Inferna

Inferna is a free-to-play open-world MMORPG that makes no secret of its lineage. Overhead camera, maps packed with monsters to farm for hours, slow progression and an upgrade system that can destroy the very piece of gear you were trying to improve: this is the school of fifteen-year-old MMORPGs —Metin2 being the obvious touchstone— rebuilt for Steam by INFERNA UG, a small German studio that both develops and publishes the game itself. It's a free download on Steam or from the official site.

It all takes place in Pangaea, a world split between two warring factions. You pick a side and one of four classes —Warrior, Wizard, Assassin and Half-Demon— and from there the game opens up 33 maps, world bosses, dungeons, guilds that declare war on each other, mounts and pets. PvP isn't fenced off into arenas: the rival faction is part of the scenery, and running into them mid-farm is part of the deal.

Progression is strictly old-school: no seasons, no wipes. The character you level is the character you keep, currently capped at level 100, with a jump to 120 planned before the studio calls the game finished. The heart of the system is the forge, which upgrades gear up to +10 and can break it on a failed attempt. That's where Inferna gets genuinely demanding, and where most players decide whether it's for them.

This is pure free-to-play: no upfront purchase, no subscription, and what you download is the whole game. Monetisation runs through a shop with a premium currency you top up with real money —redeemable vouchers exist too— selling cosmetics, mounts, pets, supporter ranks, season passes and convenience consumables. The one that gets talked about most, ever since launch, is a potion that raises the gold monsters drop by 25%.

The studio insists none of it is mandatory; a visible chunk of the community disagrees. The argument makes sense: in a game built on grinding and gear upgrades, items that speed up exactly those two things carry more weight than they would elsewhere, and the destructive forge is the precise spot where the shop applies pressure. You can play without spending anything —plenty of people do— but go in knowing that a wallet shortens the road.

Inferna entered Early Access on 20 December 2019 and still hasn't launched — an extraordinarily long stay even in a genre used to eternal betas. Version 1.0 is aimed at late 2026, alongside the level-cap increase. What it doesn't lack is activity: patch notes every two to four weeks, hotfixes and recurring events like Polarlight Hunt and Rift Jumper. The official roadmap promises cross-play with Android —already in beta, sharing the same world as PC—, iOS testing, a redesigned mobile UI, new regions and high-level dungeons, a Unity engine update and a macOS build.

There's a single global server, so everyone shares one world and there are no ghost-town server lists to navigate. That population, however, is small: a few hundred concurrent players on Steam, growing slowly but steadily over the past few years and still short of its launch peak. Steam reviews sit at Mixed, with a little over half positive across a couple of thousand opinions — a game that divides people rather than one that disappoints everybody.

Inferna is for anyone who misses the grind of mid-2000s MMORPGs: levelling slowly, sweating over a +1 on your weapon, recognising the same names in chat, belonging to a guild that actually means something. If that description makes you nostalgic and losing an item in the forge doesn't scare you off, there are months of free play here. It's also an easy one to try on a whim — there's no barrier to entry beyond the download.

The honest half of the picture: the technical finish is uneven, quests are functional rather than memorable, the interface and translation both show the size of the team, and the shop is more present than many players would like. If you're after a polished MMORPG with a living world, a critical mass of players and abundant endgame, this isn't it. If you'd rather back a small project that keeps growing at its own pace and don't mind seeing the seams, Inferna holds up better than its size suggests.