Best MMOs of 2010

The year 2010 is almost over. It has been a pretty good year for free to play MMORPG and MMO players. We got a lot of great new games, and even a few previously pay to play games were converted to free to play. Let’s take a look back at the year and highlight some of the best games.

Something I find very exciting is the growth of genres other than RPGs in the f2p MMO sector. Racing games, Shooting games, Sports games, Strategy games, we saw great new free to play games that fall into all these genres. Let’s start with racing. Need for Speed is perhaps one of the most popular video game franchises of all time. Many gamers will find it surprising that a free to play version of Need for Speed is now available online, for free. That game is called Need for Speed World and can be downloaded on EA’s new f2p portal – play4free.com Amazing right? Need for Speed World has great graphics, realistic cars, and even a persistent world city to explore. There’s a night/day system, and plenty of customization options. Most free to play games are still coming out of Asia so lets take a look at some Asian racers. FreeJack is a parkour themed MMO racing. That means players have to race across urban settings filled with streets, traffic, tunnels, railing, and so forth. Its based on a real sport, but has stylized anime graphics. Its a very appealing game, and the mechanics require some practice to master.

Moving right along, 2010 has been a good year for MMO shooters. MMOFPS games like Combat Arms, Operation 7, or Cross Fire are pretty common and we saw a bunch of new ones come out in 2010. Some of these include Mission Against Terror, K.O.S. Secret Operations, and my personal favorite of the year — Genesis A.D by ijji. Unlike most shooters, Genesis AD has a sci-fi theme, but is more realistic than S4 League. The graphics are top notch since the game uses the latest Unreal Engine. It has some cool mechanics like wall jumps, jet packs, and futuristic weapons. The interface is very similar to that of Alliance of Valiant Arms (AVA), also published by NHN on their ijji portal.

One of my favorite genres, especially as a PC gamer, has always been RTS. Its rare to find a free to play RTS games, but we’ve gotten two great ones in the past two year. Last year we had EA’s BattleForge and this year we’ve got Company of Heroes Online by THQ. Its a world war 2 themed game with fast paced gameplay, and less emphasis placed on resource management and building construction. It comes with a single player campaign so beginners can learn the basics before subjecting themselves to humiliation against other players.

There were many other MMOs in 2010, so be sure to check out all of them! If you're looking for something else, check out this huge list of MMOs which include mobile, browser, client, and more.

Conquer Online is Really Popular

Apparently the 2D MMORPG Conquer Online from TQ Digital is incredibly popular. I’ve heard of the game before and have played several other TQ Digital games including Eudemons Online and Zero Online, but never Conquer Online. Just yesterday I decided to give the game a try, as I’ve seen ads for it on a few sites and wanted to see what the big deal was. To no surprise, the game’s visuals were very much similar to both Eudemons and Zero Online. It seems like all the games from TQ Digital run off of the same exact engine game engine. The Way of the Five, The Warlords, Crazy Tao and the other MMORPGs published by TQ Digital are the exact same way. I don’t mean to say this in a bad way, as the visuals in Conquer Online aren’t bad. I say not bad, because even though the graphics aren’t Karos Online or The Pirates of the Burning Sea style “shiny”, the visuals are good enough to get the job done. To be honest, I don’t like it when games dedicate all their resources to trying have the newest and best possible graphics out there. I mean just look at games like Archlord from Webzen and RF Online. Both games launched as great looking MMORPGs, but over time their graphics lost their flare. Both games are considered fairly “ugly” by today’s standards, especially with games like Vindictus and to a lesser degree Dynasty Warriors Online pushing the boundaries of graphics.

The way I look at it – if a game is 2D, the graphics won’t really age that much over time. 2D games most certainly age better than 3D ones. I mean just look at Istaria and Planetside – both games launched as games with ground-breaking graphics, but today they’re nothing special. Personally, I think the visuals in some 2D MMORPGs like WonderKing, MapleStory and Fists of Fu to be great. New MMORPGs with 2D graphics like Angels Online from IGG and Myth Angels Online from UserJoy pull off solid 2D visuals. One huge, huge, advantage (notice how I said huge twice to emphasize the importance?) of 2D games over 3D ones is that they’re more compatible with older PCs. Not every PC in the world can play Alliance of Valiant Arms, but MOST PCs can handle Dragon Raja or Destiny Online from EnjoyMMO. A lot of my friends actually can’t play Runes of Magic, even though they want to. This makes me question whether it was a good idea for the game’s devs to make the game so good looking. This might sound a bit ridiculous, but it makes sense. Games like Final Fantasy 14 which demand absurdly powerful PCs are sort of screwing themselves over. People who want to play these game’s cant, because they don’t have amazing graphics cards – so what do these people do instead? They download and play games that their computers can handle. Games like Mission Against Terror and War of Angels which don’t demand $2,000 PCs to play. Because MOST gamers can’t always keep up with the latest technologies.

Anyway, I ranted for quite a while. What I really wanted to say is that Conquer Online isn’t a bad game. It’s not exactly my cup of tea, as the experience rate is way too fast. It’s almost Jade Dynasty or Magic World Online style throwaway because you can pretty much kill everything on the screen with your most basic attacks. I Think game developers need a better way to eliminate grind from MMORPGs without doing it with a built in bot.