I played a couple more hours this weekend. (Not as much as I would’ve liked, but I had Xmas stuff to do.) I’m tooling around Kingsmouth doing all of the side missions and killing zombies. I’ve spent most of my Ability points in the Shotgun area of the wheel, although I did spend a couple of points in the Blade section just to try it out.
So far, it feels like a singleplayer game with a bunch of other people wandering around sometimes getting in my way. I haven’t run up against anything that I couldn’t handle alone. In fact, I haven’t died from monster damage yet. (I did die once during a stealth mission in which failure meant the room exploded for some reason.) My shotgun seems to be cutting through enemies with ease.
I think I’m enjoying my time with the game, but I do have one major criticism. The atmosphere of mystery and horror they’re going for is entirely ruined by the constantly respawning mobs of trash enemies and the presence of other players running around willy nilly. It’s neither mysterious nor scary when goofballs in multicolored outfits are perpetually killing zombies in the same parking lot as you.
I hope this gets better later, but I’m not sure how it’s possible to generate any kind of “Secret World” mystery or horror in a MMO format.
hepcat
1782
That’s going to change…and sooner than you think. I put in about 3 or 4 hours over the weekend. I was also beginning to believe it was too easy. Then I wandered outside Kingsmouth a bit further and started getting my ass handed to me.
Razgon
1783
Oh yes…things change…drastically…
I’m confident the difficulty will ramp up when I leave Kingsmouth. I think it’s actually a good thing to have easy encounters in a MMO starting area.
I’m less confident that the tone of the game will improve.
Being almost 50 and Mini being in his 20s, I think we’ll be ok with grown-up concepts and language.
I am enjoying it so far.
hepcat
1786
I’m of the same opinion that the very nature of an MMO works against the more visceral tenants of horror storytelling. But as long as the storyline is interesting, I’ll be fine with it. Having it take the guild wars 2 route for subscriptions (or lack thereof) definitely makes me far happier with my purchase than it would if it were still a monthly drain on my wallet for the content.
Ultimate Crafting.
It will autobreak disenchant stuff below specified QL (buggy for me)
It will autocombine runes into chose quality level
It will show you recipes to make stuff.
There were also a few other UI mods that were very good for QOL.
At the time when I was subbing, I got quite into the mods, they added a lot to the game, and it was fun tracking their development and watching the improvements. I think the mods are an aspect of this flawed gem of a game that’s well worth getting into (haven’t played it recently - I’ll be playing it again soon).
So about crafting, can I skip it? I have tons of crafting mats in my inventory. I’d rather just buy items or find them. Am I crippling myself if I eschew crafting and sell all my runes and other crafting mats?
Not to my knowledge.
Depending on your server you could grind PVP for hours to get some Q10 Purples.
I logged in today to play some with a friend of mine and discovered that a) issue 5 quests went live including the first DLC (which is free to everyone who currently owns the game AFAIK, but will be a paid item for latecomers, and must be “purchased” from the Boosts section of the item store), and b) there’s an ongoing special event called The End of Days. It’ll last through…I think… the seventh, and has a few different components. There are Mayan zombies spawning all over the place, which can drop “Mayan remains” special bags that can drop event tokens and various items. There are world bosses called Harbingers of Nameless Days that autogrant you a related dungeon mission (one each for Solomon Island, Egypt, and Transylvania). There are event vendors. There is a new dungeon set in El Dorado, as well as a PvP scenario set there. There are five new lore pieces (called Shrouded Lore, which spawn Secret Keeper Mayan zombie waves to attack you). And there are a couple of side missions, the first of which will spawn off a Mayan zombie that comes to you. All in all, pretty cool stuff.
A friend of mine bought me TSW as a gift on Steam. It’s great fun to go through the more thought-intensive quests with a couple of buddies using voice chat to bounce ideas off each other. I’m still in Kingsmouth and my build so far has revolved around hammers and shotguns which seems like a pretty tank-like combo. My character is an Illuminati on Daemon and while I would hesitate to call it crowded, there seem to be a good number of people still around the beginner areas at least.
The last MMO I played was Tera and that only lasted about 6 weeks before the $15 a month lost it’s charm. MMOs have never really been my thing, but TSW is looking promising so far. It’s the first MMO that I’ve played where I actually want to complete all of the one-off side quests before moving on to the next area.
Razgon
1793
I’m somewhat curious what happened to Telefrogs adventure in The Secret World? Last post seemed somewhat positive :-)
Guild Wars 2 happened. Sorry. I stopped playing for the holidays to do family stuff, then someone gave me GW2 for Christmas.
I’ll probably return to Secret World eventually, but I just haven’t been motivated to go back quite yet. GW2 has its hooks in me pretty hard.
Also, I’ll be frank. The whole Merovingian start to the Dragon area was just off-putting. I was going to reroll as one of the other factions before I stopped playing.
Oghier
1795
I enjoyed the Illuminati storyline. The notes you receive from your handler are really well done.
There’s some good news about the game’s shift to the Buy to Play model.
Dropping the default Secret World subscription in December but not the cost of the game helped, a lot. The MMO sold more than 70,000 copies in the last four weeks.
Funcom said that represented a 30 per cent increase in the MMO’s total sales. Popping that into my fixed (with your help) calculator, that puts The Secret World’s grand total at just over 300,000 sales.
In August, Funcom said The Secret World had sold over 200,000 copies.
Removing the base subscription fee also boosted Secret World player activity by 400 per cent, apparently.
70K in one month is good, right? Of course, that doesn’t guarantee long-term success. Hopefully, the majority of those 70K new players stick with it and buy stuff from the shop instead of moving on after a few days like me.
Good news for them. I was out on the third day after I bought it. The combat is still dishwater dull (and never really gets better), and the vaunted investigation quests are still just finding the correct hotspots and clicking on them.
I do like the setting. I’ll probably try again at some point.
The investigation quests can be more than that. There’s one that’s in morse code. There’s one that requires clicking on things in a prescribed order. There’s one that requires avoiding detection. And some require the player to figure out where to go by giving the player clues.
The combat is basic – rotate through attacks – but you have a lot of variety in the builds you can make with the skill and action points.
Maybe it was my build (swords), but I didn’t find combat dull at all - at least not as compared to most other MMOs. I found it much more action-oriented as I was always moving and dodging.
It’s better than some, combat-wise. They do a better job of keeping combat active, and avoiding the skill/cooldown overload of many older MMOs. It’s no DCUO though.
