Secret World PvP weekend

[Maeve]

I have 2 extra keys for this weekend's beta event. This will be the first time to participate in PvP (3 faction) in the beta weekend events. If anyone has an interest in the keys, let me know.

[Aberrant]

I can't find the link, but I read this morning that everyone who registers an account before Friday will get in for this weekend.

[Maeve]

Ah, looks like that's right : www.funcom.com/news/massive_final_beta_weekend_for_the_secret_world_starts_june_22

Durham, USA – June 19th, 2012 –‘The Secret World’, the highly anticipated modern-day massively multiplayer online game of myths, legends and conspiracies, draws ever closer to its July 3rd release date. In preparation for launch, Funcom is excited to announce that the fourth and final Beta Weekend – titled ‘The Battle Begins’ – will be made open to all of the more than 1.3 million gamers who have signed up to beta test ‘The Secret World’. Guaranteed access to the final Beta Weekend will also be given to everyone registering via the game’s official website by June 22nd (use the beta sign-up form on the right side).

[Scarybooster]

I tried the game again this weekend. I'm thinking about buying it about a week after it releases out of boredom. I liked the story more this time being a Dragon. I tried PvP and it was very boring to me it seemed pointless addition on to the game. They combat is still meh even tho they added a dodge in that wasn't in the first beta (gw2 cloning?). I still dislike the cosmetic cash shop. I'm guessing it's not going to be game breaking stuff by what I saw in preview window, but I wish it had either or models not both. I would preorder and play this day 1 with 0 sub fee. As it is now, I'm thinking about buying it and playing my free month and waiting until it goes F2P. Which I'm guessing will come pretty fast after SWTOR does it and GW2 releases.

I like the game, but I don't love the game. It's worth the box fee and a month playing it. After that I'll have to see what the later content is to hook me in enough to pay $15 a month. Once GW2 comes out this game will collect dust until it drops the sub fee. When that happens I'll happily play both.

[Rer]

I'm still skeptical of any MMO after dropping so much cash on SW:TOR. Hell, I'm not even convinced I'm going to get GW2 yet. Therefore, there's absolutely no way I'm paying money for Secret World, especially given that its made by FunCom.

I love critical thinking, so taking a "MMO Vacation Getaway" with this game might be fun, but not if I'm paying for the rides.

[trapsinger]

Yeah, I'm definitely not going to be paying any more for this game.

I, too, played it for the weekend because it was free. And if it was a free game i could enjoy playing it for a week or so to enjoy the setting, but the rest of the game just isn't there.

The terrain and location graphics were great at setting the tone, but the character and npcs animations were awful. It looks like something 10 or 15 years ago, and the performance was also not good.

They claim to have no leveling system, and yet you get experience for kills which you invest in a skill system where the skills must be chosen in a completely linear order, which to me is a leveling system that they just put a different label on.

They claim to have a completely free form skill system, but they have traditional class roles, and the traditional class roles can only be filled by specific skill trees, which are based on weapon choices which are not clearly labeled, and aren't really logical choices. Now, I admit, this is only a hurdle for new players, once you learn the system it could be fine. But the roles still don't make sense with the weapons they are defined by. For example: If you want to be healer, you have to use Blood Magic, Assault Rifles, or First Weapons. Seriously? "It's okay buddy, you won't die! Let me punch you really hard in your broken rib, you'll feel better, I promise!" I heard a few people argue that you don't have to follow the traditional class roles if you don't want to, but the Blades skill definitely has agro management and damage mitigation, which someone without healing abilities will be tanking all the time...so i think the people arguing against class roles just didn't know what they were talking about.

The questing system sucked. In fairness, any one individual quest was okay, not great, but okay. Except the quests are separated by categories, you get 1 story quest, 1 dungeon quest, 1 main quest, and 3 side quests. And the order is important because you can only track and work on one quest at a time, and you cannot abandon quests. The only way to get a quest out of your log is to get a new quest of the same time to replace the old one, which they call "pausing" they old quest, but to start it up again you have to go back to the original NPC and accept it again. And if you finish the quest it defaults the tracking up to the next quest higher in your priority list, which is defined by quest type, so if you have a dungeon quest which requires 5 people, but you are soloing, you can't tell the game to skip that in your default tracking order, which means it will never go back to telling you what to do in your story unless you force it to. But the other thing to really hate about the quest system is how they laid out the quests. Quests are not marked on the map, and they are not clustered together at quest hubs, you pick most side quests up from objects on the ground. But if your quest log is full of quests of that type, then you'd have to abandon one you are on to pick it up, and remember where it was on the map to get it again later, or remember where this one is on the map to come back to it. They did lay out the quest objects so if you are doing everything in exactly the order they think you should do it in, that wont' happen often, but if you are exploring or doing quests in a different order, it's extremely easy to get out of sync with their plan, miss several quests, not know where to find them, and end up with a log full of quests you can't do because they are too hard for your "skills" which just means you are too low level, even though there are no levels in this game.

Further, it's almost impossible to quest with other people around. Not only do have to "tag" monsters that need killing for credit, but quest objects also disappear for everyone when one person picks them up, causing people to line up for both item and mob respawns, and fight with each other. And on top of that the game has no protection against getting "train"ed, meaning it's incredibly easy for one person run 10 mobs over you and cause you die almost instantly.

Having an open three faction pvp area with objectives could be cool, if it wasn't so inferior to the other games that did it. They allow 200 people to play at a time, but Dark Age of Camelot had a system that would allow over 1000, and that was 13 year ago.

Also, if I may say about the investigation quests, it was kind of cool to have to *know* things to finish quests, but this NEEDS to be an optional system, and it isn't. Very early in the first primary story quest you have to know who vivaldi is, and what he composed. Granted most people probably know this off the top of their head, but putting this type of quest into the primary story is going to alienate a LOT of casual gamers and prevent them from progressing in the game, because with no "leveling" range marked on areas, there is no real way to tell where you need to go next to "skill up" without the story quest to direct you.

Also with no way to respec your skill points, and no indication of which skills fill which roles, if you discover that the weapon you chose in the middle of the hour and a half cut scene introduction, with no real indication of how it would work in the end game, doesn't really fill the role you want to play, then are screwed. The only way to skill up a new one weapon is to grind mobs incessantly for many hours, and I'm pretty sure that being *required* to grind mobs is something that went out of fashion in MMOs 10 years ago, because it just isn't fun.

Speaking of it, the hour and a half cut scent introduction? It was SO BORING. It was worse than swtor for sheer long drawn out rambling, it told you nothing at all about the story of the game, and it just kept going and going. And the character animations aren't as good, like they tried to do make their toons with too few polygons, so it isn't fun to watch either. And the lips of the characters move in the animations *sometimes* and even when they do, it's not in sync with what they are saying.

The basic class mechanics for each weapon are all the same, to the point where they just call it "Blade Resources" or "Blood Magic Resources" Build up to five resources, burn them off with another ability. That combined with choosing your role in the game based on where you put your skill points make this a very poor rip off of other skill systems. Making a character in this feels like playing guild wars, but with only one class.

Anyway, my point is, this game feels dated before it even releases. The quest system feels like Everquest all over again, the pvp tried to clone camelot and did poorly, they ripped the skill system off guild wars without trying to understand what made it fun in that setting...

And I haven't even gotten to the poor impression i got of the developers over this weekend. For example, their patcher has to patch everything four times, and it's very slow. They did their time conversions wrong for the start of the weekend, and changed the count time on their clock multiple times, and had it show the wrong count down getting to 0 in multiple regions an hour before it was supposed to launch, apparently because they don't understand daylight savings. And even then it launched later than it should have, because when they tried to turn it all on that was the first time they realized the client didn't work, and the first thing they did was have to write a new patch before people could even play. And apparently putting a new build onto the servers with minor hotfixes takes four hours of server down time, which to me, after the 8 to 15 minutes of downtime in rift for new builds, and a simple log out and back in for guild wars 2, is just unacceptable in the modern MMO environment.

I have no idea how they plan to make money on this game, especially since they want me to pay to get the game, pay to play the game, and pay to win the game. With a game this crappy, they just can't expect people to pay for the box, the subscription, and the shop. It's pretty clears these people have no idea what they are doing.

[Slurm]

Very early in the first primary story quest you have to know who vivaldi is, and what he composed. Granted most people probably know this off the top of their head

YES.....of course.....Vivaldi.....

He did the....

um

[Grok]

Trap nailed it. I didn't play nearly as much as he seems to have done, but my initial impressions of the cut-scenes, character animations and questing system were identical.

I'm actually shocked that a game this poorly made is being released in 2012 given what we now know about the competitiveness of the MMO market. The only way I can see this making sense is if the initial investment is small and the target audience very focused. Marketing to a niche audience that is under-served in the MMO may generate some revenue if the initial investment is appropriate. The production values of the game seem to suggest to me that they didn't have a lot of money to work with.

[Slurm]

Scary wrote a post about the game as well. Seems to be a consensus about the animations:

www.scaryworlds.com/?p=384

He also talks about poop.

[Scarybooster]

The poop thing is not new

[Vejuz]

Anytime you add "Too niche" as a bad thing to a list, it means you're not the targeted niche.

I dunno. I enjoyed the game. Better than any MMO (except GW2) that I've played in a while. Now...whether I liked it enough to buy it when I don't know hardly anyone else playing it is the question. (The answer being....probably not)

[trapsinger]

hey, i didn't say too niche, i actually like the target genre. I'm a big fan of the dresden files, and other modern fantasies. that's actually the only part of the game i did like.

[Qhoren]

Jun 26, 2012 19:04:12 GMT -5 Vejuz said:

Anytime you add "Too niche" as a bad thing to a list, it means you're not the targeted niche.

I think you are completely right, Vej, and I think it's a spot on observation that dovetails well with the rest of Scary's article.