Neverwinter, a free-to-play action-MMO from Cryptic (City of Heroes, Champions Online, Star Trek Online), will be entering open beta on April 30th. Characters apparently won't be wiped, so it's more or less a launch.
It's not a large scale world MMO like WoW or Lineage II, it's like Champions Online or The Old Republic with large zones you load in and out of. From the beta a lot of the quests seem your standard fare, with you killing a bunch of monsters and the like, but one of the game's big focuses is user-generated quests so that's potentially interesting. There was at least one interesting questline dealing with the spellplague, but I won't spoil what happens. The rest of the quests frankly were uninteresting in the early goings (I got to around level 30 out of 60 total).
Combat is reminiscent of Guild Wars. It plays like an action game, but you can't move and attack. Loot and gold pops out of enemies and you run over gold to pick it up all Diablo-like. You've got 2 at-will abilities mapped to your left and right mouse buttons that are your bread and butter attacks, 3 cooldown abilities mapped to Q, E, and R, and 2 supers on 1 and 2 that you need to build up a meter to use. The mouse controls your aim and it can't be played like a typical MMO. Skills are swapped in and out of these ability slots, but there's not a huge selection of skills.
There are 5 classes (a fast-attacking teleporting rogue, a block-anything guardian fighter, a crowd control wizard, an AoE melee great weapon fighter, and a cleric than varies between healing and attacking (but word is the healing is rubbish, everyone just uses health pots)). Classes have different tab abilities (rogue can stealth, great weapons fighter enters a berserker-like state) and different shift abilities (guardian fighter blocks, GWF sprints, the rest dodge in their own way).
Beyond that it's obviously the DnD universe, races include half-orc, human, halfling, tiefling, wood elf, half-elf, dwarf, and upcoming is the drow, and will take place in and around the city of Neverwinter. Oh, and there's PvP, if you're into that sort of thing. No raids, only 5-player dungeons and skirmishes.
Here's TotalBiscuits "WTF is" video from an early beta weekend showing off the trickster rogue, leveling, and a dungeon run, and embedded below is the great weapon fighter trailer, which should give you a quick sense of how the game plays:
It's pretty fun and free-to-play, but doesn't seem to be on many people's radar, so there you go. Give it a shot if you'd like.
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