Secret World Legends

There are lots of complaints on Steam about this game’s combat. What is your impression of the changes that have occurred?

They switched to click-targetting, reduced the number of passives you could equip, took away the ability to use passives across weapons, removed subclasses of passives that offered interesting build synergies, took away auxiliary weapons, and generally made the combat much less interesting and the build space massively less. They did give each weapon a very lightweight unique gimmick - for example, elementalism abilities generate heat, which amplifies your damage until you overheat. and then you can spend it with ice abilities on cooldowns. Chaos generates a secondary resource whenever the last digit of your damage ends in 8, and when you get 8 of that resource one of three effects fires off at random. Assault rifle generates grenades that you can spend with other abilities or which I think just go off in your hands if you don’t. Etc.

I went through the basic leveling to Transylvania in the new version of the game. It was okay to begin with, but became dull fairly quickly. There’s just not enough to the game mechanics to hold my interest.

I was never playing for the mechanics, so I sort of appreciate that I can now trivially win fights that used to actually be challenging in the previous version and so can just get on with enjoying the story, which remains amazing. But that’s really more to do with the way they changed equipment into an unending treadmill of gear XP that I’m getting huge boosts along thanks to my lifetime subscription from yesteryear, and I don’t think any of the combat changes were actually good.

That’s a shame they changed combat, it was a pretty interesting system before, although convoluted. I love tinkering around with ‘build your own class’ type systems.

The best part of the game has always been the quest/story though, which I’m guessing is still intact. The game is worth the price of admission alone based on the writing, there are some really really great stories/quests in that game.

It is mostly still intact. There are apparently a couple of late game dungeons that haven’t made it back in. But they did add a quest hub in South Africa, not sure how extensive because I’m still clearing out Transylvania myself.