I asked Google what people wanted most to know about MMOs in this day and age, and who better to answer it than me, whose last serious MMO was DC Universe Online.
Which MMO Should I Play, right now, which is August of 2022? Put another way, which MMO is right for me? Again, this is August of 2022.
If you’re asking this question, you already know about World of Warcraft and the critically acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV, which has an expanded free trial in which you can play through the entirety of A Realm Reborn and the award winning Heavensward expansion up to level 60 for free with no restrictions on playtime.
…and you decided those weren’t for you, and you don’t have friends playing an MMO that you would want to join. And that’s fine. There really aren’t many games that require actually interacting with other people anymore, and most MMOs are really “you may see other player characters sometimes” rather than “you will do nothing without a tightly knit group” these days.
My answer would be, “which MMO am I being paid to promote,” if I was a streamer. So I went to the list of the top MMO streamers on Twitch, and here’s what you should play, based on that:
- Path of Exile (CohhCarnage, Zizaran, DatModz, nugiyen)
- World of Warcraft (EsfandTV, Sco, cdewx, venruki)
- No Man’s Sky (DansGaming)
So if you were being paid to play an MMO, either directly by the company or via streaming or other content services, I’d suggest Path of Exile, because you’ve already rejected World of Warcraft. No Man’s Sky is pretty decent too, though.
Which MMO in 2022 Has the Best Combat?
I’ve played WoW and FFXIV, and for both those games, it’s about watching for environmental cues while trying to keep pressing the buttons in the right order and the right times as much as possible. In my personal experience, Final Fantasy 11 had the best expression of this “everyone working as a cog in a machine” combat approach, which its focus on combos and everyone pressing their button exactly three seconds after the previous person pressed theirs. It really rewarded working as a team and discussing the combos before the killing started.
These days, some MMOs focus entirely on individual contribution, like those MMOs that, at the end of a match, tell who did the best and gives a little video of their best shot. These MMOs encourage people to focus on themselves instead of the team.
I did type this search in, and was a little surprised to see Old School Runescape on this list, as I consider that combat slow and dull.
Anyway, not for me to judge, you want an answer and you will get an answer.
I went to Google Trends and typed in the top combat-focused massively multiplayer games I could find, and came up with this:
Compared to World of Tanks, Old School Runescape, Destiny 2 and Apex Legends, Fortnite defeated them all. So, Fortnite is the best MMO to play for combat. If you prefer persistent MMOs, Destiny 2 or Old School Runescape, I guess. The numbers don’t lie. I’m just not seeing it for OSRS.
Which MMO has the best endgame in 2022?
MMO developers have LONG had to worry about how quickly their players will run out of content. One suggestion is just to make the endgame PvP — this is what Guild Wars 2 mostly does. Other MMOs just rush the players through the PvE content to get them to PvP as quickly as possible — Crowfall did this.
But mostly when people think of an endgame in MMOs, I think, they are thinking about largescale raid combat where they run the same raids a zillion times in order to gain marginal gear improvements so that they can move to the next raid and do the same thing. That was what we did in EverQuest and DCUO and FFXIV, and although I haven’t experienced World of Warcraft’s endgame, I am 100% sure that happens there as well.
I asked Google to tell me the grindiest MMOs out there, and it gave me some not-so-surprising answers:
- Old School Runescape
- Black Desert Online
- Guild Wars 2
- and, surprisingly, Final Fantasy XI
So the answer for MMOs of what has the best endgame here in 2022, is Old School Runescape, Black Desert Online, or Guild Wars 2.
This post was somewhat inspired by Bhagpuss’s post at Inventory Full about staying motivated to blog. I commented that if I really wanted people to read my blog, I wouldn’t write what I normally write, I’d look up search terms and then try to answer them on my blog.
So… I thought about it… and decided to do just that, with this post. We’ll see if anyone likes this kind of content.
I used Dall-E 2 to generate the header image, and GPT-3 to generate the title and excerpt.
I came here expecting you to be courting controversy, but you have a methodology!
Only free range, quality content on this here chicken farm!
It is all organic on this side of the fence.
You broke my irony meter. I’m billing you!
One factual correction: ANet did indeed intend PvP (Or rather WvW, which is Relm vs Realm, if we’re being technical) to be the endgame but as with the original Guild Wars, which was intended to be a PvP game too, the players had different ideas.
WvW has always been a minority interest and for the last six years or so it’s been totally niche. Maybe the posited massive revamp will change that but I doubt it. As things stand it’s probably closer to something like WoW’s pet battles than any kind of endgame.
What GW2’s endgame actually is is a lot harder to define. It doesn’t really have one. They tried Raids and that didn’t work. Then they went for Strikes, which are raids for people who can’t do raids and that didn’t really work either. If you ask in game the most likely answer you’ll get is “Fashion wars” and that’s not a joke. Looking good is probably the endgame for more people than anything, even if it does mean buying 90% of your look from the cash shop.
Do update us on how many page hits this post gets! I’m curious. Also I might do something similar to test the waters – if I can think of a suitable query.
According to the people in my GW2 guild, they see WvWvW as the endgame, but the sample size is small 🙂
The goal here is to try to get people to read more of my blog. But they have to get here first. I’d love for this blog to become as active as it was in the West Karana days (and I may soon get the WK domain back, too). But back then I was working very hard to get readers, and so probably it will never be that good again. Still, trying different things.
The degree of visible confusion going on when people land here would be golden to see. 🙂
Although with how much content out there is written unironically in this style… Perhaps it won’t even register.
Alright, sad again. 😉
Well, I do hope they like my writing 🙂
I haven’t been caught up with Blaugust at all, since my RL has ramped up in busyness for the past few months.
You could pretty much chart the course of my reaction reading this:
“Lol, are MMOs in such doldrums now that PoE is the biggest MMO-ish thing on Twitch? I guess it makes sense, cos the recent league and all.”
“Hang on… this is sounding a little off… more than irony levels of off…”
“Like AI levels of meandering off…”
“Waitaminute, didn’t Tipa say something near the end of July about AI writing her blog posts…”
* 10 minutes of post history searching later *
“Ah yes, there it is.”
Bright side, it’s been more fun for me to read this and comment than consider logging into an MMO these days.
Um, I did write this particular post 😛 But yeah my methodology is probably a little questionable… I actually did google who the biggest MMO streamers were, and Path of Exile was what a lot of them were playing, so /shrug.