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.

Rinse and Repeat: The De-Evolution of MMOs

Sometimes, you keep wondering to yourself why you always feel meh about things and when you keep searching long enough the answer actually presents itself to you in an unusual way you didn't expect. For a long time I have been pretty meh about the state of the MMO market as it stands. Now while people will say WoW is as good as it's going to get, and people that say that are going straight to Hell for lying, I on the other hand have been around to know that MMOs have been better and that WoW, regardless of mass media appeal, is actually a large step backwards from where things originally started from.

Now while I expect people to come around and try to explain to me why World of Warcraft isn't much more than piss wiffle, I am just going to put forth why I don't care. I've been playing MMOs far longer than most of the 'internet celebrities' with opinions actually have. I have actually been around this particular bush many, many times. And while the average WoWonaut will probably tell me how much skill it takes to down a raid boss that performs a repeated pattern, I will just remind them to keep listening to the bells and whistles of DeadlyBossMod to tell them how to play like a well trained terrier.

Needless to say, I am not going to sit here and try to claim WoW is a bad game, it's just not anywhere as great as people think it is. In fact, the whole genre has been stagnating thanks to that behemoth because everyone is trying to be just like them. But I digress, this is about the revelation I came to a while back ago and how I came about it.

The reason the current and has been for a while generation of MMOs has been one massive train of disappointment for me after another is plain and simple actually. For all the boasting of choice these games falsely spout, there is no choice in them. No matter if I am making a mage in Warcraft or a blaster in City of Heroes, the end result is the same; I am building someone to kill a specific group of dudes. There is no difference between either, and the solution is always the same; build up power to be able to kill more dudes.

Of course people will always try to point out the extreme cases, like the hopeless person who made it to level 85 without doing a single quest and just leveled up on gathering experience. I just shake my head though because those are called fringe cases, and are exceptionally extreme. People who point that out as alternative ways to level in these types of games are just desperate and wrong no matter how they try to slice it. Just because someone did it doesn't make it viable. So quit trying to pass off that extreme nut jobs doing something like that is a viable leveling tactic, in other words. If a person can't play the game like that normally and have equal returns to someone just pounding away on critters, then it's not a viable leveling tactic and trying to pass it off as such just shows how much of a moron you really are.

So, back on point, again. Recently I got my hands on the third installment of Deus Ex. I won't say the game play was wildly phenomenal or even superior to anything else out there, but I will say the game reminded me of what I was actually missing when it concerned my MMO gaming; actual game play choice. What do I mean? Well minus the obvious boss fights in the game, throughout most of Deus Ex I had multiple choices to actually handling almost every situation. I could be the gun ho shoot 'em up type, I could be the sneaky avoid them type avoiding violence where I can, I could go into ducts and avoid stuff, I could be more direct but still sneaky, I could even hack computers and turn the defenses against the enemy. And as small as those choices were, by contrast to where I am going, this was still way more choice than the current generation of MMOs has offered in a very long time.

Let me try and qualify that. Now, I've basically admitted that I've played UO since December of 1997, which makes me a fairly old MMO gamer. Now while certain groups of people hate on MMOs for being grindy or whatever common denouncement they are given, MMOs back then were started to be their own little, breathing worlds where the player could freely do what they wanted. Though by technical standards, UO was pretty inferior, you could still be a warrior, mage or rogue in the traditional sense, but I could also be a blacksmith, a tailor, a fisher, a house builder, a treasure hunter and many other more options that did not involve me once picking up a sword or casting a hostile spell at monsters. There was true choice in the system. I could decide to spend all my game life, if I wanted to, mining a mountain and forging the material into armor and weapons for others to buy. That was the game I fell in love with and got me into MMOs, a system on true choice.

But, as I stated before, UO was inferior, but in many ways, is still the superior game when compared to the current market of games (if you compare classic UO before itemization to what is offered on the market now). What limited the game was it was a sandbox with no real framework. There was no story, though many of us actually made up quite a bit of it. The adventure was to be had by the whim of the players, and the whim of the players could dictate many things in the world. There were events held by GMs that created many unique features on different shards and the results were fascinating as there was actual history and weight to each individual shard as it grew and became its own entity. UO was truly alive, even if technologically inferior.

However, the market has since changed and de-evolved, as I will put it, into games that hand hold and pretty much tell people what to do and disguise the lack of choice behind mountains of speech bubbles and false choice systems. The end result is always the same, no matter the path taken and it's just one boring mess. Most people know they are bored but they've tricked themselves into believing it's fun and exciting. And it is truly a sad thing to me to watch these games try and pretend they have these great communities when nothing in the world is like how UO was. Nostalgia might be powerful but when entire shards would come together for events and help to do things, that speaks many volumes of words.

Honestly, I want an MMO that gives me real choices again. Not some faux talent system that still only leaves me with one way to handle every situation; mass genocide. I want to be able to go into a game world and actually play different ways, not have to slaughter most if not all the critters in a single location just to achieve something. Multiple avenues and objectives work out way better. Hell, even awarding players for not killing everything or being stealthy would be way better.

I don't expect a return to crafting style game play, that would actually require that developers actually care that much about the game they are developing that they would want to see the world to become a living breathing entity, but I would actually want a real choice system in playing and creating characters. I want the option to be able to stealth through the wave  of baddies with an objective that rewards me for thinking outside of the box instead of only giving me the pay off if I spent several minutes chipping away at a bosses large health pool. Methods that reward me for either avoiding the fight, using the enemies against one another or just plain being smart would go a long way. The current MMO gaming formula rewards the dumbest ideas for the dumbest players in the dumbest ways. It's grossly pathetic to be blunt.

I don't know what to expect out of the new games on the horizon. They are touting voice over's and stories as the big things, which seems all and well, but what about the real game, the real choices? Can I actually sneak into the big base and get the data file or do I need to kick down the doors, and fulfill the 100 dude smack down of the standard MMO?

In closing, I will reiterate my basic stance on the current two MMOs that are coming out in the near future; TOR and TSW. TOR will just be more of the same crap. TSW on the other hand, looks like it might offer something, but I am afraid it won't do it quite as I expected and it will also fall into that trap of doing more of the same. In short, whether people believe it or not, for the past decade every big name game with the exception of one or two has been the same game constantly remade with a new skin by a new company, changing very little of the formula and forgetting what made the granddaddy, UO, so popular. How I wish UO2 was being put back on the burner to be cooked and made with some updating and definitely a graphical over haul.

Guess that leads back to the UO2 emblem on the top. Now, back then the idea was to include story in a 3d version of UO with an actual change to the world. But the story would not come at the cost of everything that made the original UO great. In fact it would build upon it. But, as all things went, something happened and EA closed it down. I don't ever expect EA to try again, but I think it would go that a UO2 using modern graphics, built on what UO started, adding story and and streamlining the game play would most definitely attract a crowd.

My current games of interest and comparing and contrasting based on what I know

It's been a week since I last posted on this blog. I got my mind caught up in other things honestly, so I ended up neglecting this. I do need to keep a steady pace on these instead of the typical make a blog and forget it for several month stretches that I normally do with blogs, so in a vain attempt to keep my topics relevant, this topic will be a compare and contrast to two games that I've thought about getting and which one actually has more of my interest and why. Which two games you might ask? The Old Republic and The Secret World or TOR and TSW as they are often abbreviated as.

TOR is obviously the more mainstream game that has the greater attention of the masses. And why shouldn't it? BioWare and EA have been banging their chest about this game for several years now, making a lot of bold claims about it since the project started and honestly, I think they've fallen short of delivering on. On the other hand, TSW is Funcoms little gem that you hardly hear anything about yet they are talking about more innovative features and actually demonstrating them in a genre that has actually been stagnant now for almost a decade. It's unprecedented and has my greater attention, so let me analyze why.

Now, before I proceed, I am not fangirling or hating on one product over another. I am analyzing this from the prospect of which will offer the greater innovation and entertainment value. I am not a Star Wars fan, in fact my personal view is it's a quaint little movie with a brow beaten tone of good must always triumph over evil through Deus Ex Machina that has garnered phenomenal success. I do feel the creator and such has garnered more praise than he actually deserves, especially considering he completely 180'd on his views and beliefs not long ago, but then that's not the heart of the issue.

Originally, when I saw The Old Republic being talked about, the first thing that popped in my head is "It's going to be World of Warcraft with a Star Wars skin" and to this day I am sad I was proven right, especially with the people who adamantly refuse to believe it even though BioWare themselves have basically admitted it was. But that wasn't something that was going to detract me. I have played BioWare games, and though I find them incredibly dull and boring, the story, sometimes, actually intrigue me when I am not being bludgeoned by a 50 page novella from the first contact NPC.

But the thing is BioWare pretty much promised the universe, but so far what I've seen delivered is pretty much an almost bite for bite copy of World of Warcraft with talky bits and a Star Wars skin. Grant it, I will probably try the game out and play it, and it looks beautiful (realist retards not withstanding). I can give BioWare that, but everything I've seen and everything as it stands looks like I will be playing the exact same game (names as well) as what Blizzard has already done, and the real kick to the stomach I think that TOR fans are still smarting about is that one of the BioWare devs pretty much said that you have to basically be WoW to succeed.

Now, the basics out of the way the other problems I have with TOR is that basically it also sounds like they are going the retard route and making it super solo able. Now I know for some of the casual market, that's like a godsend and they feel that they will somehow sully themselves by being forced to intermingle with people. For quick cash, of course, this is a brilliant design choice. But for long term this is damnably embarrassing and damaging to the longevity of your product.

Another thing that already irks me that I discussed in a previous blog post is that the customization choices, no matter how many hair styles and faces I can choose, will be limited based on actual equipment that is worn. This is 2011 now, it should be standard practice for MMOs these days to offer wider range of customization. I mean seriously, an MMO about to celebrate its 14th anniversary can claim greater customization and choice than your MMO, there is a major goddamn problem.

But I think the major crux of my problem is that it seems that they are promising 50 levels of content, of course, but so many planets which to me strikes of we will end up being rushed through them all which means we will probably end up blowing through content like Kleenex. Naturally, this is the way theme parks work, a confusing introduction with a big BS middle that is only there to get you to the even more confusing ending. They promise a lot of stories, but honestly, WoW did to, and the constant requirement of promised voice talent either means a lot of content will have corners cut during development for patches, or the content patches are going to be so far and few in between as it would be better to close your account down until several updates have gone by. Theme parks require constant maintenance because their systems rely on new things to be introduced regularly to keep players interested, and I honestly do not think BioWare is up to task on that.

Now, on the flip side of things, I will say that The Secret World has gained a lot of my interest. I still haven't jumped on the band wagon, yet, but some of the things I've seen from the GDC videos and read and actual demonstrated game play actually intrigues me of the actual prospects of the game. Now admittedly, FunCom hasn't got that great of a reputation due to Age of Conan, and their launches tend to be rockier than a mountain trail. So there is always that specter looming over the launch of TSW. However, that is something I will give a pass to their past as I look more at what the potential could hold, and as long as developers and such learn their mistakes and do not regress like other game companies have in the past, then I can see a lot of potential.

Now, comparatively, TSW is not a big name game, nor does it have a huge pedigree IP behind it and finally it doesn't have a big name backer behind it either to make it sound huge. In fact, one could say that TSW is relatively a huge unknown in the market, but it's trying to do something different, at least from what's been presented. Now, I will not even pretend this game isn't going to be Theme Park, but because everything points that it will be heavily Theme Park, but I am liking some of the ideas and premises that are being discussed in videos, interviews and on their very website on what is going on with TSW.

First and foremost, the big plus; My characters appearance will not be dictated by the gear I will wear. This is a huge, huge bonus to me, especially if the customization and clothing choices will be exceptionally varied and allow me to create an in-game persona that will be unique from everyone else's character. This alone could offer up some very deep and varied crafting systems, but it's a wait and see as not a lot has actually been shown in that department. Of course, I must confess, the current animations I have seen look stiff and that does worry me a bit on the huge promise. Hopefully they will spend time to make them more fluid. The art looks really good, it's just the animations that worry me at this time.

Another thing that has me interested is the fact they are introducing game play elements from more single player games into the meta game as a whole, for instance environmental effects that cause events or additional effects to happen. For instance, using a car alarm to summon zombies or a gas can to ignite them like how it was done in Left 4 Dead. Now, I've played a lot of MMOs, but I've never seen that mechanic before in an MMO. It's possible I didn't play one that has it, but as far as I am aware, none do. That alone opens up the floor to a great host of possibilities for the greater game as a whole, and I hope that FunCom expands greatly on that aspect of the game to be used in all manners of encounters and strategies.

Another thing that I liked and was intrigued about is they seem to bluntly be trying to not bludgeon players with lots of wordy things and such and a few lines of dialog and letting the players themselves get interested in the story to seek it out and discover it for themselves. They want to tell the story through the game play, in short, you won't have a novels worth of text to scroll through or several points of useless dialog. Even though they are making the NPC conversations talkies, they say it won't hurt their feelings to skip because the actual story will be told in the game world itself as you play, through various clues you find and environmental things. This has huge potential to add in some tangential learning into a game about the events and such in the game, which also boasts another intuitive feature I am hoping pans out like they say.

They are calling this feature Investigative Missions. Now, in traditional MMO quest logic, as everyone is aware, you get a quest and you have an objective or bullet points to complete. Reading of the text is rarely required. In fact you are often led along to the next objective quite openly so you don't really even have to strain yourself to figure out where to go. TSW is boasting that Investigation Missions will actually require players to do some research in order to solve them, and the puzzles won't be obvious. That means actually using your internet browser and google to look up things to get an idea of what might be going on. Now if this bit pans out well, then this will be an awesome game play type. This will actually make players want to be a part of the game world as a whole and not just travelling from objective to objective in the end.

Another mission type that the name escapes me now is what they described as a Deus Ex style stealth mission game play system. In short you have to stealth through a mission. But unlike a modern MMO where you get a button that magically fades you out, how I understand it you actually have to be mindful of enemy sight as well as environment around you. Things that make noise could alert critters towards you and so forth. This sounds very innovative, especially for the MMO market that has relied on everyone just basically disappearing in a brightly lit glade since the days of UO.

Anyways, those are my basics on what I am seeing for the two MMOs that have my interest, one not so much, the other gaining more as more is revealed. I will undoubtedly try out both. I am hoping that more is different about TSW than has been shown, and that I will be surprised. I hope for a deep crafting system in a game, as well as a potential housing system, but those are wishes and I won't pretend they will be offered. They've talked about sand box elements and I do hope for more information on a lot of game play features. Of course, morbid curiosity makes me wonder if TSW will go AoC's route with allowing topless females (dirty minded girl). I think about the only thing that could catch my interest more in TSW is if they told me I could make a werewolf character. It's definitely a game to keep an eye on if you are interested in MMOs, and hope for the best. I am sure many will take that to mean I am fangirling all over TSW, which I am not, it's just it is promising things that actually sound different and interesting, and I am hoping it delivers to dig the MMO genre out of this rather deep hole of stagnation.

As far as TOR is concerned, I am not really looking as much towards it as I use to. I knew it would be a WoW clone though I secretly hoped they would do something different. But when my suspicions were confirmed my interest waned fast. I wanted to really like TOR and I really wanted something to knock WoW off its pedestal, but honestly, I don't think TOR will hold my interest more than a few months after its initial launch. And that's really sad to me. I know people will undoubtedly buy it and "like" it because it's Star Wars. That's a given, just like people bought and liked Star Trek Online, because it was Star Trek. But I think BioWare has an enormous hole they need to climb out of.

Anyways, that does it for this blog. Leave commentary here about it and such, or ask questions and I might answer them. Until next time. :)