What is a fun mmorpg game

Depending on what you're looking for in an online game, FF14's endgame can be a little repetitive especially if you aren't interested in crafting or housing. But it's gorgeous world, emotional storytelling, and wide variety of activities set it far ahead of other MMOs in You can find the rest of our recommended MMOs below, but we also wanted to briefly mention some of the most promising upcoming MMOs to pay attention to.

Amazon's no-subscription-needed New World has changed a lot over the past few years of development and though it still looks promising we're beginning to worry. It's been delayed multiple times and is now coming in the spring of It wavers between being a proper MMO and just a really big multiplayer survival game. After the enormous failure of Amazon's other game, Crucible, it seems like Amazon still hasn't figured out what the New World should be.

What's never changed is the emphasis on massive PVP territory battles with 50 players on each side battling it out to control various forts and settlements scattered around the map. While I'll never say no to more PVP-focused MMOs, I'm also excited to check out New World's action combat, which actually requires carefully-timed dodges and melee attacks instead of memorizing complex hotkey rotations.

But given its numerous delays and constantly changing features, we're a little skeptical. Even so, New World could be a surprise hit and we're eagerly waiting to find out.

New World should launch this spring. It's been in development for years, but this space-faring MMO has some cool tech under its belt, especially in how it plans to handle thousands of players in a small area at the same time.

If you've played sandbox survival games like Empyrean or Space Engineers, you'll be fairly familiar with how Dual Universe works. Everything is destructible and how you can design vehicles and spaceships is completely up to you—as long as you have the resources and skills, of course. What's cool, though, is that Dual Universe takes that familiar survival sandbox and drops it into a massive galaxy where entire player alliances can cooperate or fight one another.

You can design ships and then sell blueprints to others, and there's even a LUA-based scripting language so you can create in-game automation for machines like autopilot protocols or advanced security systems that can also be sold to other players.

The ambitions behind Dual Universe are sky-high, but if it succeeds it might be the next big evolutionary leap the genre has been waiting for. In the world of MMOs, "theme parks" are that movie you like to put on in the background—the one you've seen a thousand times but still love. They don't push you into deep waters like most sandbox MMOs do, instead wrapping you up in a comforting and familiar blanket. They are games that, just like their name implies, are all about having fun as you tour from one attraction to the next.

Though they might rely on a time-worn formula, they can still conceal a surprise or two. These are often the most popular MMOs, and they've earned their reputations with every dungeon, every level, and every quest. No other MMO has had a greater impact on the genre and the entirety of videogames as a whole quite like World of Warcraft.

For that reason, putting it anywhere but first on this list just doesn't feel right—even if Final Fantasy 14 is still our best pick for the MMO of it's a tight race, however! Though it might be getting on in years, World of Warcraft continues to surprise.

Shadowlands, its latest expansion, returns to the glory of WoW's early years through a mix of ambitious new systems and one of the best endgames the MMO has ever had. Whether you love dungeons, raiding, player-versus-player battles, or just exploring a wonderfully charming world, World of Warcraft has you covered. In Shadowlands, there's also unique activites like Torghast, a roguelike dungeon that changes each time you enter it.

There's also fun events like Timewalking that let you revisit old expansion dungeons for cool loot, and World Quests that help you accomplish something meaningful even if you only have 20 minutes to play. There's not a lot of negative things to say about Shadowlands, though. Its story and questing feels tired, but each is such a small fraction of how you'll spend your time in Azeroth that it's hard to get too mad at them. That said, World of Warcraft's endgame is still very diverse and fun—even if it has frustrating flaws.

The path to its throne is littered with the bones of would-be usurpers, but World of Warcraft's unparalleled zeal for bringing the world of Azeroth to life is a force to be reckoned with. Final Fantasy 14's journey has been a long road full of disappointment.

Launching in to an overwhelmingly negative response, Square Enix refused to give up and rebuilt the whole game with a new team. The second iteration, A Realm Reborn, has done a better job of rekindling the love fans had for Final Fantasy better than any recent game in the series.

It's at once unflinchingly dedicated to following in World of Warcraft's footsteps while also introducing a host of refreshing ideas—the best being the innovative class system. Gone are the days of needing a new character for each class: Final Fantasy 14 let's you swap between them whenever you please and there's even room to borrow abilities between classes, just like in the classic Final Fantasy Job system.

But Final Fantasy 14 isn't just about combat, either. Its story starts slow but builds into a grand epic spanning continents across its three expansions, easily rivaling any of the classics like Final Fantasy 7 or It's a journey worth taking, if you have the time, but one thing to keep in mind is that 14's endgame, while offering challenging and memorable boss fights, is scarce.

Updates come at a steady pace, but you'll run the same dungeons and raids dozens of times. Now is a great time to consider playing Final Fantasy 14, though. It's Shadowbringers expansion released in and is easily the best one yet, telling a dramatic and heartfelt story in a parallel universe.

While theme parks can be great, not everyone wants to be led by the hand everywhere they go. These missions focus on finding the correct strategy to come out on top. Taking on enemies as a captain of a ship is no small task. The immediately recognizable aura of the game will be a delight to fans and newcomers alike. Luckily the game is not overly reliant on fan service.

Although it may draw gamers in, they will certainly stick around for the brilliant gameplay on display. The two major gripes that people tend to have with this game are poor voice acting and somewhat repetitive gameplay.

Black Desert has been subject to controversy throughout the years. Players will likely need to sink many hours into the game for a solid return. What makes Black Desert such an appealing gaming experience is the freedom to do just about anything you could imagine. Tools are abundant when it comes to character creation. Your character can take on several trades such as fishermen or blacksmith.

Another aspect that sets Black Desert apart is the intricate crafting system. Players can craft many items and objects that can be used for daily tasks or fighting off enemies. Players can buy a property and turn it into resource farms. For example, players can turn a property into a fishery. In addition, players can hire automated workers to operate these farms so to speak.

Leveling up your automated workers is a fantastic strategy in Black Desert. The combat system makes battles a whole lot of fun. Although some of the bosses require a ton of effort and skill. RuneScape launched to the public in as a low-res browser game with only a few hundred players and 2-D sprites for monsters, but several years later it boasted over a million paying monthly subscribers. The game was recently reincarnated as RuneScape 3 , which is as far as it gets from the primitive game many players grew up with.

It now has a visually-improved HTML 5 client with graphics accelerations, orchestral music, some voice-acted quests with cutscenes, and a fully-customizable UI. The first moments of playing RuneScape 3 are much different than in the past. Rather than force new players to muddle through an elaborate and text-heavy tutorial island as in past versions, RuneScape 3 starts off with a voiced cutscene. Players are given a quick demo of one chosen combat style Melee, Magic, or Ranged before being dropped into Burthorpe, which has been redesigned as a training area for new characters.

Existing players logging in for the first time since the update will see a cutscene introducing the story behind the Sixth Age of RuneScape , with the gods Zamorak and Saradomin returning to raise armies and do battle. RuneScape has always been about completing the latest quests, and time not spent questing or PvPing is usually spent grinding up skills to meet the requirements for the next quest you want to do. The skills grind now feels a lot more forgiving than it was in RuneScape 2 , and winning the occasional XP lamp in your daily Squeal of Fortune spins certainly helps.

You can also now set a quest as your currently active task to keep track of it and set a destination on the map to get a handy direction arrow on the minimap. Though the game can technically be played in a browser, the standalone client runs a lot more smoothly and comes with all the high-resolution textures, anti-aliasing, and bloom effects of the online HTML 5 version.

Star Wars: The Old Republic is fascinating. Next to World of Warcraft , it has somehow become the MMORPG tens of thousands have invested the most time into, despite not always being sure what to think of it.

In , it was a game at odds with itself, and while so much has changed since then, that has not. But that conflict has also led to seismic shifts, with BioWare dragging it in unexpected directions. People keep coming back and, with a new expansion on the horizon, you may be contemplating the same. You should. Things have progressed quite a bit since those days, however. Perhaps most like Knights of the Old Republic 2 , the later chapters make the Star Wars universe and the Force feel strange again.

All the XP bonuses and complimentary boosts mean that subscribers can get to the original level cap purely doing the class and planetary quests. Everything else is a crapshoot. The actual objectives for every kind of quest rarely deviate from the most uninspired MMO tropes of fetching and killing, so most of the heavy lifting is done by story and characters. After a long break, the war between the Empire and Republic has flared up again, and a new storyline has kicked off that takes players to new worlds like Ossus and Dantooine.

Along with new missions, operations and special events, the latest string of updates has also given additional attention to PvP, introducing new maps, modes, and free-for-all PvP areas. The truth is, there is no singular answer to that question. Those have to be compared and matched up with the millions of people who all have their own unique preferences. While fantasy is quite prominent in the industry, there are many other genres represented in this list, including but not limited to sci-fi EVE Online , medieval RuneScape 3 , and so on.

There are plenty of MMORPGs out there that either praises combat completely or downplay it in favor of social, crafting, and economic elements. RuneScape 3 comes to mind as a decent low-combat alternative. Assuming that combat is okay with you or a big part of the appeal of MMORPGs, then you have to come to grips with the fact that not all combat is created equal.

Generally, there are two major categories of combat styles: traditional and action combat. Traditional combat is the older style that allows you to pick one target and then go through your Hotbar skills to defeat it, usually with a global cooldown keeping you from just spamming all of the buttons at once. Action combat usually utilizes fewer skills in favor of quicker moves, constant movement, and reflex decisions.

A game like Guild Wars 2 straddles the line between both formats but is a good example of the style. MMORPGs will tend to lean one way or the other, and which appeals more to you will sway your opinion greatly. Sandboxes are appropriate for players who would rather use tools to make their own content and progress their own way, while theme parks adhere to a more defined path that allows for dev-crafted experiences and stories think expansion packs and DLC in other games. So, maybe you want a gritty fantasy world like the upcoming New World , a cut-throat environment like EVE Online, or a voyage into the macabre like Black Desert Online.

Just make sure you understand the ratings that these games stand at. Having friends and family to connect within a game can be a wonderful asset to your MMORPG career, strengthening relationships while having tons of fun along the way.

Alternatively, you could plug into a multi-game community to provide that social network while you can sample each of the games that community supports. This genre expands on the themes and common features of a standard role-playing game. In a role-playing game, players would choose a character and develop their skill set while completing tasks and processing through the game.

An MMORPG takes these game features and puts them in an online setting where players interact with each other from all around the world. Two of the most popular game settings and themes include fantasy and science-fiction. Even when the player steps away from the game, it continues to develop and evolve in various ways thanks to the active player base. It is truly astonishing to think that World of Warcraft was released way back in Its popularity has barely diminished as a cultural phenomenon over the years.

When the game was released it was an addictive gaming experience like no other. It was also incredibly easy for new players to jump in and enjoy the action. When a massive existing player base comes together as it did for World of Warcraft it takes an extremely long time for it to whittle down. In fact, the race is not a close one by any means. Its tenure as a pop culture phenomenon has led many gamers to venture into this virtual world.

As a game that is highly accessible to newcomers, it makes sense for it to house the largest number of active players. There is a very low floor when it comes to adapting to the game as a newcomer. Much of its renewed success in was thanks to the release of a brand new expansion called Shadowlands.

No plans to release a third game have been announced as of yet, and a new expansion is on the way for Destiny 2 that will add plenty of brand new missions, loot, raids, and so much more. The game can be a bit uninteresting to play alone but it is a blast with friends. There are also plenty of online communities to do raids and multiplayer content. Released in and still going strong, Anarchy Online based in a sci-fi world rather than one based on Western mythology.

It was produced by a company based in Norway and predates most of the entries on this list. Players assume the role of colonists on a hostile planet known as Rubi-Ka, populated by demonic aliens and dotted with ancient ruins and harsh geography. In addition to other quests and activities, their main goal is to find and collect a mineral called Notum while they advance their various skills.

For those looking for their Elder Scrolls fix while they wait for the next main game to be released, The Elder Scrolls Online can fill that void. It's quite similar to Skyrim visually and takes a lot of the locations, races, and abilities from previous games. The Elder Scrolls Online has a growing community that exists on both console and PC and offers a ton of content with more being added annually. It's great for both casual players and for those looking for a more hardcore experience.

The game is fairly unique compared to other entries in the genre and plays quite a bit faster than most of them. It's a welcome change for players that aren't a fan of slow combat systems in other MMORPGs and are looking for more fluid and engaging action. Guild Wars 2 has a big focus on its immersive storyline, which is extremely well written. Guild Wars 2 also has endlessly fun PvP and PvE content that takes advantage of its fast and fluid combat system.

While Guild Wars 2 is not currently anywhere near the height of its popularity when it was first released, it's still worth a shot for anyone looking for a new MMORPG to play. RuneScape is one of the oldest ongoing MMORPGs that still has a fairly huge player base and still receives content updates to this day.

The classic version of the game is one of the most engaging MMOs to ever be made and is perfect for any fan of the genre.

There's so much to do in the game, be it leveling up combat skills, exploring professions like woodcutting, or traversing different areas of the massive map. For players looking for a newer experience, RuneScape 3 is available and updates a lot of the aspects of the original game.