ZeroAX wrote:This question is an oxymoron, but does anyone know of any MMORPGs (free or subscription based, I don't care) that are low on the grinding and repetetive tasks? A game where playing a hour is actually playing an hour, not like wow where to play 2 hours you'd need to waste 4 hours on other tasks.
I am looking with something with a PvP emphasis would be nice.
If you haven't already tried them, you may want to give the Guild Wars games a glance. The name is stupid, and doesn't reflect the scale/scope of them.
The first game isn't really an MMO (Arenanet doesn't consider it one). It falls most under the category of Diablo or PSO. Towns and cities are public, but once you set foot outside of them, things are instanced.
It's an extremely horizontal game that puts a -lot- more emphasis on skill than gear/etc It takes traversing the world to collect all your possible skills, but you can only use 8 at a time.
It's set up that you can fill out your party with "henchmen" in town hubs, to venture into surrounding areas. The Nightfall campaign introduced Hero characters that can serve the same function, but can be used anywhere, equipped as you like, given skills/instruction/etc. So, basically, you can effectively play the game as a single player experience with a full party of characters you set up/order around. Offhand, there are a couple missions that will dump you in with a second group of players if one happens to be going at the same time (otherwise it's a party of NPCs).
There are multiple campaigns, which are technically stand-alone (except Eye of the North). You can bring a character between them, but in some cases if you want to have a particular main class you'll need to start in that campaign or a later one.
IMO, some of them are fairly unique - Nightfall is probably one of only a handful of RPGs featuring a predominately African (inspired) cast, for instance.
Overall, not nearly the investment that a proper MMO is. I'd say each campaign is comparable to a decent single player RPG, 30 hours or so. If you want to grind in GW1, you
definitely can, and some players do. However, it's almost entirely for prestige stuff. If you don't want to, the game flows basically like an offline game.
It's a "buy to play" game - again, like Diablo. The game costs money, but there's no sub fee. There's a cash shop, but not filled with time-savers.
PVP was a big focus in designing it, though I think it's all structured matches. Still, there are plenty of skills with PVE and PVP versions, and i think the ability to just make a PVP character at the cap if you just want to dive into that.
Guild Wars 2 is designed more like a theme park MMO, a la WoW. A lot of how it actually plays feels similar to that, or FFXIV:ARR. The world in general is shared, though story stuff is instanced, and balanced for solo.
Each area basically has a checklist of things to complete. A lot of it comes down to "Dynamic Events", which are basically what ARR copied for the FATE system...except they scale better, and so on. There are other things - vistas, some maps have jumping puzzles (not that the game is build especially well for platforming... ), etc.
The level cap is a lot higher than GW1's, and it'll probably take doing more than going from story mission to story mission to be ready for each one...but basically, if you keep exploring, you should be set.
GW2 is also built for PVP, and you'll automatically be bumped to the level cap while participating.
Like GW1, it's buy-to-play.
While I haven't gotten too far in it myself, The Secret World adopted that model as well. From what I've seen/heard, the story content for that is quite solid, and I wasn't grinding anything while playing it.
If you're looking for a very PVP-centric game... I have heard good things (in that respect) regarding Archeage.
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