Space Channel Rabbit ~ vibes

I've played a bunch of MMOs. Here's how I feel about all of them! Favorites at the top!

Phantasy Star Online 2: New Genesis

I have 1,561 hours in NGS.

That makes it my second most-played MMO ever. Right now, I'm just kind of standing on a building in Central City watching the cherry blossoms fall. It's been a while since I've even played it much, but every time I log in, the game feels fresh. The vibe is good, it has great music. It's totally free to play, so I never feel like I have to log in. There's always some kind of event going on, and every week some new Limited Time Quest is popping up, or some little piece of content.

That's a blessing and a curse, though.

PSO2NGS is such a weird game, really. It has all these social elements. Mountains of emotes. Tons of customization in the character creator, and totally free housing in C-Spaces with enormous room to play and build. And yet the pacing of everything is so frenetic that players rarely have a chance to just kind of be, unless they're afking in one of the hubs. You can sit in chairs, though!

Where NGS really stumbles is just with having regular things to do. There's not a lot of meaningful group content, and most of the interesting things are acturally solo, like Masquerade. Otherwise, you have a rotation of LTQs or maybe special Urgent Quests that are temporarily added every week or so. Once you're done with those, you're back to waiting until the next piece of temporary content. There's nothing to really dig into as a regular player!

The other major issue is that it's just hard to ever lose. In NGS, it's all about speed. With catchup gear, you can do pretty much anything right away. Clear it all. The only reason to get better augments or hunt for rare weapons is to clear things faster. So NGS ends up being kind of like a time trial game. I've been playing on and off since 2024 and not once have I ever seen a quest actually fail. Getting new augments and weapons, gearing up, all of that - it increases your potency but that just means you might finish a quest faster. You're never going to lose. At least, I've never seen it happen. At worst you might get bored and give up, or other players might leave. The lack of stakes takes a lot of the edge off.

Still! Even with those complaints, NGS is very easy to jump back into. The combat is pretty fun, and it's an okay way to pass the time for an hour or two. There's also Base PSO2 in there, which has stuff like the casino and more traditional MMO missions. I feel like NGS is literally one solid update away from being a great MMO, but for whatever reason they're just not doing it yet. Add some harder missions that can be done by duos! Slow the pace of some quests, mix it up! Please!

The community can also be weird, but I'm just gonna add this note here at the top: Every MMO community is pretty weird and/or gross. It's a fact of life, I guess. You have to dig deep to find the good people, but they're out there. Sometimes.

Star Trek Online

I was never really into Star Trek. Back when we tried Elite: Dangerous, I started watching Deep Space Nine, but didn't really stick with it. I liked it though, kind of like a soap opera in space.

Fast forward to this year and my friend suggested we try Star Trek Online, and I was so surprised that it's actually not bad at all. Its setting is pretty ideal for an MMO and the stories they tell, with hundreds of captains flying around doing different things. It's narratively consistent, which I've decided is important in an online game where thousands of "chosen ones" might be running around at the same time.

There are tons of little systems to play with in STO, like managing your Bridge Officers, sending Duty Officers out on little missions, upgrading your ship. Crafting and I guess PVP (but I haven't tried that yet). So it has most of what I like to see in MMOs, along with tons of emotes and a few spots where people hang out sometimes and roleplay. I don't roleplay, but it's fun for a vibe to listen to.

Star Trek in general has this kind of...sort of comfy, sort of boring vibe to me, and STO lives there, too. It's not the most exciting thing, but it's fine. If I could describe it, it feels like lounging around in some kind of hotel conference room...in space.

STO suffers a similar problem to NGS, though, and that's that it can be easy. I haven't actually seen a mission fail yet. In fact, one of the first missions my friend and I took right after leaving the tutorial was apparently the second-to-last episode in the entire game, and the only reason we "failed" that one was because she had to go afk and got booted, and I decided to leave it for later. Everything scales, I guess. There are extra difficulties (Advanced and Elite) that add injuries and apparently make things a bit harder, but I haven't tried those yet. In general, I'd prefer if games offered a sort of neutral challenge and fail states, otherwise I start to wonder why I'm doing anything if I can already do all the things.

That said! I like my character (and the character/uniform editor) and there's enough in Star Trek Online that'll I'll probably keep checking in even if we don't play it all the time, so it's a keeper.

The Lord of the Rings Online

LotRO is an odd case. At first, I was impressed by the size of Middle-earth, and the quest writing, and the little odds and ends. It was our first choice after leaving FFXIV, and the big reason for that was the music system. Every character can play an instrument, and Minstrels can play them all. And using ABC notation (converted from midi) you can set up bands of minstrels and play...well, usually the greatest hits of the 70s if you're a LotRO regular, but we tried to mix it up a bit.

The game's an eyesore, though. Maybe it's just me, but I don't just mean the fact that it's dated. Plenty of dated games still look great, like World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy XI, and even Base PSO2. But there's something about LotRO and their attempt at realism circa 2007 that just did not age well at all. They recently added UI scaling (finally) but all that did was make some of the eyesores a bit larger. A step in the right direction, but still not great.

Beyond that (and it's a big big negative for me personally because my eyes can't take it), I think it's a pretty solid MMO. It has adjustable landscape difficulty, the Shire is nice, I like the sort of down to earth rustic music. Some areas look nice visually, like Rivendell. The Trollshaws are a visual nightmare. I really can't emphasize enough just how much this game's visuals impact my ability to enjoy it.

It is! A game I want to get back into, though. I'd like to see Moria someday, and maybe Mordor. I have a River Hobbit. I miss playing songs. It's a game I want to like and I do like it, it's just hard to play, sometimes.

Honorable Mentions

Still Installed

Final Fantasy XI (HorizonXI): This one's confusing. It's a good game. I like the quests and how things aren't just spelled out for you. It can be difficult and slow. But how much grinding can a person really put up with when grinding is all there is to do? If I'm hanging out in the Buburimu Peninsula murdering birds over and over...where's it all heading? Am I leveling up just so I can grind some more somewhere else? Aside from fishing, there aren't really any minigames to play or things to do socially. Usually when playing an MMO, I hit a point where I start to see the path ahead, and if the next 100 hours look similar to the previous 100 hours, I start to check out. I might go back to this one, but it's hard to see the "why" and the amount of mindless grinding is absurd.
Lost Ark: idk? It's fine but completely mindless. We played it for about eight hours before dropping it forever.
Guild Wars 2: I want to like this one. I try it now and then. But there's something about how characters move, how floaty everything feels, and the art design that just doesn't do it for me. It's one of those MMOs where the idea of playing it sounds good, but once I'm in there I'm like "ew let me out." I'm still willing to give it one more chance though...
Everquest 2: I tried this for a bit but haven't done much in it. The music is nice and sweeping. The graphics are severely dated. Everything's dead and quiet. But I made a magical frog and hopped around. That's all I have to say about that.
Runescape: Not really my kind of game, but has a certain charm to it. I like the music!
World of Warcraft Classic (TurtleWoW): I like this quite a bit, tbh. It's aged pretty well, and the feeling of waiting for an airship and then actually riding it across the world is amazing. My friend and I made Tauren. One day, though, I just kind of stopped playing, and that was more of a me thing. I just got sort of tired of the grind and quest quest questing. We also had some weird experiences with the community that weren't the typical "gross" like I mentioned above, but a sort of simmering tension. One person freaked out at my friend because they thought she was trying to interfere with his fishing in the pond at Thunder Bluff (she was just standing there). And then we got screamed at because we queued up for a dungeon we apparently weren't ready for despite what the levels said. It's the kind of game that's been around for so long that you have people who've been playing it for 900 years and can't comprehend that some players might actually be new.
Tower Unite: This isn't really an MMO, but it's a persistent online space with minigames and condos you can decorate. The thing is, it has this grody, seedy, skeevy vibe to it like hanging out at a suspicious strip mall at night. The community is uniquely bad. But if you ignore that, the games are kinda fun?
Elite: Dangerous: I liked this, but it's another game I played a ton right up until I didn't. It has this thing called the BGS, or Background Simulation. And it sounds neat on paper! All these different factions, all the markets, the way players can hypothetically affect the world. But after a while, you start to see that it really isn't THAT interesting. It's still the sort of system I'd like to see implemented in other games though, because dynamic systems are so needed in MMOs. My biggest memories of Elite involve traveling way way way out into the cosmos and being the first to land on and get my name on some planets, and that's pretty cool. Also flying little fighters while my friend piloted her own ship.
TemTem: Totally worth the $9 when it's on sale. You can play through the entire story co-op and there's some fun to be had. I haven't checked into it in a long time, but after the release of TemTem Swarm, the developers kind of retooled the entire thing to make it more friendly, and totally scrapped the cash shop. It's one of the better (if not the best) Pokemon-like games out there that isn't actually Pokemon. The monster designs are also a ton of fun.
Sky: Children of the Light: A super chill game where you just kind of wander around. There are other players and you can interact with them, and decorate a little house and things. I still need to explore it more. It's nice but in a very sort of relaxing comatose way. A vibe game.
Toram Online: Graphically kind of nice in that old PS2 sort of way, kind of like FFXI. Music is bopping. Keeping it around just for some vibes.

Uninstalled