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The gaming industry has gripped the internet revolution to make titles more interactive than ever imagined. Along with revolution comes cost.

While Blizzard are offering the retail edition of World of Warcraft for $20, it will cost an additional $29.99 for the Burning Crusades expansion. Regardless of maybe not wanting the expansion, to simply play WOW will cost you an additional $15 per month. This method of monthly subscription based MMO accounting started several years ago and has yet to cease. Even in a world filled of piracy, the software developers do not lose money on massive multi-player gaming. Unfortunately some of these technologies are becoming very costly on top of our monthly internet bills....

A more friendly approach was for developers to charge for titles and allow free gameplay, as the game has already truly been purchased. Valve and Sierra are great examples of this method. Half-Life Deathmatch, Team Fortress, Opposing Forces, Counter-Strike, and Day of Defeat are still 100% free to play spanning 10 years after the initial release. This has proved to keep loyal followers for ages, as there are still 8 year Counter-Strike veterans pawning the servers. Thanks to the games never expiring nor asking for a monthly access fee, veteran gamers do not complain when the games are greatly updated to the new engines for purchase (Counter-Strike Source, etc). More recent examples of this method include Quake Wars: Enemy Territory.

More recent is the "Free to Play" titles that feature optional upgrades for purchase. This means that you can play the full featured game for free, but if you would like a quick start with ranking and items, you do have the option to purchase a starter pack. Some of the leading "Free to Play" titles are

  

Bounty Bay Online

Bounty Bay Online brings us to the Caribbean seas to trade as a merchant, to seek quest for treasures, to wage war against other colonies, battle over deep waters, and more. BBO is 100% Free to Play. There is however an online shop to purchase Starter Packs and various items intended for the eager players that do not wish to earn their ranks and items.

   

Cabal Online

Coming to the fantasy front is Cabal Online. Cabal brings 6 character classes, over 100 NPC's, 9 environments (similar to Diablo), a modern battle system (similar to Final Fantasy: Crises Core), player partying for coop play, and many quests.

  

Combat Arms

Bringing us to the modern warfront is Combat Arms, a fps title closely resembling the Call of Duty series.... and what is better than the Call of Duty series? A free game that is just as good. Features include ranking, weapon customization, custom charecters, and 8 enviroments ranging from deserts to jungles,

 


Comments (Page 2)
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on Aug 17, 2008
Also the first game in the OP is Voyage Century not bounty Bay. (Though I think they might be the exact same thing)

Also Air Rivals is fun but its a grind fest.
on Aug 17, 2008
I'm aware of some other methods of payment for MMORPGs:

Guild Wars takes the classic approach used for most online games - it costs money to buy, but is totally free to play. This means there isn't a steady flow of money like other MMORPGs, but if they follow an episodic approach and release expansions on a regular basis, they can still get a regular flow of money.

Silkroad and some other lesser known MMORPGs take an unusual approach by offering premium items that can be bought using real world currency inside the game through an online store. It's a risky approach, and players that don't have the money to buy premium items may feel disadvantaged, but apparently it works: Players in Silkroad will often spend more money on premium items than WoW players pay on a monthly basis!

By the way - don't waste your time trying Silkroad - there's vastly more bots than humans in there, and it's got a really steep grinding curve.

Runescape offers an all or nothing premium membership: Members that pay get to access extra game content through a WoW-like subscription. Unlike WoW, Runescape also offers free play, albeit on servers that have ads.

Personally, however, I'd really like to see more Sci-Fi MMORPGs. I'm a really big Sci-Fi fan, but I haven't seen any really good ones.

Anarchy Online showed promise, but it seems to take forever to do anything in it, and only one of my friends played it. It's also a pretty dwindling community by now, from what I hear.

EVE sounds like it's too free form, with very few quests and no restrictions on PKing. Sorry, but I like quests and prefer to PvE rather than PvP.

For the most part, you really just end up playing what your friends play, because part of nearly all MMORPGs is the community. These days I just pay the subscription fee and play WoW.

Yeah, it costs money - but that's where most of my friends went. And frankly, despite the old graphics, it's very polished gameplay. It's got most of the features from the other MMORPGs, and it's the only game I know of that has a centralized marketplace (auction house in the case of WoW), which frankly is something most MMORPGs could benefit from but rarely implement.

The community is really WoW's strength: It's easy to find other people in real life that play WoW. It's easy to play with friends. It's easy to talk to other people about it. Everybody has it, or at least knows what it is.

It's not so easy to find friends that play some other game like Cabal. While I'm sure it's got a decent online community, it doesn't really extend that much into real life, because it's new and doesn't have the same large player base that WoW does.

. . . and despite Cabal being labeled as a "WoW killer" by some people I've talked to, it really can't be a WoW killer until it builds up a community that is on the same scale as WoW - and that's very difficult. You need more than just a great game for that: You need a big marketing campaign and incentives for people to switch. If they can't build up a decent player base, they risk becoming yet another niche MMORPG, played only by a few loyalists.
on Apr 15, 2009

You guys are too funny.... Everything is not a conspiracy 

I actually merged this from a couple of articles I wrote, and admit I should have changed the title to be a little more versatile

I do have a site of my own, which I am not promoting.

Anyways, I am not affiliated with any of the programs listed.

on Apr 17, 2009

 

blitxxx...  this is not exactly the first topic you'd want to be creating on a forum considering you've never even posted here until now because it raises a shadow of doubt over your intentions, thus many start feeling this is spam/advertisement.   I wouldn't be surprised if the thread gets locked.     

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