Which of these MMOs would run best on my not great laptop?

I purchased a small little Lenovo U260 ultrabook, 4G RAM, intel 1.33GHz i5, over the break and I've been loving it for writing but am a little interested in trying to install an MMO on it. The graphics card in it is one of those crap intel HD 3000 integrated graphics cards. Not great, though I've been able to run some games on Low settings.

Of the following, which do you think would run most smoothly on my laptop. I assume all of these will run at Low at best, but I'm wondering which will look best run smoothest. Also, of the ones I've mentioned, I'm also looking forward to suggestions about which you guys prefer.

Here are the ones I'm interested in:

Lord of the Rings Online: I've played this in the past and really dug it. Good stuff.

Star Wars The Old Republic: Fan of Star Wars 4 to 6 and love Mass Effect.

Final Fantasy XI: Yes, an oldie and apparently not a goodie, but I've enjoyed just about every FF and this is the one I haven't tried yet. The monthly fee is a buzz kill.

Secret World: I LOVE all the occult stuff that this game covers. This looks like a real treat, but being the most recent release I worry it is the least likely to run competently on this system

Star Trek Online: I've started watching TNG and am really getting into this universe. The prospect of having my own ship is ballin..

Any suggestions? Any preferences?

The Secret World is junk, FF11 is not worth the money, I would try LOTR online personally, it just depends on the lore that you prefer.

@Imsorrymsjackson: What didn't you like about Secret World? I heard a lot of cool things about it. I agree about FFXI and the coast.. bummed they haven't gotten F2P yet.

@RainVillain said:

@Imsorrymsjackson: What didn't you like about Secret World? I heard a lot of cool things about it. I agree about FFXI and the coast.. bummed they haven't gotten F2P yet.

It just didn't break any new ground for me in the MMO genre, i'm sure its very interesting if you like the lore but the game itself just falls a bit flat, gets boring really fast and there isn't many people playing it to be honest. On a seperate note, don't try and run Guild Wars 2 on that Intel HD card, my friend tried it and it runs like an absolute dog.

The Secret World ran like shit on my pretty decent gaming laptop and SWTOR is probably the worst-optimized MMO out there. Even on the best machines, it can still run like crap.

As for the others, they're all fairly old so you shouldn't have much of a problem running them.

Lotro worked fine on laptop which is probably worse than yours. Lotro is still mmo though and that's why I didn't play much of it.

I wouldn't say that The Secret World is junk, but of the games on that list it's only slightly better than Star Trek Online. I found them both to be somewhat shallow experiences and a bit repetitive toward the later levels. Granted, I hardly played Star Trek Online much after the beta so maybe things have changed a bit.

Given the system you'll be playing these games on I'd suggest either Final Fantasy XI or Lord of the Rings Online. You should be able to run both without too many issues.

FFXI used to be a pretty solid game, but I'm not sure how the community has held up and for it's age I'm still surprised that it has a monthly fee.

LOTRO on the other hand has remained solid and seems to still get content/updates pretty regularly.

SWTOR and LOTRO would probably run best and secret world would probably be the worst

LOTRO should run on your laptop and it's a great game as well (although the fact that they accidentally gave me one of the expansions for free makes me a little biased).

The Secret World is amazing.

However, it's horrendously optimized. If you have anything less than a 3 star computer, forget about having a playable experience.

That's all I know.

If you are worried about stuff running on your laptop, Final Fantasy XI will run on just about anything on high settings these days. I wouldn't buy into it though, its just not worth the subscription these days as it hasn't aged well. That being said, you can get a pretty good edition of the game pretty cheap and you have a free month too see if you really want to make the dive. The fact that it was designed around being played on a controller is a plus in my book.

I do not have any experience with the other MMOs.

FFXI would definitely run but is not forgiving to new players.

LOTRO will very likely run and is free to play.

I doubt the others would run well on that hardware.

Hard to tell on that (try system requirements lab website) but definitely would go with Star Trek Online. Might still be guild people/giant bomb ppl running it & last I looked the game looks great & now free to play.

Been playing LotRO since '07 and still enjoying it, unlike SWTOR and STO, both of which I tried as a fan of the licenses and was subsequently disappointed by. The only good thing about SWTOR was the story stuff, but it's not worth paying the monthly fee for. LotRO also works on my girlfriend's laptop, though she had a dedicated graphics processor. I've heard iffy things about Intel integrated graphics and LotRO, but it's definitely more scalable than any of the others in your list. Thankfully it's free to download, so you can install it and see how it runs before dropping any money on it. Oh, and if it does work and you decide to keep playing, I definitely recommend paying the monthly subscription instead of dealing with the F2P nonsense.

STO works pretty well on lower end systems. I was playing it on an old aluminum iMac and the graphics weren't exactly pretty, but there weren't any issues with actually playing the game. Plus having your own Star Trek ship is really fun. Crappy part, all of the really sweet ships you either purchase straight up in their store or they have lockbox lottery type things where you can win them, but you have to pay for the keys to unlock the boxes, so again it's a pay to play kind of thing. But you can totally play and have fun without spending money, tehn if you like it you can drop some on ships or whatever. I rock a long range science vessel retrofit, although I just got a Breen warship as a prize during the winter event that I am going to try out for a bit.

Thanks for all the suggestions, guys! I think I`ll start with LOTRO and see how that runs. My hesitation about trying something is because up in here in the great white north my GF and I often hit our 90Gig monthly limit. So if I were to download all these massive, 10-20Gig games, I`d already hit my cap!