MMO with Smooth and fast gameplay

[GodEmperor]

Been a Wow Player for 5 years and one thing I always notice when I try other MMORPGs is that the movement always feels clunky and slow. Tried RIFT, Guild Wars 2(Not bad), TERA and one other forgot the name. Although wow is cartoony, the movement smoothness and gameplay speed is unlike the others I've played. It's just leagues better.

Now my friends are planning to play another MMO till WOD arrives, preferably a free one so guild wars 2 and ESO is out of question and I want to know if there is a good free MMO with Wow like combat. Anyone have any good suggestions?

They just played RIFT and we all thought it was meh although the talent options were awesome. Is Neverwinter any good?

Edit : We all love to PvP. World PvP, BGs and arenas. Don't really care about Lore or anything. Also we prefer medieval magic type RPGS over futuristic ones.

Thanks

[CandyCotton Marshmallows]

You first have to view games as an individual before you can give them an honest review.

I've taken long breaks from WoW playing other games, and when I'd come back, WoW would feel clunky and unintuitive as hell.

I feel WoW is behind GW2 and Tera in smoothness and gameplay speed. WoW feels slow and choppy in comparison, for me. They are just leagues better. SWtOR is now pretty smooth and feels better than WoW for me.

If you can't break yourselves out of your narrow mindset, you won't be happy with any game.

F2P games I can think of atm though;

Aion
Star Wars: The Old Republic
Tera
Rift
ArcheAge


BUT, I strongly suggest you all play FFXIV until WoD. Most people I know who played WoW a while enjoy that the most and quite a few says it reminds them of the feeling they had with vanilla/BC WoW.


If I were to make another suggestion; it would be to choose something other than an MMO to play. Minecraft to be creative or to play the tons of crazy maps and puzzles people have made; or find a MOBA you all can like. Smite is an interesting take, LoL is my preferred one, DoTA2, etc ...

this way, you don't have to worry about trying to be honest with a different MMO title (overcoming your familiarity bias), you take a break from the genre while still playing with friends, and enter WoD fresh and ready to enjoy it.

[GodEmperor]

Thanks a lot for the post. We can't play FFX because even if we like it, we'll be shifting to WOD when it arrives and don't want to waste money buying a new game. I personally liked GW2 although not as much as wow, but of my 4 friends, only I have it and I don't want to force them to buy a new game.

Archeage looks really good. Aion looks kind of slow. LoL I've tried for a day and didn't like the click to move style.

I do like the idea of something other than an RPG till WOD. Might try something different if we don't like Archeage. Thanks

[Vintersol]

Games that i played in kind of smoothness and fast gameplay (in recommending order):

1. Tera
2. Aion
3. GW2
4. Neverwinter

[Mokal]

Games that i played in kind of smoothness and fast gameplay (in recommending order):

1. Tera
2. Aion
3. GW2
4. Neverwinter

shame those all are flops

[GodEmperor]

Games that i played in kind of smoothness and fast gameplay (in recommending order):

1. Tera
2. Aion
3. GW2
4. Neverwinter

Might give TERA a try again, was on my laptop a year back when I tried it and it was slow. Should try it on my PC. One thing that put my off was I felt like the devs made the female costumes skimpy on purpose. That and I couldn't understand why my character was cheering and dancing every time he herbed or mined. Was like wth is this.

[RoninaThorstone]

How about Vindictus? That's the smoothest and one of the more fast paced action MMOs out there.

[Kane Hart]

Does Vindictus of content? I thought it was really small game.

[RoninaThorstone]

Does Vindictus of content? I thought it was really small game.

It was a small game 5 years ago.

[Terahertz]

How about Vindictus? That's the smoothest and one of the more fast paced action MMOs out there.

Agreed on how smooth it is, but it seems like a weird game with the constant phasing and instancing.

Neverwinter is a really smooth game. Should be a nice game to spend some time on.

[Toosdey]

I got a buddy who says the same thing about every MMO, but I never understood it. RIFT, for example. I don't get what people mean when they ay the movement is clunky. I see no issues with it. The only reason I don't play RIFT is because it makes the hardest grind in WoW look like a casual Saturday afternoon.

[Attackrabbit]

I liked Vindictus until there was some sort of EU account move and my account just vanished :/

[Fencers]

Been a Wow Player for 5 years and one thing I always notice when I try other MMORPGs is that the movement always feels clunky and slow.

This is totally imaginary.

Two things are happening to lead you to this false notion: 1. World of Warcraft has shorter & tighter animation rigging compared to modern MMOs. 2. You are used to and expect the timing of World of Warcraft's combat engine in tandem with the animation routines.

There is no objective proof that the input response of World of Warcraft is at any stage better than the input delay of competing MMOs given the same circumstances of hardware, capability and connection.

One may also be under the impression due to the #2 above that games where the animation and combat action are not tightly linked that such a game would be "wrong" feeling compared to World of Warcraft. While this can be objectively measured within a given title, the actual gameplay result is irrelevant in most cases where the input is allowed a fail-through via the client and server synchronization.

An example would be like Rift- where the inputs are immediate but the engine does not care what it displays in animation sequencing so long as the Action is executed. Which Rift does, 100% of the time. It is very nearly the fastest of 2nd era MMO traditional roll based combat.

I would recommend Vindictus as the fastest (input is immediate) and smoothest (animation rigging is synchronized very closely to input) playing MMO from a combat POV.

[Dawon]

I'd say go for Star Wars.. I had a very nice leveling experience when I co-op:d it the whole way and I can imagine myself coming back to this game later on...
Especially if you are used to WoW, SWTOR feels a bit the same... so you'll probably get the hang of it immediately... The individual storylines for all classes are pretty engaging but the "kill X, collect Y" quests in the middle are boring as usual...

[GodEmperor]

I got a buddy who says the same thing about every MMO, but I never understood it. RIFT, for example. I don't get what people mean when they ay the movement is clunky. I see no issues with it. The only reason I don't play RIFT is because it makes the hardest grind in WoW look like a casual Saturday afternoon.

The GCD might have something to do with it as well. Since we just tried RIFT this week, I can tell the spells have around 1.5 sec or even more not sure. Playing Unholy I'm used to 1 second GCD and I feel even Wow warrior seems faster than the classes I've tried in RIFT and it has 1.5 GCD with some spells that are off the GCD. And the movement feels slower, might be because it's more realistic than wow.

[Ferocity]

EverQuest II. It plays a lot like WoW (to be precise - a lot like preCata WoW), but it has more depth in everything, very big world. It has free-to-play mode. You might be spoiled by it, because of ability queue (and button-mashing being punished), auto-assist and other neat stuff. However, don't expect everything to be given there without any efforts being put into character like in most post-WoW MMOs. Don't get frightened by the age of it, it was made as "MMORPG of the future" back in time, so it holds quite well now.

This is totally imaginary.

I agree on this, it is mostly about getting used to the animation style, and many WoW players simply got too much used to how WoW handles it.

[Daerken]

-snip-

I don't know if I would call it imaginary. It is tightly connected to animations, just like you said, and when animations don't match up to expected movement or reaction or input it looks wrong. Clearly, you get past this somewhat if the game actually does follow input correctly and you just spend a lot of time with it.

Another thing that is being brought up a lot is TERA. I don't actually know if they've changed their systems regarding combat but when I played it around release it was almost unbearable. The combat did not feel responsive or fluid at all, mostly thanks to your character being completely rooted and stuck in animations when you were casting or attacking. Getting stuck in animations actually is fine in games, but only if the animation is quick enough to feel like you never lost control. You can argue that getting stuck in animations in TERA is by design but attacks didn't feel like commitment but more like crowd controlling yourself.

Quick edit: Played SW:TOR at release, I could recommend it for the story and playing it like a co-op game with RPG-elements, but the combat is nothing to write home about. Combat is ripped from WoW but is actually done worse in the sense that there is no feedback or sense of impact.

[Doylez]

Doesn't exist imo.

MMOs I've tried so far:

Aion, SWTOR, The Secret World, Guild Wars 2, Tera, ESO, WildStar.
And I really can't recommend any of them to someone who is looking for smooth and fast combat.

[Fencers]

I don't know if I would call it imaginary. It is tightly connected to animations, just like you said, and when animations don't match up to expected movement or reaction or input it looks wrong. Clearly, you get past this somewhat if the game actually does follow input correctly and you just spend a lot of time with it.

If you are referring to World of Warcraft, than I do not disagree WoW is "fast" and "smooth". WoW is an excellently made video game.

What I was addressing as false is the notion "other" modern MMORPGs are by contrast not as smooth or fast. Due to various factors of implementation one can come to believe such a thing even if the gameplay expression is objectively contra to their notion of "feel". Or one might hold a bias based on previous experiences.

[Beazy]

This is totally imaginary.

False, I've written multiple applications to monitor packet loss, transfer speed and server response timing. Blizzards AT&T servers coupled with their brilliant predictive technology have always been more responsive. Since the late 90's. Rift is a horrible example, it was by far one of the slowest server to client response times of any MMO I've ever tested, second only to WAR.

Why? Who knows, I dont work at blizzard. One thing could be the key, the placement of data centers. Blizzard has a far more data/server centers than everyone else.