OKY, Im not 100% sure I will play one very soon, but Im curious about MMOs in 2025. I used to play WoW around its release and up through Burning Crusade. Hows the MMO landscape in 2025? What are some good MMOs to try if I wanted to give one or two a shot?
I did play other MMOs than WOW here and there. Namely Aion, Guildwars 1 and other smaller ones.
I’m open to trying most types of MMOs and don’t mind subscribing monthly if it’s worth it. I’m especially curious about MMOs besides WoW (which would probably be the obvious choice), but I kind of want to try something different—even if WoW in 2025 is a completely different game compared to 2006
Oh btw. Doesnt need to be a MMORPG could be something like Foxhole or Ark as well. As long as its a game with servers and many players.
Thanks for any input 
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Hows the MMO landscape in 2025?
I don’t really like MMOs; the only one I liked and played was Tera, but that was a long time ago. That being said I just started Black Desert with my brother and a friend. So let me share my experience with 3 and a half hours of playtime.
The combat seems super fun and super cool and it’s the thing that is keeping us interested in it, the way it is freeform and combo focused makes so it doesn’t feel like an MMO, or at least like MMOs I have tried before. But so far that is the only good thing I can say about it, it’s just that it is a really good pro.
Now comes the bad. The UI is complete sensory overload, there 500 gorillion things on the screen at all times, including all your combo buttons reminder. It is beyond overwhelming. And it is not intuitive either, you have to take your time looking at every single small button to know what it does and to what menu it takes you.
I also cannot understand why the first player experience is so bad. In these 3 and a half hours, I swear that 95% of our time have been going from point A to point B and spamming the dialogue skip option, and I really mean spamming. There’s so much dialogue and so many cutscenes in this game, it’s absolutely exhausting. If it would let us at least play a bit and kill a ton of monsters, even low level ones, then take it’s time to slowly present the world it would be much better and much more engaging, cause so far it has been a slog. I hope it gets better.
Also, it is extremely sexist. The character select screen have 90% of it’s women characters in skimpy outfit and 95% of it’s men characters in full clothes or armor.
guild wars 2 is the only MMO I’ve ever considered worth playing
- feels like a real video game. You can dodge and move out of the way of attacks.
- you don’t have to make formal groups for most of the content. You walk outside, see zombies attacking and you go fight. You get credit. So does anyone else there.
- the story is pretty okay and you can play it yourself
- there’s no real gear grind. You swap gear out during the initial level up process, but once you hit the cap you’re done. There’s cheap good-enough gear (and dirt cheap mediocre gear), and slightly expensive next tier, and “fancy free reskin and stat swap super expensive”, and that’s it. My characters have had the same gear for years and it’s fine. Sometimes they release new combinations of stats, but it’s never just a power bump
- the mounts are fun
- the big “convergence” events are fun. ~50 random players shuffle into an instance and fight monsters together. You don’t really need to talk, but it’s fun to win (or lose sometimes) as a group
- all 9 classes play differently, and their subclasses are also pretty distinct
- there’s good free QoL. Deposit materials anywhere. Teleport to merchants/banks for free and back (if you weren’t in an instance). Only cost is waiting for the loading screens.
- no subscription fee. Buy once and you’re good. Base game is free, but the expansions add a lot
The mmo genre is a collection of people continuing to play FFXIV and WoW while desperately thirsting for something new that isn’t being provided.
I used to have Blue Protocol (cancelled) and Ashes of Creation on my radar. Ashes has dropped off my interest because it’s designed around pvp in a way that will not retain players as the losing players will not have fun.
The only one on my radar for the future right now is Stars Reach, which is being developed by the dude I consider responsible for Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxies and Everquest 2. If there is anyone in this industry that actually seems to understand mmo communities as a social phenomena it seems to be him, even if he is a little techbro brainwormed at times. The game is basically trying to be Noita style interactions but 3d at mmo scale with all the mmo economy bells and whistles you’d expect. It is the first thing in a long time that I’ve seen which is genuinely trying to do something new that does not actually already exist and that alone is genuinely interesting.
Everyone is really really thirsty for new mmos so any slop released gets MASSIVE then drops off hard when it doesn’t meet expectations, typically korean mmos filled with the most grindy and obnoxious systems in existence. Lost Ark’s player count chart illustrates this well https://steamdb.info/app/1599340/charts/#max or I guess a more recent example would be Throne and Liberty: https://steamdb.info/app/2429640/charts/#max
Is there anything the MMO crowd is looking for that could be accomplished by an indie studio, or is the draw tied to the huge wealth of content that FFXIV and WoW have?
Raph Koster’s studio for Stars Reach is indie. Looks like they have an unlaunched kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/starsreach/stars-reach
The draw of mmo’s is different for a lot of different players. For some it’s the dungeon loop. For some it’s the questing. For some it’s the social aspect (for me it is this) of creating guilds and making a name for them in the community.
full MMOs are very expensive, time consuming, and risky to make to where even many AAA developers won’t attempt it, let alone Indies.
I don’t think this is true anymore. A lot of indie studios have made mmos, some successful. AAA games these days have ballooned in cost to make to the point that they average 200m - 300m. Lost Ark cost $80m to make. So as far as comparing mmo budgets to AAA game budgets the mmos are actually cheap by comparison now.
Boss fights. I’m sure this idea isn’t original, but my friends and I always had the idea that for someone mostly interested in raiding and dungeons, you could cut out just about every other part of the MMO.
But keep classes, keep gear, and focus the game on going through tightly designed dungeons with fun mechanics. Can also have various sizes from 2, 4, 6, 8 or however many people. Add challenges, time trials, medals, modifiers.
There are games like this but none of them I know of function like an MMO with tab targeting, ability bars, etc like in WoW. Stuff like Left 4 Dead or Vermintide but with more unique boss fights.
Unfortunately, full MMOs are very expensive, time consuming, and risky to make to where even many AAA developers won’t attempt it, let alone Indies.
Rabbit & Steel isn’t as complex as an MMO button-wise but it might fit the bill
FF14 is free to play until you finish the main quest line. It’s a very cozy game and has a chill user base. MMO design has completely stagnated since WoW, but if you have the itch ff14 is like the least toxic choice.
Imo WoW is still good, but the sheer amount of content make 90% of game neglected and basically just be there for nostalgia trips and transmog, but this is same thing as in every other games with seasons.
Star Wars Old Republic is also still there and free until you hit endgame, so it’s definitely worth checking.
Except that i can’t think of a single new MMORPG game that wouldn’t be action slasher with combos and other twitchy shit so the genre is in deep stagnation in bad place generally.
Star Wars Old Republic is also still there and free until you hit endgame, so it’s definitely worth checking.
Agree with this. I used to play SWTOR a lot and the first 55 levels especially are really good. That is the initial release and the first expansion (rise of the hut cartel). The rest I could give or take to be honest, but it’s by far the best story telling I’ve seen in an MMO. It’s really fun to go around to 2-3 other people all playing different classes and you can all watch each other’s stories and their choices and then help them with the combat in their quests while they help you with yours. It’s really well designed in that you all basically take turns doing your personal stories and then there’s usually a planet specific quest chain that slots in along side those. Great for small group multiplayer.
Sadly, I don’t have anymore Windows machines, so cannot play it anymore, but I have to admit the story kind of went off the rails with the expansion where they basically established a second hidden empire that suddenly attacks the galaxy.
Imo WoW is still good, but the sheer amount of content make 90% of game neglected and basically just be there for nostalgia trips and transmog, but this is same thing as in every other games with seasons.
It’s a guilty pleasure for me. I still sorta like it, but it felt a lot easier to connect with people and make friends in the past. Nowadays, I just get on every few months to a year to grind m+ solo
There’s a great MMO
that has a zillion emotes on this website 
and isn’t a real mmo 
.I did play other MMOs than WOW here and there. Namely Aion, Guildwars 1
Another user here mentioned this, but Guild Wars 1 is still active and its sequel Guild Wars 2 is good. The main story kinda drags but GW2 is free to play, or rather free to try out. If you want mounts and new abilities, you need to purchase the expansions, primarily, GW2: Heart of Thorns and GW2: Path of Fire. If you are into story content though, the expansions are where it’s at. The content coming after the main GW2 story (which includes DLC called “Living World”) is so good and intriguing!
The good thing about the expansions (and DLC) however is that they are buy once and play forever. GW2 is up to date with its newest expansion, Janthir Wilds, released last year, August 2024 and ArenaNet is committed to making new content for the game on a yearly basis, the parts of which are released quarterly (from the expac release dates in August).
Of course, if you want to re-live your earlier MMO days, Guild Wars 1 is still as good as you remember. I haven’t played, but there are still players and a community and it’s pretty big.
How’s Elder Scrolls Online?
I just returned to it after 5 years away and I gotta say while it still has some of the jank I remember they’ve added a bunch of cool things to improve the game
The biggest downside is that ESO plus is still needed if you either want to get into crafting or just don’t want to be bothered by inventory management, not that you can’t get around it with alt accounts used for storage or starting guilds entirely to be your personal banks but that can be a pain in the ass to do
The biggest appeal of the game compared to other MMOs has to be the fact that everything is still fully voice acted and the voice acting tends to be of above average quality. Maybe FFXIV does have a good story when you get into it like others here have said but it’s genuinely hard for me to get into when the voice acting is so sporadic that I don’t even recognize any of the characters voices and the low quality of the voice acting just takes me out of the experience further.
The only time ESO makes me read is when I pick up an actual book just like in a regular Elder Scrolls game and that goes a long way in building immersion (something which the theme park like nature of modern MMOs is inherently corrosive to)
The world and the lore are really the best parts, normally we only get to explore a small part of it in the mainline Elder Scrolls games and the way Bethesda is going we’ll never see most of the world of Elder Scrolls in the main games unless the modding community does something especially awesome so ESO is really the only chance to experience this for now
FF14 is my top pick for a pleasant and active MMO experience.
I agree with this. FF14 is a great place to be a new player in, as it tries very hard to keep its older content relevant. It’s also the only MMO with an actually good story, even if it takes a while to get actually going, the first bit of it is not that good (still leagues above other MMO plots though).
Vanilla WoW in 2004, Vanilla WoW in 2025
i wish i could recommend OSRS but they raised the price significantly last year and it also seems like they’re gonna completely ruin the game before too long:(
wow and osrs are the ones that i still play today, though not retail wow. ive found myself sucked into the classic progression servers that are currently on the cataclysm expansion. Though i will say, the subscription fee paid to blizz gives you access to all versions of wow, whether its classic vanilla, classic progression, season of discovery(vanilla but with new stuff) as well as retail. retail though is the only version where youll have to buy the most recent expansion to get access to current endgame content.
Overall, wow is still a pretty good game and you can find decent communities to be active in. The broader community is full of fullblown treatlers and can be overwhelmingly toxic to new players would be the primary reason why i dont really recommend people to play it
Guild Wars 1 is still up and is a solid playthrough, but is not very active. Arena Net said it costs so little to keep it around that as long as people play GW2 it’ll still be there
Guild Wars 2 is also pretty good, but the story is weaker and the WvWvW turns into zergs most of the time so it didn’t keep me very long, idk how the raiding/fractals scene is
I do not recommend ARK, player base was moba level toxic
Try FFXIV, there’s a very generous free trial and it’s a good game with a good story.
Tbh I mostly stick to older, or at least older style ones so from time to time I’ll pick up EverQuest for a month. I use to play project 1999 with friends but trans oceanic timezones are a pain but they enjoyed it as a thing to do while we hung out. Im watching the development of a couple similar things: Evercraft which is just a blocky EQ but it seems promising, and legends of old which is a single player free eq clone.
The ascension wow private server is fun if you like gambling with random abilities and has a test server up for their custom classes. They’re interesting so far, tinker let’s you use different ammo for your guns or built a robot to help you fight, necromancer is a cross of warlock and death knight: DoTs and you can summon an army of skeletons.
Old school RuneScape is picked up occasionally as well, but mostly as something to do on my lunch break or when I want to watch some shows
