Star Wars: The Old Republic is an example of an MMO that is neither a success, nor a failure. It gets semi-regular updates every year – not to the quality of WoW or Final Fantasy XIV, but much larger than Blade & Soul and other free MMOs.

Case in point: Patch 7.3, titled Old Wounds, which rolled out a few days ago, on June 13th. Players will return to planet Voss to explore the never before seen Interpreter’s Retreat, while uncovering the secrets of a newly found relic of Darth Nul.
Additionally, EA is moving the development of the game from BioWare, to Broadsword Games, with roughly half of the 80 active members of the dev team transitioned to other areas of the company, and the other half laid off. Something that is deeply disappointing to hear.

It’s difficult finding an MMORPG to devote time to. Games either don’t live up to the unrealistic hype that other people create for them, or you happen across one you genuinely enjoy and it turns out nobody else does. The game’s empty.
And with so many MMOs having come out this year: PSO2 New Genesis, Swords of Legends Online, Bless Unleashed, Crowfall, Elyon, New World. Have the top 10 most played MMOs shifted? Is there something better out there that everyone is devoting their time to? Let’s find out. Together.
Especially given next month is the beginning of 2022, and you’re going to want something big to play, right?

Let’s start this off with the only Anime MMORPG in this list: MapleStory.
MapleStory released all the way back in 2003. This game has spawned a plethora of other titles under the same intellectual property: MapleStory M which was received with.. moderate enthusiasm, and a sequel, MapleStory 2, that shut down a year after launching.
Neither title truly managed to capture the quirky style that MapleStory employs. This is the only MMO in this list to utilize a horizontal graphical style – you move your character horizontally, left to right, across the screen. You can jump and climb, but the bulk of the game takes place on one level.
You take quests, you venture out, you group with other players, fight for control of the area, and… grind. This game is a grind. An unbelievable grind. Almost grindier than any other MMO I’ve played in the last decade. Thankfully it employs an incredibly fast, often chaotic action combat system to make up for the time you spend engaged in combat.
It’s got an adorable Anime-ish graphical style, and gets updated repeatedly over the course of the year, with new areas, new events and new classes. This brings players coming back to the game, and is what makes it one of Nexon’s highest grossing, most profitable franchises, averaging hundreds of thousands of players across all regions per month.
Yes, this list isn’t including specifically English-speaking countries.

Star Wars The Old Republic released back in 2011 as part of the greater “Star Wars” franchise. Movies, TV series, video games. And while The Old Republic – The MMO, never truly lived up to the potential of the IP, it still eventually found its footing, and allowed for Star Wars fans to channel their inner fan.
Now The Old Republic has had its highs, and its lows. With its low points lasting significantly longer than its high points, but that’s partly due to how the game has been handled up until this point.
This is an open-world MMO, with plenty of different regions – and as you’d expect, plenty of different, highly diverse worlds to explore at your leisure. The Old Republic has one of the deepest, most compelling narratives of any MMO.
And while that’s 2 for 2 thus far, its combat is much less impressive. It utilizes a fairly basic tab-target combat system that definitely looks and feels older than a 2011 MMO should, given RIFT, Aion and TERA.
Star Wars The Old Republic just released their latest expansion – which has garnered quite a bit of attention, and shot the game up to hundreds of thousands of players over the course of the last month. How long this lasts however is another question all together.

The Elder Scrolls Online released in 2014, a mere 7 years ago. It feels like it’s been out longer though, right? Much like Star Wars The Old Republic, The Elder Scrolls Online is set within an already existing franchise: The Elder Scrolls. You know. Morrowind. Oblivion. Skyrim. Yes, I listed the 3 best in order of best to most overrated.
ESO has been pretty steady for the last couple years. It’s never really had any large peaks in terms of growth, but at the same time, it hasn’t sunk very far beneath what it had already established itself as.
The game has a fantastic narrative, a large open world to explore, action combat, a fairly extensive class system allowing you to more or less equip what you want in terms of weapons and armor, while giving you freedom to craft your class – in terms of skills, however you like.
Graphically, the game holds up well. It’s one of the better looking Western MMOs out there, with Guild Wars 2 being the only real competition.
ESO averages a couple hundred thousand unique players per month, and has been averaging roughly a similar amount all year.

Guild Wars 2 was released back in 2012, and has since gone on to become one of the most played free MMOs. More than that, it’s generally considered to have the friendliest community of any MMO online.
The main issue with Guild Wars 2 is that for the last several years, content has been released fairly slowly. This is due to NCSoft being incompetent, and inhibiting ArenaNet from truly making Guild Wars 2 one of the greatest MMORPGs of this generation.
And with slow releases, comes an expected decline in terms of player population. Although with the recent announcement of its latest expansion, “End of Dragons” looming on the horizon, players have come back in droves to play catch-up, and new players are jumping in to see what all the hype is about.
Guild Wars 2 is a gorgeous game with an incredibly large world. It has plenty of class customization, an active PvP community and one of the better narratives out there.
The game utilizes a very high quality hybrid action combat system, allowing for players to change their entire playstyle by merely altering the weapon they have equipped.

Now this one is a little different. See, on the one hand, Star Citizen hasn’t launched yet. It’s an indie MMO that has been in development for years, and has, over the course of its time spent in development, acquired hundreds of millions of dollars worth of funding.
More funding than Final Fantasy XIV. More than World of Warcraft. And we’re still years – perhaps decades off from being capable of playing a fully realized game. However, that hasn’t stopped players from playing it in the form it’s available in.
This is a very incomplete game, with very few fully implemented features. Yet last year they reported that they had – at their peak, hundreds of thousands of active players. Which is some of the most ridiculous numbers I’ve ever seen for an unreleased title that is still so far off from being ready.

RuneScape is the oldest title in this list, releasing back in 2001. I’m not entirely certain how this game has retained the playerbase that it has, but I guess this is a testament to how good the game must be, right?
Now I’ve never dedicated much time to the game. I’ll be the first to admit that – not every person will enjoy every MMO, right? It’s asinine to believe that anyone would enjoy every single title in this list.
RuneScape is an enormous game, with more content than you can realistically dream of partaking of if you’re a new player. Sure, it’s very dated – both in terms of how it looks and how it plays. But that’s part of its appeal.
Even though it’s 2 decades old at this juncture, this game – these developers push out more updates than almost any of its competitors, paid or free.
Thankfully player numbers are public, so we can see that there are hundreds of thousands of active players at almost any point in the day. Even if some people claim that half of them are bots.

Black Desert Online released way back in 2014. Yeah, almost 8 years ago. Eight. Years. In all that time, not a single MMORPG released has come close to competing with the game’s dominance over the market in terms of graphics or combat.
To date, BDO is considered to be the “pinnacle of the MMORPG genre,” that one game that every MMO has to live up to. And I can honestly understand why.
Not only is this game absolutely stunning – the world itself, which is completely open, no loading screens at all. Entirely explorable without limitations, whether on land or sea.
But the depth of the character customization is unrivaled. Name one MMO with as good of a creator as BDO. You won’t find one. Couple that with some of the best action combat, and you have what should be the best MMORPG available, yet due to its horrendous pay to win, RNG and grind, falls short.
Pearl Abyss have confirmed hundreds of thousands of active players – on the higher end of the spectrum – which sets it above almost every other MMO in this list.

While New World is less than 2 months old at this moment, it is definitely worth noting that even with all of its issues, all of the exploits, the hacks, the duplication of items, of gold, the lack of endgame, Amazon’s poor handling of all of this, their choice to make the grind even longer in a recent update.. there are still hundreds of thousands of people playing this.
At the time of writing, there was still a peak of 132,000 players concurrently logged in, with likely over a million players still playing over the course of the last month – minimum.
New World features a large, open world – albeit the world itself seems to lack much in diversity – both with regards to the environment, and the monsters found within it.
It utilizes an action combat system that honestly isn’t bad but felt too limiting to me when I played it. There’s an extensive crafting system, a territory system and so much more that is completely overshadowed by how often new exploits are taken advantage of, repeatedly ruining the experience for everyone playing.

World of Warcraft released back in 2004, and up until 2020 was the most populated MMORPG. It was completely unrivaled. Nothing came close to competing with it, especially after WoW Classic launched.
Yet like everything, eventually things fall into obscurity. And while WoW is far from falling into obscurity, with the game still having over a million active players across both Retail and WoW Classic, it’s a far cry from what it once was.
This is evident by the premature end of Shadowlands, in their mad rush to push out something new to re-ignite the playerbase’ passion to play through something new and potentially exciting.
WoW is definitely a dated looking game – for most of it anyway. Newer zones are absolutely gorgeous, and the game features what is arguably the best tab-target combat in the genre. With the exception being maybe Aion or ArcheAge.
It also features more lore than almost any other game I’ve ever seen, but its story has become so disconnected, such a convoluted mess that it’s almost funny trying to keep track of what’s going on.

And finally, Final Fantasy XIV. Final Fantasy XIV released initially back in 2010, and was such a critical failure that they overhauled the game from the ground-up costing hundreds of millions of dollars.
This was the largest undertaking in the entire MMO genre, and has paid off, given it is now the most played, most popular MMORPG. And with Endwalker having just launched into Early Access, and both Mrs Stix and I playing through it, this is probably going to be the largest year for the game to date.
Final Fantasy XIV already confirmed they had hit their highest concurrent player numbers before the mass exodus of WoW players, and the combination of the those additions to the game with fans are going to make queue times unbearable.
Final Fantasy XIV features a large open world, with each expansion introducing even larger areas than the last. It’s a gorgeous game with an incredible narrative. Shadowbringers was by far the best storytelling I’ve seen in an MMO. And I’ve played almost all of them.
Its combat isn’t the best, but it’s good enough that it doesn’t bring the game down – doesn’t hinder it.
The amalgamation of everything that Final Fantasy XIV does right has shown continued success, with the game once being rivaled by Guild Wars 2, and now tripling, maybe quadrupling it in terms of active player numbers.
Nobody ever thought Final Fantasy XIV would dethrone WoW. They thought WoW would to that to itself, and Final Fantasy XIV would continue on the route it was. Boy were we wrong.

And that’s everything. They’re the 10 most played MMORPGs in 2021, moving into 2022. Were they what you expected?

Star Wars The Old Republic is a tab target scifi MMORPG – one of the few scifi MMORPGs readily playable on the market, released to critical acclaim – then ultimately critical failure by EA games back in 2011.

SWTOR takes place in the fictional universe that the movies occupy – and offers players the ability to explore multiple worlds with a unique graphical style, basic combat, and fairly large, customizable class system.

With the end of the year on the horizon, and the MMORPG market drying up, what better time is there to discuss MMORPGs that’re still worth trying than right now?

Star Wars: The Old Republic is one of the only active Scifi MMORPGs left on the market – not that there was ever really much of a selection to begin with.
The only other active Scifi MMORPG being EVE Online. And uh.. wait, nope, that’s it.

So with not much of a variety to sate peoples appetite, is Star Wars: The Old Republic actually worth it, when you have games like Final Fantasy XIV, Guild Wars 2, Black Desert, Blade and Soul, Elder Scrolls Online and World of Warcraft?

Let’s see.

The game takes place in the Star Wars fictional universe shortly after the establishment of an incredibly delicate peace treaty between the Galactic Republic and the recently re-emerged Sith Empire.
If you’re thinking you’ll see some familiar faces though – you’re wrong.
Star Wars: The Old Republic takes place 300 years after the events of the Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic games, and more than 3,600 years before the events in the Star Wars films.

When beginning the game, players are given the option to choose between two factions – much like many PvP MMORPGs – The Sith, and The Republic.
However, unlike any other MMORPG – and much like BioWare likes to do with their games – you’re given a unique morality feature to toy with that affects your overall standing along the light and dark spectrum.

The game was touted as the “fastest-growing MMO ever” – reaching an entire million subscribers within 3 days of it officially launching, but those numbers fell fast, forcing the game into a free to play model.
So, yes. The game is technically free to play, however, to access endgame, and therefore the latter part of the game, you are required to purchase the expansions through a subscription.
Although, admittedly, the game doesn’t require an active subscription to continue to access endgame content, just to first access it.
So in essence, what this means, is that the “entire” game – the full, complete experience, requires a purchase. So I would be more apt to refer to it as a buy to play game, much like Guild Wars 2 or Black Desert Online.
But I’m sure people will argue it isn’t, and that’s fine. As the base game is free to play – much like Guild Wars 2’s is, and that is classified as free to play as well.

Now that we’ve tackled the business model, let’s take a look at the gameplay.

As stated earlier – you can make choices that affect your overall standing along both the light, and dark side of the spectrum.
This affects quite a few things ingame, such as opening or closing storylines and quests, and going as far as affecting your NPC companions, providing players the opportunity to engage in a variety of differing stories from one another, and further – even their own alternate characters.
This actually leads into something I really find quite unique – especially in an MMO: Through these choices you as the player make, you’re given the opportunity to attain a love interest.
So for those forever aloners out there that don’t have a girlfriend- I mean, significant other; I’m not saying most of us are guys – what?
Then this feature may be exactly what you’ve been looking for.

Then there’s the world – or more aptly referred to – worlds – since you’re given the option to navigate quite a few different planets in total.
The environments you’re given access to and the areas you’re allowed to explore are actually quite diverse and true to the franchise.
The actual maps you get to explore are also all fairly open – giving you large zones to run around questing and killing monsters in.

The overall gameplay – speaking specfically about combat and movement – is somewhat dated. It feels somewhat poor and clunky at times and the UI is a little unintuitive.
But it doesn’t really hurt the game so much – just, more or less makes it slightly less appealing.
The route Star Wars: The Old Republic takes is actually a tab target combat style. Which surprised me as there were plenty of MMORPGs taking the action combat route yet Star Wars opted to remain traditional to MMORPGs at the time.
A fun addition to The Old Republic though that the majority of MMORPGs don’t emply is the AI companion system. According to the wiki:

“The AI used for companions during combat helps set SWTOR apart from other MMOs.
Not surprisingly, the Bioware game ‘Mass Effect’ is used to describe how companions in SWTOR engage targets.
Specifically, they don’t behave as a passive pet, merely adding damage over time; instead, they seem to select weak targets, and consistently disengage from mobs that have been neutralized with crowd control effects.
Therefore, instead of babysitting a pet, players get the feeling of working with a competent teammate.
This makes it easier to rotate through class skills without pausing to re-direct the companion to prevent him from ending an effect prematurely.”

Now, regarding classes – there are quite a few to choose from, however, they mainly revolve around the same holy trinity that most MMORPGs swear fealty to: Tank, Healer, DPS.
And trust me – the classes aren’t always as easy to differentiate between as they seem. I thought I was going mage when instead I picked healer. Just an FYI.

Beginning from level 10, all players are able to participate in unranked ground PvP – both 4v4 arenas and 8v8 warzones.
Players are bolstered all the way to level 70 to provide a semi-even playing field.
To participate in ranked PvP as opposed to unranked PvP you are required to have an existing subscription. What this means is that if you’re not paying – you are physically denied access to ranked PvP.
Furthermore, to reach max level, you are required to subscribe at least once as mentioned earlier to unlock the Knights of the Eternal Throne expansion, and the level 70 cap attached to it.

Next up is space PvP – referred to as Galactic Starfighter.
Space PvP is instanced and allows queueing at any level. It also has daily and weekly quests that reward both XP and CXP at max level, along with tokens used for a plethora of reasons like ship requisition and upgrades.
For a more in-depth look at space PvP, I recommend going to the Star Wars: The Old Republic SubReddit, as they cover it quite extensively.

PvE – or more specifically, Dungeons and Raids function as Operations and Flashpoints in Star Wars: The Old Republic.
However, unfortunately, Operations are locked for subscribers only. Operations are 8-man group content focused around fighting bosses – mostly like dungeons and raids in traditional MMORPGs.
Flashpoints are 4-man group content focused around more or less the same, but are much more story centralized than Operations, and have a much more traditional party size limitation for dungeoning.
Flashpoints are not subscriber-only content and can be done by free players as well.
Then you have Uprisings, which are.. different. Very different. They’re shorter, much more action packed versions of Flashpoints.
You can find more in-depth reviews on each mode by once again visiting the SubReddit if you want.

The soundtrack – or music, overall, isn’t bad.
I mean I’m sure there’ll be people that complain the soundtrack is either amazing or terrible, but from what I recall playing through the game for around 12-14 hours, there was nothing that caught my attention.

Finally – the story. The story in Star Wars: The Old Republic is its key selling point.
The entirety of the game revolves around its story. If I had to compare it to something, I would say it’s like a fully voice acted, choice driven Final Fantasy XIV.
There is so much story in this game – so, so much story that it is almost ridiculous.
Everywhere you go, everything you do is for a reason. Every choice you make, and every choice you’re given has consequences that could affect the story down the line.
Having such a large emphasis on story, and allowing the player to customize so much of it is something BioWare has become known for with games like Dragon Age and Mass Effect.
So it’s impressive to see it in MMORPG form as well.

The story in Star Wars: The Old Republic is some of the best storytelling I’ve come across in an MMORPG.
Even if you dislike the games combat, graphical style, music. The fact remains that its storytelling is almost unrivaled.

Now, to finish this video off, let me say that if you want a Too Long ; Didn’t Read version of this video, then yes, Star Wars: The Old Republic is worth trying, at the very least, if you haven’t ever played it in the past.
Unfortunately quite a few things such as ranked PvP and Operations are kept from free players, but don’t let that stop you from trying out the game.

Operating System: Windows XP / Vista / 7
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E6420 2.13 GHz / AMD Athlon x2 Dual Core 5000+
Video Card: Nvidia GeForce 7900 GTX / ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT
RAM: 2 GB
Hard Disk Space: 15 GB

Operating System: Windows 7 / 8
CPU: Intel Pentium Dual Core G6960 2.93 GHz / AMD Phenom II X3 B75 or better
Video Card: Nvidia GeForce 465 GTX / ATI Radeon HD 5850 or better
RAM: 4 GB or better
Hard Disk Space: 15 GB