I think that picture just made me throw up a little in my mouth...

Wang - The problem with MOST free MMOs is they are either too grindy or to do anything you ahve to purchase stuff to go anywhere in it.

Try out Runescape although it can be a pretty young crowd. or check this:

http://downloadfullversionpcgames.com/blog/2007/06/17/100-of-the-best-le...

Alot of those games on that site are free and mutiplayer. Enjoy!

Yeah, that's something I'm really looking forward to.

I just got through doing a write-up for Shaiya, but I wouldn't suggest anyone play it. Same with RF Online, and Last Chaos. The extreme grinds in these games kill them, along with pretty bad balance issues. RF Online suffers worst from balance, as there are parts that are mandatory PvP, but if you don't go Accretian, you're pretty much setting yourself up to get ganked. LC and Shaiya suffer from having very little direction/story, and most of the quests are "kill X until your eyes bleed."

At the moment I am having a lot of fun with Project Torque, which is a free racing MMO, but if you're looking for something more along the lines of an RPG you're not going to get much out of it. There is a bit of a grind, and it sucks that a lot of the best cars/upgrades/items are AeriaPoints only (the ones you pay for), but it's still good free... and the grind isn't much worse than what I'd do in NFS or similar games when I'm looking to make money for upgrades, or progress the game. So far I haven't even come close to winning a race, but I've still been able to progress fairly well.

Also on the system at the moment is AO, which I've never really gotten into much, except for a really long time ago on a free trial of Shadowlands. I fell in love with the shade class, but unfortunately that one isn't included in the free-to-play version. I started up another agent, but I'm probably going to try another class and see if it grabs my attention a bit better. Agents in AO are a lot like Druids in WoW for me... I really like the concept, but for some reason it just doesn't hold me when it comes to playing one.

After that I'm going to give Twelve Sky another go, as I remember at least getting a little out of it when I played it. It's another heavy grind Korean MMO though, so not sure if I'll stick with it any longer this time than I did in the past.

Pur, Have you tried Dungeon Runner? There is another one called Two Moons or something like that. I briefly tried both out a long time ago. They both seemed to have some promise but it wasn't hard justifying $15 a month to play something much better.

2Moons is turning out to be the best free game I've played since I started into it a month ago. Very very diablo-ish. Some pretty interesting classes. Pretty good animations and combat system. Fairly complicated skill system.

Not very friendly to starting guilds though, as to make a guild you have to be level 50 and pay out something like 1,000,000 DIL (my level 14 character only has about 60k so far, and most of that is from picking up junk people were dropping on the ground to make room for better items).

I'll do a more in depth write-up on it in the next few weeks, but so far it's a good game in my book.

So far I only really have three gripes with it:
1. The big Acclaim banners that pop up. One's kinda big and pops up randomly while you're playing, and the other one takes up a large portion of the screen when you die... and when you log in. I'm not sure if this is their way of enticing people to pick up premium accounts ("Pay us and we'll remove the banners!"), but if that's what it is, they should consider some alternatives to that method. On the flip side, you get an XP gain bonus from viewing the banners, which makes me wonder if there's some way to disable them, even if I lose that bonus.

2. No character customization, besides your name. Every magician is identical. Every knight is identical. There is no gender choice here. Just would have been nice to have some more options in there.

3. Technical Difficulties. This is kinda a two part issue:
A. Server Lag - This is supposedly being taken care of, but it slows to a crawl at random times. At the moment they're doing heavy server maintenance to try to fix it though, so this might be a non-issue in a couple weeks.
B. System resources - I know my system isn't top of the line (in fact, very far from it), but if I turn the settings down, it doesn't look any better than Spellforce. Still, it bogs my whole system down after about 45 minutes if I'm switching zones a lot. A quick reboot fixes it, but it's annoying to have to go through that.

Sorry to 'mance, but I just installed RF Online last night. Seems decent so far. Anyone been playing it and able to give a review?

I've played some, and it seemed to be okay, if quite grindy. I think the biggest problem was that they were balancing the races based on their populations, but didn't separate the Western servers from the Asian ones. Since few people over there were playing the cyborg/mech race, they were made to be pretty powerful. On the Western servers, they're over-represented, so they usually win the PVP side of the game, which helps a lot with the crafting side of things. I played as an elvish character, but it was still pretty fun. I ultimately got distracted by shinier things.

At the moment I'm dipping my feet into the Perfect World International Closed Beta (but all it takes to get a key is to request one from a couple different MMO news sites. It has very good character customization, on par with Oblivion or AoC. It even lets you bring up a reference image and overlay it over your character's face so you can get it as close as you can. Gameplay's been pretty fun: not nearly as grindy as I expected, but I'm not that far into it yet. I've only played as a human so far (there are beastmen and winged-elves as well).
The ability to fly around the game world is one of the biggest selling points. The elves can obviously fly from the very start, but humans and beasts have to wait until quite a bit later to get their flying mounts. It does suffer from pretty standard graphics, though. Even with everything cranked it's not terribly impressive. It's not bad, but I'm also semi-playing AoC, and the level of pretty is markedly less. It does suffer from some of the things that usually put me off of Item-Mall MMO's. It's got some variation in armor, but not nearly as much as I'd like. The world map is somewhat clunky to use, the maps are set up in sections, and you can't center it on your position, just show where you are on that map. It does have a decent amount of variation in weapons: you can use dual blades, dual swords, longswords, or broadswords, polearms, poleaxes, clubs, spears, dual hammers, dual axes, and shields (haven't encountered any shields in game yet though). You can also get costume or dress-up clothes as well, at the moment they're only available through the item mall, and the item mall isn't available yet (it's set up, except that their billing system isn't set up/active yet, so you can't actually buy anything). They're debating whether or not to make everything in it free during the Beta, or give everyone X number of item store currency. I don't see why they don't, since all the character's are going to be wiped at the end of the closed beta.
All in all it's okay, better than some free-to-play's I've tried, and it's still in Beta and has a group of people on it who are more competent/devoted to their project than Funcom is to AoC, so it could turn out to be pretty good.

RF Online is right out! I played for a good while last night and was witness to the grindfest that it is. Skill advancement is based on usage, so in order to develop a given skill I had to use it over and over and over and over in combat. Balance seems to be achieved by potion spamming, too, so all in all it's a lot of 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2, 3.

Reminds me of why I prefer action games.

*Uninstall* and back to Exteel.

I didn't need a key for PW when I registered. I got one anyway from one site, but it never asked me for it.

I played some perfect world. Its alright. Unfortunately I seem to end up playing the same way with every character: nuke, nuke, melee.

I'm trying out Scion of Fate now... (taking forever to install despite small dload)

Haven't gotten my key for Runes of Magic yet. (curses!)

If anyone wants to try out [url=http://atlantica.ndoorsgames.com/center/default.asp]Atlantica Online, I've got 10 invites to the closed beta for it. So far it's pretty fun. It's a party based game, where you have your main character and x number of mercenaries, and sort of plays like a JRPG with battle screens and turns.