10 Free to Play MMORPGs You Should Try In August, 2020!

This week has been crazy. Final Fantasy XIV extending their free trial all the way up to the end of Heavensward? PSO2 New Genesis? Genshin Impact’s official launch date? A new Fable game? Man!
But you know what… that’s all content to look forward to in the future. That doesn’t effect us in the here and now.
So with this in mind, let’s talk about 10 Free-to-Play MMORPGs you can play right now – 10 that you probably haven’t played, or almost 10 that you haven’t played, that you should definitely try out while waiting for the aforementioned content, yeah?
These are 10 games that I don’t include in a “top video” for the entire rest of the year with very few exceptions. With this knowledge, be aware that I may have included one of your favorite MMOs in a previous top 10 list earlier in the year, so if you’re looking for those, take a look at previous months!
Now let’s jump on in..

I included this in the first video I did back at the beginning of the year, but I continue to get comments on every follow-up video asking why I didn’t include Guild Wars 2. So here it is again!
Guild Wars 2 is an interesting free-to-play title. It initially launched as a buy-to-play MMORPG but then adopted a free-to-play business model after they found that it was not a sustainable long-term strategy.
What seemed to work for ArenaNet is having the base game of Guild Wars 2 as a free title, while making each expansion – and therefore the most recent content and features available as paid expansions, for players that were interested in continuing beyond what they experience in the base game.
Guild Wars 2 is arguably one of the, if not the best free-to-play MMO on the market. The game utilizes a large, segregated world filled with beautiful environments.
Zones are locked to certain level ranges, meaning that if you enter a zone, you’re automatically synced down to the maximum level appropriate to the zone you’re in.
This is one of the few instances of this being done in an MMO outside of dungeons or raids, and this type of level scaling promotes a sense of camaraderie among players since to complete objectives out in the world, you’re often required to work together.
Combat is a unique blend of action and tab-target – definitely not true action like Black Desert or Vindictus, but also not tab-target like WoW or Final Fantasy XIV.

Here’s a relic from an age long passed! Fiesta Online is one of the few Anime MMOs I really enjoyed back in the day. It was so difficult, but also packed with players everywhere.
It’s honestly a little disheartening seeing the state the game is in these days – absolutely barren of life, but I, and I bet many of you as well, have pretty fond memories of your journeys, your experiences within the game.
It used to be a competitor to FlyFF – who is in much better shape, honestly. Fiesta Online is another MMO that utilizes large, segregated zones, with zones being filled with monsters, treasure and… well, yeah, the norm.
Back when I played Fiesta, this game was the pinnacle of Anime graphics in the genre, and the combat was almost unrivaled for a game of its kind. While it still isn’t bad, it definitely hasn’t aged very well.
Regardless, with its tab-target combat, and very mid-2000s Anime graphical style, you won’t really get to experience a game like this anywhere else.

Honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever included Age Of Conan in a top 10 video. Not because it’s bad by any stretch of the imagination – but because.. I’d just forgotten all about it until now.
Don’t get me wrong – this isn’t a forgettable game – this is probably one of the few MMOs that left a lasting impression on me.
I only scratched the surface of the game, honestly, investing less than 20 hours total in it over the course of my play through, however, I could tell exactly the kind of game it was: A brutal one.
It was beautiful, it featured an interesting hybrid form of action and tab-target combat and was one of the first MMOs of its kind. While I wouldn’t say this is necessarily an “adult MMO,” it’s definitely targeted at adults and has a much more mature storyline than your average MMO.

This one’s in here ’cause.. well you guys know why this one is in here. It’s probably one of the few MMOs of its kind, and is actually a very solid title.
Like most MMOs released within its time, Scarlet Blade has segregated zones. They’re much smaller than the ones in Final Fantasy XIV or Guild Wars 2, but still offer plenty of little quest hubs to seek out and take missions from.
The combat is interestingly also a hybrid between tab-target and free-aim combat as you can freely aim certain attacks, and AoE without targets necessary, but at the same time most of the classes’ main abilities all require targets, thus my classification of it being an interesting hybrid.
The classes in the game are all pretty unique, have fairly unique weapons, and the armor.. man, the armor in this game, the outfits in this game are ridiculous. While a very traditional Scifi MMO for the most part, this definitely appeals to a certain type of gamer. The sophisticated, refined men of taste.

I know some of you guys prefer the original Cabal over Cabal 2, and you know what?
I’ll probably include the original Cabal in a future video, but today I want to go ahead and include Cabal 2 because I invested more time into this and to me, this felt much more like a modern-MMO that I could invest much more time into long-term.
Not because Cabal is a bad game, it’s just much grindier, which is good in some instances, but with my lack of time these days I find it easier to dedicate time to games like this.
Cabal 2 is a pretty good looking game – you can make some solid looking characters and the areas you get to explore are about what you’d expect. There are dungeons, there’s open-world content and.. at the end of the day, this is a pretty basic, pretty traditional title as well.
It has tab-target combat, abilities can look pretty flashy depending on the class you choose, the best part? There are still players playing, both Cabal and Cabal 2.

I used to play this years ago. Back when I had the patience to mindlessly grind. Yup. Who here remembers Metin2? All of you should. I went back to the game a few months ago to record footage and spent.. so many hours grinding Wolves. So. Many. Wolves.
After recording hours worth of arduous footage, my PC died and I lost everything – including my Tree of Savior footage, so I ended up scrapping that video. But you know what? Rarely are games in this day and age this grindy. And that’s part of the appeal.
Sure, there are quests. But they don’t necessarily do much in terms of progressing you forward. There’s an auto-grind feature in-game though that you can pay for, and set to grind for you so you can be leveling AFK – which is what I may or may not have done.
Combat is tab-target, and graphically, the game definitely shows its age but I’m gonna admit – the free-aim tab-target was definitely ahead of its time and still wows me to this day.

With the recent launch of Star Wars: The Old Republic onto Steam, I figure this is as good a time as any to go ahead and include this in a top 10 video, right?
Don’t hate me for saying this, but I’ve honestly never played through all that much of The Old Republic. Mrs Stix has, quite extensively. She played ’til endgame a few years ago, and has a lot of experience in the game, along with all of the characters. Since she romanced quite a few of them.
I always found that feature incredibly awkward to have in an MMO, ’cause you’re playing alongside potentially thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of other players, meaning there are.. quite a few of them in relationships with the very same NPC.
Call me old fashioned, but I like my partner to be mine! The selling point for The Old Republic is its story. The only game with a story that really captivated an audience this large is Final Fantasy XIV, so imagine this being the free alternative to 14’s story.
Although to access the most recent content I do believe you have to pay, which is definitely a turn-off to some players. Its tab-target combat also feels a little dated but it has a large, beautiful world to explore that more than makes up for it.

I’ve gotta include Perfect World in a list this year. This is my 2nd MMO – the second MMO that I played full-time all the way to endgame. I invested over 2 years of my life into this game, and ended up spending thousands of dollars on it. To date, I don’t regret a single moment.
I played on the Sanctuary server back when Nefarious was almost in full control of the entire land, after Legendary and ShockWave had all but fallen apart, and ran one of the most powerful guilds on the server at the time.
Yup, you can guess how many fond memories I had in that game. It was the first open-world PvP MMO I’d ever played, and after being killed, if you didn’t have the necessary item, you would potentially lose gear upon death.
But this was – this is a very grindy game. We’d spend hours grinding the same instances in Twilight Temple for materials for our gear. We’d grind out monsters for hours in the open world for that few percent of XP.
And for a game made when it was, not only is its incredibly large, open world absolutely enormous, and with its new zones – really, really impressive to look at, but its combat and skill effects were very impressive.
Although this is a Perfect World Entertainment game and as such, the cash shop and pay-to-win is probably worse than Black Desert.

I’ve actually gotten a few requests to do a dedicated video on Priston Tale over the last couple months, and I’m not sure why. I first played the game back at the beginning of 2017 and you know what? It felt like a more.. Anime-esque version of Metin2.
This game looks really, really old. Not RuneScape or EverQuest old, but like an old PS1 JRPG. And thankfully I loved old PS1 JRPGs, so this was right up my alley.
Even though it looked noticably dated, the character movement, the tab-target combat, everything felt really, really high quality – much more so than in an MMO released back when this was.
I’m not sure really how large the world is, but I know that we only explored a fraction of what it really had to offer. It’s definitely an old-school title that doesn’t hold your hand at all and requires a lot of monster-grinding to level, but it’s highly rewarding to play.

I’m gonna go ahead and include Lost Ark here because Mrs Stix and I have been streaming this over on Twitch every weekend for the last few weeks, and we’ve been having an absolute blast.
Lost Ark isn’t your typical kind of MMO – it’s an isometric title which is something I’m not really used to or overly fond of. I’ve liked a few isometric RPGs over the years but it isn’t a type of game I’m really drawn to.
And the game doesn’t have a global release currently. Smilegate, the devs behind the game are definitely working on it but as of right now, the game is available in South Korea, Russia and Japan.
This game is one of the smoothest MMOs I’ve played in recent memory. The action combat is very impressive, looks incredible – heck, the entire game looks incredible. There’s so much to explore and a ton of features the further you get through the game.
Honestly when this launches globally, even though people claim they’re never going to play it.. they will and this is going to be pretty big. At least for a while.

But you know what? These are just 10 MMORPGs out of many you can find online. There are hundreds of games available to play – and we have a selection of videos covering quite a few of them with more videos to come every single day.