One point that many fail to mention here which I believe detracted greatly from the game is that it is a fundamentally difficult game to play. There is an endgame gear grind, a dungeon mode requiring a boss fight unlock and gear check, a 500+ skill system that is obtuse and does not always work as expected, and investigation missions that require a lot of work to solve unless you Google the solutions.
Many of TSW zones are brutal on players and the combat system if not mastered makes this even more difficult. There is a definite place for this MMO in the genre but not as a mainstream title. It best serves a niche hardcore audience that is prepared to put in some work to develop ideal gear sets and skill sets.
Your average themepark MMO player that is used to having everything handed to them on a platter won’t enjoy an MMO like TSW.
The endgame nightmare modes were especially brutal, and the model of making the final boss of each instance the progression, rather than making a progression path of instances, could make even a good run feel like a failure since you didn’t full clear.
It was a strangely serious business endgame for a game that was previously about story, exploration and puzzles.
Miramon
1603
Yeah, it smacks of not having the resources to invest in planning and implementation of a larger scale end-game, everything sucked away by the design demands of the mid-game that most players will only experience for less than 2 full months. Good dungeon encounters are hard to design, of course, but they’re still easier than coming up with good PvP or some other magic alternative that will keep people playing when there is no more content.
Nesrie
1604
GW2 doesn’t anywhere near the problems TSW did. Hell GW2 doesn’t have the problems Star Wars had, certainly not even FXIV… is GW2 your first run at an MMO? It’s a pretty clean release. Rifts is the only other game I think of that had a similarly good release.
It is asinine to think the real problems with TSW is that it’s too different instead of being a broken barely working release that they expected people to continue to pay in to until they got around to actually fixing things. You’re off your rocker with this one.
Razgon
1605
Nah, he isnt - The game certainty wasn’t broken for me. I played for my month without any issues. There were 2 quests I couldn’t complete due to it being broken, but that was it.
The guild chat thing didn’t bother me at all. TSW isn’t really a game where you need a lot of guildies to help you and generally I was too busy being immersed in the world, or spending hours trying to solve the puzzles without looking at the solution online.
Nesrie
1606
Well based on the begging that Funcom keeps sending out in their e-mails, there are more people who felt there was something wrong with TSW than are actually paying for the game. I know it was a buggy, barely working pos when I played it. I also know I am not the only one with that opinion. And not that reviews are the end all, there sure are a lot of them that mention bugs, and ugly graphics, poor character models, and broken quests.
Razgon
1607
We agree the game is hurting, but thats for lack of players, not bugs.
Honestly - A ton of the “bugs” people complained about on the official forums were people unable to get away from their tradition expectations of how an MMO works, to one that does not hold your hands at all.
I can’t begin to tell you how many threads were there whining about quests not working, when it was just a quest they had to actually think a bit about to get to work, instead of following the yellow brick road.
I know I am not the only one with that opinion (Hey, thats a brilliant sentence - it lends my post a ton of credence!)
I enjoyed it, just a bad time to release the game with nary a few months of honeymoon before GW2 and Panda hit… (One of which was ‘free’ and the other of which everyone was already subscribed to…)
I liked the combat where it felt your ‘twitch’ skills would help, and it was the only mmo I’ve played (played most of them - except for the Asian ones) where I have actually tried to pay attention to the story.
The 1 day trial was enough to get me to buy the game, but that said, they could have offered at least 14 days and perhaps have a reduced subscription price to be competitive.
Just because WOW gets away with 14.95 a month doesn’t mean your game will.
It is a shame that Funcoms first good game gets killed off both by their past mistakes (and many expecting this one to be one as well) and the expectations they had to it. As they say themselves that “The game wasn’t generic enough” for the mass market, basically they should have “dumbed” it down to make it more accessible. I admit that I had to use google a few times myself to clear some of the quests but I dont feele like it hurt the game in any way.
Oh well.
Razgon
1609
Yeah -they should have had a money incentive of some sort to get people hooked. Lower prices than normally on sub, lower prices on 12 month subs and the like. Perhaps that would have gotten more people to play.
the 14.95 days are probably over for everyone but WoW.
Nesrie
1610
I played MMOs before they even had graphics. I don’t need my hand held. There were a lot of problems with that game. It took me a couple of hours just to figure out how to get on the same instance with the people I wanted to play with… that would be a big part of the MMO experience. Maybe some people don’t care about chat in an MMO, but a lot of people do. These are not minor issues for an MMO.
Yes, the chat issue definitively hurt the game.
Having guilds restricted to a certain faction made sense lore wise, but since everything else let you mix factions it kinda hurt the game for players who wanted to be guilded with different factions.
blah
1612
Lay off the pipe.
I can count on one hand how many broken quests I ran into in TSW. The only other issue that I ever encountered was the chat bug. In GW2 I’ve run into literally dozens of broken quests that only fix on server resets, multiple instances of the in-game mail and AH being shut down, issues with group members not appearing to each other, the guild system was broken for nearly two weeks, and I’ve had more than a couple of skill point mobs that weren’t working or were spawned below the world. Add to that the fucking abysmal customer service, rampant bots and hacking, and GW2 is every bit as screwed up, if not more so, than TSW EVER was! And don’t pretend the above isn’t accurate because ANet has responded to every single one of those issues in their official updates.
Dude, I get it, people are having more fun playing GW2, so they overlook the shit that’s wrong with it. And that’s fine, but it doesn’t make the problems magically disappear. It’s laughable that people talk about how buggy TSW was and then gloss over the exact same type of problems in GW2. And you want to talk asinine? Asinine is comparing GW2’s launch to Rift, which was practically flawless. Asinine is claiming that TSW was a “broken barely working release”.
Reemul
1613
It is true though, GW2 as an out of the box release has very few issues and pretty much nothing major (AH not working was IMO no issue it meant you concentrated on playing the game) however it does have a few things that needs sorting ASAP. But the rest of your original post was pure rubbish and the is nothing in it to say GW2 should have failed based on bugs/issues. I agree bots need dealing with but don’t they in all mmo’s.
Gw2 had a good pretty solid launch and now needs the WvW sorting. However TSW’s main problem was as mentioned due to the nature of the game you could never be sure it was a bug or you were on the wrong track meaning you ended up googling it because you lacked faith in what the game was doing. Seem games cannot get by with certain types of issues and TSW certainly falls in to that category.
TSW was pretty poor at telling you how to build you character, documentation and tutorial was non existent, which is fine when it’s following a similar formula but TSW wasn’t this put people off quickly. I liked the game but still only managed a month before getting turned off.
Sure GW2 had a few issues but certainly nothing that says failure while pretty much everyone playing TSW was going this will failure due to the issues people were having, no chat at all was a killer as well
TSW should never have been marketed as an MMO. As an online game with a multiplayer component it was terrific at launch. Not perfect due to the quest issues (although it was very easy to tell which ones were really broken versus just hard without spoiling anything by reading forum post titles) but really good as an ARPG with a living world, some coop play, and a fun skill system to explore.
Its only when you think of it as an MMO that it fails. Then the chat bugs become a huge issue, the skill system becomes overly big, poorly explained and unbalanced because your focusing on only end game content not the solo PvE journey, and the PvP being weak starts to matter.
Of course no one expects to pay monthly for a solo game with online social/lite-MMO aspects.Or, if they are willing it would only be with a lower monthly fee and a very low initial cost.
Oghier
1615
I don’t mean this as criticism, and I recognize that many, many people hold this opinion… But I do not understand it. GW2 has no way to trade items with another player, other than via mail. With no COD mail option, that meant any trade with a stranger was an invitation to be scammed.
So GW2 had no economy. They launched the game without an economy, and it was weeks before they fixed it. That’s not quite as big as TSW’s chat disaster, but launching without an economy is a pretty big deal.
Yet, people forgive it. They even come up with silver linings like, “it forced you to concentrate on the game.” GW2 seems to have an enormous well of goodwill upon which it can draw, and people will happily ignore gaping holes in the game. Is it because it’s pretty? Because it’s free? For me, it’s because the game does a fantastic job of encouraging exploration. I remain amazed, though, that Funcom can, in many eyes, do no right, while ANet gets the benefit of the doubt on everything.
Hopefully some people will resub to Secret World periodically to play new content. What really surprised me about Secret World is, given all the ballyhoo over Old Republic’s story and voice-acting, Secret World does a better job with those.
I can’t speak for the quality or bugginess of this game, but I found the projections that Funcom had for its launch performance to be fascinating. In what crazy world did they really think it would do the kind of sales they were looking for?
Razgon
1618
It was probably that or don’t make the game at all - those projections are for investors.
Age of Conan sold really well out of the gate, and then subsequent MMOs also sold well out of the gate. I think Funcom had a reasonably expectation that a new, high production quality MMO would sell better than it did.
hepcat
1620
This game actually interests me and as soon as I dispatch a bit more of my game backlog, I would love to try it. I say this because reviews lead me to believe it’s more story driven than most MMO’s. Is this true? I would love more Amnesia and less Call of Duty in an MMO. Although I’m not sure that would really sell well.
