Place 2: Star Wars: The Old Republic
The only MMORPG to date from Bioware has a whole series of standard quests that couldn’t be more generic. At the same time, many of the most enjoyable tasks in the genre can be found in the class stories and the overarching story campaign of Star Wars: The Old Republic.
Or as my colleague Gloria H. Manderfeld so wonderfully and aptly formulated in her text on our list of the best MMORPGs of all time for SWTOR: “In which MMORPG can you strangle a slave with her electric collar, seduce your apprentice, woo a mysterious blue-skinned person, and receive a romantic love letter full of death statistics?”
The developers of Star Wars – The Old Republic know how to create trailers:
I am very happy to admit that the MMORPG benefits enormously from its fantastic implementation of the Star Wars universe. In addition, there is the cinematic presentation, the pleasing sound design, and often strong voice acting.
And with the companions, romances, and some story surprises, many of Bioware’s old strengths find their way back into SWTOR – though not quite at the level of the studio’s best RPGs.
Place 1: The Secret World
It’s kind of sad: the clear quest king in the MMORPG genre hardly plays a role anymore and hasn’t attracted 100 simultaneous active fans to the servers on Steam for many months. In the list of the best MMORPGs of all time on PC and console, the title didn’t even make it to the top 30.
And yet, The Secret World from Funcom offers the most diverse, enjoyable, and unusual quests that the genre has ever seen. You can expect cleverly designed, challenging puzzles where you must search for solutions like a detective and research with modern tools.
The developers sometimes lead you on false trails or into tricky sabotage missions. The dense atmosphere of the setting around myths, conspiracy theories, and horror stories is complemented by good voice acting and dynamic presentation that is still impressive today.
I personally find it very unfortunate that hardly any developer has taken a cue from the quests of the Funcom MMORPG, and that the developers have never managed to eliminate the weaknesses of the game so that it could establish itself on par with WoW, TESO, and FFXIV. My colleague Benedict Grothaus explains in this article much more extensively why The Secret World is so special.
