I think I’ve decided the suck part of Secret World Legends doesn’t overwhelm the Secret Worlds part of Secret World Legends. I came to that conclusion while doing the Polaris mission, which is Secret World (Legends or otherwise) in a nutshell: it may be clunky as hell, but where else are you going to get this kind of game world?
-Tom
I was doing the mission in the Franklin House in Blue Mountain yesterday where you learn all about the awful things that have happened there in the past…and it was just so damn good. Same thing…the clunky bits are gonna clunky, but damn this is still so good.
I was answering Malkav but got a little too cryptic in my haste.
I disliked pvp in TSW. In SWL I haven’t found it all that objectionable. The matches are over much more quickly which helps. It’s still chaotic but it feels better to queue up a do a quick round. On reddit I had seen a mention of decent loot; overall it’s not great but it does seen to give you a few things although they seem weighted towards consumables.
There is no daily challenge but, when I get back from vacation, I’ll probably continue to do a round or two per session.
I do not understand the loot chase here. Pretty much everything you get just gets rendered down and glommed onto your weapon or one of your jewelry pieces. Maybe I’m wrong, but the impression I have so far is that loot is just a drip feed of item xp?
[quote=“Madmarcus, post:244, topic:129091”]There is no daily challenge but, when I get back from vacation, I’ll probably continue to do a round or two per session.
[/quote]
Oh, you mean there’s no PvP daily challenge? Because there’s definitely a list of PvE daily challenge stuff. Shift+L calls it up, I believe.
-Tom
Dungeon fix sems to give a chance of a random loot chest, the bigger chest have better loot.
Either way, I spent all 18 of my dungeon keys yesterday. Got some new interesting items that I need to level up before I can use them, but all of them had an additional feature (like shield, extra dmg, etc) whereas the other items I have gotten before have just had stats on them.
My level 40 character is kinda sad that the Patron boost to AP/SP only applies to new stuff… which means that I should level a new character (since my other character will be a few hundred AP/SP’s behind new ones…). So I made one, and this character needs to pay 5000 marks to unlock each weapon, has none of the cosmetic outfits and none of the achievements I did on the other character.
So in summary: Yay… booo! Typical Funcon; One hand that giveth, and the other taketh away.
Did the final part of Solomon Island quest chain, love the end stage with that explorer in the ice…
You are right that the loot is just a slow progression of xp for weapons and talismen but it’s also another chance for a mark 3 with a good power. I guess I like being just a little ahead of the curve I would be on without the added little trickle of loot from a few pvp matches.
I have to admit that the final stages of the mission sequence having to do with the investigative-journalist/conspiracy-theorist guy, (blanking on his name) has the most successfully dreamlike feel of any game I’ve ever played. Wandering through that creepy suburbia felt truly nightmarish.
There are special loot drops, which have a purple background and an extra affix. Those drops generally come from dungeons, but I also got one while speedrunning missions in Kingsmouth yesterday for the daily. Then I got three in one run through Darkness Falls story-mode.
You played the original right? If you linked your old TSW account, you should be able to do the “collect all your old outfits/unlock all weapon pages thing” from the delivered Items window in Agartha, even with a new character.
It’s nice that Funcom have given this game a new lease of life, it was always a flawed gem, with some of the most immersive storytelling and fun puzzling in any game ever, combined with a clunky combat system.
Nice to see both features present and correct in this iteration. :) It’s quite amazing that they’ve managed to work on the combat system and it still feels clunky. For me, it has something to do with the pace of the animations combined with sluggish responsiveness somehow. Not that I like the super-fast animations of some of the more Asian-style combat, but something inbetween (e.g. Cryptic’s Dungeons & Dragons, or Warframe - they just “sit” better in terms of pacing and fluidity for me).
It’s fun to revisit the story, and it’s still amusing that regardless of how ancient the graphics are, the conversations still have great voice acting and loads of character, with the overall writing and concepts being really very good for a videogame.
I guess the streamlining of the mechanics of the combat system is ok, but I am disappoint that yet again another attempt at “freeform” ability design has sort of failed (the last big one I remember being a shame it didn’t work was Champions Online). There was something very fun about discovering interesting combinations, but one thinks that surely the devs must have foreseen all, and these things get discovered pretty quickly by players anyway, so then the system becomes somewhat optimized by the players after all, so the devs might as well not have bothered.
What is the problem with that type of game design? Is it that you can have either freeform or “character” but not both (i.e. you have to make things generic and switchable in terms of numbers, or you have to have carefully balanced bunches of numbers with uniquely characterful abilities, in which case it can’t be freeform?)
I can’t help but think something more conditional would work better for freeform (i.e. a system where the mob is “aware” of what the player can do and tailors its own abilities more precisely to the player’s) but then I guess you’d have another problem of unclarity for the player as to how to build - or maybe (with an online game) too much complexity in the calculations for fast enough combat? Dunno, but I’ve always felt more contextual awareness would be a good thing - surely such a system could be translated for the player so it can be made comprehensible in some way to aid character/class building?
So I’m going along grooving on the writing and the cutscenes and so forth. Then I get to this part, which I’d mercifully forgotten about:
Ugh.
-Tom
I’m having a blast running through the story again. I’m level 49 and still in Egypt. Apparently Transylvania has a steep curve requiring purple talismans and weapons, so I’m not sure how long my enthusiasm will last. I’m already seeing people ask for nightmare dungeons with gear limits attached. That was the nail in the coffin for me with TSW, the elitism that required serious cat-ass grinding to even get into a group. I’ll probably flail through to pre-Tokyo and then wait to see if the Aegis system is re-introduced. If it is, I’m definitely out of the game. There is so much good to this game but the grinding is soul-destroying. I wish there was a way for grouping to occur that made sure that everyone was at a similar level and the mobs were auto-scaled to fit.
Oh yea, this was my second new character. my original has everything.
My cabal is running dungeon runs every day, so if you’re interested you should look us up, I’m usually in the q23 channel just in case someone drops by. I guess we’ll be starting harder dungeons shortly as a few more hit 50.
Ha, yeah, everything with Cassie and Beaumont-cough-Loki was cringeworthy. It’s funny that the more a game tries to show how grown up it is the more childish it seems to be…
SWL has put out their development/content update roadmap to the end of 2017.
Someone who’s paid more attention than I can correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems like they’re basically adding a big chunk of content from TSW expansions, and also scheduling raids and events from TSW to happen in SWL as well.
I’m really having a good time, still fiddling about with my build (I did find a dps builder I like, which helps to prevent me from going energy-less with my guns) and enjoying the story immensely.
The very last item on the list (“Dark Agartha”, etc) is the first thing that represents actually new content. Elite dungeons and raids, the events and the Transylvania stuff they describe, not to mention all the Tokyo bits, were already in TSW classic. I actually had assumed that those Transylvania missions were already in the game because they pitched it like all the content in the first three regions (including post-launch “issue” missions) was in Legends. Guess not. Hoping they have a better solution to Tokyo than AEGIS this time around.
I doubt it, though. The timeline they describe is significantly more aggressive than I was expecting and doesn’t seem like it would offer enough time to completely mechanically revamp that content, just tweak it to fit the new paradigm.
They have promised that they do. They’ve said that AEGIS is being reworked in light of player reaction to it in TSW (a lot of us quit right then, including me).
I can’t link anything, because they no longer do much in the way of official communications. Other than occasional news releases and server maintenance, the only place where they now dialogue with players is the Discord channel. There are a couple of devs who like to hang out there and chat.
I assume they’re saving some money by shutting down their forums.
Did our first Cabal summon today, some guy named Joe at the graveyard in Kingsmouth. Was nice.
Finally hit 50 and tried my first elite. We couldn’t get past the second boss, but I think it was mostly due to mechanics, even though my shitty gearlevel didn’t help.
Ran into a interesting problem last night. (same happend to a cabal member, who bought Chests on the AH to sell to vendors for money…)
Had 2 inventory slots free.
Kill a boss and try to get loot.
Fail repeatedly to kill next boss and thus die many times
Did not have enough money to repair Anima
Did not have enough money to upgrade an item set.
Had to sell items on AH to have enough room in inventory to loot boss.
STILL not any money to repair/upgrade
Rince and repeat for next boss, and next one after that.
After exiting and completing dungeon daily I guess I had 1000 credits, which was enough to upgrade 2 items (and thus free two slots).
So; For the first time since Vanilla WOW my progress is hampered by not having any money to “repair”.
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Another thing, was looking into UI mods for TSW. Really, the only way to make them is to have Adobe Flash Creator Studio and/or download Unreal Engine 3 SDK for Scaleform Clik?
Seems like a good way to ensure that not a lot of UI mods would be created. (and there aren’t that many I guess).
Oh well…
There were ones for the important bits of TSW classic. A lot of them probably don’t work on Legends, some of them would be irrelevant. For example, the mod I absolutely relied on was a crafting automater, but they stripped out the entire crafting system far as I can tell (and frankly, that is a change I can approve of). So no more need for that.
