8 MMOs that You Can Play Even if You Like Playing Alone
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You clearly don't play FFXIV, and didn't do very much research on it. The game does indeed follow the Holy Trinity, and DPS jobs do indeed do the most DPS (depending on player skill, obviously). The game has many, MANY group dungeons and trials baked into the main story, so it cannot be completed alone, and it's actually fairly grind-light outside of the optional relic weapon quest and gathering materials for crafting.
Sorry, but as a long time player of FFXIV, I'd rather potential new players didn't walk away with any misconceptions about the game.
Sorry, but as a long time player of FFXIV, I'd rather potential new players didn't walk away with any misconceptions about the game.
Thanks for that, I was about 3 seconds away from opening Steam.TT Kairen said:
OT; I play Star Trek and Star Wars, and love the fact that they are very single player friendly.
Shouldn't be surprising, this quality. The guy is a hack writer and the Escapist was better off when he wasn't polluting the front page with a poorly written buzzword article. I'm more surprised they actually brought this septic trash back at all, it was nice not having to see it in the main feed on mobile because, shocker, The Escapist still hasn't made it possible to switch between that and desktop while using a mobile device.TT Kairen said:
About the only thing he said that was right is that the game is a JRPG. But even that is offering him a wide birth of generosity, given how he is trying to argue Japanese MMO's are grind heavy single minded titles... Considering the only other predominantly "Japanese" MMO is Phantasy Star, it's one thing to be ignorant and another to be so downright lazy that it's almost racist, since he's all but saying all asians are the same... the same kind of thing as a person's dad might pull their eyes to the side and start chanting the first slightly 'asian' gibberish they've heard and act like it's the same to anyone.
I know others have already mentioned FF14, but Wildstar? Wildstar!? The game that was so up its own arse that it was Die Hard raider or go home noob the game? The game that demanded its playerbase be only the most hardcore and group focused players out there, and that was by the devs own wishes?
I can agree ESO is solo friendly but not for the reason you listed, you could solo it before One Tamriel but only after did it become a completely open affair. It wasn't because you could be a tank, dps or healer regardless of class as before you still had to play smart, now they just lifted the barrier and let exploration be the motivator with everything scaled to the player exactly and more content focused on making the character feel more important while doing their best to avoid "The only chosen one syndrome" that has plagued the single player games for ages.
I can agree ESO is solo friendly but not for the reason you listed, you could solo it before One Tamriel but only after did it become a completely open affair. It wasn't because you could be a tank, dps or healer regardless of class as before you still had to play smart, now they just lifted the barrier and let exploration be the motivator with everything scaled to the player exactly and more content focused on making the character feel more important while doing their best to avoid "The only chosen one syndrome" that has plagued the single player games for ages.
Calling bullshit on two of them;
FFXIV: Every single dungeon is tied to the main story in order to progress so you're going to have to buckle up and group with people every few levels or so. This was just a few months back so unless they patched that... The game was not soloable.
SW:TOR is stingy with rewards. Either myself or my companion got undergeared as quests weren't designed with TWO people in mind and I could never afford to outright buy upgrades. After a certain point my companion started getting three-shot by enemies which left my squishy Inquisitor vulnerable. I don't know what I managed to do to mitigate it but this pretty much happened every few levels.
Granted that was like, one or two years ago so in case they patched that, too...
Edit: Didn't specify on that first one.
FFXIV: Every single dungeon is tied to the main story in order to progress so you're going to have to buckle up and group with people every few levels or so. This was just a few months back so unless they patched that... The game was not soloable.
SW:TOR is stingy with rewards. Either myself or my companion got undergeared as quests weren't designed with TWO people in mind and I could never afford to outright buy upgrades. After a certain point my companion started getting three-shot by enemies which left my squishy Inquisitor vulnerable. I don't know what I managed to do to mitigate it but this pretty much happened every few levels.
Granted that was like, one or two years ago so in case they patched that, too...
Edit: Didn't specify on that first one.
I've been playing a lot of SWTOR recently, both with a friend and solo. It's actually quite possible and fun to play through it solo, as I've been doing with my Imperial Sniper. Flashpoints may be a bit tougher, but I've yet to try them solo, and the monetary rewards are actually fairly decent, especially if you buy adaptive armour and just upgrade the mods once every half dozen levels or even less.Zydrate said:
And adaptive armour is nice and cheap at 2.5k credits apiece. Sure, the mods, enhancements and armour for each piece go up in price, but it's not an amount that isn't easily affordable now, especially if you do the odd side mission or space battle. Though, for the latter, you have to make sure to take the operations from the mission console next to the flight console.
Also, cybernetic legs. More games need robutts.
Edit: Oh, if you meant with a friend, yeah, it's still quite easily affordable, with adaptive armour, as I said. And it's easy to make some quick cash on the Galactic Market by making and selling colour crystals.
Yeah, gonna have to echo the sentiment of others here regarding FF14. It not only follows the Holy Trinity, it does so VERY religiously. Healers are healers, tanks are tanks, DPS are DPS. There's no off-specs or hybrid builds.
Also, Wildstar was built to emulate old-school WoW in design philosophy. Maybe it changed drastically in the past few years, but back when I played it, it was hardly a solo experience outside of leveling.
And so on and so forth. Seriously, why get people to shit out articles that didn't get even 10 minutes of research behind them?
Also, Wildstar was built to emulate old-school WoW in design philosophy. Maybe it changed drastically in the past few years, but back when I played it, it was hardly a solo experience outside of leveling.
And so on and so forth. Seriously, why get people to shit out articles that didn't get even 10 minutes of research behind them?
I jumped into say this, so I will instead echo it.TT Kairen said:
I started FFXIV so that I could eventually play with some more experienced friends. I suddenly found myself, however, in what, to start with, is a game that is very solo. I chose to be a Tank, and the main story for the best part is tailored for your classes strengths and weaknesses. But that is only the very early game...
After only a couple of hours of main quest and class quest missions you find that the game pushes you to play as the class you have chosen. As a tank I found that a lot of missions started to have friendly NPCs that fought with me. If I didn't act as the tank, distracting enemies and waiting for the healer to replen me, then the team would die and I would fail.
A few levels on and the game takes another slight turn. It starts introducing dungeons that force 4+ players. These players are chosen within the servers for being the trinity style classes that are required to beat it, usually 2x DPS, 1x Tank and a Healer. This dungeon gameplay definitely then becomes a standard as you carry on up the levels. There are still many single player fetch quests, and of course the crafting, non combat jobs, but those only seem to be for gaining levels, equipment and money so that you can get back to the multiplayer main game.
EDIT: I will point out though that the multiplayer bits of the main story will nearly always have you paired with those you don't know. I suppose you could count this as a single player experience if you count barreling through each dungeon at the pace of the fastest person attempting to execute your role flawlessly so that you can gain the end of level kudos points as such.
Final Fantasy XI, on the other hand, IS pretty solo-friendly these days, which isn't terribly surprising given its age and slowly dwindling player base. A while back the devs introduced the Trust magic system, in which you can summon NPCs into a party with you, and have pretty much covered every role in the game with one such Trust or another.
You can't make it through the highest level content solo, but just about everything else you can manage by yourself.
You can't make it through the highest level content solo, but just about everything else you can manage by yourself.
No Phantasy Star Online 2? I'm insulted!
I'm a decent ways into the game and it's quite Solo Friendly.
While having a balanced party is helpful, since the game is so action heavy and the more fragile classes have really great evasive skills, tanking isn't something that's super important. And if you have no healer and no health-stealing abilities, you can just pop a telepipe to go back to the dropship, restock on potions and then dive back down.
Plus, all classes can contribute to damage. The sword type guys are up close dishing out area damage and charged attacks, the ranged guys are peppering the enemy with weakspots and sniping away, and the mage types have a wealth of abilities that can either nuke an area or do precision damage to one enemy (on top of their ability to heal and buff).
And finally, you can recruit NPCs or "player NPCs" (that people make public) to form a party with you and while they're not super smart, they can help take the pressure off you and heal you and buff you.
Oh, and the game's large-scale events that pop every few hours will (if you set your quest instance to public) pair you up with up with random people up to a max size of 12 people in a big giant mob, with no need to actually form a party (although it does help, since you can more easily see HP bars of allies if they're in your party).
And it's free to boot, with only one thing in the game making me wish I put a bit of money in (You get a single stat-boosting pet at the start, and if you want to play as multiple different classes on the same character instead of using separate characters, you won't be optimal).
The only thing is that you need to get the translation patch and stuff and stuck to Ship 02, since the game was unforgivably never released in North America.
Seriously, SEGA, WTF!
I'm a decent ways into the game and it's quite Solo Friendly.
While having a balanced party is helpful, since the game is so action heavy and the more fragile classes have really great evasive skills, tanking isn't something that's super important. And if you have no healer and no health-stealing abilities, you can just pop a telepipe to go back to the dropship, restock on potions and then dive back down.
Plus, all classes can contribute to damage. The sword type guys are up close dishing out area damage and charged attacks, the ranged guys are peppering the enemy with weakspots and sniping away, and the mage types have a wealth of abilities that can either nuke an area or do precision damage to one enemy (on top of their ability to heal and buff).
And finally, you can recruit NPCs or "player NPCs" (that people make public) to form a party with you and while they're not super smart, they can help take the pressure off you and heal you and buff you.
Oh, and the game's large-scale events that pop every few hours will (if you set your quest instance to public) pair you up with up with random people up to a max size of 12 people in a big giant mob, with no need to actually form a party (although it does help, since you can more easily see HP bars of allies if they're in your party).
And it's free to boot, with only one thing in the game making me wish I put a bit of money in (You get a single stat-boosting pet at the start, and if you want to play as multiple different classes on the same character instead of using separate characters, you won't be optimal).
The only thing is that you need to get the translation patch and stuff and stuck to Ship 02, since the game was unforgivably never released in North America.
Seriously, SEGA, WTF!
Yeah, at the least completing the main story is easily possible solo. And if you do heroics you get decent enough gear for yourself anyways, at least as you level up. It's not at all hard to get gear that's high enough level once you hit max level. And honestly, you can get away with underleveled gear for the story missions very easily.Katherine Kerensky said:
Thing is doing end game content of course requires groups. Same for GW2 which was also mentioned. And if you want good money end game content kind of matters lol
Was going to say something about FF14 but it's already been beat to death. Wow... Tank does the most damage? Come on...
I can only speak to GW2, but it's absolutely solo friendly. It's probably why I like the game since I've never cared for the hassle of getting a good party composition together for group content. That's in the game if you want it, but 99% of the game is either completely soloable, has the multiplayer naturally integrated into the open world, or is doable just by joining a random party of 4 other people (dungeons and fractals). Every class is capable of doing good damage. Some are better than others at this, but I'd never say you're handicapping yourself by picking one class over another.
Sure you can play them alone, but you sure as fuck won't be having any fun doing it. And I LIKE playing solo games but really, MMO's are really not a solo affair no matter which one you play, the best content is always gated behind interaction, as is the nature of the genre.