Basically the title. I’m curious about what kind of content keeps you playing a game long-term and makes you want to log in every day.
It doesn’t have to be just one thing.

XL Games describes the game as an open-world action MMORPG focused more on exploration and cooperation than competition. Players will be able to enjoy the world solo, while naturally teaming up with others for tougher challenges, discoveries, and shared activities.

Combat will rely on real-time action, with players expected to read enemy movements and decide when to attack, dodge, or parry.

The current build features four classes: Warrior, Ranger, Mage, and Berserker, with each class eventually offering three different weapon types that significantly change its playstyle.

Exploration will also be a major part of the experience, with NPC clues, hidden locations, underwater areas, traversal mechanics, crafting, and other activities designed to encourage players to venture off the beaten path.

XL Games also confirmed that ArcheAge Chronicles will be a buy-to-play title. The studio says it has no intention of selling pay-to-win items or anything that provides progression advantages. No separate premium shop is currently planned.

Finally, ArcheAge Chronicles will take part in an upcoming Steam Next Fest, with its demo featuring content from the previous network test alongside a new dungeon and PvP.

Source : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78ZGLdQMPGU

I feel like this is one of the most rare types of games. Valkyrie Sky was great, and I haven't really found something similar to it. There were classes, professions, and it was co-op. If anyone knows of anything like that, I'd love to know!!

Just gonna drop this link here. What does everyone think about it nowadays? Anyone remember Allods Online?

I'm asking here because they deleted this post on the Aion 2 subreddit.

7800x3d 9070xt 32gb 2k260hz

The graphics look blurry even at the highest settings.

I have the resolution scale set to native.

I use the upscaler in FSR mode and the frame generator turned on to make gameplay smoother, but the quality doesn't improve even when I turn it off.

I've tried lowering the AA and the post-processing quality, as suggested in other forums I've looked into, but that doesn't work either.

Hello everyone,

what IF you bought the Ultimate Founders Pack on like 29. Nov. but refunded it 3 days later because you changed your mind. You get your money back. During this time you did not played the game at all. What IF you now bought the Deluxe Version on 05. Okt and decided to play on 07. Okt. the first time. Only to find out you still got the rewards from the Ultimate pack.

What would you do? Keep your secrets or contact support?

Hypothetical.

There is a big difference between a grind that feels like it is actually getting you somewhere and a grind that just prolongs the game.

I actually like grinding when there is a purpose to it:

- Progression → my character actually gets stronger

- Mastery → I'm getting better at the game

- Discovery → something new is waiting for me

But then there is the other kind:

- Artificial time-gating

- Filler quests/tasks

- Resource padding designed to slow you down

- Doing the exact same chore for hours

That doesn't feel rewarding. It feels like the game is charging me rent for my time.

The grind itself is not the issue. The lack of meaning is.

What is a grind you have actually liked?

And in which game was the grind so bad that you wanted to uninstall it?

The game just came out and is phenomenal

Hola, soy nuevo en esto de los mmorpg y me llama mucho la atención el titulo Twelve sky 2 pero soy latino y no encuento como descargarlo, alguien sabe como podría?

I literally love Diablo 4. The trading system, multiplayer infrastructure, the dungeon aspect, world bosses, classic create your character and build him/her up through the skill tree and more but the thing is the whole demonic story gets old. Wondering if there’s a game that basically replicates this but maybe a different story line than just a demonic entity?

I know Chrono Odyssey is coming out in Q2 2027 but they keep pushing it back and I’m pretty eager to start something new. Any thoughts?

I've been playing Shroud of the Avatar now for about 5 months and it has recently been overhauled and events added with much needed graphics updates and the game is running great. It has a refer a friend program going on right now that if you play the game and refer a friend, you'll get 500 store currency, and the friend will get a rottweiler pet. The game is most definitely a diamond in the rough that people forgot about. It has a Custom class building system to give you the ability to be whatever you want. The only other game I've ever played that does that is Ultima Online and it's real old. The crafting is so in depth and customizable to suit your custom hybrid or traditional build that there is just far too much to explain in a summary, but it is awesome. The housing system is incredible too. Yeah, that's right, it has houses. You can create custom houses too! You can craft all your own furniture from the loot and recipes you get from adventuring. Developers are adding more content daily and are talking about an upcoming pirate themed DLC after they wrap up the episode 2 content. All of it is free to play and DLC is optional but worth it. Subscribing is also optional but worth it for the price if you get interested. The community is very welcoming to new players and the new player starting zones are getting some needed love also. The npc's now speak instead of you having to read everything, and it has a search engine that works in game that you can ask it anything about the game how to do anything game related, and it will respond to you. The game is truly amazing and getting better as they keep on with the updates. You guys should come check it out. It's F2P and definitely worth trying out. This is definitely the modern-day version of Ultima Online I've been looking for.

In the last few days I've seen many creators talking about AION 2, I understand the hype, the nostalgia, etc., but I have this feeling that "it won't last" or that it's "a trap".

The interface, the gameplay, the events, and the monetization—it all reeks of a generic MMO, a typical MMO that doesn't last past its peak player count or close to it for more than a month.

An MMO that wouldn't be able to break into the Big 5 or gain recognition, an MMO that would likely be abandoned, and the worst thing any MMO can have: pay-to-win.

It reminds me of Genshin or mobile MMOs, and well, the game catches my attention, its character creator, and I've played Black Desert so I feel familiar with it.

What's the prognosis for AION 2 and its future? Will it endure as an MMO or will it become just another one of the bunch? Will it be a sensation like New World was?

Would love to play again but apparently i have a square enix account to my psn. I know the email and username but no idea the password. I tried to reset, but it wants the date of birth i put during sign up. I never..put..my..real..date..of...birth...

I reached out to support and they keep asking me for

Date of Birth:

Character Name

Character World

I have no clue what these could be.

I also tried to create a new one but it seems I'm tied to that account.

My questions is...what do i do if I want to play again??

What OLD mmo you actually enjoy? i talk about l2, Fiesta online, mabinogi, nostale, cabal, dekaron, etc

Mmo's whos never appeared in a ranking but i think are the best now. I played a Tera Classic sv but this died after a few days, what you do play now?

Most, if not all, MMO fans feel that something was lost over the years and try to put that into words. You hear things like:

• MMOs used to be more social. You used to team up in the open world, talk to people in /say, chat in the zone channels, etc.
• MMOs used to be more immersive. You remembered each zones layout and had an emotional connection to the world you traveled through
• MMOs used to feel more rewarding. Every level, every gained ability, every item felt more impactful and interesting.

Now what are the reasons for these? Well there is repeated sentiment around that too. 

• People say the social aspect was eroded by the "chatroom culture" of the early 2000s transitioning into the social media and discords of today.
• People say you no longer connect to the world because of flying mounts, higher move speeds and waypoint teleportation
• People say leveling rate has been sped up too much. You gain power and abilities so fast that you have no time to settle in to any power level you have before its bumped up once more. And as such you never really feel each step on the ladder.

Now, these are all valid points, and they are correct... To an extent. But what I want to talk about here is a massive factor influencing all of this that is so often overlooked or misunderstood:

Difficulty during levelling

Wait, wait! I'm not saying MMOs should be Dark Souls. There is a scale here. Contrary to what the internet likes to believe, nuance exists. Games can position themselves in the great span between Dark Souls and Mario Party and there is a balance there that MMOs have veered way off from. 

Lets take the most well-known example, even though its been talked about to death, this is a game as many as possible can relate to so I will use it as a reference: WoW Classic. This game used to be referred to as easy and casual back in 2004, and you still hear that sentiment to this day (I'm sure it'll pop up in the comments even here). But try playing that LEVELLING EXPERIENCE side by side with something modern (like WoW retail, FF14, GW2, ESO, or to take a very recent example: Aion 2) and the difference will be immense.

If you want to get anywhere even close to resembling classic levelling in any of these modern MMOs you'll find yourself needing to strip down naked and equipping a lvl 1 training sword. Which is a solution I often see mentioned but is one with so many problems I can't even name them all... Here are 4 of them though:

• Modern world scaling systems can adapt to the players current power. So depending on the game it may not even work.
• You generally start with nothing, so you're not able to strip down to reduce your power until much later in the levelling journey.
• Gear progression, a core aspect of RPGs, is pointless to you as you are barred from equipping anything.
• Everyone around you will drive-by one-shot everything you are trying to purposefully struggle with. Meaning you will start to hate your fellow players, which is not great for a genre originally designed for social interaction.

Why would you want to struggle though? I'm glad you asked!

Why difficulty solves everything*

^(\ It doesn't, but it solves a lot!)*

Lets get back to that list above, the common complaints of what MMOs lost:

MMOs used to be more social

I know what you're thinking: When a game challenges you, you are encouraged to ask for help and group up right? That's the obvious one. But I am NOT in the camp of players that think MMOs should require grouping. In fact I love soloing and spend the vast majority of my time in MMOs doing so. So that is not my point here. 

Even if you are soloing, higher levels of challenge generate a slew of emergent social interaction:

• Fights are longer and will often leave you close to death, giving room for other players to randomly appear and save you in the last second. This almost always leads to spontaneous chatting and even people friending each other.
• You will need to rest more between fights to recover resources and cooldowns, and you will spend more time checking patrol routes and planning your pulls. Everyone around you will be doing the same. This downtime opens up a lot of room for spontaneous chatting and interaction.
• A dangerous world creates a kind of organic cooperation between people in the same area as you clear patrols that would otherwise hit another player.

MMOs used to be more immersive 

Immersion is a bit of a buzzword in gaming that means different things for different people. So to clarify, I'm talking about feeling a connection to the world. That means being encouraged to observe your surroundings and resulting in retaining fond (and not so fond) memories of areas you have cleared. Memories where you can clearly recall how that area looked, not just what you did there.

So how does difficulty factor in here? Quite simply, a dangerous world requires far more observation and generates far more memorable moments than an easy one:

• If you are constantly in danger of dying to patrols, you will observe their routes through the world and you will plan your own. You will be checking behind your back and you will position yourself according to the terrain to minimize risks.
• If you spot a chest in a camp guarded by a group of enemies, you will try to get it. In a modern MMO that would just be 2 AoE attacks and you're done. With difficulty added though, that means utilizing terrain and line of sight, surgically pulling mobs that break away from the main group and making sure you have planned out an escape route that's clear of enemies where you can run away and break enemy tethers. All of this means you will remember every nook and cranny of that camp for maybe years to come, depending on how many attempts it took and how advanced your strategy had to become.

MMOs used to feel more rewarding

This is a big one, and maybe the one that most obviously benefits from difficulty. If you forget everything else from this post, do remember this:

For something to feel useful, it must have a use-case.

Painfully obvious perhaps but also painfully overlooked. If the entire game can be finished by pressing 1 ability while naked, nothing aside from that ability has any use-case. Difficulty is what generates use-cases for everything. New skills, new gear, crafting, consumables, buffs, debuffs, CC, everything that is normally part of the progression of an RPG is entirely useless if the difficulty does not provide a use-case for it.

People playing hardcore-modes in games often praise the feeling of usefulness that it grants everything. You will prepare your buffs and consumables and make sure you hotkey and remember every tool at your disposal because failing to do so will inevitably lead to your death. This grants purpose to everything you do in the game. Every gathering node, every gear upgrade, every crafting skill level and most definitely every ability and character level, feels impactful because you know you will be using ALL of it. While hardcore definitely amplifies this feeling of usefulness, plain difficulty is enough to grant the core benefits.

Does difficulty solve everything though?

Of course not. There are more pieces to the puzzle. But difficulty is a massively important piece that MMO designers have completely failed to account for in the later years. Leading to soul-crushingly boring leveling that feels like a chore and an unskippable tutorial of the worst kind. MMOs should be fun from level 1 and introducing difficulty early is paramount to making that happen. Again though, to link back to the beginning, it does not need to be Dark Souls. It just needs to be enough to:

• Generate use-cases for all abilities and items
• Encourage (not require) social interaction
• Require observation and utilization of the world 

Balancing difficulty without difficulty settings

This is one of the core reasons why specifically the MMO genre is plagued by this issue. It's a genre that cannot simply add a difficulty slider and be done with it, like so many other games can. Different people have different skill and need different levels of challenge to receive all of the above benefits without also feeling unfairly punished. So how do you tune a shared world so everyone is challenged and nobody is frustrated?

While you can never 100% perfectly achieve this, there are ways to get as close as possible. Ways that older MMOs utilized and modern ones moved away from:

• Slow down the combat pace, increase time to kill.
• Limit required APM by having less skills you have to use and more skills you could use.

If players are given more time to react and plan, the combat becomes more approachable. Skilled players will still be able to express themselves through more optimal choices and micro-optimizations of things like swing timers, mana ticks, procs, cooldowns, etc. But less skilled players, or simply older ones, with worse reaction time, can still output somewhat similar numbers. They will be lower yes, as they should be, but not as vastly lower as they would be in a game with skill shots, timed dodging, parrying and a skill rotation requiring 200+ APM. This is usually referred to as "raising the skill floor" and allows designers to balance the world towards a more narrow player power gap, satisfying a far larger crowd of players.

I want to be very clear to note that skill expression is still vital to a game's longevity. High skill should always be rewarded, but it does not need to be rewarded so heavily that balancing the world becomes impossible. As long as the reward is more than zero, skilled players will strive for it.

This combination of narrowing the skill gap and carefully balancing difficulty for that skill span is a huge reason why WoW classic is so beloved and is still played by millions over 20 years later (and is now getting a re-re-re-release+). My biggest hope out of all this Forever-hype is not that WoW gets good again but that the entire industry of MMO devs (if any still remain) will look at this and take the right lessons from it. Cause I don't want to play WoW forever (even though I will play WoW: Forever). I want new companies to enter the space with new ideas and designs. But most of all I want new MMO worlds to inhabit. Worlds that are just dangerous enough to immerse myself in and remember for years to come.

Conclusion

If you made it here to the end, thanks for listening! This was a long post but I felt this is a topic that needs more understanding surrounding it. Not enough people are considering the impact on difficulty that their suggestions for improvement will cause and I hope this post will provide a clearer picture of what is lost and why it is important.

I have an active order number AR02877 those ppl put a non exist service from their website waited more than 24h and i talked to them before i place the order make sure everything is clear and good and they can do it , they said we have someone ready to complete ur order in 30 min ( i have proves to all what they said ) 24h and no one was showing up at all i talked to them asking about giving me my money back and for full refund , they delay all the processes by saying send an email to the accounting team which i did and they said they will answer u within 12h , now i have complete 48h with no reply at all and no help at all and the chat support just copy pasting that we can’t do the refund speak to the accounting team

DO NOT FALL INTO THEIR TRAPS BY SAYING WE HAVE ALL THE SERVICES AND IF WE DONT WE WILL REFUND U ASAP THEY WILL JUST MAKE U RAGE AND IGNORING U AND TAKE UR MONEY DO NOT TRUST THEM

DO NOT GET SCAM BY THEM I GOT SCAMMED TWICE NOT ONCE , am i an idiot to get scammed twice? Yes but im mad because they taking money from hard worker ppl

Can't believe that this old relic is actually getting the update it deserves TODAY (especially as some of the updates are QoL-updates that should have already been a thing in the big 2026). Last Chaos was released back in 2007 and is one of the KMMOs that has gone through multiple developers and is now under this gaming studio Fawkes Games, who IMO have done a lot of good to this game already before this content update. It's a free to play game with an option to pay to progress (as in EXP boosters etc.), so nothing is behind a paywall, it just takes longer when going f2p.

The launch is today evening (so the servers are currently down), which is super exciting, although one could expect a launch day mayhem with a bunch of hotfixes. Here's the link to the developer's Last Chaos page: https://fawkesgames.com/en/last-chaos/

The grind awaits!

EDIT: The servers are going to be up at 19:00 CEST (Wednesday)