Totally and absolutely GOTY

gurugeorge

You know, I had some fun with SWTOR, it wasn't quite as dire as many made out, but the contrast with this game is instructive.  SWTOR felt "phoned in"; by contrast, TSW is obviously the product of passion, with a ridiculous amount of attention to detail, which makes the game world come alive in a way I haven't seen in any MMORPG till now. 

This is easily the most immersive MMORPG I've ever played.  In fact, it's so immersive I'm getting that "buzz" of playing an MMO for the first time since my first MMO - a feeling I never thought I'd recapture (and not for want of trying).

Depending on your build, combat can be samey or varied, quick or slow, epic or dull.  It's totally up to you and how deeply you think about your build, how much you try things out, change things about, experiment. 

PvE wise you are almost always in the kind of situation where you end up standing over the body of a dead boss with a sliver of health.

PvP - I'm not a "pro" PvP-er, but I do enjoy it.  So far I've done Fusang, which was a fun experience, especially when the 2 main zergs managed to come together to fight over one of the objectives (and it wasn't even an important one, it just happened to escalate).  You will kill and be killed a lot, and that seems to be ok.

Crafting is a bit slow to begin with, until you've been playing the game for a bit.  But by the time you're near the end of the Savage Coast and getting into the Blue Mountain, if you've been doing it right you've been hoarding your base mats and runes and upgrading them as you go, crafting really comes into its own, and you find yourself able to craft useful things quite regularly.  It's an asorbing little side-game for anybody who has the slightest hint of OCD.  The customizable inventory helps a lot here - it enables you to organize mats and kits and everything just the way you want, so it's all clear to you what's going on.  Lack of a market has has been a bit of a pain, but it's coming in the next content update at the end of July.

But the jewel in the crown of this game is the way they handle missions.  When I read about the mission limitation, I was worried.  But the way it's done, it functions to keep you immersed at all times.  You never think of  a mission as a chore you've got to do, it's always integrated with the world you're moving through, part of the virtual world.  And generally, when you pick up missions, they lead you to others, and to discover new parts of the map.  There are hubs, but you never have that compulsion to hoover up all the missions at a hub.  It's more like "ah good, here are some missions I can get later", but you usually concentrate on the one you're doing because it's so absorbing.

And of course the investigation missions - more immersion, by the bucketload.  I won't deny that I've looked up hints on a few occasions.  If I get stuck for more than about half an hour on something I get an itch to move on (life is short), but most of the time it really pays to try and work it out for yourself.

Amazingly, the missions seem to get better and better, instead of worse and worse, as is the norm for MMORPGs.

Some missions are bugged, but not for everybody all the time, and the developers are working on it constantly - anecdotally, most of the notoriously bugged missions in the first zone seem to be fine now, and the second and third zones seem to be getting less and less buggy.  This is good, because with missions being often tricky, if you can't tell whether the reason you can't progress is you or the game, that's a very bad situation for the game.

I've done two of the dungeons so far, and this is probably the most "standard" area of the game - you have things to avoid, "tricks" to be aware of, etc.  If the team doesn't know what it's doing, a wipe can be just around the corner - which seems to make people wary of doing them with newbies, which is a bit unfortunate.

One of the not-incidental side-benefits of the challenge level of the open world missions is that very often people just group up naturally if they see each other questing in a zone with a known mission.  "Hi, you doing x, want to team up?" usually gets you a "sure".  Nice to see some PUG-ing in an MMO again.

Again, the whole feel of this game is very old skool in the way the developers treat difficulty and challenge.  There's very little hand-holding, and what hand-holding there is is unobtrusive and fits in with the flow of the game world.  The combat is tough enough to make you feel good when you beat it, but not so tough that you can't beat it with a little care and attention to your build.

It's all so exquisitely fine-tuned, rich and detailed. 

If you love games that give you a sense of "being there", do yourself a favour and don't delay - get this game NOW.

 

FredomSekerZ

If you mean GOTY for yourself, cool, happy you're having fun OP. For me, don't know. Haven't played all video games of the year.

if you mean GOTY award. LOL. A popularity contest that isn't decided by quality. It doesn't matter. For get the GOTY thing. I don't even get why players care about it.

BigCountry

+1

 

Good write up.