A game called just came out of early access and my friend introduced it to me.
It's a free-to-play hybrid between Diablo's action-RPG game play with more traditional MMO exploring and socializing. There's three specs for each class, and every character can turn into a titular Devilian for increased power and unique abilities.
It's honestly quite fun, I haven't experienced any play-to-win paywalls after playing for about 10 hours. There's lockboxes and standard monetization stuff, but it's very unobtrusive and low-key. The community's pretty small right now so its long-term prospects are uncertain. I'll probably drop some money on it, I'd like this game to succeed.
I played this to max level. Inexplicably, they turn off matchmaking at max level, forcing people to find groups in chat, which might not be the worst thing in the world if they had any sort of filter for the gold sellers, but they don't.
I ran Hell+2 dungeons 25 times without getting a single upgrade before I said **** it, uninstalled, and joined the dozens of other people ranting on reddit about the same issues.
Devilian was localized by Trion, the same company responsible for several other noteworthy games.
Rift was the first game I played from Trion, developed by them, I enjoyed that MMO for several years. Unfortunately, like most other MMO's, they failed to innovate at all with their expansions, instead letting the game become stale and eventually unplayable.
Defiance was, and still is, one of a very small number of respectable MMO FPS games. Unfortunately they never did get raids in, or any meaningful endgame progression, so my experience there was short-lived.
ArcheAge was Trion's first big project that involved localizing rather than developing. AA had a lot of social aspects that brought players together in fun and unique ways, which I greatly appreciated. Sadly, they patched in dramatically more powerful gear with each patch, which was also dramatically more expensive, so that just half a year after launch it costed thousands of US dollars to maintain any semblance of competitiveness.
Trove was a great attempt to recreate Minecraft's building experience, while also having refined combat and lots of unique classes. I had very high hopes for this one, but then they made it exceedingly difficult to collect the basic building block colors, so players couldn't even construct simple structures without hundreds of hours of farming. Also I found the endgame raids lackluster, and class balance severely lacking.
Then came Devilian. I don't know why I let myself believe this time would be different..but I actually got my hopes up, and even bought the founders package. I only hope that whatever Trion comes out with next, I'll have the strength to just say No.
