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Originally Posted by Rumblehoof I play WoW. Avidly. I have a 60 Shaman and a 60 Rogue, both decked out, as seen in the WoW Realm/Toon thread. |
No way I could have guessed that
While it's not an RPG, Space Cowboy Online is a freaking BLAST. It's fully 3D space shooter/flight game by some dev group in Korea. It's very different from any MMO I've played before, but it's definitely got that "touch" that all Korean games have. It's translated into English poorly, and the game follows in suit with every other Korean MMO - grind, grind, grind. Once you get to a certain level, though, you are allowed to take part in large-scale battles with NPC motherships, and full out PVP. The PVP is intense and insanely chaotic [in a good sense].
You can choose from 4 different ship types, one of which is a ground tank. You also choose an avatar which just basically amounts to your character that you run around as in the central town hub, and your profile picture.
It's surprisingly addictive, and is in free open beta right now (and has been for a couple months). Google for the name, and the company site should come right up.
I also play on a private shard in UO, Divinity. I played UO for upwards of 6 years until the EA takeover, and almost considered re-activating my account just to play around for a month or two, barring my characters hadn't been wiped from the system by now. UO is, to me, the best MMO out there, despite its graphical shortcomings - Rather than making it a "game", and forcing you to grind experience to raise your characters, it plays more like a persistant world. It was one of the very first MMORPGs on the market, alongside Everquest - Back when the genre was new, the focus was more about having an interactive, living breathing world, rather than merely a community-based game like that of FFXI or Warcraft.
There aren't any levels to gain, and your skills are based on percentages. There's a skill cap of 700%, and can be tweaked at any time - allowing you to switch professions with little effort. On average, you can get a maxed-out character "profression" of your choice within about 2 weeks, and from that point on, there are thousands of different things to do with yourself. There are no giant end-game bosses or instanced dungeons. What you choose to do is completely up to you - and I love that concept. If you want to just go around slaughtering wild animals and cutting them into pieces, you can. PVP was very rampant early on, and with so many different ways to PVP, it was a blast.
Sadly, UO has changed dramatically since EA took it over. The more the genre becme 'refined', the more EA urged UO to change. Over time, patches would come out one by one that were completely changing how the game was played. They added real classes, and eventually another race. It eventually began to mimic Diablo 2, and from that point on, the game was never the same. Their 10th anniversary is coming up in early 2007, and apparently something very big is planned for the game which required their recruiting a whole new staff of programmers and artists. I pray something good comes of it.
Old-style UO is still great fun, though. There are several private servers out there that mimic it almost flawlessly, and add in their own little bits of spice for good measure. With any luck EA will find a way to start up "classic" shards, and I can re-live my middle school years again
Play any MMORPGs? 
2 games... 
In the new beta version, Dungeon, there's an underground dungeon where you can fight monsters and get treasure and get weapons that look mighty cool. If you don't feel like RPG, then it can serve as an easy chat room. It's Shockwave-based, so if your computer has problems loading BMs, don't even try this.
). It also starts newcomers off with free weapons and a shield, and the f2p (free to play) quests are pretty good. If you really get into it, you can become a Member and get access to the forum and the 250% bigger Member's Map.
