Free Realms
Official Release: April 28, 2009 Servers closed: March 31, 2014
Freerealms was an MMORPG developed and published by Sony Online Entertainment. It was a faux-free to play MMORPG where the focus was younger audiences and families. Instead of choosing a job in the beginning of the game, you had access to every job and could switch whenever you'd like. You could play as a human or a pixie. There were combat jobs such as Brawler, Ninja, and Wizard, as well as skill classes such as Chef, Miner, Blacksmith, and Postman. The combat was action orientated, with everything being an instance. You were faced with hordes of enemies, and your attacks hit multiple targets. You also had skills you could perform based on your equipped weapon. Crafting and harvesting of materials was done through mini-games, which was rather interesting in a world of MMOS where crafting was watching bars fill up. It also had player housing, racing, exploration rewards, a minor storyline, and tons upon tons of quests for every job. The game suffered from its subscription model. You could play a few classes up to the cap of 20, but most only to level 5 unless you had a subscription to the game. This was not an issue until later in its life when they restricted the kind of mini-games and combat instances you could begin as a free member, meaning those who tried the game would not get very far and would not experience the game enough to want a membership. It was a very atmospheric, family friendly game, but its playerbase dwindled and eventually it was shut down as they could no longer keep up the servers.