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

“I’m bored. Hey, Stix, can you suggest a free to play MMORPG?” Sure I can. And you know what? I can do one even better – I can list you 10.
See, every month I do a video titled “Free to play MMORPGs you should try in x month.” This way I can include 10 free MMOs to try out – 10 games that I don’t include in a “top video” for the entire rest of the year.
The goal of these videos are to highly more obscure, less populated games that perhaps you overlooked, or might not even know exist.
Do note that since I do one of these every single month, I may have included a game in a past video. Such as Guild Wars 2, TERA, PSO2 and Vindictus, which have all been included a couple months back.
So, let’s take some time and spread not only some love, but also some activity around the genre a little bit, yeah?

Dragon Nest is a fantasy MMORPG with a very strong emphasis on PvP. The game was developed by and is currently published by Eyedentity Games in 2011.
There were several things that set Dragon Nest apart from the rest of the competition almost a decade ago. First, the game had, and still probably has some of the best action combat in an Anime MMO. Second, the game utilized a hub – where you could converse with a ton of players, group up, and tackle dungeons of varied, increasing difficulty.
The game has definitely had a substantial decline in terms of population, and that’s mostly due to how poorly Nexon managed the game over their time as publisher.
If you’ve ever played any of Nexon’s MMOs, you know exactly how bad they are and the exact reason Dragon Nest was so poorly received.
Despite all of this, I get repeated requests to take an updated look at how it’s doing and constant comments asking why I haven’t included it in a “top 10” yet.

Aion’s a little different of a title. It has two different publishers: NCSoft in North America, and Gameforge in Europe. The game was initially released back in 2009 as a pay-to-play subscription based MMORPG, later going free-to-play in 2012.
It has continued to reinvent itself periodically over the course of the last decade, with enough changes being made that the game is almost unrecognizable from 3.0 to 6.0 – something that is a blessing for new players and a curse for older veterans.
The North American and European iterations both vary in terms of content available to players, and even names of NPCs, classes, cities, worlds. But the most drastic difference is the population.
Since Europe is.. pretty large, you can bet there are significantly more players active. North America pretty much gave up on the game years ago.
However, even despite that, Aion remains one of my favorite tab-target MMOs I’ve ever played. It has some of the best combat in the tab-target scene, has exceptional character creation, and – while I’m not sure about how it fares currently, it once had some of the most fun open-world PvP I’ve ever participated in.

I was never really all too fond of Aura Kingdom in the past. It’s an Anime MMO that had been developed by X-Legend, the guys behind pretty much every reskinned Anime MMO over the 2010s and published by Aeria Games.. which is now Gamigo. Yup.
The game was released originally back in 2014 and has remained semi-active – at least for Anime-MMO standards, ever since.
However in terms of Anime MMOs, if you’re looking for something traditional: A nice, aesthetically pleasing Anime game that has a variety of classes to choose between, a non-instanced world to explore with other players, good quality tab-target combat and dungeons to run? This might be a solid bet.
Honestly, with the exception of a linear progression system and a terrible publisher, at its core Aura Kingdom is a fun game.

Albion Online is probably one of the more popular titles available right now. But that wasn’t always the case. The game was released back in 2017, being developed and published by Sandbox Interactive in an attempt to recreate the player-driven world of Ultima Online.
While the game spent 2 years as a buy-to-play MMO, in 2019 the team behind the game decided the only choice they had left if they didn’t want to shut the game down was to undergo a business model change. And it worked.
They took the game from averaging a couple hundred concurrent players, to tens of thousands of concurrent, active players at any given time during the day, changing the game’s trajectory.
The game is a complete sandbox MMO – providing a game completely void of classes, allowing players to play how they want, with whatever gear and weapons they want. “You are what you wear!”
Since the game is a complete sandbox MMO, it has a full player driven economy and also provides full-loot PvP zones, although you’re not required to enter them if you don’t absolutely want to.

Silkroad Online is an old one. The game launched back in 2005, being both developed and published internationally by Joymax. Interestingly, for a game released 15 years ago, its playerbase is still more active than titles released a decade after it.
That’s not the only interesting aspect of the game, though. Silkroad starts players off by choosing a weapon as opposed to a class.
You then proceed to level up your class separately, depending on the weapon you have equipped, providing you the ability to level any specialization at any time.
Job experience is earned through quests and grinding monsters, as is personal experience but they’re not shared. Meaning you can be level 30, but a level 5 warrior.
Admittedly, the game itself does feel dated with its point-and-click movement and click-to-attack combat style. But if that isn’t an issue to you, then this should be a ton of fun!

Shaiya is an MMORPG Developed by ChoiRock Games and published by Aeria Games back in 2007. While Shaiya may be a fairly basic, traditional tab-target MMO in 2020, back when it released, and heck, even until up to just a few years ago players would praise the game as if it were the best thing to have ever graced the MMO-scene.
While the game definitely takes a lot of inspiration from Lineage 2 and World of Warcraft, it provides players with a lot of customization over their classes, offers an active PvP system, but most importantly – and this is the feature that caught my attention, Shaiya actually has a “hardcore” mode that has a permadeath feature.
Yup, you can actually die, permanently, and lose everything you worked towards.
So if you’re looking for a hardcore tab-target MMO with permadeath? Shaiya’s your bet. My only issue with the game is the current publisher, but that’s the case with pretty much every free-to-play MMORPG.

Ragnarok Online is one of the big OG MMOs. It was one of the first Anime-inspired isometric MMORPGs to utilize a sprite-graphical style, releasing all the way back in 2002.
The game was developed and published by GRAVITY and has been receiving periodic updates in the form of “Episodes” for almost 20 years, now. If you haven’t played Ragnarok Online, then you’re truly missing out.
While a lot of games have attempted to, and failed to replicate what Ragnarok did to the genre, nothing comes close to the original. This game has so many classes that you could waste the next decade and you still wouldn’t have played every single one to endgame.
Ragnarok uses an old point-and-click movement system, and the same type of combat system, but it truly shines in how diverse the game is and how much content it provides players.

Rift is an open-world fantasy MMORPG developed and published initially by Trion Worlds in 2011 and now published by Gamigo. Rift started off as a pay-to-play MMORPG as it was attempting to overthrow the titan that is World of Warcraft.
Shortly after Trion realized it had no chance and converted to a free-to-play business model. Honestly, for an MMO that is almost a decade old, the game has aged pretty well.
I just finished a video on Rift that I’ll have up next week for those of you interested, but Mrs Stix and I found the game to be a solid traditional experience.
It has a very unique large talent-tree providing a lot of customization over your character, a large, expansive class system, some great quality tab-target combat, a large open world filled with monsters and quests.
The only issue we found was how you went about leveling – with Intrepid Adventures making the vast majority of content obsolete. But if you want to tackle the game as it should be, it’s definitely possible.

Dream Of Mirror Online is an Anime MMORPG released back in 2007. The game was developed by Softstar and published by Aeria Games until 2012 after which Aeria opted to shut it down.
It remained shut down until 2015 when Suba Games revived the game and decided to publish it within North America. This is one of the very few MMOs inspired by Chinese mythology.
The game was ahead of its time, allowing for players to not only explore a large, open world, but also providing players the ability to swap between and level all of the games classes at any time.
Something that even today, people claim is an “innovative feature” due to how little it’s done. The game is tab-target and definitely looks dated visually, but it’s still an adorable Anime MMO if you’ve never tried it out.
Plus you can fly in it! That’s something that most MMOs opt out of due to how small and empty their worlds are!

Closers Online is a hub-based MMO released back in 2017. The game is developed by Naddic Games and published by En Masse Entertainment. This is one of the few hub-based MMOs left and has retained an active playerbase over its 3 years of life.
The game functions primarily as a side-scrolling RPG, running into instances with a group – or solo, whichever you prefer. You have varying difficulties to run, a plethora of different environments to play through, a surplus of bosses to defeat.
A large selection of characters you can create and play as and a lot of customization. It also has some of the best action combat in a game of its kind, something I know is highly important for players.
If you’re looking for a story-driven Anime title with great action combat, then this might be what you’re looking for. Plus, it just received 2 large updates to Busan! So this is as good a time as any to jump in!

And there we have it. 10 Free-to-play MMORPGs I think you should definitely give a look if you’re looking for something to play with all that spare time you no doubt have.