The 10/10 Project

Syp’s got an interesting idea up, to check out 10 MMOs he’s never played in his life over the course of 10 (not sequential) days.

Despite my being so caught up in GW2 that my ants and camels are busy dying over in A Tale in the Desert (hint: not logging in for 9+ days does a number on the things that require regular upkeep and maintenance,) I think I might just join him.

Though it may take me the course of 2 months or so to get them all. They’ll have to be sequentially installed and deleted as my hard disk is choking for lack of space, and if there’s one thing I have very little patience for, it’s sitting through a 10 gb download with poor speeds.

It took a bit of research to come up with a list of MMOs I haven’t yet played, because I’ve mostly tried any that have caught my eye already.

The following list feels like trawling the bottom of the barrel to me, most were previously dismissed for some reason or other:

1) Anarchy Online

2) Asheron’s Call 1 and/or 2 (not sure if any free trial available)

3) Battle of the Immortals (is it an MMO?)

4) Dark Age of Camelot

5) Free Realms

6) Blacklight Retribution (not an MMO but always been intrigued by the ads)

7) Raiderz

8) Istaria

9) Mabinogi

10) Maplestory

11) Runes of Magic

12) Ryzom

13) Star Trek Online

I note with a lot of irony that a bulk of them come from Perfect World Entertainment. For some reason, the vibe I get from just scanning their stock of MMOs is that cash shop power galore runs rampant, everything is probably very grindy without cash shop boosts, and everything is probably very typical MMO quest and holy trinity combat with a heavy group reliance and an endgame focus on raiding to climb the infinite gear ladder – something I’ve never been interested in from the get-go and thus dismissed even trying them out in the first place.

Perhaps I’m wrong. One night in them can’t hurt, I suppose.

I chucked in a baker’s dozen instead of ten, as I’m really not sure some offer free trials. If they don’t, they’re off the list.

Ryzom is the only game I’ve tried once, and though it didn’t captivate me then, I’d like to give it a second chance to. I think its main problem was that it was so slow and grindy I never got out of the tutorial zone or found I had any impetus to.

We’ll see how far I get.

Oh, and I might just throw in Planetside 2, World of Tanks and Xyson in there somewhere, having somehow forgotten that they exist as I was compiling that list. I’m not sure if my primitive computer can run the first two, but it’s worth a shot, making it sort of a 15/15 project (plus 1 FPS) instead.