This week is more Enderal for me. A free total conversion of Skyrim (you need Skyrim obviously). It's a complete new game with new mechanics, story, skills, etc. It's fully voiced and waaaay better than Skyrim IMHO.
I’d suggest Guild Wars 2. It’s an MMO that can be played quite casually and doesn’t require massive time investment or grinding. It has a fun gameplay loop that encourages free exploration. Collaboration with other players arises freely from gameplay.
Yep absolutely seconding this one. Everything is very much a play-as-you-want playground, with many ways to level and a low stress, community based world. Pretty much everything that causes friction against other players in other MMOs (kill stealing, limited resource mining, open world pvp etc) just isn’t in the game or in its own place you don’t have to go.
I will say that it has a lot of complexity and systems on systems that have built up over time that can be opaque and overwhelming. But again, you have the choice not to engage, and can do perfectly well running your character around maps exploring and picking cabbages and pumpkins and doing whatever you think looks interesting. Just remember to change out your armor and weapons every few levels on your way to 80.
It’s one of the few MMOs I bought at launch and made it from level one to the cap without ever actually teaming up with anyone. And the story was good too!
I vaguely recall getting about 30 days out of the free tier until I decided to start purchasing base/expansions.
So, I think I’d just say be aware that it’s probably not an “indefinitely free” kind of thing – but will give you a sufficient amount of entertainment until you want to consider if you want more.
I’ve enjoyed OSRS on and off since about 2004, but if you’re wanting to avoid walking simulators, it is the worst offender. A big part of the game is calculating the best possible path to follow. You are making trips to the bank in between every activity and multiple times per quest. Many skills exist just to ease to burden of traveling around the world.
My personal favorite MMO is vanilla WoW. I’m obviously biased but it is just what I had the most fun with back when it came out and I think it still holds up incredibly well today. I play on a private server called TurtleWoW and it is 100% free. They have continuously added their own expansions over time and are currently working on a client that runs the game in Unreal Engine if you desire more modern graphics.
If it seems to old school, Guild Wars 2 is a really good choice as well. I played through the base game and first expansion of FF14 and ultimately wasn’t impressed. It’s great if you like to role play with other players, but everyone is so focused on playing the meta that it took all of the fun out of the game for me. People would kick me out of groups for trying to play with my own personalized set up.
They recently released an installer for Linux. It’s an ISO which I did not have much luck running on Linux Mint. Before that was released, they released TurtleWoW as a portable zip file. They still update the game with that release. I use Proton on Steam to run it on Mint with no issues.
No legal issues for players to worry about. My understanding is that since it is a version of WoW that doesn’t exist anywhere else at this point, it’s ok to run severs for it as long as money isn’t being charged for it. TurtleWoW devs do accept “donations” which will reward players with in game cosmetics, but as far as I know, no pay to win items. Unless you count a pet that acts as a portable bank. Using it let’s you interact with your bank that can otherwise only be accessed from various cities in game. I don’t have that pet myself, but I have been able to use other players’ when I come across them in the world.
Sounds help a lot. For most enemies it’s either sound or literal visible movement. The rest is just learning after getting hit i guess. But just these two things will take you far.
I know, I know… But right now the whole “go there and do the thing, good, now go there and do the other thing” is kinda what I need to shut off my brain and have some fun.
No shame in enjoying a serving of slop every now and then. You can’t be expected to eat broccoli and celery all the time, sometimes you just need a burger.
Depends what you like, but I’m still nostalgic for old school WoW and find myself wanting to play every now and again but don’t want to subscribe for a whole month. My recommendation for that would be Turtle WoW, it’s an expanded vanilla private server that has it’s own launcher and everything so it’s pretty simple to get started with.
Interesting. How likely is it that Blizzard throws another tantrum and files a lawsuit? I heard they’ve done that before against people running private servers.
That’s what worries me a bit as well. As far as I’m aware, they seem to be pretty safe for now? Nostalrius WoW was a big private server that got shut down by Blizzard, but they were located in the USA. Turtle WoW is based in Europe (UK if what I found is accurate) and has done transformative work to the game, including working on a whole new compatible client in UE5 that should be releasing this year. But the issue still remains that they primarily have Blizzards assets, story, etc as the base of their game. I guess time will tell, I’m hoping it sticks around though.
Been playing on twow for about a month now, it scratches the vanilla itch better than classic did, folks seem reasonably friendly and it’s nice to have a community on the server vs modern WoW of never seeing the same person twice
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.
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Aktywne