My review of The Secret World

Well, I thought about it for a while, and considering that I haven’t actually written anything for this blog in like two months or so, I figured I should. Given that The Secret World has been out for over a month now, as they so proudly proclaimed in an email, that sounded like a desperate plea to me to get more people to sign up to their game, I figure it is about time to probably sit down and discuss why this game didn’t work with me like I hoped it would and why I never got it after having played it for a while during its beta. In fact, I came to despise the game so much that I actually uninstalled it twice during the beta life, only reinstalling it again after a friend got in beta and thought I could at least give them a familiar face to hang around with (until we discovered he was in those weekend betas which was completely different and builds behind the beta I was actually in).

Now, let me begin this by saying I wanted to like this game; I really did. You can’t believe how deep down I wanted this game to actually be the fresh faced, change of pace and offer something new that was sorely needed in the MMO space, especially given the stagnating nature of the genre. The idea of a modern setting place with the investigation missions sounded fresh and original, but even sounding fresh and original doesn’t mean it delivers exactly what was promised. So, when it comes to the break down I will try to point out exactly what I liked, but I will probably have a lot of things I absolutely despised about this game, and I am quite sure this will set off a few people who think that TSW is the second coming, just like people who believe GW2 is the second coming as well.

Now, first up let me talk about character creation. Needless to say, a few articles I’ve read have applauded the character creator and I have to keep asking myself one simple question; why? It’s atrocious in this game. Now, I will freely admit I might be spoiled from other games like City of Heroes, Champions Online and APB, but come on. The character editor makes games like SWTOR and WoW look positively deep and complex. At best you can do is choose a couple of faces and various slide positions that actually do nothing in the long run and despite TOR actually has a limited but at least an ability to change height and body mass on a character. This is just appalling.

Now, that’s not to say that the character art is bad; it isn’t. In fact, the character models are fairly detailed and animated (at least with emotes) fairly well, and with little tearing or stretching of the actual character model polygons; but if you were hoping for deep, or meaningful character generator, you might as well look someplace else. Clothing variations are limited, and anything you look for style which actually put you off because things like long coats or jackets still use that ancient taped to the back of your legs type of animation, thus it doesn’t look good at all.

Game world wise, this is a beautiful world; as long as you aren’t playing around in the three central hubs. London, Seoul, and New York are all cramped, tiny, not well built or well-planned out. The other locations in the game, however, are nicely sized and in some instances can feel too big at times, and quite beautiful to look at and very atmospheric. It’s almost a jarring contrast because the actual play areas feel like so much went into them, while the hub areas, the areas meant for socializing and getting together, feel like such an afterthought. Of the three hub locations, only London was the one thought about the most as it is the largest, and New York feels like the smallest. None of them feel like they offer the venue they were supposed to be for and feel completely superfluous to the actual game as the Argatha network provides all that basically.

That brings up the three factions; again totally superfluous. They aren’t required other than the once in a while faction story arc you might get. The three factions can be completely cut from the game and nothing would change. That is how tacked on they feel. I never really got to try out PvP, because every time I would try the actual thing would break, so I can’t say how any of the PvP maps are, but considering my past experience with games that base their PvP around skirmish maps, that would most likely suck anyways, especially given the fact it’s skirmish maps with 3 factions fighting instead of 2. 3 factions really don’t work well in a theme park environment. But down to the wire, other than a few lines of dialog here and there, there is no reason to have three factions in this game. Once you’ve passed your initial intro (which is the exact same for all three factions again) your contact with your faction is negligible at best and just completely pointless.

Speaking of superfluous systems, that brings me around to the entire skill system. Now, outside looking in, this sounds like a great and awesome concept; except, it’s not. There’s little to differentiate one skill set from another and there is even less reason to actually shoot for high level skills other than you have them. This is a game where the low skills are just as good, and in many cases better, than the higher skills you can actually get later on. The whole concept just seems like bad ideas, and instead of feeling like earning something new, you just get the same skill you were already using with a slightly different animation, sometimes, that can have a longer cast time or actually delivers less damage. It really did sound like a neat, and interesting concept, it’s just it was delivered poorly because each skill set does the exact same resource building as the other, offering no real variety other than a look when the wire is actually drawn out.

And that brings me to the other part of that equation the combat animations or skill animations. Take your pick. They are horrid. I am not going to mince words here. The combat animations are stiff, poorly animated and at times makes me just want to go play a game like City of Heroes at times just because I feel a game that is now 7 years old going on 8 has better animations, when I feel that most of the new animations in City of Heroes are atrocious now. The characters are stiff, very wooden and when it comes to actual attack animations barring a couple, look like they went the cheapest route possible for animation budget.

Next on that list is combat. And good God, was there entirely too much of it and it is very boring. Early on in the game, dealing with the zombies, you can probably plow through several of them without issue or problem. But as the game progresses, it has a habit of increasing the monster health factor substantially, but your damage stays relative. This is a very gear oriented game and if you are under geared even by a little bit, solo enemy fights will take a while to do. Combat is very repetitive, very boring, and it breaks up an otherwise immersive experience constantly. No matter how you try you can’t avoid it either, you will be fighting regardless of your intent just because of how the game was set up. The only way to avoid combat is to just avoid questing all together.

Now, missions themselves are… standard MMO tripe. Except they lead you by the nose as well as hold your hand to each of the next parts of the mission chains. What makes missions atrocious in TSW is they are so far apart from one part to the next, and are set up exactly like WoW style mission settings it makes you wonder what the developers were thinking. And the mission journal is the worst offender as it is purposely designed to limit how many missions you can actually have at a single time with you only able to have 3 side missions 1 main plot and 1 investigation type mission at any given moment. If you pick up more than that you have to choose to delete an older mission thus losing that progress. This would have been smart, if the missions in this game were not set up to be spoonfed like they are in other MMOs.

However, I will give props to the investigation missions. Now I said earlier that missions lead you by the nose, and for the most part that is right. They lead you by the nose going so far as to highlight and show you the object right down to the few meter area they are in, that you need to click. However, investigation missions actually make you have to do a bit of research and have no such hand holding going on. This is refreshing, to a point. The problem I have with the investigation missions was they sort of club you over the head with the clues that the in game browser became nearly pointless. I did several investigation missions and only a couple of times did I open the browser and sadly, when I entered keywords, it took me straight to the answers as they were already filled out on the game web site itself. While the theory was nice and sound that means that any investigation loses all-purpose thanks to any search engine more advanced than a pocket calculator being able to pick out any post or wiki with the answers you are seeking. This also has the fact that any replay value is set instantly to zero because the answers are always the exact same.

Story, voice acting and the like, I give this game prop’s for. I enjoyed it a lot better than TOR’s poor attempt and I certainly thought it was a lot better written and sounded better acted. I rather enjoyed the conspiracy over tone and that the NPCs actually moved around. However, no matter how good the story is, it is completely over shadowed by bad game play and game design at almost every turn for me. I gave it my all, and then during the last few beta weeks, FunCom started shoving out patches that would break entire systems just to get the patches out fast. My enjoyment factor kept plummeting and fast, especially after the 3^rd time I remade a character because of something that happened that forced me to rethink instead of having to try and go through the process of redoing missions and gaining skill points just to try a new skillset. I uninstalled this game twice from my hard drive. The first time I did it was out of pure frustration and boredom with the game. I reinstalled it again when a friend got in one of the betas and I thought I could join them, only to find out I couldn’t. I toughed it out and tried to keep testing, but with only a couple of weeks left till launch, I uninstalled it again.

The gear grind in this game was just awful as well, because gear is what defines the character, not the skill set regardless of what you are told. And though they try to say that you can have whatever look you want, it didn’t help that most people kept choosing the same face and hair styles because those were the only good ones. I couldn’t even walk around Kingsmouth because my preferred face, hairstyle, and clothing look was being used by several other players. This is a game with a bunch of good ideas but awful implementation. It sounded like it wanted to be a sandbox world, but instead decided to be a theme park instead, which is ironic since you spend a large portion of your game time in a theme park.

If I were to give this an overall, I would say wait until it goes Free to Play. I’ve heard they are adding more hairstyles and such, but hell, I hear a lot of things about MMOs that just launch that turn out to actually do very little. I really did want to like this game, as I said, but it just buried itself under the weight of a lot of things that just make it not very fun for me to play.

Why I am not Fond of Theme Park MMOGs

It's probably been on the minds of a few people that last few times they see me bring up a rather sharp distinction of me saying I don't like theme park MMOs and would rather have sandbox MMOs back on the market. Now for some, this is probably a very confusing statement because the current market, as it stands, there really isn't a sandbox MMO out there, other than EVE, but that is more of a spreadsheet machine with a visual option stapled on, but that's another story entirely. Since I know many would probably want me talk about something else, I am going to talk about why I don't like theme park MMOs anyways.

In my last blog I talked about how I felt games today were getting way too easy, to a point I feel that subconsciously people feel insulted by the actual challenge and reward at the end. I feel this is why people are becoming disgusted faster and faster with the games they spent anywhere between $50 to $60 dollars on give or take the version and whether you bought it digitally or not and all manner of other trivialities that developers and publishers are slapping on to eke out a little extra cash on people. And yet people say they breeze through these games the moment they buy them and pretty much finish them in a couple of hours, challenges includes. That's very much a serious let down because to me if I get a game and just breeze through it that quickly then the reward at the end just feels hollow. It's an empty victory.

This is how I feel about MMOGs now, games meant to be played as a team game, but developers have been increasingly making them more accessible to the masses as a whole. The result is a game that has no lasting appeal or value because you can breeze through to the end already. This is a terrible design choice when it comes to theme park MMOs which rely heavily on their replayability and such.

Now, artificially, MMOGs (most anyways) already have an inherent lengthener to make the game play last longer. This is inherent in most of them, basically the leveling and progression system. Some MMOGs go so far as to add an extra layer on top of that with actual gear progression as well. However, as MMOGs have been going and the dumbing down of the process continues, parts of these equations have either been made drastically "streamlined" (ie time to reach the next tier is ludicrously simple) and the other part is either given on a platter or made so worthless as to not matter at all. This, again, is devastatingly ridiculous design choices for a theme park based MMOG.

But I am on a tangent and this doesn't really answer the "why" I don't like theme park MMOGs, so I will do my best to try and stay focused.

First and foremost I think my number 1 annoyance with theme park based MMOGs, that I have, they like to toss out a word a lot lately and it gets used so much and a big excuse for why they make such terrible decisions in the design process of the MMOG. This word is story. Now don't confuse it with I think injecting stories into an MMOG is a bad idea. The complete opposite really. However, many MMOGs use story as an excuse to actually hinder the overall game play experience with either bone dead stupid easy game play, ridiculous design decisions, and overall no reason to actually provide a long lasting game other than the intro, a somewhat beefy middle (the grinding part of your typical MMOG) and an ending that lasts for several months while developers either rush to try and offer something new or, better yet, make promises and soothing remarks in an attempt to make their player base feel something is actually going on behind the scenes. And honestly, the really bad ones about it are the ones that make it sound like the monumental world, but when it's delivered it's just an impressive mess and disastrously delivered to be more or less insulting to the bulk of the players intelligence.

Story is treated like a crutch in theme park MMOGs a lot of the time. And the bad part of it is, they either constrain and choke the life out of the story for game mechanic purposes, or use the story as an excuse to not even bother offering something decent and entertaining to the players as a whole. This is just bad design philosophy on the whole. A story should be complimenting the game play experience, it should be riding hand in hand actually, but for whatever reason, no one wants to bother. And it hurts the game. This becomes especially true in games that pretend to start with story then just start adopting nothing but childish jokes and internet memes in place, and it is even more insulting if the game provides endgame content, it totally ignores the story completely.

The next part that annoys me is a big one; Theme Park MMOGs, no matter the false sense of openess or the vast take they have on the world in particular are just rail shooters. Invisible rails, but rail shooters none-the-less. You are pre-programmed in an Theme Park MMOG to follow a set course. There is little choice to deviate from this set path. In fact, this path is pre-programmed for you to reach the ending. The bad part, however, is when a game offers nothing at the end for you to do and becomes a monumental fart in the face. There are walls everywhere that prevent you from going certain places, whether they are overt or covert. Most probably never realize it, but they are. It's called the zone level. Yep, critter level is a covert wall to keep you from entering into an area you shouldn't be in. And some MMOGs have actually been putting physical barriers down now. At first they started with an explanation why, now they just say, because you can't. No reason.

Another thing on that part is the community, as big or great as people think they can be, is hollow. It's even more so these days because the MMOG communities are slowly becoming police states controlled by the company that produces them. And I do mean this the community in a theme park based MMOG is rather hollow inside. They sort of go through the motions, as it were, when it comes to talking about their entertainment value, but you just get that feeling that as much passion as they might type they have or it seems like they have in the vocabulary they are typing, you just can't help and shake that feeling that the sincerity isn't really genuine. The only sense of passion seems to be derived from the actual investment in the product, not necessarily the love for the product. This creates a rather bizarre paradox, as it were, where people are just there because of what they put in, but not actually there because they love or enjoy the game. In fact, you can probably spot people who often make posts that they think the forums of a specific game are more fun or they just log in to update things once in a while or something. That's rather passionless.

This leads into the game just doesn't offer a real world. The game is basically the world that time forgot. Even if it has a simulated day and night, everything is scripted and programmed to happen exactly. That quest you did three years ago will still be there. There's no sense of progression, at all, no sense of evolution. The game begins and hangs there. Just imagine watching your favorite TV series, as it were, and all you see is the first season. And that's all you ever see of it. This world only exists in that state. Oh expansions might add things every now and then, but for the most part, outside of total overhauls (that aren't that much of overhauls) the main world is still in season 1. And it's jarring as hell for the experience when you go from one point in say an expansion talking about events as if three years went by, and then you get back to the main world and everyone's talking about that event as if it was still going on now. There is no sense of growth, no sense of progression, nothing at all. It's just there.

It's a single player game, all in all. It might have a few moments that desire you to team up, but some of the latest ones have made that completely optional even. The challenges, if they can be called that, are barely passable to make you even think past a few idiot one shot kill attacks, and many of the ones presented now don't even offer that so making it easy for teams to just power through the damn things. And this problem is exacerbated because many of the theme park MMOGs now are actually telling players from the get go they are the only one that matters in the game world. This is a stupid thing to tell the players honestly, and it removes any sense that teams and allies are even important.

Theme parks get boring. No matter what's done. They don't change, they don't offer any freedom, and they don't ever provide any tools for a real community. Many also hamstring themselves behind a story excuse, and this is just shoddy. A sandbox MMOG can work with story and instead of keeping everything around constantly, let's it grow, change and even evolve.  Theme parks are afraid to do that, for some silly reason. They are afraid if they don't offer the exact same quests a few years down the line that you did on day one of launch, people will magically disappear.

Many also develop tunnel vision, something they try to inflict on their players to, trying to guide and force players down the road towards their endgame. All in all, it's just a silly notion that should stay in the single player park. MMOGs should be sandbox games that offer freedom to the players as a whole, with stories that actually compliment the game play, not hinder it like it's doing now. MMOGs are about vast communities that can be formed, but what is being formed in today's MMOG communities are just empty, hollow people not even really sure they actually mean what they say, and not even wholly believing what they say themselves.

My Thoughts on the Misuse of the Word Immersion

I am sure the entire lot of you that actually read over here might have noticed the actual new banner at the top. I didn't try to make anything extravagant and I am sure there are going to be a few that say they can do loads better. But I just wanted something simple and basic and reflects me in general. Nope, I didn't do any of the artwork, I haven't drawn anything in ages. I doubt I would be able to make good looking stick figures these days, not to mention I don't have any real tools to import them onto a computer and even attempt to make them live.

That bit out of the way, I've been debating the past few days what my next blog should be about. I generally wait till something juicy comes along, usually out of the fires of my own melodrama, but then when I look at it, I hardly post as much as I use to and I generally just sit back and only glance at front pages these days. I don't even feel inclined to go into the forums directly unless I am feeling really masochistic. This makes me wonder how positively cynical I must have become now if I don't even feel entering a forum is worth my time from the elevated levels of self-entitled stupid that floats around lately.

So that makes me wonder what I could talk about? I talked about what I wanted to see in a game and all that but I guess I could just pick a topic off the wall and start talking about that instead. So the random topic for today I wish t talk about will be immersion.

Now, if you are anyone that actually sifts through the filth that is an internet gaming forum, you will see this word crop up an uncomfortable amount of times throughout any reasonable sense of the actual bitching and moaning that generally goes on from people trying to propose ideas that would only benefit themselves and damn anyone else that has a different idea approach going on.

Now, in general, I have no problems with this word, and I have no issues at all with how it is being presented as something to strive for in a game, but it is so dangerously misused that often times I want to reach through the screen of my computer and just bitch slap the people that even dare use it. Let me explain.

The basic conceptual idea of immersion is something that gets you into the spirit of something. In other words, the idea is that you can sit back and not worry too much about if something is accurate or anything but you feel you have some connection to that world without actually being in it. Of course, some people are taking that word quite literally, and expect to be transported into the game and I don't think people understand how they are trying to use it anymore.

Long ago, I use to be a UO player. I loved classic UO, and I am sure anyone who remembers and played UO will probably say similar things. The game was lovingly called an Isometric view game, or now-a-days what people call 2.5D. For those that don't know, isometric is an angled top down view of the world that isn't from the first person perspective or anything. It's an extreme third person in other words.

Unlike today's modern MMO, the game didn't rely on a plethora of quests to keep people interested or a new big bad dungeon boss to want people to go out and conquer. Instead, it relied on the community to build itself and do things together, themselves. A relative playground. Believe it or not, this was quite immersing for many. Oh there were very tough monsters to overcome and you could own your own house and such and it was a dangerous world. In fact, many ideas WoW stole from UO such as the entire death screen thing and corpse hopping, but that's something for another day.

The game world actually felt alive, and in its early days, was literally alive as there was limited resources and such and required the economy to actually work. Of course, hoarding players came along and ruined that and they had to remove the entire artificial limit, but what grew out of that was probably one of the best and most thriving communities ever created for an MMO.

Me personally, I was primarily a crafter though I also had a mage character and probably one of the better duelists around. I remember when going to work when I wasn't busy I would actually draw up little diagrams to think up ways to optimize my little armor shop. You see, in UO, crafted armor from a master blacksmith was actually useful and could compare to the magical armor that was found out in the world to. This was immersive because my character was useful and I didn't need to practice with sword and sorcery just to go do something I was enjoying to do.

I owned a little shop near Cove in Felucca (the original world before they created care bear land of Trammel) and I was a part of a guild called the Defenders of Cove. Considering I was a blacksmith it shocked many that I actually also had some rudimentary fighting skills as well, so when it came to PKs trying to attack me they generally were in for a fight when I could pull out a weapon and start wailing on them, but this was all back in the day when things were simplistic and such.

But I am getting off on point here. What I was bringing up was about immersion and today people take that point just a little too far. Every time I see someone mention the word I cringe because what they describe isn't immersion at all, but actually being put in the world. They don't want to feel a part of the world they want to be a part of the world, and that's scary honestly. It's one step short of the Matrix scary to me honestly, when I sit here and listen to people say they want to feel immersed.

Personally I don't want people near my gaming if that's what they want or think it should be like. We are borderline almost back on top of the Dungeons and Dragons scare of the late 70s early 80s that happened. Yea I probably dated myself there, but trust me growing up and enjoying Dungeons and Dragons was very scary because media and just about every outlet was making you out to be a criminal. Never mind being a girl playing the game. But because of a couple of nut jobs, the PnP explosion of the late 80s, early 90s almost never happened.

In short, I will use Yahtzee's explanation of immersion. First I will say this, for most of you people, the way you are using to describe immersion, that's not how the word works. Get it through your thick heads, what you are describing isn't so much immersion but pretty much submerging, IE being completely drowned in what is there. Immersion is something where you tend to think about something from the game, or play it for a while and never realize you did, or even a slight extreme where you are walking about and think about some little bar or meter as you conduct your basic journey.

Use to do these little immersion things after playing CastleVania for a while (and not the Nancy boy CastleVania's that have come about either the originals that were tough). Immersion is a word, but it's being made into a scary word because it's being misused and so badly misunderstood as what it's true meaning is. I think people need to take a step back and realize what they want first before flinging words about or Jack Thompson's tirade and stupidity will actually be taken up by people with real clout and a D&D level take on it will occur. Thankfully, the people who have tried starting shit about MMOs and games in general haven't had enough intelligence to fill a teaspoon, but the wrong misstep somewhere can change that quickly.