Avoiding the lameness of WoW, I've been shopping around for some interesting RPGs. I tried Rappelz, Cor-something, and a few others that were pretty much all equally lame.

Then I came across Sword of the New World. It came out about 6 months ago and was originally a pay-to-play game, but they decided to make it free instead. It's similar to all the other games in that you go on quests and earn experience by killing things, etc. Here are some of the unique features that I really like:

-Instead of controlling one character at a time, you control a party of three.
-Your party auto-attacks mobs, but you use skill/spell hotkeys manually (and in a way that makes sense)
-The only race is human
-There are five main classes (that you start with) and about 2 dozen or so UPCs (unique playing characters) that you earn through quests
-Every UPC comes as a card that you use to either create the character or sell it off, especially important to know because you can also buy the card on the in-game auctions (effectively giving you, say, a level 60 character at level 1)
-Playing a group of three characters at a time, all of which can be switched out for whatever you have in your quarters makes leveling alts pretty easy, as you could put a level 100 in with a level 1 and go rank them in a high-level area
-Just about every class/character has several stances that change depending on which weapon you wield, giving you a different skill/spell set with each one
-PvP is both interesting and hard
-Being only 6 months old, there's not much crowding. I prefer to play on the UK/DE server, which is almost always "low" in capacity
-One of my favorite things, some of the worst English translations since "All Your Base" for quests, making them highly amusing.

So, as far as free-to-play games go, I really, really like this one. I'm also interested in finding out how Darkfall is once it comes out, but for now, I've pretty much stopped playing CF (due to boredom) and have been exclusively playing this game (because it offers the most variety/complexity).

So, questions, flames, comments? Maybe reviews of any other interesting MMORPGs? If you want to try this one and download the game for free, it's:

[www.swordofthenewworld.com]