In the world of MMOs, 'theme parks' are that movie you like to put on in the background-the one you've seen a thousand times but still love. As of early 2022, Palia is still going through small closed testing and hasn't made mention of a release date yet. Its website also mentions cooking, fishing, and romance 'with elements of open world adventure games.' If you've ever wanted Animal Crossing to be an MMO, this is one to keep an eye on. From its reveal trailer, Palia will include resource gathering, gardening, and decorating. It's a social simulation MMO-so think games like Stardew Valley. It's not an RPG, nor a shooter, and is not set in space either. The ambitions behind Dual Universe are sky-high, but if it succeeds it might be the next big evolutionary leap the genre has been waiting for. You can design ships and then sell blueprints to others, and there's even a LUA-based scripting language so you can create in-game automation for machines (like autopilot protocols or advanced security systems) that can also be sold to other players.

What's cool, though, is that Dual Universe takes that familiar survival sandbox and drops it into a massive galaxy where entire player alliances can cooperate or fight one another. Everything is destructible and how you can design vehicles and spaceships is completely up to you-as long as you have the resources and skills, of course. If you've played sandbox survival games like Empyrean or Space Engineers, you'll be fairly familiar with how Dual Universe works. This space-faring MMO has some cool tech under its belt, especially in how it plans to handle thousands of players in a small area at the same time. It's been in development for years, and is currently in beta for subscribing players.

To make things easy, we've also broken this list down into categories that really get at the heart of what makes each of these games exemplary.ĭual Universe is a massively ambitious sandbox MMO that's like Minecraft meets No Man's Sky-but everyone exists in one shared universe. Whether you want to kick ass as some sort of human-cat hybrid or conquer the galaxy as a ruthless dictator, the MMOs on this list represent the best the genre has to offer. To celebrate that awesome lineage-and help you decide which one is actually worth your time-we've rounded up the best MMOs that you can play right now. MMOs have come a long way from the text-based multi-user dungeons they evolved from. But at the heart of all these big numbers is a simple ideal: That anyone from anywhere can become anything within the confines of these virtual worlds (and grind out some epic loot in the process). Take World of Warcraft, for example, where players have collectively logged more time in Azeroth than our species has been on this planet-over 6 million years.

Top popular free to play mmorpg 2017