What free to play games are there?

[Gurgeh]

I would like to know, what are some good free to play games that are out there? What games do you know of and would you recommend them?

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

I'm finding War Thunder well worth the download. It's got a learning curve, but the game is deep and sophisticated enough that there's a lot there to dig into.

[Venator]

I troll the Free to Play section of Steam pretty frequently, though there are other sources too. My current impressions:

- War Thunder: lots of fun, bit of a learning curve, suffers from very slow unlock progression.

- World of Tanks: bit easier to pick up than the ground-forces section of War Thunder; much faster unlock progression.

- Star Trek Online: Space battles are huge fun, powerful character/crew/ship customization and quick advancement (for an MMO). Ground combat is clunky though.

- Champions Online: From the makers of STO, if even more crazily diverse character customization. Gameplay is hit-or-miss though, with relatively few superpower archetypes available for free.

- Mechwarrior Online: One of the most intellectual and thinking "shooters" available, with just about everything important available for free. Downsides? Shaky optimization and shaky connections between the devs and player base (and reality).

- Sunrider: First Arrival : Anime visual-novel-thing plus turn-based space combat. Entertaining, but the optimization at the current beta phase is horrible. Should run fine on a better PC than my laptop, though.

[Elheru Aran]

STO is good fun if you enjoy Trek. If you're not really into Trek but enjoy SF, the space combat will be good stuff, but ground is a grind. I like it, used to play pretty regularly for a few months but since other things popped up IRL I've dropped it pretty much. Pop back every now and then, though.

I took a shot at Age of Conan but the initial download was redonkulous, something like 50 GB, that included patches and such though. But it still took me a few days to actually get the game to where I could play it. FWIW, I enjoyed the first few levels well enough, but since then I haven't done anything with it. Take that as you like.

LOTR Online is a decent game if you like LOTR and don't care for WoW. Extremely grindy once you get past the first few levels, though.

[TheFeniX]

I troll the Free to Play section of Steam pretty frequently,

This. Warframe has been seeing a lot of changes, but I shelved it a while back. Hopefully it's still "Third-person ninjas in space who chop up generic bad dudes in 4-player co-op." Fun game, had no business being as good as it was.

[lance]

Bloons line of games

Gemcraft

13 days in hell

[Simon_Jester]

A Star Control II clone called "The Ur-Quan Masters" is both glorious and available.

http://sc2.sourceforge.net/downloads.php

[Spekio]

If you like MOBAS, Dota 2 is pretty fun, if a little hard to get into.

[AniThyng]

I sometimes wonder if Earth001 is some sort of bot that is being tested here and on the straightdope forum

Would you care to name a genre at least?

Anyhow:

Warthunder and World of Tanks: Both have their merits, the former is more "realistic", the latter more "gamey", I personally play both but more warthunder lately because after months of WoT I'm kinda bored of it, but I still am hesitant to declare WT the winner in the online tank game field

[Vendetta]

Marvel Heroes is what's getting most of my time at the moment. It's basically Diablo with Marvel characters, by the original designer of Diablo. It had a bit of a rough start design and business model wise (and development changed hands to the current studio just before release), but they've done a hell of a lot to improve the click on things til loot falls out of them experience, are pretty generous with giveaways, and have done a really good job of making a very large cast of characters (30+, with a new one every month) feel distinctive in playstyle and reasonably balanced.

Path of Exile is the other big free to play q-diabl, it's more thematically similar to Diablo but I did find it a little less compelling.

There are roughly infinity free to play MMOs, Trion's games are free to play (Rift, Defiance, Archeage when it comes out) there's all the many Perfect World ones (including Star Trek Online), Tera, Dragon's Prophet, etc.

[Gaidin]

This. Warframe has been seeing a lot of changes, but I shelved it a while back. Hopefully it's still "Third-person ninjas in space who chop up generic bad dudes in 4-player co-op." Fun game, had no business being as good as it was.

What literally made it as good as it was was the missions were either five minutes of killing anything that moves or the missions were as long as you wanted them to be, your choice. No hours and hours of hack and slash unless you choose to make it so. It still is that from what I've heard. It's kinda the perfect shooter for the person that has 30 minutes of free time or 5 hours.