One of the things that makes me happy about World of Warcraft‘s next expansion is that cosmetics are becoming more unified. Unlock a plate chestpiece on one character, all of the characters on your account who can equip that chestpiece will be able to use that appearance. That’s wonderful, it frees up inventory space, and perhaps most importantly it’s a boon for those of us who play multiple characters.
Some games are set up in such a way that you’re encouraged to play multiple characters even more heavily, of course. Star Wars: The Old Republic offers you more emotes and perks depending on other characters in your lineup, including a special character frame if you manage to complete all of the class stories. Even reputation is cross-character. Other games, like Final Fantasy XIV, are actively hostile to players who take on multiple characters.
I’m a poor judge of these things, of course, since I do have alts in Final Fantasy XIV and happily play them. But it does raise an interesting question. In your opinion, what’s the best MMO for having an army of alts? What MMO is the best about sharing items and boons across characters? It’s not a question of which MMO has the largest variety of different character types to explore; which one makes you feel as if you’re meant to have more than one character?
Every morning, the Massively Overpowered writers team up with mascot Mo to ask MMORPG players pointed questions about the massively multiplayer online roleplaying genre. Grab a mug of your preferred beverage and take a stab at answering the question posed in today’s Daily Grind!
EQ2. I have an embarrassingly large number of alts on that game. I just needed to try out all the millions of classes, dang it!
SWTOR is the best game for having alts. FFXIV is the best for never needing one.
Restark As long as you never want to have or do anything non-trivial or actually nice on any of your characters, sure. The game is deceptively accessible for simply leveling from 1 to 80. Everything beyond that you ever might actually want to do is simply horrible.
If you never level beyond 50 or 55, I would agree with SWTOR as being the ultimate alt-friendly game. Unfortunately beyond that it becomes a hideous chore to keep more than one character moving through the expansions. And it has only become more tedious and grating with the new unending pointless grindfest “solo endgame” model that Bioware has adopted since KOTFE. I loved the launch game and played it for years, right up until KOTFE launched. Most of that time was spent leveling the 20+ characters that I created since launch. I even deleted and re-rolled my entire legacy at one point for fun, and I really enjoyed it, even after seeing some of the class and planet stories several times. When KOTFE dropped, I got to the level cap with my first character, took one look around, and walked away.
SWTOR! However, I prefer the way FFXIV ARR does it so you do not have to make an alt for every class.
City of Heroes, Champions Online, WoW, Star Wars the Old Republic, and even Wildstar!Â
I love games that let you save characters, but none so far just let you design characters unless unless you have an empty slot. Kind of a shame.
EVE Online
Virtually everyone I know in EVE has multiple accounts with characters that each perform a variety of specialized tasks. It really help that CCP endorses this too. I’ve had days where I’ve played with four clients open across multiple monitors so I can multi task. I’ve even known people who can pull off one-man fleets with their armies of alts.
But for a more traditional MMO, GW2 is probably the best when it comes to multiple accounts. For such a competitive game its very commonplace for someone to have multiple max level characters, and GW2 pulls it off nicely with a lot of the account-wide features.
Champions Online, no contest. The sheer variety of characters you can create puts every other MMO to shame. It’s the only game in which I’m currently maintaining a long-term subscription.
GW2. Â Since ascended gear is account bound, legendaries are account bound, the bank, the wallet, and they have those overpriced account wide slots for your copper salvage-o-matic. Â Other than that, I guess WoW, since pets, mounts, and heirlooms are now account wide.
WoW used to be the best, until WoD. Â GW2 is pretty good for alts these day, since almost everything is account-wide.