And thank you for your patience. I've been away on a business trip so I've been even less available to play or post than usual, but I should have time to start this weekend.
I've decided I'll play one game a week for the first four weeks to decide see how they do for a single session, give my reactions and then see what I feel compelled to come back to.
The four games I'll play will be:
- Lord of the Rings Online: The good news about this game is I'm already a fan of the books and I know the plot, so I'm hoping leaving a coming back after a week will be a little less disorienting.
- Fallen Earth: Two recommendations and the free to play model is supposed to be relatively generous.
- Everquest 2: I've been curious about this for quite a while and will be interesting to see how it plays.
- Rusty Hearts: This is purely from Killington's recommendation that it has short missions that might work well for someone with limited play time.
Games I decided not to try (yet):
- Everquest: Although I'm quite curious, at this point it quite old and with limited time, I'd rather play something newer.
- Guild Wars: I looked and I can buy it for $20 from Steam or $30 for the Guild Wars Trilogy. The Trilogy is a very good deal if I decide to stick with it, but while I'm experimenting, I'd rather not pay until I know I'm going to like it and it's wasted money if I never play the game. I'm also hopeful that it'll go on one of the Steam sales or might be reduced when Guild Wars 2 comes out.
- Guild Wars 2: Sounds like a great game from all I've read, but the price will go down and I can justify $60 even less than $30 with my limited time.
- Dungeon and Dragons Online: I've just never felt any compulsion to play this game. I used to play D&D P&P briefly and even remember buying one of the first edition boxed sets but someone will have to give me a good reason to want to play it online.
- City of Heroes / Villians: I've never been a big superhero fan, so the other settings are more interesting to me.
You all have me excited about playing again and it'll be interesting to see how they stack up with my limited play time. Thanks again for all the advice!
4 Games, wow! I hope you won't spend more time installing the stuff than actually playing the games themselves! ;)
ReplyDeleteNow without sillyness, have fun and I'll certainly follow your adventures. :)
Yes, I do hope to play, not just install the games...
DeleteActually since my play time is so limited, it's actually easier to find time when I'm doing something else to get the installation done and do a little research (and, hopefully, do some posting as well!).
Glad to hear that you decided to give Fallen Earth a whirl. If you need a friend some times, my toons name is Tod Banks. Best of luck!
ReplyDeleteThanks! I'm very interested to see how it plays. A great thing about free to play games is you can just try them out. When I had a subscription I felt like I should be playing that game, otherwise I wasn't getting my money's worth out of it. Now I can just see what's out there!
DeleteHmm, i guess i am a little late, but my advice would be Star Trek Online.
ReplyDeleteReasons for that:
- It's F2P, you can indeed play the game from start to end without investing any money into it.
Actually many people invest some money for convenience, though. A little more inventory space, a very cool ship which looks better than the free ones (despite also not being really better than them), some more bridge officers to have a really weild mixture of races on your bridge, etcl. But you don't _need_ either of them. )
- You can spend all your time, if you want, in doing small missions. Just exploring nebulas, patroling systems and visiting planets you can level up easily. Each of that activity will be between 20 and 60 minutes, so they're quite casual friendly.
- Unlike in other MMOs, those missions are not even all combat. There are plenty of "scan here, mine there, talk with some other race and bring some stuff they need" missions.
- If you want more than just randomized missions, it has some really well done "episodes". Those are mission chains of like 5 to 10 or so missions each, which tell a story all over them. They often also yield nice reward items. The longest of the episode missions take around 60 to 90 minutes to do, but many are significally shorter. (As a warning, only federation characters get plenty of them. On Klingon side you have only a fraction of episodes, although one of the Klingon-Only Episode is absolutely awesome in design and storyline. )
- There were no new episodes since a while and probably also won't be any more soon. But the game has "foundry" missions, which are missions created by players for players, and there are plenty of them. Indeed, a big portion of them are bad, but thanks to a ranking system it's easy enough to pick and fly the better ones. Thus, if you're just cruising the galaxy for the fun of it, this is a source of new activities, provided by other players.
Additional sidenote: Yes, they are a little older and were on par of technology of that time, so the voice acting and cutscenes can't compete with SWTOR. Also, there won't be any new ones in the next future, as far as we players know.
And next to all of that, the game got it's very own style of "Pokemon". Your ship has a crew of duty officers, which is like colonists, scientists, security, traders and so on. Wherever you go, you can find some missions to assign them to, be it to trade stuff, chart some space section or colonize some area. You assign them to missions and reap the rewards a few hours later. It can be played as a tiny pasttime at the side, but i also know of players who invest hours into it, just for the fun of it.
After all this big bunch of "advertising" the game, the only real drawbacks in my eyes:
- PvP is suboptimal.
- The so-called "endgame" is rather limited. There are some 5-man elite missions for the best gear, but that's about it. So for the dedicated WoW raider, this game is fail.
- The quality of foundry missions is "mixed", some are really fun, but you can also pick a rather bad one. And they are the only soure of new missions in the game at the moment. (The game is progressing. Within the last 6 weeks, the game got two new spaceships, and is supposed to get more in the next months, along with starbases, new team missions and some more. But no new storyline. )
So, if all the options you decided for don't stick, i'd advise to just give this one a try, since it plays well in small portions. :)
Thanks for the detailed comments, Sylow. I watched Star Trek quite a lot with my older brother growing up, but the idea of being a star ship Captain doesn't appeal to me. Maybe it just seems too much like work! However, this does seem like a game that would be good in small less frequent chunks of time. If I'm looking for something completely different in the future, I'll check it out.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I like checking out the blogs of those who post (assuming they have one). Do you have a blog?
Sorry, no blog here.
DeleteNo apology needed. Thanks for reading and the detailed information!
Delete