Allods Online has been in closed beta for several months, and is apparently quite polished, which is a nice change from usual state of MMOs. It's entering open beta this coming Tuesday and might be worth a download.
I'm not really a fan of the item shop system in MMOs (where you can purchase items with real world currency) but as long as there isn't anything in the game that forces you to buy items to continue, I can probably live with it.
I really have no idea if it's any good or not but the initial poking around I've been doing has come up with a lot of surprisingly positive feedback from people who can actually speak and type in full words with proper english, which is quite rare these days.
As always, it's almost impossible to tell if an MMO will be worthwhile from screenshots and forum posts, but I've been looking for something new, so I'll have to give it a try for myself.
Whenever I try a new MMO I approach it like this; I have an annoyance meter, and a satisfaction meter. When the game does something stupid it fills part of my annoyance meter. When I enjoy part of the game it fills my satisfaction meter. If the annoyance meter fills up before the satisfaction meter, I quit and uninstall it. If not.. well, I'm not sure, that hasn't happened in five years.
