Final Fantasy XIV

Final Fantasy XIV launched badly enough in 2010 that Square Enix took it offline, apologised, and rebuilt it from scratch. A Realm Reborn is the result, and the sequence of expansions since has made it the most narratively ambitious MMORPG in operation, the kind of game where people recommend it primarily for its writing, which is not a sentence the genre usually earns.

Mechanically it is a theme-park MMO with one significant twist: a single character can level every combat and crafting class. There is no reroll, no alt requirement, and no wrong choice at character creation, which removes the genre's most common source of regret. The trade-off is a strictly gated main story you must clear to reach current content, several hundred hours of it. Whether that is the price of entry or the actual product depends entirely on you.