I would base your foundlings upon your foundations. Your hardware, software, and resource capacity will define how much you can excel your games development. It’s good you’re eager to try to make a game, but free will not come with easy, unless you decide to spend some money.
My personal choice is that realm crafter 2 will be a great eye candy capable, yet EASY to use tool. Chances are you will be spending money on an engine if you’re eager to get into game development. Now we can all understand the wallet issue ;p
I believe you should take an initiative to spend and invest just a little bit into something that could go a long ways for you, in this I will use games in development made by realm crafter.
Apoc-Online, they got interviewed by massive; the leader of that game might actually get a job from massive because his game was impressive.
Fact is it’s up to you how you decide to make your game look, be it a sloppy place down 40 trees and few buildings, or if it’s a neat thought out 50 trees on a trail and a pathway.
I truly believe if you invest for a beginning engine you would get a much more sufficient development. Other than this the game engines you will find that are free, are still either open source, require mass amounts of programming, scripting, and development and wont be free for to long.
My opinion is that you would do so much better going with an engine you can buy once and use forever.