we find it hard to connect. Typical teenagers stuff but she’s struggling more than most, and finding things she wants to do and find joy in can be hard. But one thing she would love to do is play video games with me, and we have PCs, and we’re good to go.
We’ve played WOW before but want something new. The only thing I would suggest is that space sims like EVE Online are definitely not her taste.
It’s based in the Elder Scrolls universe, obviously, So there is deep lore there. Monthly rate is free. You just have to buy some version of the game. You may want to look into ESO Plus, however. It costs a monthly fee (starting at $12.99), but you get a bunch of perks, including access to all DLC.
They just released another massive expansion, Summerset. Pretty big player base at about 2.5 million active players.
I will suggest, as I usually do, Guild Wars 2. The game is colourful and easy to enjoy. There are lots of things to keep you occupied. Map completion (exploration) is encouraged and every zone will have something unique to offer.
Once you have finished the main story quest there is more to do, including the Living Story which gets updated every few months, often with a new zone to explore. There are 2 types of PvP in the game (no PvP in the general environment- you won’t get ganked). There are dungeons and raids and all sorts of high end gear to craft.
I was going to recommend TES:O as well if you’re looking for a traditional “western” fantasy MMORPG. It’s probably the newest significant MMORPG of that style. There’s a number of Asian MMORPGs but they tend to be very grindy and favor more twitchy reflexes in combat.
If you want to get out of the fantasy milieu, there’s Secret World which went Free to Play a while back and offers a unique blend of monsters, myths and modern settings with a heavy emphasis on lore and puzzle solving.
If either of you have any attachment to Middle Earth (Like, you enjoyed the LotR movies or something) then LotRO is REALLY GOOD. It’s certainly a WoW derivative, but it does things just differently enough to make it feel right, and the storyline quests are surprisingly engaging.
There is a free play event for ESO starting tomorrow. It’s a special they are running for QuakeCon. So if you want to give it a test run, now is the perfect time.
Some advice: make a list of three* MMOs you’d like to play with her. Show her some gameplay videos from each, and say what you like about each. Then let her choose one. It will be the game she choose to play with you.
*It must be three. Two choices aren’t enough, and four or more becomes overwhelming.
It’s the only one that even attempts to deviate from the WoW model of quest hub leveling, it rewards exploration and it is designed from the ground up so running into another player is always a positive instead of them taking away from your resources. It is open ended and exploration heavy. The power curve is extremely small and with almost zero effort you can achieve about 95% of the power of a fully geared out character. It looks gorgeous. Combat is fun and action based. It releases story based free content every few months, most of the time this includes new zones. Every other game out there just looked at WoW and went “let’s do the fuck out of that but with minor meaningless tweak that usually makes it worse than WoW”
In addition to what DigitalC said about Guild Wars 2, I’ll add/expound:
No monthly fee, as has been mentioned.
It was designed to remove a lot of the drudgery from playing: instant fast travel; access the market from the field; decent inventory management; hardly any LFG (looking for group): whoever you are around when dealing with a boss or swarm or other system-generated task IS your group, automatically.
And XP for crafting and gathering, which makes a non-combat character somewhat viable.
I’m surprised you and your daughter have moved pass WoW. The game, in my opinion, is probably the best in the genre: Stable, huge player base, big world, etc. Guild Wars 2, as others have said, is a good alternative for a game set in a fantasy world.
I would discourage EVE Online. The learning curve is not a curve but a cliff. The game becomes fun if you’ve invested a significant – and I mean a significant – amount of time. The community is also toxic, and I’m sure, as a parent, you don’t want your daughter exposed to all the neckbeards and freaks who’ve inhabited that game for years.
Like others, I think Guild Wars 2 is probably the best choice. I disagree wholeheartedly with ESO, as I didn’t enjoy it at all, but these things are subjective.
However, I will also throw out there Final Fantasy 14, which is underappreciated I think. Lot of different classes, relatively easy to switch between them. The crafting mini-game can be fun. Dungeons are pretty easy, while being non-trivial.
Whilst this is true, and whilst I would also very much recommend GW2 (I play it quite a lot), I will say that free players are somewhat limited.
There are currently 2 expansions available - Heart of Thorns (which gives you gliding, as well as a huge chunk of story and maps) and Path of Fire (which gives you another huge chunk of story and maps, and mounts).
The mounts are huge in the game - not in size, but in how much they change what can do and how you go about pretty much everything. Playing Free To Play and watching everyone else zip by on their mounts might get dull. My daughter, who played on a Core Account when she was around 10, became disillusioned with the game because of this.