Star Wars: The Old Republic

The base game has the best quests and dialogue of any MMORPG I’ve yet played. The later expansions (Knights of the Fallen Empire and Knights of the Fallen Throne) are awful and cost money, so you can just play the base game for free and never even have to spend a penny to get eight unique class storylines to play for free. It’s honestly the last great game from Bioware.

Old school runescape free to play is a great introduction but you should go into it knowing that its not a free to play game and you’ll likely be paying a subscription fee.

Guild wars 1 is a old but its good and its like $10 one time payment. It can be done solo or with other players.

I used to love Mabinogi. It’s a bit different then most MMORPGs but it had some real cool features. My favorite is any character could learn any skill in the game. It also has a coherent story with some surprising plot twists. On to of that, you character ages and will even get fat if they eat too much. Haven’t played it in years, as well as any MMORPG for that matter, but this is one of the ones I have the fondest memories of.

Guild wars 2 maybe ? Beware, it’s chonky.

If you like Lord of the Rings: Lord of the Rings Online is extremely nice story wise. It’s an old school MMO, but that shouldn’t shock you when you only know old school ones anyway.

If a low initial fee is fine, wait for Elder Scrolls Online sale. You can regularly get the base game for $5 or so. It has no forced monthly cost so those $5 are worth hundreds of hours or quest content.

I played Albion for a bit, it’s quite fun and its free to play. I just started WoW Classic a couple of weeks back and I have never played it before, not too difficult and like some have said its free until level 20.

Old School Runescape i’ve had a decent bit of fun with and i’d recommend it. It takes a lot of reading, but there’s a free option for you to try if you’re unsure and it runs on damn near anything. Granted i’m not the target audience for MMOs. I usually hop in and dick around a little bit then pop out

I did search and found this article listing 16 to consider.

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Wow isn’t very newbie friendly due to the mere SIZE of this behemoth but if you work at it, it can be enjoyable. You’ll never run outta stuff to do.

It’s free till level 20. Then you can decide whether you wanna continue. You can pay for the sub with in-game gold.

City of heroes is still available for free and is a lot of fun. Pre-WOW but the graphics are decent. A great community too.

Its not new, but maybe check out Ragnarok Online. I don’t know how beginner friendly it is, but I was able to pick it up pretty easily with no prior knowledge.

Guild wars 2, it’s free to start and B2P for every season and expansion with no FOMO or P2W mechanics, only convenience. I see a lot of recommendations for FF14, but one thing most people don’t tell you is that the vanilla game is absolutely terrible. The main story quest (MSQ) for vanilla is just bad and boring, to the point where they actually cut some content out of it because that content was unnecessary. It’s still long and boring though, and I really wish they would just give people the option to freely skip the vanilla game with a recap video and go straight into Heavensward because that’s when the game gets really good. If you can power through the vanilla story of FF14, then I guess try it out, but my vote is GW2.

If you don’t like the back and forth type stuff, you’re probably looking for a theme-park style MMORPG. You might try something like Warhammer: Return of Reckoning.

Depends what you like, but I’m still nostalgic for old school WoW and find myself wanting to play every now and again but don’t want to subscribe for a whole month. My recommendation for that would be Turtle WoW, it’s an expanded vanilla private server that has it’s own launcher and everything so it’s pretty simple to get started with.