10 MMORPGs and Games I Actually Play in 2020!

“Hey Stix, what MMORPGs do you actually play in your free time?”
That’s a question I get asked repeatedly, and honestly, I’ve never addressed it in a video before. I tend to talk about MMOs that I’ve enjoyed, MMOs that I recommend to players if they’re searching for a game to satiate their thirst for something new.
Today I want to go a little deeper, though. Today I’d like to take some time to talk about what games – both MMOs and otherwise I currently play, actively, right now.

Now let’s jump into this.

Final Fantasy XIV is one of my all time favorite MMORPGs. I’ve been playing it on and off ever since Heavensward first released years ago and have been at endgame for every single expansion to date.
Final Fantasy XIV isn’t your traditional MMO though: This is a game that has a slow build-up to something amazing. It has an incredibly deep, rich story that many players agree should be the standard for new MMOs.
While its tab-target combat is definitely a lot slower at early-game than it is at late-game, I can attest to enjoying it quite a bit.
I’m a fan of tab-target combat, and the plethora of abilities to utilize depending on the situation, combined with on-the-global-cooldown and off-the-global-cooldown skills makes for combat that often has you thinking ahead of time what you should be using.
The game has a large, beautiful world to explore, although it does employ segregated zones, which honestly, are barely even noticeable the further through the expansions you get.
There’s plenty of content to consume in the form of dungeons, raids, ultimate content, savage content, extreme content, and, admittedly even PvP if you’re in the small percentage of players that want to partake of it.

Outward is a multiplayer co-operative survival RPG. But it isn’t a survival game in the traditional sense, rather, the game employs survival like features like hunger, thirst, stamina and a need for regular rest.
This is a game that Mrs Stix and I did not think we’d enjoy, at all, but we’re very interested in anything and everything co-op related, and as such opted to give it a try.
The game uses a very interesting action combat system. It isn’t fast, it isn’t flashy. Instead, it’s actually kind of slow but promotes and rewards use of strategy.
Instead of rapidly spamming abilities, you instead have a small selection of skills that you can bind to your hotbar. This limitation fosters a sense of “building a unique character” as opposed to every player having access to all 20 to 30 skills.
The game features incredibly large, open zones with loading screens only between regions, of which there are.. 5? Total, meaning that for the most part, you can freely traverse between the entire world sans any kind of loading.
There’s so much to do in this game: Farming epic gear, purchasing your home in each major city, tackling endgame bosses, a plethora of dungeons, although multiplayer functionality is limited to 2-players, which works for Mrs Stix and I but could potentially be an issue for larger groups.

There have only been a handful, maybe less than a handful of third person shooter games that I would deem worth playing long-term. Especially with your wife. This is one of them.
Strange Brigade is some of the most fun I’ve probably ever had in a third-person shooter, and I feel Mrs Stix more or less agrees.
You take on the role of a group of adventurers, and a wise-cracking narrator on a journey to stop evil from destroying the world. Both in the main story, and once again in the DLC.
As this is a third-person shooter, the majority of the combat is based around shooting. You have access to a wide-selection of guns, with quite a bit of customization for each and every weapon.
You also have special abilities to equip that make up the what’s left of the non-shooting aspect of the combat.
The game is completely chapter-based, meaning that you take a mission from the overworld map, are deployed, and make your way through a mostly linear yet beautifully crafted map that can take anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour and a half to complete per mission.
This game is not only beautiful, but it has a lot of multiplayer features and promotes playing with up to 4 other people. There’s also several game modes: The traditional campaign, a horde mode, and a scored attack mode.

Alright, so this is a more recent game we’ve started playing, and it’s both on stream and off. We figured, since Smilegate are working through launching the game globally, we’d take a look at it ahead of its launch.
And you know what? Surprisingly, we’re really enjoying it. It isn’t what we’re used to and is quite a departure from the norm for us. Lost Ark is an isometric action MMORPG. While I’ve played through my fair share of isometric MMOs, I’ve never played an isometric MMO that has kept our attention this long.
I mean for the most part, Lost Ark is pretty traditional: It’s a game that features pretty linear zones with portals leading to the next zone and the next quest-hub. So in that, the game is fairly linear. At least from what we’ve experienced in our first 10 or so hours.
The combat is fast, the combat is fluid, it looks beautiful and the characters are incredibly responsive, more so than you see in other titles. Like other titles in the genre, you have abilities bound to W, S, A, D and other letters while you use your mouse to move.
I know this can be a little irksome to some players but that’s what most games in the isometic genre do. There’s quite a bit of story to the game, but the translation we’re using is a little broken and as such it’s difficult to follow what’s really going on.
As this is an MMO, there’s a ton you can do in-game. There are dungeons, raids, various types of PvP, you can sail the ocean in search of loot and.. well, honestly I hope to find out in a little more detail what the game offers players as we’re working our way through it.
We stream this on Twitch every week though so come join us if you’re interested!

A fresh release announced at the PC Gaming Show 2020 was Among Trees, I was eager to play this particular game as soon as it became available on the Epic Store.
A Steam release is expected 15 months after its release on the Epic Store. It encompassed all the things I love in a survival sandbox: exploration, survival, and deadly animals, or at this particular stage in the game’s alpha development-bears.
The graphics and calming music bring to the table an all around beautiful experience while you struggle to survive. If you don’t feel like struggling though, there is a Zen mode option that just allows you to experience essentially camping in the wilderness without bears, but what fun is that?!
While there is no confirmed co-operative multiplayer experience planned, we can only hope it’s a feature they consider somewhere down the line. If you want to see more on my adventures in the wilderness, go check out my channel!

Borderlands 3 had a bit of a controversial release, launching on to the Epic Games Store before anywhere else, much to the dismay of the playerbase. However now that it’s on Steam.. everyone loves the game and sings nothing but its praise.
We played via the Epic Games Store and we had an absolute ton of fun, though.
Borderlands 3 follows the epic Borderlands 2 – however without Handsome Jack, which was probably the most depressing thing I’ve had to experience in the entire gaming genre.
Unlike most first-person shooters, Borderlands 3, and all Borderlands games in the franchise is a looter shooter, with enemies dropping hordes of new weapons, weapon crates and quests rewarding epic loot and.. well, I mean let’s be real here.. you run around killing things and looting everything that drops. That’s the entire premise of the game.
It also has a well fleshed-out story with characters spanning the entire franchise, being set years after the events of Borderlands 2 which is pretty sick I’ll admit.
Combat is what you’d expect: It’s a third-person shooter, so for the most part, you’re blowing people up with a variety of guns but you can melee too.. if you want to. You don’t need to though.
The game world is also incredibly large, taking you to a wide-array of beautifully crafted unique worlds each with their own aesthetic look and feel.
And you’re never at a loss of things to do, as while they’re releasing very regular DLC for the game, there are also several different game modes to play through including additional difficulties.

This is probably the longest MMO I’ve ever played. I began World of Warcraft back in 2008, during Wrath of the Lich King and have had an active subscription pretty much ever since, and have played during every patch and every expansion to date.. with the exception being Cataclysm and Warlords of Draenor.
But with Shadowlands right around the corner, Mrs Stix and I have once again jumped back in to the world of WoW, and are working our way through to get to a point where we can tackle the latest content and ready ourselves for the Shadowlands pre-patch.
World of Warcraft is a very basic – okay, well maybe not basic, but very traditional MMO. It’s set in a large open-world, that only has loading screens to enter dungeons, raids, battlegrounds and arenas, and when traveling between continents.
Otherwise, the zones are completely open, taking actual hours to run from one side of the continent to the other, and there are how many now? 6?
While the game features a very disconnected story if you’re new to the game, the game still prides itself on its deep, lore-rich world and characters.
It features what is probably some of the best tab-target combat in a tab-target MMO, with the only games that come close being Aion or ArcheAge.
There’s a ton to do as well: Battlegrounds and arenas for PvP, or you can turn warmode on for open-world PvP, there are dungeons, heroic dungeons, mythic dungeons, mythic+ dungeons, raids, heroic raids, mythic raids, warfronts, and.. I kid you not, there’s so much to do in WoW these days.

Left 4 Dead 2 is a 4-player co-operative multiplayer first-person shooter. Honestly, Left 4 Dead 2 is probably the only kind of its game that we actually play. Typically, we tend to be drawn to games that have a sense of vertical progression: Better gear, higher levels, skills to unlock.
But this game – trying to survive the hordes of zombies while making it to the end of each chapter really kept us pretty enthralled. No joke, we no-lifed this game over the course of a week and were very bummed out when we finished it.
At its core it’s a fairly linear game: While there’s plenty to explore in each zone you move through, and many ways to go about making progress, there’s only a single route that allows you to complete the chapter and mission you’re on.
You can pick up a variety of weapons over the course of the chapter you’re on, and every map features more or less the same types of weaponry. Interestingly, there are plenty of melee weapons to equip and utilize, making for either first-person shooting or first-person hacking-and-slashing.
There are tons of game modes you can play through: The campaign, survival, versus, realism, realism versus, scavenge, and mutations, and with 20,000 players playing concurrently within the last 24 hours.. you can bet this is a heavily populated game still.

Have you ever dreamt of being the very best, like no-one ever was? Because in Temtem you can actually do that. Temtem is an MMORPG that was released just this year, and is one of a handful of monster-capture MMOs that have released since the genre’s inception.
In Temtem there are various large, open islands floating in the sky, each housing a plethora of unique Temtem and Dojo’s for players to conquer.
Your job is to explore these giant floating islands, all the while leveling your Temtem and working your way through all of the Dojo’s, making your way to become the Pokemon mast- Er, the.. Temtem master? I think?
Currently the game is in Early Access and the entire game isn’t yet fully playable, but hopefully next year we’re capable of not only pursuing that dream, but also achieving it!
Combat is interesting, as much like Pokemon, the game is turn-based, with each Temtem using an ability, with the faster Temtem going first, and then the turn subsequently ending.
While a lot of features are definitely planned in the future, right now the game allows you to play through the entirety of it co-operatively with another player, while seeing and interacting with thousands of other Temtem trainers out in the open world.

The last game on this list is Remnant: From the Ashes. If I recall, there was a large DLC released recently, and they’re in the process of developing and releasing their final DLC right now.
Remnant is a third-person action shooter. It utilizes guns and bows equally as much as close-proximity weaponry, providing a lot of interesting builds to pursue.
While the game utilizes segregated zones, with loading screens splitting them up, the game provides a lot of interaction with the zones you’re exploring, providing countless buildings to enter, loot, explore, and kill enemies in.
There are quite a few hidden weapons, rings, accessories and items to be found so exploration is vital to your overall growth.
There’s a pretty good story that pushes you through the game, with new zones typically unlocking as a direct result of the need to progress.
Each zone tends to end with a large boss fight, with some of them actually taking Mrs Stix and I hours to defeat, like the double giant moth things… man we almost felt like quitting the game after hours on those things.
While there are a couple different game modes I think, the main replayability of the game comes in the form of new dungeons and new bosses, since you’re not guaranteed to see all dungeons and all bosses in each play through of the game.