I mean to me honestly... I hate stories in MMOs. Because to me they seem to greatly hurt.. well the MMO portion of the games. IE the point of an MMO is, about meeting real people playing together etc... Stories tend to lead to things that IMO harm them... first and foremost, quest chains, In the old days of ragnarok online, Everquest etc... You find people, you group together and kill things to level up. Generally speaking they usually had huge ranges that you could work together on... Often in the points of like 50-60 hours... you could take 5 days off, and when you come back join up with the same friends you ran with before you left. Quest chains on the other hand... oh sorry I played for 30 minutes while you were having lunch, I'm on quest 6 of the chain... you're only on 2 now... you'll need to solo I guess. In addition I don't find quests immersive, under the raw concept that, MMOs can't be immersive. The defining requirement of an MMO is... the world can't change because thousands more people need to do exactly what you just did. I remember WoW used to drive me crazy because the NPC would be thanking you for killing all the werewolves in his garden, while you can see the werewolves respawned right behind him as he's thanking you, and of course as you are walking out from killing the big bad of the region... you're getting begged by people to come help them kill the same big bad. I love MMOs... but I can't help but feel like the desire for story... is drastically harmful to the whole concept of them. Because there's 2 key problems... Most people can't be the stand out legendary best guy... with thousands of players, and the world can't change. But yeah that being said I kind of looked at new world as a potential game to fit the itch that I've had for years... of an MMORPG that actually was group based, working together as a team like the old days... but amazon owning it basically made me say nope... and looks like that part alone was a good reason not to.

I think Old School Runescape has absolutely nailed quests. You don't actually have to do them for one. Some will unlock areas, while others will just give xp, some will unlocks skills. But the best part? Some of them actually change the world, but only for those who have completed the quests.

I got this at launch because I was so desperate for a new PvE MMO. It was okay, but I lost interest pretty quick.

Best thing about new world was the secret level short: "AND YET AELSTROM LIVES"

It had all sorts of weird exploits. There was an exploit where playing in windowed mode and resizing the window would effectively make you unkillable. That got used in PvP where you run into a capture point and then start resizing the screen keeping the capture point forever contested.

This game fucking sucks. Fuck Amazon.

Contrary to others I liked this game quite a bit. The life skills were fun, if sometimes tedious, and the sound design of gathering materials out in the world was intoxicating. I spent hours mining rocks and cutting down trees. I still hear the sounds of it sometimes. Didn't enjoy the combat that much but others seemed to have at the time. The game didn't have much to keep it relevant long term but I'll miss that flash in the pan that hooked me for a month or two way back when.

keep corporations out of gaming

This game was one of the driving forces behind the development of the Lumberyard engine, which eventually became o3de. The game might suck but it spawned a new, free, open sourced game engine based on CryEngine, so at least something potentially useful came from it.

It'd be interesting to see your take on FFXIV given that it's essentially 2 games. One where you have a solo main story and one where you have a bunch of activities you do with friends. One does spawn from the other, but it's so drastically different from your regular MMO that I'm not sure it deserves the title in spite of the fact that it has a shared world.

I've been somewhat interested, I've heard very similar descriptions of it. Honestly the second game is one I'd really like to play, but I have no desire at all to play the completely unrelated game that you have to finish to get to it.

I actually really like it. I can't remember if I got the game for free or relatively cheap. But it scratched the itch that Elder Scrolls Online had. In other words, it fulfills the itch I used to have when I played WoW nonstop as a kid, while also being more "action-y", and you can play it solo with hundreds of other people playing it solo. I don't remember if there was a subscription or microtransactions were aggressive. But I do remember spending 2 months straight just going around chopping wood. I remember quitting it because there was nothing to really DO with that wood.