Star Wars: The Old Republic is fascinating. Next to World of Warcraft, it has somehow become the MMORPG tens of thousands have invested the most time into, despite not always being sure what to think of it. In 2011, it was a game at odds with itself, and while so much has changed since then, that has not. But that conflict has also led to seismic shifts, with BioWare dragging it in unexpected directions. People keep coming back and, with a new expansion on the horizon, you may be contemplating the same. You should.

Things have progressed quite a bit since those days, however. After you finish your class story at around Level 50, you’ve not got several games’ worth of adventures and crises and character-driven yams left to play through. The first couple of expansions aren’t really worth repeating playthroughs, but everything from Shadow of Revan onwards is surprisingly gripping stuff, evocative of the single-player RPGs that inspired it, but not beholden to them. Perhaps most like Knights of the Old Republic 2, the later chapters make the Star Wars universe and the Force feel strange again.

Going back to the level playthroughs, those first 50 levels are going to either fly by if you’re subscribed to their hip, or take a good while longer if you’re here for free-to-play. All the XP bonuses and complimentary boosts mean that subscribers can get to the original level cap purely by doing the class and planetary quests. They’re invariably the best written and most engaging parts of the game, to the point where it feels like a classic BioWare RPG. Everything else is a crapshoot. The actual objectives for every kind of quest rarely deviate from the most uninspired MMO tropes of fetching and killing, so most of the heavy lifting is done by story and characters.

As a new or returning player, especially, you’re not going to run out of group or single-player stuff for a very long time, and the busiest servers feel as lively as a fresh MMO, so you won’t be starved for people to play with. It’s still growing, too. After a long break, the war between the Empire and Republic has flared up again, and a new storyline has kicked off that takes players to new worlds like Ossus and Dantooine. Along with new missions, operations, and special events, the latest string of updates has also given additional attention to PvP, introducing new maps, modes, and free-for-all PvP areas.

Tons of players keep coming back for more, but each time they do it’s a bit different, most of the time for the better. Part of the allure is the fact that Star Wars fans have been a bit underserved in the game department under EA’s stewardship, and while the Battlefront games do an excellent job recreating the movies’ impressive battles, they don’t really capture the universe in the same way that an MMORPG like The Old Republic does. If you’re looking for a good Star Wars yarn, this game’s overflowing with them.

By the time December rolls around, a full decade will have ed since Bethesda first awed us with the announcement of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, which is considered one of the greatest RPGs of all time (if not for its depth or its main quest, then for the openness and flexibility of its world). The Elder Scrolls Online returns again to that frosty, Viking-esque province with its new Greymoor expansion, and it’s filled with expansive combats, quests, and settings.

Greymoor is certainly beautiful, to its credit. It’s set in Skyrim’s dreary, marchy northwestern corner, which nevertheless manages to show how far graphics have come since we witnessed the launch back in 2014. The centerpiece is Solitude, a city that extends over a rocky arch and makes a good subject for screenshots.

You’ll find a sense of familiarity creeping throughout the rest of Greymoor. This is not a chapter to play if you’ve been wanting a massive overhaul of the now-familiar Elder Scrolls Online experience we’ve known since 2016’s One Tamriel, which did wonders to reinvigorate the game after its rocky launch but is now starting to lose some of its novelty. So in addition to the familiar Harrowstorms, completing Greymoor’s full range of content consists of venturing into six solo-able dungeons called delves, two public dungeons that offer a little more challenge, beating six world bosses, hunting down skill shards for more skill points, and for high-end players: a new raid-like trial. The trial aside, that’s roughly 15 to 20 hours.

If you’re new to Elder Scrolls Online and you simply want to visit Skyrim again, we recommend Greymoor for how this familiar design allows you to drop straight into the new content. If you love gorgeous, nostalgic landscapes above all else, this new Greymoor expansion offers a strongly nostalgic return to the northwestern corner of Skyrim. The formulaic story isn’t as compelling, but it’s at least buoyed by a couple of standout characters. The rest of Greymoor is largely a variation on the familiar Elder Scrolls Online formula, although a new “Antiquities” system introduces a welcoming new way to earn cash, gear, and cosmetic items.

Over two decades ago, two brothers working out of their parents’ house set themselves the impossible task of building their own graphical multi- dungeon, a genre that later evolved into the MMORPGs we know today. RuneScape launched to the public in 2001 as a low-res browser game with only a few hundred players and 2-D sprites for monsters, but several years later it boasted over a million paying monthly subscribers. The secret behind RuneScape’s success is that it’s been continually updated throughout its lifetime, not just with regular infusions of new content but also with several major graphical and gameplay overhauls. The game was recently reincarnated as RuneScape 3, which is as far as it gets from the primitive game many players grew up with. It now has a visually-improved HTML 5 client with graphics accelerations, orchestral music, some voice-acted quests with cutscenes, and a fully-customizable UI. This combines with its preceding update and nearly 20 years of new quests and zones to produce an MMORPG with more depth and character than many other AAA titles.

The first moments of playing RuneScape 3 are much different than in the past. Rather than force new players to muddle through an elaborate and text-heavy tutorial island as in past versions, RuneScape 3 starts off with a voiced cutscene. Players are given a quick demo of one chosen combat style (Melee, Magic, or Ranged) before being dropped into Burthorpe, which has been redesigned as a training area for new characters. NPCs here will explain how each of the game’s skills works and set you tasks to get you started. Existing players logging in for the first time since the update will see a cutscene introducing the story behind the Sixth Age of RuneScape, with the gods Zamorak and Saradomin returning to raise armies and do battle.

RuneScape has always been about completing the latest quests, and time not spent questing or PvPing is usually spent grinding up skills to meet the requirements for the next quest you want to do. The skills grind now feels a lot more forgiving than it was in RuneScape 2, and winning the occasional XP lamp in your daily Squeal of Fortune spins certainly helps. You can also now set a quest as your currently active task to keep track of it and set a destination on the map to get a handy direction arrow on the minimap. But a lot of information is still not easily accessible in-game, so you’ll find yourself frequently looking up the RuneScape Wikia page to check what an item does or see what the next step is in a quest.

If you’re planning to return to RuneScape after years away or want to just give it a go for the first time, we highly recommend RuneScape 3. Though the game can technically be played in a browser, the standalone client runs a lot more smoothly and comes with all the high-resolution textures, anti-aliasing, and bloom effects of the online HTML 5 version.

The saga continues. This time, you and the other heroes of Azeroth have to journey to the afterworld. Right on the heels of Battle for Azeroth, Sylvanas continues her warpath, kills High Overlord Saurfang, and breaks the Helm of Domination from Wrath of the Lich King. In doing so, she creates a rip in reality, furthering The Jailer's plans to condemn all souls to eternal torment in The Maw, Azeroth's version of Hell and the ultimate fate for the worst of the worst. You and other heroes must travel to the Shadowlands and travel through the afterlives to rescue souls that don't deserve eternal torment. You also have to restore the energy flow to the other afterlives and rescue famed heroes from Torghast, a foreboding tower where the Jailer keeps his most prized souls.

As you play, you'll be able to choose a faction. Each faction serves one of the four afterlives, and they all unlock exclusive armor, side quests, daily quests, pets and mounts. You'll also traverse The Maw and complete dungeons, raids, and side quests there. Explore Torghast, a dungeon full of dungeons where you and your friends can experience different runs, including 20-level missions with high-powered loot waiting for you and your party at the end.

If you love exploring realms away from Azeroth, the concept of scouring the afterlives is an interesting concept. New players can jump right into this expansion, and more seasoned players will enjoy the new content and callbacks to old favorites like Wrath of the Lich King. This collector's edition will also delight fans with exclusive content and physical items.

Guild Wars 2 is eight-years-old now, can you believe it? The original game launched to huge acclaim, fanfare, and millions of sales. Eight years on, it feels like ArenaNet is hitting their stride once more with the Path of Fire expansion. Simply put, this is the best Guild Wars 2 has been since the launch.

What’s amazing and different from other expansions is that it’s not an expansion focused on features. For the most part, the big new thing in PoF is the Mount System itself. The rest of what makes this expansion so good is the heaping piles of content that comes with it. Heart of Thorns, the preceding expansion, focused a lot on new features, and with refinement since its launch a couple of years ago, the Mastery system, Elite Specializations, and the new cadence for the Living World content have led to PoF.

PoF brings back a sense of exploration without the frustration that Heart of Thorns was sorely lacking. As ambitious as the design of Maguuma was, Elona is much closer to what made Guild Wars 2 great at launch. Huge, expansive zones that focus more on the use of lateral space than the vertical. Add in the mounts and their extensive new sets of abilities, and the “group content-on-demand” of the Bounty system, and suddenly you’ve got the most fun new zones in years. Each one builds on the lessons learned from Heart of Thorns and the Living World Season 3, and it shows.

The mounts themselves - though the only wholly new features of the expansion - are enough to refresh the entire game. Traveling becomes fun again, in a way that even the Glider couldn’t do. Each one has its own unique strengths and weaknesses. Being able to assign each one to its own hotkey makes it easy to switch to the one you need with the press of a button.

In the end, though, we can’t recommend Guild Wars 2: PoF enough. It’s no secret that Guild Wars 2 has been amazing as an MMORPG these past few years, and PoF has put everything in the best directions possible for ArenaNet’s flagship. The mounts, the zones, the Masteries, and the story all bundle up together to make one delicious stew of gaming goodness.

When it was first released back in 2003, EVE Online was a largely empty universe with a smattering of players all trying to grab power and smash each other’s heads in with it. EVE was originally described as a desolate wilderness of constellations, but for some the challenge of taming that wilderness and carving out a chunk of it for themselves was irresistible. The empty world of New Eden was a newly opened book, and those early players were writing the first chapter in each other’s blood. Players who enjoy PvP can become pirates or fight for one of the empire faction’s militias, spending their days playing games of cat and mouse with other players through the low-security areas of the galaxy. They could one of the warring alliances out in the lawless null-security regions and become part of massive fleet battles, or a ruthless war corporation looking for weak groups to gank in high-security space.

PvE-focused players can grind missions to help the NPC-run corporations of EVE fight off pirates and rival organizations and collect bounties in the process or farm endless streams of NPCs in asteroid belts or cosmic anomalies. Explorers can use scan probes to search space for hidden pirate sites in the hopes of making a big find or even venture through unstable wormholes into one of the thousands of hidden star systems. Industrialists spend their days hoovering up asteroids all throughout New Eden, manufacturing most of the ships and modules players use, and making a profit trading on the fully player-run market.

The one thing all of these activities have in common is that they’re slow and deliberate, with a lot of downtime between moments of action or surprise. Players will spend hours hunting for that elusive kill for an adrenaline high (combat in EVE is so high-stakes that new players frequently experience physical shaking). Or they’ll spend that time farming ISK, the in-game currency, to replace lost ships, analyzing markets for opportunities, and deg the perfect ship setups for particular tasks. You could look at this as busywork or grainy gameplay, but it’s all in preparation for those moments of action that matter most.

EVE is, to this day, one of the most fascinating virtual worlds to observe and to read about. On the largest scales, huge alliances gather thousands of players together into massive fleets and carve up lucrative areas of the galaxy between them, giving rise to politics and warfare that often mirrors the real world in startling detail. There are areas of space controlled by coalitions of American and European alliances, regions annexed by the Russian power blocs, and countless neutral states and vassals paying tithe to far-off lords.

Most new players will give EVE a try after reading some incredible story of a record-breaking way or political betrayal in the sandbox, only to be confronted by a terminally slow game with so much depth you could drown in it. A combination of more than 15 years of new features and niche gameplay that remains distinct in the MMORPG genre conspire to make EVE a difficult game for the average person to get into and enjoy. EVE’s big saving grace is its unparalleled scale and welcoming community, from the training corps that will show new players the ropes to the alliances that will eventually bring them into the history-making battles that EVE is known for.

If you’re in the market for a sci-fi MMORPG that’s more of a long-term hobby than a ing interest, something that you can become deeply engaged with and find a place to belong in, we highly recommend EVE Online. If you manage to scale the learning cliff and aren’t put off by the indirect controls and disharmonious interface, you’ll be ing one of the most compelling virtual societies in gaming history and a world in which your actions can have real consequences. Just don’t try to go it alone.

Traditional MMO combat, as popularized by World of Warcraft, isn’t exactly thrilling. While PvP and high-end PvE ratchet up the mobility factor a bit, leveling generally involves all the high-octane action that’s typically associated with being a tree. That is to say, you root yourself in one spot and flip your brain switch firmly into the ‘OFF’ position. Tera Online, by contrast, requires skill-based swinging and fleet-footed acrobatics, leading to adrenaline-pumping last-second dodges against even the most mundane of foes. Tera would’ve made for an excellent neanderthal to kick off modern MMOs’ evolutionary cycle. Matched against said modern MMOs, however, Tera’s non-combat elements (quest structure, crafting, story, PvP, etc.) feel woefully behind the times. It’ll put up a hell of a fight if backed into a corner, but at the end of the day, it feels like an out-of-place missing link - not entirely stuck in the past, but definitely not ahead of the curve.

So let’s talk about the good: the combat. Put simply, standing still is a suicide, especially once Tera starts tossing larger groups of enemies into the fray. If a bad situation sprang up, players feel confident to switch gears and tackle enemies head-on. This is the first MMORPG where position drives the player’s skill choices from moment-to-moment.

Group play is a lifesaver on Tera. In almost complete contrast to solo questing’s thinly-veiled level treill, it’s fast, frantic, and rewards tactical complacency with a hulking monster claw to the clavicle. A basilisk BAM, for instance, might charge, pounce, spin abruptly, or leap sky-high and come crashing down, potentially crushing the whole party. Meanwhile, the vampire-centric Sinestral Manor’s final boss - which could best be described as the result of a radioactive spider being bitten by a radioactive copy of Gears of War - is generally less agile, but prone to launching fiery ranged projectiles while you’re distracted by its smaller (still disgusting) offspring.

Tera Online is an action-MMORPG that nails the “action” part and then manages a face-palm-inducing face-plant on all the other bits. Combat moves quickly and feels great, but dirt-dull quests, a generic, disted story, repetition, repetition, and repetition ensure that any fun you might stumble across is short-lived. Even grouping to take on colossal, world-roaming boss monsters - initially a thrill few other MMOs can watch - eventually grows old due to a lack of variety. Between impressive graphics and flashy battles, Tera has mountains of style. Substance, however, is still lacking.

Call of Duty began as a single-player videogame, then became multiplayer, and now, this new installment is an MMO. It may not feel as expansive as World of Warcraft, but once you complete missions and secret ops with over 20 people, you'll feel like you have the best of both worlds. Participate in larger-scale missions like those in World of Warcraft, but immerse yourself in the world of Call of Duty.

In this installment, you're a soldier during the Cold War, a decades-long conflict between the U.S. and its capitalist allies, and the Soviet Union and its Communist Bloc. Follow a mysterious figure named Perseus, who's seeking to disrupt the world order. Alongside iconic characters from the CoD franchise like Hunter, Woods, and Mason, you'll meet new operatives and use Cold War weapons from U.S. and Soviet nations. You'll also raid and fight your way out of bunkers from urban centers to frigid tundras to steaming, hot jungles. And let's not forget the zombies.

If you're a fan of CoD, looking for an MMO that's not Fantasy or Sci-Fi oriented, or want to stay in a world that feels smaller without as many people raiding at once, this is the MMO for you. Some gamers may argue whether this even qualifies as an MMORPG, but since millions of people play at a time, and the world spans from East Berlin to Vietnam to Siberia, it feels big enough to count.

It’s difficult to peg what makes the Final Fantasy series so unique in the RPG space. Perhaps it’s the stylized visuals and stellar musical scores. Maybe it’s the turn-based, yet action-infused, combat. It could be the familiar monsters and recurring mascot creatures. It’s probably the shared themes of camaraderie, high fantasy, and discovery. Whatever the case, Final Fantasy XIV Online nails the series’ formula on all points, delivering what is easily the best game in the series, and perhaps the most defining one.

The latest expansion, Shadowbringers, delivers even more content, including new regions, story developments, and gameplay tweaks. Final Fantasy XIV Online feels like a love letter to the series, as well as to the fans, and it’s an experience that you don’t want to miss. The plot takes you to Norvrandt, a world that’s consumed by light and overrun by light-spawned monstrosities. The few surviving people have banded together to live within the sanctuary known as Crystal Tower and its barrier-protected city, the Crystarium.

Despite its multiplayer-oriented nature, FFXIV Online’s story is the keystone that s much of what you do in-game. Even seemingly mundane quests can lead to surprising plot developments, and it’s clear that the development team has put a tremendous amount of effort to weave the narrative as carefully and expansively as possible. What this amounts to is a shockingly rich experience that combines all of the nostalgic elements of older Final Fantasy games with a new, immersive plot focusing on a single character.

Your character in the MMORPG is integral to the developments within the game world for a variety of story reasons, and it’s a pleasure to see this expanded upon with each new chapter of FFXIV, right up until the end of Shadowbringers. The plot delivers a sense of closeness that is unlike other games in the series because your avatar grows via narrative and gameplay. As a result, you’re pulled into FFXIV’s universe like no other game in the series before it.

Final Fantasy XIV’s tale is delivered as a slow burn that is meant to keep you invested for the long haul. Perhaps the haul can be a bit too long in certain instances: all too often you will hit a level requirement before you can complete the next story section, which forces you to grind dungeons and hunt monsters to gain the experience required to continue the story. These roadblocks serve as an inconvenience when you try to get to the end-game, and they happen a bit too often for players.

While the subscription-based payment model may turn people off, Final Fantasy XIV Online is a wholly unique game that delivers to be the quintessential Final Fantasy experience. There is a constant influx of new content, seasonal events, and balance patches that keep the game fresh, and the community is as alive and energetic as ever. Despite its MMORPG nature, the game is every bit a Final Fantasy game as its predecessors, and worth the price of ission.

Black Desert Online is maybe the most unique MMORPG on the market. Terrible for some, amazing for others, it truly is a mix of blazing fun and insane hardcore difficulties for a game out there. Black Desert is indeed hardcore. No matter how many years you could spend playing the game, you can’t master all of the levels available.

There may not be a story in the game - really, there isn’t - but Black Desert Online offers superb combat. Building and exploration run so deep in the game, but fighting is satisfying enough to carry the experience on its own. There are 14 classes available, and each commands a diverse and exciting set of skills. Rangers and Witches are fun, but Melee is where the money’s at. The sheer number of combos you can string together is staggering, especially given how natural it all feels on a mouse and keyboard.

This is not a cooldown-driven MMORPG where you just macro skill rotations. Black Desert’s combat system is a playground of invincibility frames and animation cancels that’s every bit as fun to experiment with as its world. Much like energy and contribution, you get skill points just by fighting stuff. You can also reallocate those points whenever you want, so it’s easy to find out what skills you enjoy using, upgrade them and purchase ‘flow’ skills that take your combos to the next level - and then unlock your alternate ‘awakened’ weapon to do it all again.

Whether you talk to or pummel everyone you see, Black Desert always comes down to choosing your own adventure. As a result, you can wring some great stories out of the world despite its lackluster central narrative. For instance, your characters all share the same family name.

Black Desert is not like most MMORPGs, and where it tries to be, it falls short. But it is a stunning and organic fantasy sandbox ripe with choices to make and questions to answer. It also recently came to Steam and has another major update on the way, so there’s never been a better time to give it a go. It’s a game that defies expectations. That’s precisely why it turns some people off, but also why it’s so damn fun.