Hi teamliquid, I dunno if this is in the correct section or whether it shuold be in Sports and Games(if so, please move it there), but I've been looking for a fun casual MMORPG to play with friends. It has to be something that isn't too time consuming, as I have school right now and its taking quite a lot of time out of my life.
I'm looking for something I can play once a day for half an hour to an hour and a couple of hours on weekends and still have fun. Hopefully be able to do things both by myself(or looking for group) and with a friend. I haven't found anything too good, I'm willing to pay to play, although 15$ a month games are pushing it(unless they're really worth it). PvE is probably what I'm looking for considering that I'm not going to invest heavily in the game.
I've played WoW and guild wars(i enjoyed gw, but couldn't really get into it after a while), and a countless amount of bad f2p games(among them a couple of good ones).
Star Wars: The Old Republic is coming out on the 20th I think, although I believe this is a $15 a month game.
As for only being able to play for 30-60 minutes a day, I think that's fine for any MMO up to the level cap. However if you actually want to do end game content I doubt that will be enough time.
Oh yes, like the poster above me mentioned, LOTRO is a great free to play MMO (Kind of free, you'll probably end up paying like $15-30 throughout the game unless you want to do a ton of grinding.) From my experience the LOTRO community is 1000x better from the WoW community as well. I've played WoW for several years and then I tried LOTRO out for a couple of months and I was completely shocked by how much nicer/more helpful/less trolls and spammers there were.
MMO's tend not to be the sort of games that you can play for half an hour to an hour a day and have fun in... You should prolly look for FPS games mainly or starcraft for example. You cant really do anything in 30 mins on an mmo...
idk if the new eq2 free to play is up yet, Not EQ2 extended you dont want that, its the old f2p model. but the new regular eq2 just went f2p and has a silver and gold sub for additional content, the silver is like a 10 dollar one time fee. the gold is probably 15 per month or you can just play completely free,
I never really gave it a proper shot as I haven't played MMO's for a while myself but you could check out Vindictus. It's a F2P Action-MMORPG with some unique mechanics to the genre, this mostly being the games physics. Gameplay seems to be mostly shortish dungeons so I'd imagine it supports those small game sessions pretty well.
I think D3 is pretty casual you don't need a guild with the ball and chain raid times and I don't believe Blizz is going to charge a per month fee. I could be wrong on that though. The items aren't bind on equip so if your friends are further along than you they can give you hand-me-downs so no one should get too far behind. I just got my beta key and so far it's been fun.
LotRO completely without paying? Probably not. I'm not 100% sure how it works (stopped playing years ago, but have some family who still play, but they're on lifetime accounts, ...) but I think you have to buy "adventure packs" or something like that, which are basically the quests in the higher zones. I think you _can_ earn them ingame without paying, but I assume it's a stupid grind. You can theoretically grind with monster killing to max level - but that's probably not a fun exerpience But I dont think it's going to be a huge investment.
The questing/leveling experience is the best I have experienced in any MMO I played (SWTOR will probably beat it, but I havent played that yet^^). Only endgame is very boring after a short while (very few raids / instances or pvp). If you have a friend with who you can play it's probably even more fun
This isn't really an mmo but my casual "mmo" of choice is Minecraft. I haven't played since the TL MC server has been down but I will resume play when the server is back up. It's not similar to most games, but for me, it's the community that keeps me playing it. In the last iteration of the TL MC server, I just built infrastructure to link together people's properties.
I would only recommend it to people who have friends that play it since it really is the social interaction of the game that keeps me playing.
You can play LotRO for at least 30 hours, probably more, without ever having to buy anything. The world is massive and well done. Once you do find yourself needing to buy things, you can decide whether you want to. Gameplay is nothing special though, in my opinion. So if you're not into the whole exploration thing it might not be worth the time.
If you are only in it for PvE and willing to pay 15$ a month I would go with SWTOR. Best PvE I have ever played in an MMO. The story is great and you don't have to have a group to do any of the main quests. But that really depends again if you think its worth it, youtube some video's of game play and see if you'll like it .