Dead Space 3 after playing the first two. It starts off as a Gears of War game until a very cool space Uncharted moment. I know it’s the weakest one but going in knowing that makes it easier to enjoy it.
Pirated old WoW on pirate servers is quite nice imo. Vanilla, The Burning Crusade and The Wrath of the Lich King. Never give Microsoft-ActivisionBlizzard a single cent btw. OSRS seems nice, but I never played it myself. It’s not free at all though.
Old School RuneScape (OSRS) membership prices in USD as of June 2025 are: 1‑month plan: $13.99/month 6‑month plan: $11.99/month (total $71.94) 12‑month Premier plan: $8.29/month (total $99.48)-
You can play OSRS for free. Its just got some features locked behind membership. But you can also get membership through items in the game. As an enjoyer of vanilla wow, I’d recommend giving it a shot.
I played pirate servers for a little bit after a LONG break of not playing WoW. It was a little buggy, but it was enough to scratch the itch, explore some new things, and realize I didn’t want to get back into WoW.
Yep, but also some pservers offer new content (like new locations, classes, skills), and some offer different gameplay altogether, like classless servers where you roll skills for any classes as you level and try to build something that makes sense.
There’s a new one coming out, project epoch, that has me interested. Also there was ascension servers that had build your own class. These are free old wow alternatives.
Last time I’ve played on Ascension they also had another project in development, called World of Runescape (basically total conversion fully-custom WoW). Don’t know its current status but it looked amazing in videos.
Its not new, but maybe check out Ragnarok Online. I don’t know how beginner friendly it is, but I was able to pick it up pretty easily with no prior knowledge.
If you don't like the back and forth type stuff, you're probably looking for a theme-park style MMORPG. You might try something like Warhammer: Return of Reckoning.
I dug my sim racing gear back out recently and have been putting in quite a few hours into the rallycross mode on Dirt Rally 2.0! I’m currently trying to tell myself that I normally only do this for a month or two a year, and that I don’t need to buy a sim cockpit to do it with! 😂 Although I could use it for American and Euro Truck Simulator, so maybe worth it.
I decided to give Vintage Story a try. I was not prepared for what I was about to experience. I can already say it's not for everyone. It's like if you took Minecraft survival mode and then turned it into an actual survival mode. One of the first things everyone makes in Minecraft is a pickaxe. It took me about 2 hours to get the first pickaxe and then another 10 hours (though I did a lot of other things before upgrading my pick) to get the next tier of pickaxe. I probably would've gotten it quicker if I had only focused on that but I had a lot of other survival needs that had to deal with. But to go over what you need to make your first copper pickaxe.
Obviously you need copper. Copper bits can spawn above ground (and a small hint that everyone mentions. If there's copper on the ground there's a small vein of copper right below it in the first layer of sedimentary rock). When you've collected enough copper you need to smelt it and cast it. To smelt copper you can't use wood, you need to use charcoal. How do you get charcoal? You make a charcoal pit and burn wood into charcoal. You need an large amount of wood. How do you get wood? You make an axe. How do you make an axe? You flintknap an axe head and combine it with a stick. Now we can smelt copper but how do we cast it? For that you need to create a pickaxe mold. To create a pickaxe mold you mold clay and then fire it in a pit kiln. A pit kiln is pretty much a hole in the ground that you fill with the clay mold, dry grass, sticks and wood and then let it burn for a whole in game day. When you have a mold you put molten copper into the mold. But you can't just take molten copper and stick it into the mold. You need a crucible to hold the liquid copper and tongs to hold the hot crucible. A crucible is made the same way a mold, you form it from clay and the fire it for a day. Tongs are probably the easiest part of the part of the process as you need just sticks and rope (which you make from cattails). If this feels like it takes forever it's because it does. This is why it's not for everyone but my god did this push the right buttons because unlocking the pickaxe felt like a real milestone.
And in case anyone cares what I did for the next 10 hours, I harvested probably about 1000 tule plants to make a thatch roof. I started a farm and collected different kind of seeds (because you need to rotate crop to keep the soil healthy). I made a cellar because your food will spoil within days if you don't stick them in the cellar. I collected enough copper to make a copper anvil so I could make more advance copper tools. I prospected the land to find tin and lead veins so I could make other metals than copper. I foolishly believed making leather might be easy so I hunted some animals until I looked up leatherworking and then gave up because I hadn't found limestone (or it's equivalent) to start the tanning process. Instead I started to make compost from the leather which I will later use as a fertilizer. Oh and I made a fruitpress to make juice from all the berries I've found.
It's a real survival experience and I'm definitely enjoying the complexity of it all. There's an in-game survival guide that is pretty informative so I don't need to go online to understand how something works. The game also has a very customizable gaming experience. You can very much tailor your experience to be a bit less survival or significantly more survival. You can also modify the worldgen to fit your needs which is something that got removed from Minecraft. There's also a really good modding support. So far I've added the Carry On mod that lets me move chests and barrels around because when I expanded my base (to have more space for my stuff) moving my stuff around was a pretty annoying experience. I also have my eye on some other mods but those require starting a new playthrough and I want to get a bit better grasp of some of the mechanics before pulling the trigger on a new playthrough.
TL:DR I absolutely recommend Vintage Story to anyone willing to put in the effort it demands. You will be rewarded for that effort.
If you want to check out some classics look up project 1999 for EverQuest or the classic world of warcraft servers. RuneScape isn’t a bad choice if you’re into the grind.
Modern I don’t think there’s much I can recommend, even the subscription based games have stores attached now & few or no in game events run by GMs
EverQuest was a throw back, but I cut my teeth on the realm. I would love a simple guy like that again. Also the present events when you find those rare sashes, man that lit up a monkey part of my brain.
Unless you are playing purely for nostalgia, I would very much avoid runescape. It isn’t a game for kids to play during typing class. It is very much an obnoxiously sweaty (set of) game(s).
I think you can play the entire original campaign for FF14 for free? And FF14 is probably THE best theme park MMO out there. That said, my experience is “it is the best community on the internet” is very much marketing and you WILL have bad experiences during dungeons… which are mandatory for story progression. You can negate that if you join a clan but then you aren’t really playing with The Community and are already into hardcore-ish play.
I don’t know where the free/paid demarcations are, but I would actually recommend Guild Wars 2 or Elder Scrolls Online for a newbie. The latter does suck if you want to do any crafting as a free player (and inventory management in general will be hell) but you are there for the overworld gameplay. And both GW2 and ESO are very much geared toward playing solo in a crowd. As in you’ll walk around the overworld which is basically a single area with 10-20 other players. You’ll do event quests together, see each other while you go to the store or walk toward an instanced area, and so forth. But you won’t have to worry about someone telling you they are going to <REDACTED> your family because you didn’t skip a cutscene or aren’t holding aggro properly in newbie dungeon.
If you get into those? You can maybe find a guild and play some of the higher level content. Or you can go pick up FF-MMO or WoW or even SWTOR (apparently it is still going).
As far as dungeons in FF14, at this point, I believe that basically every dungeon can now be done “solo” (that is taking 3 other NPCs with you to complete the dungeon). And the trials, I believe, mostly have that as well, though I’m 100% positive on all of them.
But the point is: as far as dungeons go a player can get through them by themselves now. In fact, I think much of the main storyline content is now solo-able.
Still suffering my way through Blasphemous. I think I misjudged the length of it initially as I had heard it’s fairly short. I’m probably over halfway now, though. I’ve played about 13 hours and just killed Exposito.
My notes are more or less unchanged from last week. I love the story, lore and world building. The atmosphere is cool as hell and the art is great. Gameplay is janky, clunky and has an overabundance of platforming for a game that strews instant-death hazards generously all over the place and has a bunch of projectile-launching enemies hand placed to cause maximum annoyance. Plus the controls are clunky, hitboxes are janky and jumping onto and grabbing a ladder is way harder than it should be. And did I mention every single enemy deals contact damage that jolts you to the side and often knocks you off an edge?
The bosses meanwhile have been cool designs, but not really that complex or challenging. I think it’s been 3-4 tries per boss on average. They’ve been fine, but not really worth trudging through the rest of the game for.
So overall it’s been a mixed bag. I respect the game for its artistic vision, and I understand that having the player suffer is meant as a sort of method acting to go along with the game’s theme of the virtue of suffering. But I don’t know, I’m not really having fun playing it.
I don’t find the absence of criticism suspicious. The petition makes sense. It aims to solve a problem that affects many individuals and a significant part of human culture.
What I do find suspicious is the sudden emergence of criticism now that it looks like it might succeed. I smell astroturfing and media manipulation.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne