I will also say that Wildstar looks good, BUT it's not out yet and to be honest I have no idea when it will be released. It's in the ongoing limbo of "sometime this year" which seems to have been going on for a couple of years now. It's in early closed beta at the moment though, so I'm guessing either late this year or early next year despite all positive forecasts (I tend to be a skeptic when it comes to MMOs). That said I don't remember if I've seen anything about Wildstar's planned business model or anything of that sort.
As far as FTP games go, I've been mostly playing the ones by Cryptic Studios, largely due to their mechanic by which you can obtain paid points by trading in game currencies (Dilithium, Questionite, Astral Diamonds) for them, making just about anything obtainable if you put in the effort, a good marketing gimmick because it's also gotten me to spend a fairly substantial amount of money on them. As someone who has done Alpha, Beta, and is now playing after launch (headstart) I can say Neverwinter is a good game BUT it remains to be seen how well it will fare in the long term. They seem primed to have it succeed better than "Star Trek Online" (which nearly died, but then came back in a huge way and is now one of the big FTP success stories, bigger than even City Of Heroes was in it's prime for Cryptic) but whether that will be the case remains to be seen.
The Secret World is a good "one time fee to play" game, but is fairly low on content IMO, and the endgame is a bit hard to break into. I kind of drifted away from it when my cabal fell apart part way through Nightmares, and I didn't want to go through the frustration of finding another, similar, group.
The Old Republic Online has improved substantially since launch IMO, but it's "free to play" gimmick is more or less a "pay for everything" model, where they seem intent on forcing you into a subscription model. I stupidly spent a fairly large pile of money trying to unlock an account to the point where it would be "free to play" only to find that some things they game does to you cannot be overcome, and even after spending a couple hundred dollars your still going to
be a second class citizen at best. Sad because I always really wanted to like that game, but it's always disappointed me.
My advice would probably be to mess around with Neverwinter for a bit, and then see if Wildstar is out by the end of the year. That said, I'm not ready to sing the praises of "Wildstar" due to never having seen that one in action, and getting burned by too many MMOs over the years. A lot depends on how much content it launches with, and of course what their business model is going to be like, I expect to pay something for an MMO, but honestly I've noticed companies getting too greedy nowadays. Not to mention the guys running Wildstar are NCsoft, who are the guys who have pretty much run a number of MMOs into the ground, most recently "City Of Heroes/Villains" which pretty much got axed without much warning or justification, claims being that it wasn't profitable enough, but at the same time they ironically have been unwilling to talk to anyone about picking it up (and several companies have tried, including the original developer... Cryptic, and their new Perfect World patron apparently). Of course then again there are wierd rumors about that one as well, the game being haunted/cursed, and some borderline creepypasta type stuff none of which gives much in the way of details. I've kind of been hoping CoX would become MMO gaming's first real "urban legend" but it doesn't seem like it will even live on that way.
