Someone will say that playing MMORPG is stupid, because life is fleeting: it is better to spend an hour playing a match in Dota 2 or CS: GO than to admire the elf’s half naked back in Lineage II or to do local tasks in World of Warcraft. If you do not agree, then welcome to the club. I’ll tell you about the top 10 live MMORPGs, which is not too late to start playing in 2023.
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Release Date: July 17, 2017
Star Wars space opera is respected all over the world, and many want to test lightsabers in action. At SWTOR, this opportunity is realized in all its glory.
Users have to side with the Galactic Republic or the Sith Empire. The game takes place over 3,500 years before the start of the movie universe, so there are no familiar characters in it.
In many MMORPGs, acting out is not necessary, and few think about the correspondence of the character’s actions to its origin, character and other personality-determining details. In SWTOR, the roleplay is, as it were, built into the pumping process: during the passage of quests, there are several options for the development of events, and the final result really depends on the player’s answers.
Sometimes in the course of passing SWTOR story campaigns you forget that you are playing MMORPG. In your group, sometimes for a long time there may be only NPCs – with them the character can have a romantic relationship. By the way, I already wrote about this in article about weddings online.
Star Wars: The Old Republic is not very popular – in the early years, the publisher talked about 1.7 million players, and it is unlikely that over time there will be more. At the same time, to attract newcomers, the developers did a dangerous thing – a token for an instant level increase. Considering that the high-end content here is rather scarce, and the plot along the level of pumping is the most interesting part of the game, I highly recommend not using it.
Release Date: September 30, 2010
ArcheAge is the cutest MMORPG I know. A large number of social activities, professions and entertainment makes it a kind of interest club. You can be a fisherman, a gardener or a shepherd, almost not being distracted by such a useless thing as hunting for monsters.
If you think Death Stranding is the only courier simulator in the gaming world, then you just haven’t played ArcheAge. For years, local farmers have been transporting their goods from point A to point B. And yes, robbing caravans here is a must.
In 2023, the ArcheAge developers took care of the newcomers: they facilitated pumping and added armor, the characteristics of which increase with the level of the hero. The main problem in this MMORPG at the start is work points. They are necessary for literally all actions, from collecting resources to crafting. The game is free, but in order not to get a nervous tick due to a lack of work points, you must make a premium and take other bonuses from the in-game store. Since all actions will require points, an accelerated increase in them is the key to a strong psyche.
As in many MMORPGs, initially the players are divided into two factions – the Harnians and Nuyans. However, it is in ArcheAge that the user can abandon prejudice, jump into the ship and sail under black sails for a better life with a bottle of rum in his hands. It is easy to guess that this special fraction is the pirates. However, there are only 150 places in their elite society. Most often, slots are occupied by members of the coolest guilds on the server, a beginner without special merit is unlikely to be accepted in close ranks.
Release Date: Summer 2015
If in 2023 you are looking for a game in which you can destroy entire clans alone, this is Aion. The possibility of solo-pumping, solo-farm and solo-bending is realized here perfectly. However, you will have to pay for this: NCSoft And games without donat are incompatible things.
Initially, Aion was distributed by subscription, but in 2016 it became shareware with the ability to issue premium access, which enhances experience and farming. The division into PvP and PvE is very conditional: you can go to the boss and find yourself actively fighting against players, because it is not only more interesting, but also more profitable from the point of view of farm currency. Dividing the users into fractions of the Elyos (angels) and Asmodians (also angels, but fallen!) Made it possible to create an interesting PvP conflict in the open world, without having to copy the WoW cleanly.
Many people know the feeling when you start playing in a big company, you pump a few levels in a crowd, and then you can’t get together for a week. In Aion there is an opportunity not to depend on constantly busy friends and swing alone – this made me the happiest gamer on earth. Although the quests in Aion leave much to be desired – kill some bears, turn in the quest and … go kill the bears again. When your friends get together again, you can share the quest for the bears with them and not miss anything in the joint experiment.
NCSoft continues to update Aion. The latest patch, “The embodiment of power,” was released June 16, 2023. In 2019, the game had quite serious problems: its profit fell to the lowest level in three years. It is not known how many users visit the worlds of Aion, but developers continue to open official servers to this day.
Date of release: July 2005
The Souhait clan has become part of the history of Perfect World. Now the game is a little like the one I was in love with. She continued to develop completely not according to the scenario of World of Warcraft, but rather stepped into a puddle of Lineage II. Rare, but dramatically affecting the game add-ons scared away users. The endless leveling system, even with a donat, does not allow beginners to compete with olds. Only official associations and rediscovery of servers, as well as pirated hosting help.
In May 2023, the Northern Lands patch was released for Perfect World. Graphics in new locations are diligently trying to meet a high technical level, but still are not enough. In addition, MMORPG is not at all the genre that they go to for the sake of beautiful textures.
In 2019, Perfect World Mobile, a project for smartphones, approximately resembling the PC version, was released. Even the original PW had many features that made life easier – “hirki”, restoring health and mana, automatic path finding and other amenities. Well, the mobile version simply plays in itself, especially if you feed the character with donut cutlets.
Why is the game high in this ranking? Firstly, it was bought by my Souhait nostalgia. Secondly, according to official Mail.ru data, the Perfect World community has 12 million users, although the company is silent about how many gamers enter the game every month. After downloading the client, I was surprised that even in the starting locations you can still meet live players, and in the global chat they still joke about moms. The atmosphere is almost like in DotA!
Release Date: April 4, 2014
Even before the war broke out between the Dota 2 community and League of Legends, many gamers were aware of the conflict between World of Warcraft and Lineage 2 fans. I know about it firsthand – at first I fought for MMORPG from NCSoft, but after the defeat of Elmoreden’s troops, the developers sided with the more insightful Blizzard. Now the question of a game worthy of the podium top is already rhetorical – World of Warcraft is thriving, and life on the official Lineage 2 servers filled with bots and “preschoolers” is barely warm.
“Preschoolers” are people who have made the word “economy” in relation to Lineage 2 a curse word. The ability to play commodity-money relations at the dawn of MMORPG attracted many users, and the spoilers, extracting additional valuable resources, and the crafters who created the equipment from them, were very popular professions – until those same “mother’s businessmen” appeared who preferred to withdraw currency from the game . They jokingly say that the main purpose of such manipulations is to buy instant noodles in order to eke out a miserable existence. The economy in Lineage 2 is already not very stable, killing itself over time due to frantic inflation and saturation of the market with goods, but reselling Adena kills new servers at space speed. Such activities are illegal, but not everyone is punished.
In order to at least slightly increase the interest of players who carry money to the cashier, rather than withdrawing them to a personal account, the developers added a huge number of bonus items to the in-game store, entry quests appeared in the client, and pumping ceased to be hardcore. In addition, now Lineage is not one game, but five at once: the original, Classic, Essence with fully automated pumping and two official mobile versions. You can read more about the conditions under which Korean MMORPG fans are forced to exist in 2023. article.
There are no official statistics about online PC versions of Lineage 2, but mobile ones are consistently in the top of the most popular applications. In addition, the publisher Innova continues to open new servers for both Classic and the standard version – this is indirect, but confirms the demand.
There is a sad fact: Lineage 2 community is divided into small fractions, and the developer is behind it. Нельзя не упомянуть, что самая активная игра в «ту самую MMORPG» проходит на нелегальных пиратских серверах, с которыми NCSoft активно борется. Почему же эта спорная игра достойна занять второе место в моем топе? Медаль за былые заслуги.
Дата релиза: 23 ноября 2004 года
Разработчики MMORPG изо всех сил стараются идти в ногу со временем, добавляя элементы сессионных игр и облегчая старт для новичков. Практически во всех тайтлах этого жанра теперь можно найти бонусные выходные, автоматизацию рутинных действий и полное обновление контента в определенные временные промежутки. Иначе — стагнация и потеря онлайна. Впрочем, история и мода цикличны, так что я планирую дожить до нового пика популярности MMORPG и снова стать эльфом 80-го уровня.
