Choosing the right MMO could be difficult at times, especially when you have a specific taste, and developers haven’t made it easy in any way as they are getting creative when it comes to game features, and this is especially the case with Korean games like Black Desert Online.
What to Look for When Choosing an MMORPG
Everyone has their own taste, but at the end of the day, there are some factors that are common among all gamers when they are choosing an MMO to play. Everyone cares about the game’s population per se as no one wants to play a dead game that will shut down in a couple of years.
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There are so many factors that can come to play when choosing the right game and those include:
- Population & Community
- The developer of the game
- Game business model
- Gameplay
- Progression
- Graphics
Population & Community
A healthy community in an MMORPG is maybe the first thing anyone should take into consideration as this genre of games is people-oriented due to how the content is played.
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If you want to go raiding, you will probably need 4 to 12 people to go with you as this type of content can’t be done solo. The same goes for dungeons and PvP arenas. Most of the content in MMORPGs needs people around it, so finding a game with a good population is very important.
The Developer of the Game
Another major factor that players should look at would be “who is the game developer” because some MMO developers have some past experience of failing to build a proper game or making a game pay-to-win heavy or even not caring for their community.
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The game’s lifespan lasts as long as the developer does, so if you plan on investing time in the game, make sure that the game developer is doing the same.
Game Business Model
This might matter less to some people, but checking if the game is free-to-play, pay-to-play as a subscription, buy one, or pay-to-win is something to consider. Personally, we don’t mind how the game model is as long as the developer is funding it properly without abusing the players’ wallets.
One great example of that would be Digital Extremes and how they are handling Warframe. The game is completely free-to-play but the team is making proper money from microtransactions that are not pay-to-win.
Gameplay
This is maybe one of the most important that people tend to look at when choosing their right MMO as so many things come to play here like what game modes are offered, is the game is action-combat or tab-targeting, is there anything to do at endgame, and so on.
This depends so much from player to player and what you enjoy doing in a game. Do you look at whether the game has so many side activities that you can do like fishing and hunting, or do you look at how many raids the game offer?
Guild Wars 2 for example offers different game modes like PvP, World vs. World, PvE dungeons and raids, and much more that satisfies every player’s needs, and these are the types of games you want to be looking out for.
Progression
Progression is a tricky one as there are two kinds of progression when it comes to MMOs. You have horizontal progression and vertical progression. What’s the difference you ask?
Well, horizontal progression is when you don’t really progress in your gear, but more in your account as a whole and you do things for convenience. One example of that would be GW2 legendary armor, and how it is collected only to allow players to conveniently swap stats on demand without having to purchase a new set of armor every time they need new stats.
Vertical progression on the other hand is something similar to how World of Warcraft works. You complete raids to collect gear, and when a new major update hits, your old gear becomes irrelevant and you will have to farm the new raid to get the newer gear.
There are pros and cons for both aspects, and it is more likely that vertical progression games don’t respect the player’s time as much as horizontal progression games do, so we would go with the latter.
Graphics
This is probably the least important aspect for gamers as Old Runescape is still a thing, and because of that, we are strong believers that a good game that does all the above perfectly, regardless of its graphics will excel.
Conclusion
To conclude, choosing the right MMO that you can actually enjoy and invest your time into is a bit of a hard thing to do, especially now due to how other game genres are taking over. However, if you need to choose the right one, just follow our list and you should be good to go.
