The Secret World

Oh!

http://www.thesecretworld.com/news/subscription_no_longer_required

They've dumped the sub fee and gone for a close-to GW2-style model- pay once, get the whole thing, no restrictions, cash shop optional. I understand the cash shop items actually make you more powerful, which is not great, but I can probably live with it. Looks like major DLC will be paid content, as opposed to GW2 doing it all for free, which is also not perfect but will depend upon my enjoyment of the game.

Now I am tempted- I like that they were looking at something a bit different. I wish TOR had done their free option this simply.

Yeah, I'm thinking I may check this one out now, since I'd been interested in it but not wanting to pay a sub.

(not all GW2 content will be free, they've been upfront from the start that some will be paid)

Oh, the big expansions will be paid for on GW2, I am sure, but it looks to me that Secret World stuff on the scale of Lost Shores will cost (they are quoting five dollars for the next update).

Ahhh. Well, $5 isn't bad for something like that, really. Free is preferable of course, but that's pretty reasonable.

(btw, did you read about the January/February GW2 updates?)

Yeah, $5 isn't bad if the game is fun.

Actually, no I did not...

Lemme go dig up the link and post it in the GW2 thread as I don't think I did...

Ok, so, I dived into this on a whim. Actually, my first impressions are not good, though hear me out.

Problem 1 was mostly my own fault- I had tremendous problems actually downloading and running the game. This was in part because I bought it through Steam (for conveniece) but I wanted to run it out-of-Steam, as I think MMOs don;t run brilliantly through Steam what with them having their own launchers and patchers etc. Unfortunately, just copying the Steam files over to where the independent client wanta them didn't work very well (and downloading it again, at forty gigs, was not palatable). However, the very sluggish nature of getting my account up and registered was not my fault- possibly caused overload as Free-to-Play just opened.

My second problem is that, thus far, the game runs like absolute crap on my system. I can barely do anything without stutter and horrific popup. Now, my computer is showing its age a tad and I intend to upgrade next year, but it is far from prehistoric, and this is happening even on lowest settings. This is apparnetly somehting I am not alone in, so I followed advice like turning of DX11 and initiating a database repair- only for the repair to take another two hours and THEN do another hour's of re-downloading after that, so it was getting to the point where I had spent the whole damn day just trying to get the game actually functioning at all. It was still slow afterwards. This cannot help but be very disfavourably compared to Guild Wars 2. The Secret World is not a very pretty game from what I can see. That's not a huge deal for me, but the fact is that GW2 is much prettier- and runs on my system with no trouble at all. I hope this is some relatively temporary issue with TSW, else it shows terrible issues with optimisation. Maybe it's server-side again.

Thirdly, I was disappointed with the start-up. The character creation choices are very limited and unattractive. The amount of cut-scene and loading time when you are starting play is huge, and I was almost in torpor before the game actually started- this as opposed to GW2's virtual adrenaline overload in creation and your beginning of play.

Fourthly, I was disappointed by the initial style. I was expecting a slow discovery of weird magical stuff and the opening up of this 'secret world'. Instead, with some very clumsy exposition, you are just given magical powers immediately, tooled up for your chosen organisation without a word and sent off to kill zombies on an island. Ok, so fair enough for getting people to the action, but that's a completely wasted opportunity.

Fifthly, many of the game's choices are deadly conservative. I am back to old familiar MMO issues like old-fashioned quest design (kill six zombies... now kill another six over there...) and queueing up behind a quest trigger whilst other people use it before me, all things that GW2 has thankfully done away with. One of the best things GW2 did with its world exploration is that you were always pleased to see other people because they could only ever help you. Here, when I am seeing other people thus far, I know they are going to to slow down my quest completion.

-

So.. you'd be forgiven for thinking I was outright trashing this one. But no- there's actually something to this. I can DEFINITELY see why it was never going to get anywhere on a sub fee model, because it has nothing like the kind of pull it needs to snag people in like that. But there is something about the style and the world they've built (delivered with the subtlety of a brick to the face, but still compelling in design) and the weapon mechanics which I can see adding up to something entertaining on an F2P model (and the game is relatively cheap).

So, assuming it actually runs properly on my computer, I'll get back to you on how it works out.

Oh, and I understand it has open access to partying up with people on other servers, AHEM GUILD WARS 2...

I feel obliged to follow the above up after some more play time, as it gets better.

After a patch- whether correlation or causation, I don't know- the game is running a little better, though I am still on minimum settings and getting a frame rate only just over the line of acceptable. A lot of the slowdown is due to the game's very inefficient loading of the map and graphics, which not only means long load times before you get into the map, but also once you start playing it as it continues to load then. I often see naked payers around as it hasn't loaded their clothes yet, NPCs that are invisible as they aren't loaded yet and, in a couple of surprises, entire large buildings suddenly springing into life in front of me, which at least explained why I couldn't run any further. I've learned now to give a map a couple of minutes after it starts running in order to give it more of a chance to load the local environment, but I still have issues.

However, the stronger parts of the game become more clear when you play it more. The first is the emerging story of each zone, which becomes more apparent the more you interact with the game. Running around Kingsmouth (which I would call an unashamed Cthulhu reference, except it is trumped by having a road called 'Arkham Avenue'😉 fighting zombies every few seconds seems like straight action stuff, but soon you do find yourself being drawn into the mystery of the strange mist that brought the changes to the town, and what happened on the ship whose arrival heralded said mist. Even on many of the more action/shooty missions, elements of this story are revealed.

On top of that are some very enjoyable 'investigation' missions where the game becomes more of a puzzler, giving you some basic clues and then leaving you entirely o your own (no map pointer) to work out what they mean. This can involve you looking closely at manhole covers, looking up online references that the game makers have seeded on the net, intercepting and decoding morse code that will tell you where to look or following any number of various riddles. I've certainly never played an MMO which had me running around the environment trying to find a damn clock or spending a while pondering what the phrase 'There were plenty of volunteers for the burning', which I had found on the back of a painting, meant (though where that was telling me to go was irritatingly obvious once I got it).

There are some clever mechanical touches too. When you die, you become a kind of ghost thing, able to wander the map and reincarnate either at one of several spawn points or at where your body is lying. At first, this seemed cool. Then I started to consider it a simple inconvenience that slowed down respawns. However, once it became clear that some things are different in the ghost world- both in sight and sounds- and these actually formed part of some riddle-solving, then the whole thing was clearly awesome.

So, definitely some strong points. It's still sluggish, ugly, mostly conventional in gameplay and with not very interesting combat, but for story and puzzle interaction alone it's worth the asking price. The thing that really strikes me though- none of the puzzle solving is co-operative (something I have only ever seen in Myst Online) so... I am not quite sure this game needed to be an MMO. Just being a straight game with multiplayer options would have kept nearly everything that's good about it, and once more, charging a sub fee for it seems almost ludicrous.

Anyway, of the puzzly/investigation/story connection side of things appeals, check it out. If you don't care about that, then you can almost certainly find another MMO that does what you like better.

Well, that just decided for me whether or not I'll play it...which is a definite no.

I do plan to get this at some point, but not until I get a better rig.

Oh, related to the original post- the 'no levels' thing is a bit of a fake. They've taken out a redundant mechanic, which is fine, but the effect is pretty much zero. It's still straight xp based progression- experience gives you points (instead of levels) which allow you to wear better gear, and gear makes you more powerful. Everything you associate with a levelling system is in this game, simply minus a level number.

The no classes thing is genuine, but I always think that just makes people more boring. Effectively everyone can eventually do anything they like, because you can buy every single skill. You can only do one thing at a time as you choose which skills are currently in use, but you can switch as needed. This solves issues of re-speccing and needing a certain type of player for high-end content as an existing player can just change skills, but you lose a lot of the soul of things. I've always thought building characters with a distinct purpose is good; you just need to make sure that early mistakes you make in development can be undone.

I wish there as a bigger difference between the factions, actually.

So trying this out.

Maan character creation is lame in this game. The combat so far is alright but feels a little weird to me.

Yup, it's the most limited character creation I've seen in an MMO, though my experience is not broad.

The game fails to build on whatever promise it had- it just becomes more and more of a slog as you go along.

Played the game. Got bored in the first hour. Switched to MWO and SWOTOR.