What MMO are good for Roleplaying these days

[cowboyx]

I like MMOs which involve roleplaying rather than just raids and PVP and such, and I'm coming out of LOTR Online.

Anyone got any suggestions as to what MMOs people are playing and whether there's any actual role playing going on?

LOTRO was fun enough, but with almost no Aussies playing on the RP Server, it was more like a single player game for me.

What are you playing these days? What do you like about it? Is there any RP?

[Marius]

I'm still roleplaying in Age of Conan, though it's definitely helped by two things.

1. I work from home, so can arrange my work day to go RP in the afternoon when I feel too tired to work.

2. I have a good friend I RP with, so don't have to put up with randoms.

At night you won't find much.

The highest concentration of RPers in a single game right now might be in SWTOR on one of the big RP-PvE serviers, but I've not logged on there in a while. Plus I found that RP a little restricted as it's most often saintly Jedi vs ludicrously evil Sith.

Judging from how much RP was in Age of Conan at release (far more than SWTOR yet at a fraction of the total playerbase), I'd say The Secret World is worth keeping an eye on.

[cowboyx]

I'm still roleplaying in Age of Conan, though it's definitely helped by two things.

1. I work from home, so can arrange my work day to go RP in the afternoon when I feel too tired to work.

2. I have a good friend I RP with, so don't have to put up with randoms.

At night you won't find much.

The highest concentration of RPers in a single game right now might be in SWTOR on one of the big RP-PvE serviers, but I've not logged on there in a while. Plus I found that RP a little restricted as it's most often saintly Jedi vs ludicrously evil Sith.

Judging from how much RP was in Age of Conan at release (far more than SWTOR yet at a fraction of the total playerbase), I'd say The Secret World is worth keeping an eye on.

Good to hear from you Marius. SWTOR doesn't really interest me, and your opinion of reinforces that opinion. I've always thought the SW universe to be a bit 2 dimension. I had the same sort of thing in LOTRO, such a tightly defined, good vs evil world in both settings.

I might give age of Conan a try as it seems to have a Free play option, to see if I like the feel. Are there Australian servers? Or at least servers where Australians congregate?

[Marius]

Not really, that's the main problem with the game. It's well past its golden age, and so you'll find RP difficult to find as an Australian on weekdays. On weekends you might find it still too cliquey, but give it a go by all means, roll on the Wiccana server. I'm there, and as I said I still enjoy it greatly, but I've had time to get to know people and find what I enjoy.

Right now there unfortunately isn't a great RP option for Australians. I'd keep my eye on Guild Wars 2 and The Secret World, both of which will launch this year.

[cowboyx]

I'm definitely going to look at Guild Wars 2 when it comes out. If it even goes a little way to throwing out some of the awful cliches of current MMORPGs (grind, classes, balance, static quests), it's got to be worth a look.

[Marius]

GW2 is highly promising.

And I think SWTOR lost a heap of potential for RP because of the faction system.

Smugglers couldn't smuggle... they had free access to all Republic worlds and couldn't go to any Imperial worlds, or even talk to imperial players. So Han Solo's entire reason for existing was not portrayed. Likewise, bounty hunters were turned into little more than Imperial police.

And there was certainly no effort by the Sith to hide in plain sight, like what the entire prequel series was based on. Jedi and Sith were instead glorified duellists, and this is how people played them.

The effort to capture a lot of customers via creating Space WoW killed what character the universe had, I thought.

[Mr.Gomez]

its not a traditional kind of mmo per se but ive been playing torn city for over a year now and i think the roleplaying in it is quite deep for a text based game, you can be who ever you want to be. plus its the kinda game you can
play for five minutes or fifty, anyway check it out if your interested: http://www.torn.com/1501371 my character in torn is ofcourse named mrGomez and im open to help any noobies that might need a hand!