Anarchy Online

Anarchy Online was the first large-scale sci-fi MMORPG, and it is somehow still running. Funcom launched it on June 27, 2001 with a first month so broken it became a founding story of the genre, and more than two decades later the servers are still on.

The game takes place on Rubi-Ka, a mining desert in the year 29,475. Everything turns around notum, the mineral buried there: the Omni-Tek corporation mines it, the rebel Clans want them gone, and the neutrals live in between. That fight is what feeds the territorial PvP.

You pick one of four engineered breeds (Solitus, Opifex, Nanomage, Atrox) and one of a long list of professions. Most of the system revolves around nano programs and implants: gear goes on in layers, and each piece raises the stats that let the next one fit.

This is a genuinely old MMO. The interface is dense, progression is slow, and the economy assumes you will ask questions in chat. What you get back is hundreds of hours spread across five expansions and boosters, and a small veteran community that still answers.

Anyone can play for free with no time limit: the free account covers the base game and the Notum Wars booster, with character restrictions and a progression ceiling. The community calls those accounts froobs, and they have been part of the game's folklore for years.

A subscription adds every expansion and monthly reward points, drops the character restrictions and raises the level cap to 220. Funcom does not publish the price outside the account area on the official site, so the figure floating around elsewhere (roughly USD 15 a month, cheaper on 3, 6 and 12-month plans) is not official: check it when you sign up.

Everything runs on a single server, Rubi-Ka, since the two English servers merged in 2013. In March 2019 Funcom added Rubi-Ka 2019, a progression server for subscribers only. The modernized Dreamworld engine reached live servers on June 25, 2015, after eight years of attempts.

Updates have gone quiet. The last documented content is the Condemned Subway raid from October 2020, and the newest patch listed on the official forum is from that same month; the last news post on the site is the 22nd anniversary event in June 2023. There is no public roadmap, and the studio's development is on Dune: Awakening.

It is worth it if you want to play the origin of the sci-fi MMO and treat gearing up as a puzzle of stat requirements. It is not worth it if you want a busy world, modern onboarding or new content: Funcom has never released player numbers and has not announced plans in years. Trying it costs nothing, and the Steam version is the same game.