Once-Perfect Open-World RPGs That Are Unplayable Today

As video games evolve, so too do the medium’s most popular genres. From first-person shooters to open-world RPGs, games are never stagnant, creating, borrowing, or stealing successful new ideas from each other to try and create the next all-time classic. With that comes progress, advancements, and also the unfortunate outcome where some beloved games become so archaic that they’re virtually unplayable.

That’s the sad case with these next five games. They were once the talk of the gaming world, be it for a couple of months or over a decade, but the industry’s progress has left them behind. Playing them today is a struggle. They’re visually and mechanically dated, reliant on genre staples that were phased out long ago, and generally just a frustrating and ultimately disappointing experience.

Rearrange the covers into the correct US release order.

Easy (5)
Medium (7)
Hard (10)

Start

Rearrange the covers into the correct US release order.

Easy (5)Medium (7)Hard (10)Start

Asheron’s Call

This Once-Legendary MMORPG Looks Rough In Its Old Age

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One of the original “big 3” MMOs in the late 1990s, Asheron’s Call was never as popular as Ultima Online or EverQuest, but it toyed with some very cool ideas that made it a cult hit and fostered a devoted fanbase that kept showing up well into the late-2010s when the game was shut down. From its patron-vassal system intended to help new players find their footing to its completely open-ended class system, Asheron’s Call was constantly dabbling in new ideas to see what would stick.

While it is also physically unplayable after its servers were shut down in January 2017, Asheron’s Call was a video game fossil late in its life. Its visuals were so dated that it required resolution scaling just to run properly on modern monitors, and even that was an imperfect solution. That open-ended class system was completely unguided, which meant new players would need to do a lot of reading just to create their character, let alone actually play the game. At the other end of things, gameplay elements that relied heavily on RNG had been cracked and optimized years earlier, eliminating a lot of the exciting discoveries that drove the game in the early days. Asheron’s Call was a brave, off-beat, and deeply creative early MMO, but the truth is that it was shut down at the right time to preserve its legacy.

King’s Field

This Ain’t Dark Souls

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Credits: FromSoftware Inc.

Today, King’s Field is largely known for being an early proof of concept from FromSoftware of what would eventually become the studio’s soulslike formula. It has deliberate combat, an interconnected dark fantasy world, and a steep learning curve. For many, playing the King’s Field games is just an excuse to absorb more FromSoft in between releases. While the series does have its merits, the first game is about as archaic as they come.

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I could point to the painfully dated visuals or the boring, hallway-like environments as reasons why King’s Field just doesn’t hold up today, but determined players can overlook those things. No, the real reason why this game is unplayable in 2026 boils down to movement speed. Imagine the slowest video game character you’ve ever played as. Now cut their movement speed in half. That’s the speed at which you’ll move for the entirety of King’s Field. It’s genuinely brutal, like playing a character walking through Jello. It makes the world’s interconnected nature detrimental rather than immersive, because it takes forever to get anywhere.

EverQuest

This Inspiration For Many Modern MMORPGs Didn’t Keep Up With The Times

It’s hard to overstate just how influential EverQuest was. Another of the “big 3” early MMOs, EverQuest is credited as the primary inspiration for World of Warcraft. In fact, the story goes that Blizzard devs were so obsessed with playing it that it was how they spent much of their time in the office. And it truly was something special in its day. The rabid EverQuest fandom sank hundreds of hours into this game, grinding, leveling, adventuring, and exploring. Needless to say, if you were to jump in now, you might wonder what was wrong with them.

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Part of the problem is that EverQuest is not designed for HD monitors. Every texture in the game looks like the same muddy green color; the walls, the ground, and everything in between. This makes navigating the game’s opening city of Freeport a nightmare. The translucent, sparsely-detailed map doesn’t help matters. Combat, meanwhile, involves turning on auto attack and hovering near your target enemy, waiting for them to perish, and then moving on to the next. It requires doing a lot of this to level up, way more than in something like World of Warcraft, so the intense grinding is also a deterrent. All in all, EverQuest just doesn’t have the appeal it once did. EverQuest 2, even though it’s not a huge improvement, is still a lot more inviting than the first game.

Final Fantasy 11

Trapped In The Shadow Of A Superior Final Fantasy MMO

It’s one thing for a game to have once been the gold standard of online open-world RPGs, or even to just have pushed the genre forward in a meaningful way. Final Fantasy 11 certainly tried to do this, but made some design choices that are so baffling they almost feel like they’re done to frustrate genre fans, not welcome them. The controls are obtuse, entire systems, stats, and mechanics are either poorly explained or not explained at all, and even the simplest things like opening a menu are done through unintuitive methods. It doesn’t help that, outside of the upscaled PC version, Final Fantasy 11 is trapped on the PS2, a system not designed for MMORPGs, and had to cut a lot of corners in its design as a result.

The other nail in the coffin is that a spectacular Final Fantasy MMO already exists: Final Fantasy 14. It’s often cited as not just one of the best Final Fantasy games, but one of the best MMORPGs of all time. Granted, that wasn’t always the case, but its legacy is pretty set in stone at this point. It just seems silly to go back and play a clunky, frustrating, and extremely dated game like Final Fantasy 11 when you can easily get over 100 hours of play out of Final Fantasy 14 before spending a dime.

Sacred 2: Fallen Angel

Does Not Know The Meaning Of “Quality Of Life”

It’s long forgotten now, but back in 2009, Sacred 2: Fallen Angel was a pretty big deal, mostly due to the success of its predecessor. It’s a single-player ARPG technically speaking, but it also has a multiplayer component, which was one of the highlights of its release, along with its world design and open-world map. It had a lot going for it, from cool character and class designs to some unique exploration options, but it’s ultimately the poster child of all the things that RPGs have moved away from over the last 15 years.

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For example, the majority of the quests you’ll undertake are repetitious fetch quests that are clearly inspired by early-days WoW, and while they did the trick back in 2004, even by Sacred 2’s release in 2009, they were pretty uninspired, and that’s only gotten worse in the years since. Spells are frustratingly uninspired, and are often just reskins of a different spell with a slightly different color effect slapped on them. Worse still, upgrading your abilities like you would in any other RPG can actually make them worse if you don’t balance your skills correctly, but of course, there’s no tutorial for how to do that. While this may feel like an arbitrary addition for this list, Sacred 2: Fallen Angel was successful enough to sell around 1 million copies in its first year, and popular enough that it received a (very poor) remaster in 2025. That said, if you’re thinking of going back to the original after being disappointed by the remaster, you’ll probably just be disappointed twice over.