Other Multiboxable games discussion for those leaving WoW

[RedSorc]

Well, here's some thoughts from somebody who has sunk a good number of hours into almost every game you can think of on the list. For perspective, I am a PvE multiboxer who's interest is generally into trying to clear tough group content (e.g. Mythic+ for WoW). This is going to be pretty long, apologies: your post made me feel that there might be people out there that appreciate something detailed like this.

I will not be making mention of any MMOs that explicitly outlaw multiboxing (e.g. Archeage, Eve (sort of)). I will also not be talking about any dead games that have had fan-made revival servers (e.g. Warhammer Online, Star Wars Galaxies), particularly as such discussion is probably against the forum rules. I also exclude any games that I tried and completely failed to produce a workable multibox with (e.g. Elder Scrolls Online).

I will also point out rather grumpily that my favorite game on the list would have absolutely been WildStar if it hadn't died, which was a difficult to play but incredibly rewarding MMO to multi-box in this man's opinion.

An important absence from this list is Everquest 2. I have played it, and I think it would be quite a promising game to play that is reasonably easy to set up into a multibox, but it was so long ago that I tried it I don't feel I can give any sort of meaningful feedback upon it. For what it's worth, at the time I didn't feel that it was worth playing over and above WoW, or any of the other games on this list.

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Rift - https://www.trionworlds.com/rift/en/

My Experience: Hundreds of hours with both 5-box and 10-box teams. Cleared much end-game content.
Initial Set-up Difficulty: Easy (roughly on par with WoW)

Rift is a game that is very easy to get into and start playing, with macros, follow and all the other bells and whistles we need to get a team up and running nice and quickly. There's now three expansions worth of content to play through on top of the base game, and the level sync system means that you have the option of running through all of it at some rough approximation of the power level it's intended to be at, giving you a good number of hours of content to clear at your own pace.

The talent system allows for a lot of flexibility, and there's a lot of fun to be had in figuring out which compositions and builds work best with multiboxing teams. In addition, the fact that its free means that its very plausible to set up 10-box teams in order to be able to progress through raid content, which is a lot of fun the first time you try it.

However, there's three big problems with it that mean I probably won't be returning to it, personally.

• Dungeon content is way too easy. At some point during the history of RIFT, I think around about when Nightmare Tide was released, the majority of dungeon content was rebalanced from being an interesting challenge to multibox, into a chain-pulling face-roll-y free win. End game dungeons begin to give you a sensation of difficulty, but the majority of the content (with the exception of a couple of dungeons with mechanical challenges) is now very straightforward.
• Very little content at max level. To put it mildly, the most recent RIFT expansion is a little lacklustre on group content. The most recent expansion has a grand total of three(!) new dungeons, as compared to the eleven that shipped with the original game. There are a couple of old dungeons that have been given new "intrepid" difficulties, but it's still pretty underwhelming, particularly as there is no Mythic+ style infinite difficulty mode. There seems to be little prospect in more being added to the game at this point, so there's almost certainly a finite amount of time you can sink into the game.
• Levelling through the newest expansion is a CHORE. Ay, ay, ay... Prophecy of Ahnket is a huge pain to level through, particularly if you want to raid in a 10-box. Levelling through the adventure system is slow and painful with such group sizes, and dungeon experience is poor. The best way to level is actually just by questing through the storyline... but the quests in the new expansion are extremely frustrating to box, including multiple compulsory scenarios that must be completed solo. It's a huge slog.

If you've never played the game before, there's absolutely a good amount of content here for you to consume. It's just a shame that it's now very finite, and much of it has been rendered trivial by system changes.

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Star Wars: The Old Republic - https://www.swtor.com/

My Experience: I would estimate 100+ Hours of play clearing all content up to level 50.
Initial Set-up Difficulty: Moderate (No macros make certain basic functions hard, but but it's very easy to get a team fundamentally up and running.

A lot of what I mentioned for RIFT is going to hold true here as well. When the game released, it had big plans for competing with WoW on all fronts, and they spent a lot of time pushing their dungeon and raid content in previews. Over time, the focus has shifted more towards the game's strength, its story content, which means there is precious little available group content for multi-boxers to consume. Again, just like RIFT, the most recent expansions have almost no group content attached to them. The most recent expansion has just one new dungeon, and no infinite difficulty mode.

Without macros or addons, managing rotations is a challenge, though I had a lot of fun trying to figure out a good party composition for multiboxing. Characters generally stop following whenever you use an ability, which is a huge pain in the ass. As an aside, this is the only MMO that I've ever boxed where I found it was much easier to manage melee followers rather than ranged.

There's kind of two ways you can box SWTOR. With a 4-box, most dungeon content will be pretty trivial, and you'll have a slightly clunky leveling experience as you will have to do almost everything 4 times over during questing. On the other hand, you can take one of each class (though some of those classes will be tricky to pull off!) and experience all of the stories all at once.

With a 2-box, you have a less arduous leveling process, but you can still clear dungeons by having each character bring along one of their companions. This is easier to pull-off, from a technical standpoint, as you have two less rotations to manage. Plus, companions are significantly weaker than player characters, so it actually puts all of the dungeons at a really good level of difficulty to overcome.

It's worth noting that you can't use companions in raids, so there's no option to 4-box, then try to clear raids with 4 characters and 4 companions.

If you've never played the game before, the storyline is rather good (I can give a particular recommendation to the Imperial Agent storyline), but this will be less attractive if you've already played the story before.

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Neverwinter - https://www.arcgames.com/en/games/neverwinter

My Experience: Hundreds of hours, at various moments clearing some of the end-game content.
Initial Set-up Difficulty: Hard (Google "Alias" to help find threads to help you: some assembly required. Sadly, a recent patch broke a very important targeting slash command which broke the easy follow system)

Neverwinter was one of the wave of "action" MMOs that all hit the market at roughly the same time. It wears the "skin" of 4th edition D&D, but in reality the gameplay bears very little resemblance to that ruleset. It's a game with a very conventional, old fashioned structure though: Do simple "collect 20 monkey-nuts" kind of quests all the way through a levelling zone, do a dungeon at the end of the zones, end-game content is driven by daily quests and harder dungeons.

Before I get too much deeper: As I mentioned above, a recent update broke a targeting command that was a critical component of my follow/assist setup. I have no idea whether this is intentional or a bug that will be fixed, and I have no idea if this was specifically targeted at multi-boxers. This means it's now impossible to send a keystroke to a character that makes the character "lock on" to a target. This means that if you want to have your team follow your leader, you now need to manually go to each individual character and point it's cursor at the team leader before you push the follow button, or otherwise just pray to Tymora that your characters all happen to be pointing the right way. Unless a workaround or fix is found for this, Neverwinter is a really difficult game to recommend.

Neverwinter's best and worst feature is that your character is probably never going to be "finished": whether it be enchantments, mounts, companions, companion gear, story boons, artifact leveling, support artifact leveling or a bunch of other things I forgot about, there's almost always another way to improve your character's stats and abilities in some small way. Buyer beware: this is the most P2W, lootbox driven MMO on the Western market. It will take a LOT of grinding to eke out enough currency to get your team into a shape to farm efficiently for... more currency to improve your team further so you can begin to think about tackling end-game content.

On the other hand, this also means there is a lot of systems and content to engage with that always leaves your team with a sense of progress from session to session.

Multiboxing seems incredibly uncommon, but lots of events scale with more rewards when more people participate in them, so this might be the one game I've ever played where somebody is actually *happy* to see a multi-boxer rock up.

[RedSorc]

There was this awkward period of time where they decided to turn leveling dungeons into 3-man content, whilst keeping end-game dungeons as 5-man content. Mercifully, this has been reversed: you can now experience each of the dungeons as you level up. The levelling dungeons are a reasonably appropriate challenge, that will test your abilities (unless you outgear them).

End-game content is tough, as it involves a lot of twitch-y action-y dodging. There used to be compositions and builds that could get around some of this, but a lot of that has been nerfed in recent updates. The end-game has a decent stable of content available: there's still a constant trickle of a new dungeon or so every update, and there's a scaling system such that all content remains sort of valid forever, so you actually have quite a bit of content to clear at max-level. There is no infinite difficulty scaling though, so once you've cleared it, you've cleared it.

I've had a lot of fun in Neverwinter over the years, but it's worth mentioning a third time that there's no way I'll pick it up again unless someone figures out how to make follow a single key press again.

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Final Fantasy XIV - https://www.finalfantasyxiv.com/

*NOTE: Whilst it has a free trial, FFXIV is the only game on this list that uses a paid subscription model with no F2P aspect*

My Experience: Very limited experience multiboxing, but hundreds of hours sunk into playing the game casually.
Initial Set-up Difficulty: Easy. (You have macros and a follow command. Note that using macros for DPS rotations is incredibly suboptimal, so you'll want to try and find another way to do rotations)

FFXIV is a very fine MMO, with the most recent expansion having perhaps the best story/plot that I've experienced in recent memory of any game, nevermind MMOs. It's very WoW-esque, which makes it a reasonably easy game to box, and all of this sounds pretty good until I ask the question: "Yeah, but why would you actually box it?"

Here's the problem: FFXIV just does not do challenging small group "dungeon" content. In FFXIV, dungeons are 4-man and raids are 8-man. All dungeons are pieces of easy content that you do either as a part of the story, or once per day for a daily reward. They are intended to be done by four random guys thrown into a room together, many of whom may be playing on the PS4 and have limited ability to communicate with the rest of the party. They're easy, and there isn't really a "harder" version of them. Some dungeons have a "hard" mode, but this just means that they're scaled to a higher intended level/item level with completely new enemies and bosses, not that they are actually harder content. The challenging aspect of the game is confined to the raids. Whilst I haven't attempted it, I can tell you right now that clearing some of those with an expensive 8-box is going to be incredibly challenging because of the nature of the majority of the mechanics.

So, what is there to sink your teeth into? There's one or two features that might be interesting to do in a multibox. Palace of the Dead and Heaven-on-High are so-called "Deep Dungeons" with 200 and 80 levels respectively. Whilst the early levels are cake walks generally used for levelling alt classes, the deeper levels are genuinely challenging content for 4-man groups. Again, a problem here is that once they are done, they are done, and in spite of their layouts being randomized, I cannot see myself wanting to farm them for months on end as my only real piece of challenging 4-man content. Palace of the Dead is now 100% playable all the way through on the free trial, so that might be worth your time to have a go at if you're interested in sinking a month into the game and then dropping it.

So, yeah: my advice here is that it's a fantastic game that will make a poor multi-box game.

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Lord of the Rings Online - https://www.lotro.com/en?

My Experience: A couple of dozen hours
Initial Set-up Difficulty: Medium. (Some reading and a few hours will be necessary to get basic functionality set up; but everything will work reasonably smoothly once set up)

This is probably the game on this list I've spent the least amount of time with that I might have the most potential fun to eke out of it. One thing that should be mentioned that is difficult to overlook is that the F2P model is incredibly unfriendly to multi-boxers. Whilst it is technically possible to grind the currency to unlock content, that is a big, big ask, and a relatively small portion of the game is available in pure F2P. Buying access to all of the expansions on three or six or twelve accounts is a big ask for a game I suspect is not going to even be all that special in the long run.

Something I feel I have to point out here in my experiments with the game: it feels very "clunky" to multi-box. Perhaps I needed more time and effort with the game, but the follow range is frustratingly short and has a tendency to randomly break. Interacting with the world on multiple accounts felt clumsy. In the end, one of the reasons I haven't spent all that much time with LOTRO is that the game felt like a bit of a chore to play.

Of particular note in terms of potential content to engage with is the "skirmish" system, which is a small selection of dungeon-like content that can be scaled to be ran in a variety of group sizes, at a variety of difficulties, and might well provide a solid piece of content to sink our teeth into. Two of these skirmishes are ready to go out of the box for F2P players.

I'm by no means an expert here but the game suffers from the same problem a lot of the MMOs on this list with "dwindling" player-bases suffer from: A lack of end-game content. The most recent expansion has a grand total of one dungeon that has 3 difficulty levels, and there isn't a system for incorporating old content into the end-game.

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Guild Wars 2 - https://www.guildwars2.com/en-gb/

My Experience: 60+ hours 2-boxing, clearing the first couple of dungeons and a few easy fractals.
Initial Set-up Difficulty: Very, very hard (No follow command, and some very strict rules on multiboxing)

So this is a bit of a weird one. Contrary to popular belief inside the game, GW2 does allow multiboxing: they're actually the only MMO I know of that has a clear policy on it. The policy is pretty strict and is a tough nut to crack: no using macros, all characters must be operated "independently", and one keystroke must correspond to one action on one character.

That's a tough one... but you can do it! I've had some limited success playing two characters simultaneously using what I call a "dual-wielding" setup. Effectively what I do is I play one character with the keyboard, and I play one character using a 16-button MMO mouse. There's no real trick to this set up: you are literally playing both characters simultaneously, working like a fighter-pilot to try and keep one eye on each of your screens to try and maintain situational awareness on both of them. The mechanics are no different to me "dual-wielding" two completely independent laptops in front of me.

There's quite a fun little game here in trying to figure out which classes and build work best with this playstyle: obviously, you do not want anything that has even a remotely complicated rotation to manage, as you will have to manage both rotations simultaneously with no short cuts!

Ultimately, whilst this has a steep learning curve that's pretty cool to try and overcome, there's not all that many obvious challenges that can be conquered using this playstyle. Dungeons are balanced around 5-man parties. Whilst they aren't impossible to 2-man (particularly once you have appropriately geared and built max-level characters), many of the encounters are very much built around the idea that you have a full party, with lots of situations where you need to split the party to cover multiple objectives, while also having to defend an NPC.

It's certainly an experience to be had, but frankly I think I just enjoy playing the game casually in the long-term.

[RedSorc]

Dungeons and Dragons Online - https://www.ddo.com/en

My Experience: 100+ hours multiboxing, many, many years of playing the game casually.
Initial Set-up Difficulty: Very hard (No follow command and lots of platforming aspects)

Similar to Guild Wars 2, this is most definitely not a multibox-friendly MMO. Assuming that you aren't just parking your extra characters at the entrance of the dungeon while you solo, playing DDO with a multi-box involves using the "dual-wielding" setup I described before, though there are no codified rules for DDO mandating one keystroke, one action on one character for DDO, which makes handling rotations significantly easier.

So, getting this going is a significant challenge. However, the potential for long-term play is a lot bigger. A two-man team can conceivably clear all the content in the game. The game uses a "reincarnation" system that means that there isn't so much of a conventional "end-game" like in other MMOs: people play the game to the level cap, then reincarnate to do the entire game again with a *slightly* more powerful character, perhaps this time tackling the quests on a higher difficulty level. The highest difficulty level in the game (Reaper 10) is incredibly challenging, and is absolutely not something you can expect to clear without exceptionally powerful characters that have undergone many, many reincarnations and earned many, many "reaper" points.

The game really revolves around its incredibly deep levelling system. In it's early days, the game sought to be a representation of 3E D&D, represented in a real-time 3d world. As the game has aged, it now bears less and less resemblance to its inspiration, but still has the deep system of classes, feats, skills from 3rd edition, layered with a pair of more conventional MMO talent systems to produce a startling array of different characters that can be created. Beware: it is absolutely possible to create a terrible character in this game if you don't know what you are doing! A lot of the longevity in the game is in the joy of creating a new character concept, building it out, levelling it to max level, then repeating the process because you came up with a better idea at some point during the levelling process. This also means that all content added to the game remains relevant forever: it doesn't suffer from the common F2P MMO problem of having the most recent "endgame" having only scant content as the team's development resources have dwindled.

Recently, there was an incredibly generous promotion where the creators basically gave away the entire game for free. Unfortunately, that promotion ended on August 31st. The F2P model might appear to be somewhat stingy at first glance. The game only offers a small fraction of the available quests for free, and additional "packs" of adventures are unlocked using bought currency. But... the currency to unlock more adventures is farmable, and is a "critical mass" of content that you can unlock whereupon you will gradually just end up slowly unlocking the game as you just play it. Essentially, once you have enough adventure packs unlocked to be able to comfortably level from level 1-20, you can keep on doing that, roughly earning enough to currency to unlock one new pack each time you do it. Even before the crazy Covid giveaway, I had multiple accounts with pretty much the entire game unlocked without having spent a penny, though that definitely requires you to have sunk a lot of time into the game.

In conclusion, this one is definitely a bit of a niche choice, and will provide a very different experience to your classic MMO, but offers a lot of opportunity for getting your teeth stuck into a nearly infinite progression of challenging content, with the developers still frequently adding new content to the game.

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That would be it. I can't help but feel like I've forgotten about one or two games. I can update if I remember any.

[wowairborne]

I am going to try EVE online, can't broadcast keys either but game is gonna be a lot easier to control per character cause a lot of ingame automation. i think 2-3 accounts is good enough.

[leroyreborn]

I am going to try EVE online, can't broadcast keys either but game is gonna be a lot easier to control per character cause a lot of ingame automation. i think 2-3 accounts is good enough.

might look at eve echoes its made for the mobile gaming on phones and such but can be ran on PC. i'm running 5 accounts on it now.

[wowairborne]

might look at eve echoes its made for the mobile gaming on phones and such but can be ran on PC. i'm running 5 accounts on it now.

thank you i'll DM you if i get into it.

[Eminiar7]

Thank you for this. I came here looking for ideas of a new game. I have been boxing 5 accounts in wow for many years, but now I've closed them. The idea of not playing wow is horrible to me, so probably I will eventually come back in some capacity. But for now I feel a need to take a break from wow and from boxing.
All my gaming focus has been on wow for the past years, so I think maybe there are some good games out there that I just didn't have time to explore. Before I started wow I played a game called Dark Age of Camelot, which I loved. Unfortunately they made some changes there that I don't appreciate, among other things shutting down an entire expansion in some kind of attempt to make the world smaller, because there are so few players. So I'm not going back there either.


I don't do pvp or gold farming, for me the game is about immersion and playing fun classes, and exploring the world. I'm interested to know, of the games you have listed, is there one that you would choose if you did not want to box, or maybe just dual box?
Preferably it would be something where I can still mostly keep to myself, and avoid group content with other players.

[Pantao]

Long story short I quit WoW in 06 due to military stuff, DCUO on and off from 10-12, Eve from 13-17, then came back to WoW in 18. Eve is a very good game, extremely competitive, and manipulative. But it is extremely unforgiving, for anyone that is new at least research the slang before attempting to play the game. a small mistake can cost you a lot in game since when you get killed, everyone else gets your stuff that's not destroyed. Ratted in nul-sec.

[RedSorc]

I don't do pvp or gold farming, for me the game is about immersion and playing fun classes, and exploring the world. I'm interested to know, of the games you have listed, is there one that you would choose if you did not want to box, or maybe just dual box?
Preferably it would be something where I can still mostly keep to myself, and avoid group content with other players.

Based on those comments, FFXIV would be my recommendation. As I say, FFXIV is probably not a great multiboxing game, but is a fantastic MMO in it's own right that also just so happens to be going through a "golden age" right now, with the community generally being very positive about its most recent expansion. There is the odd piece of group content that is compulsory, but its honestly not a big deal at all. PvP and gold farming are also not really big things in it, at all. The only bad thing I have to say about FFXIV is that you do eventually run out of content, it's not a game you could play 50 hours a week for month on end and still have things to do. But, if you're new to the game, that won't be a problem for the first 100-200 or so hours of gameplay.

In terms of "playing fun classes", FFXIV also has a system where one character can learn all the classes: the class you are using is determined by what weapon you are holding. So that's a plus if you're the sort of person that like trying every possible class under the sun in an MMO to figure out which one speaks to you.

In terms of a game to dual box, SWTOR stands out. The fact that you can bring along two companions means you can run with a "full" party to clear group quests even on a two-box. It's a pretty robust MMO with a reasonably generous F2P offering. If you've not played through the storyline before, that will be a reasonably charismatic experience. It inherits a lot of DNA from the old Bioware games with lots of good/evil story choices (think Dragon Age, Jade Empire, Mass Effect, etc), which might be a positive or a negative for you.

[Hisha]

Just wanted to send a big thanks to RedSorc for a great write up on the other options that are out there. I went ahead and downloaded and started playing SWTOR and FFXIV to test them out solo and try to determine which I would like to multibox or if I am even going too. Either way just filling time till Hogwarts Legacy drops next year, since I've gotten the wife hooked on the idea of us both playing it. Knew I would get her into gaming sooner or later!