Built to Last: What the Oldest F2P MMOs Have in Common

Light a candle for the old guard, adventurer. This spring, Cryptic Studios head Jack Emmert argued that MMO fans are as hungry as ever, and that new games stumble when they're built from features instead of a vision.

He has a point, and the proof is on our own list. Some of the free worlds people still log into every night launched before the first iPhone.

The veterans

• 1997: Tibia in January, Ultima Online in September
• 2001: RuneScape
• 2003: MapleStory and EVE Online
• 2006: Dungeons & Dragons Online
• 2007: The Lord of the Rings Online
• 2010: Star Trek Online

Every one of them can be played free today. Ultima Online even has community-run free servers alongside its official ones.

What they share

Read their histories side by side and a pattern shows:

1. A world with its own identity. Nobody mistakes EVE's player-run economy for MapleStory's side-scrolling maps. Each one is easy to describe in a sentence.
2. They never stopped updating. Expansions, events and steady patches, year after year, often decade after decade.
3. They changed their business model when they had to. Five of these eight launched with a monthly subscription and went free-to-play later.
4. Their communities do half the work. Guides, events, wikis and, in Ultima Online's case, whole servers.

Our take

New MMOs don't need more features. They need a reason to exist that players can explain in one sentence, and a promise to keep showing up. The old guard made that promise and kept it, and their players kept coming back.

Where to next

• See how the veterans rank today: Best F2P MMOs
• Play the classics free: Best MMO Free Servers