Secret World - Review

OldTimeGamer

I thought this was a reasonable point to review The Secret World as so far I've played the Beta weekend and the current free weekend, celebrating one month since the launch.

The introductory stages of the Secret World is quite intensive as it explains the rather complex nature of the faction you have chosen. However these backgrounds largely seem to be completely irrelevant to the actual game itself. Furthermore the game allows you to use two weapons but you start off only with one. This is the kind of things that should be explained instead.

The game locations are well-written but far from secret. Very public events, such as a zombie apocalypse, are ongoing and these sense of relentless chaos is persausive. Some of the characters are very impressibe, Deputy Andy seems like a very nice person who carelessly drops hints of a darker path.

However the quests tend to be a bit more variable in their quality. Quests are scattered in all kinds of places and often you can't simply pick them up as you find them because you can only have so many active quests at one time. This where the modern day setting might help as you should really be able to mark places on your phone to remind you to return later.

The current, exact state of a quest is very important as someone objects only become clickable at exactly the correct point and some of the things you are looking for some quests require a lot of patience to find.

The combat is sufficiently enaging but the early game has you constantly surround by zombie hoards. This means that the blade initially is the easiest weapon to start with as you start with a 360 degrees sweep attack.

The combat is very D&D style, in that it is all about attrition. The game claims to not have levels but you often clearly need to become more powerful before you can continue.

If players are inattentive then it will be very easy for them to completely miss the talismans, which you have to equip before you can use them and which you should be constantly upgrading as find more powerful ones.

The problem with playing the Beta and the current Free weekend is you become bored of the content as such a person is forced to start from scratch. 

This is a problem a lot of players seem to face because it is very easy for someone to design a poor character and want to design. There is no redesign as players can grind even a poor character to something competent.

My conclusion is that the game is OK but I don't think it is viable.

mmo-ice

Nice review not bad. The Secret World really is a game of its own standing far out from the crowd.

negativf4kk

u can pick two weapon at start, u can mark places on the map .....

review of rewiew 2 of 10

Psychow

Why isn't this in The Secret World forum?

UsualSuspect

Originally posted by OldTimeGamer

I thought this was a reasonable point to review The Secret World as so far I've played the Beta weekend and the current free weekend, celebrating one month since the launch.

Hmm, yeah, a lot of experience there, I'm sure that's enough to be able to write a review with.

The introductory stages of the Secret World is quite intensive as it explains the rather complex nature of the faction you have chosen. However these backgrounds largely seem to be completely irrelevant to the actual game itself. Furthermore the game allows you to use two weapons but you start off only with one. This is the kind of things that should be explained instead.

As soon as you get into the police station, which is five minutes into Kingsmouth, you can claim a new weapon as a reward. If you didn't do that, there's also a small crafting quest right there that lets you create whichever one you want.

The game locations are well-written but far from secret. Very public events, such as a zombie apocalypse, are ongoing and these sense of relentless chaos is persausive. Some of the characters are very impressibe, Deputy Andy seems like a very nice person who carelessly drops hints of a darker path.

Orochi Corp has closed off the bridge and has helicopters keeping the skies clear. I'd say they're trying to keep things a little secretive there.

However the quests tend to be a bit more variable in their quality. Quests are scattered in all kinds of places and often you can't simply pick them up as you find them because you can only have so many active quests at one time. This where the modern day setting might help as you should really be able to mark places on your phone to remind you to return later.

Open up your map and right click to add a map marker. How hard is that?

The current, exact state of a quest is very important as someone objects only become clickable at exactly the correct point and some of the things you are looking for some quests require a lot of patience to find.

What do you want? A big glowing sign pointing to where you have to go? If you want to be able to find something then look for it, if you can just go to a spotlit point and pick it up then where's the fun in that? Use your brain for a change.

The combat is sufficiently enaging but the early game has you constantly surround by zombie hoards. This means that the blade initially is the easiest weapon to start with as you start with a 360 degrees sweep attack.

Any weapon is fine. It's quicker with area effect attacks, but you can choose whatever you like. There's a whole host of skills to select and the variety and options grow as you gain ability points.

The combat is very D&D style, in that it is all about attrition. The game claims to not have levels but you often clearly need to become more powerful before you can continue.

Not sure how you got D&D combat style out of this game. And all RPG's have you become more powerful to continue, otherwise people would ignore everything and go kill the boss at the end. Game over.

If players are inattentive then it will be very easy for them to completely miss the talismans, which you have to equip before you can use them and which you should be constantly upgrading as find more powerful ones.

Yep, if players are stupid then they'll miss the point. Can't argue with you on that one.

The problem with playing the Beta and the current Free weekend is you become bored of the content as such a person is forced to start from scratch. 

And the fact you don't see a lot of content or how the game plays with multiple skill wheels opened up, or the more dangerous dungeons, or the different locations, or.. and so on.. as I said at the start, might have wanted to see a little more of the game before deciding you had seen enough to create a review about it.

This is a problem a lot of players seem to face because it is very easy for someone to design a poor character and want to design. There is no redesign as players can grind even a poor character to something competent.

I saw a lack of healers while levelling, so I spent 2 hours going over a few old quests and repeating a dungeon. After those 2 hours I was a very competent healer. Is that too much to ask if people want to fix a bad design? Of course, they could start over but what's the point? You'll be doing exactly what you could already do, but you'd lose the abilities you've already bought. Seems like a no-brainer to me.

My conclusion is that the game is OK but I don't think it is viable.

And you think it's not viable.. why? With your limited play time and the fact even your review is wrong about certain points, I can understand you not thinking it's viable. You might want to learn a bit more about it before writing it off.

 

Ambros123

Why can't MMORPG.com not have a consolidated review section like Amazon does with their star rating?  I can give a rat's ass what some nobody rates a game nor does anyone care.  Having all these review pop ups is annoying and only encourages flaming and pissing contests.

OldTimeGamer

To answer some of the rather random questions and indignant challenges.

I played The Secret World as much as I was able to play when I was invited to play it for free. This qualifies as much as the next invited person, especially since the purpose of such invites is surely to get peoples' responses. If it was a better game then I would have subscribed. Of course it will be more to the taste of subscribers, who are prone to get defensive.

I posted the review here because I have no further interest in The Secret World.

For the Beta I used the first quest to get my primary weapon; in the free weekend I used the first quest to get a secondary weapon. This second time around was rather disappointing because I did not get the dropped blades that I recieved the last time as the weapons were more random and less applicable.

For people who have never played played classic pen and paper role-playing games D&D combat means combat by slow attrition due to huge pools of hit points. Other styles of role-playing game can have more mortal systems (such as Traveller, RuneQuest 1 to 2 and GURPS)  where a single wound can kill or maim.

People constantly asked for redesigns throughout the weekend, just as they asked for the number of the keypad and how to solve the Missing Person Quest. I was able to solve these latter two quests by patience and careful observation. The anger that some posters are expressing here is possibly from transference to all the people that pestered them.

The free weekend is probably a sign that the game is not getting enough subscribers by either attracting subcribers from the launch or converting enough beta players.

I, for one, will decline any future invites to play The Secret World.

 

BigRock411

Originally posted by OldTimeGamer

To answer some of the rather random questions and indignant challenges.

I played The Secret World as much as I was able to play when I was invited to play it for free. This qualifies as much as the next invited person, especially since the purpose of such invites is surely to get peoples' responses. If it was a better game then I would have subscribed. Of course it will be more to the taste of subscribers, who are prone to get defensive.

I posted the review here because I have no further interest in The Secret World.

For the Beta I used the first quest to get my primary weapon; in the free weekend I used the first quest to get a secondary weapon. This second time around was rather disappointing because I did not get the dropped blades that I recieved the last time as the weapons were more random and less applicable.

For people who have never played played classic pen and paper role-playing games D&D combat means combat by slow attrition due to huge pools of hit points. Other styles of role-playing game can have more mortal systems (such as Traveller, RuneQuest 1 to 2 and GURPS)  where a single wound can kill or maim.

People constantly asked for redesigns throughout the weekend, just as they asked for the number of the keypad and how to solve the Missing Person Quest. I was able to solve these latter two quests by patience and careful observation. The anger that some posters are expressing here is possibly from transference to all the people that pestered them.

The free weekend is probably a sign that the game is not getting enough subscribers by either attracting subcribers from the launch or converting enough beta players.

I, for one, will decline any future invites to play The Secret World.

 

so how many hours would you say you played before comming to these conclusions?

Theocritus

      The picture you are painting is far more in depth than the actual game....TSW has always had the appearance that it was going to be a great game, but Funcom just didn't deliver.....Half the time it feels like you're watching a bad movie instead of playing a MMO.

OldTimeGamer

If you have access to basic arithmatic you can work out how many long I have had access to the game.

After all I declared my access at the start of my review, which included being reinvited back to play.

It seems that FunCom valued my time spent as a player, despite your misplaced anger.

TheAncient

Originally posted by OldTimeGamer

For people who have never played played classic pen and paper role-playing games D&D combat means combat by slow attrition due to huge pools of hit points. Other styles of role-playing game can have more mortal systems (such as Traveller, RuneQuest 1 to 2 and GURPS)  where a single wound can kill or maim.

This is for me is a reason why games like TSW are missing the point in that they have the MMO part, but not the RPG bit. You mentioned Traveller and straight away I was back to 1982 in the school dormitory with character sheets and rule books. Why? (I know you know why OldTimeGamer, but for those who don't) it's because you have invested a lot of time and care and attention to detail on your character, every step along the way is a pause for thought moment. You care for your carefully crafted character. Recent MMORPGs are almost fully disconnected from their heritage. They should be called Online Multiplayer Games or OMG for short since that was my own reaction on comparing TSW to the proponent perspective.

With TSW you cannot even define a role, and hypocritically you are still locked into the trinity of tank, dps & healer despite the allegedly open style of play. Games like Traveler had much more scope. Hah, anyone playing Traveller or its' equivalent now would gain Theorycrafter status just for being able to play these games.

The lore, setting and complexity of TSW is often praised as being innovative but I'd like to point readers to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveller_(role-playing_game) just to get an idea of what the RPG part of todays MMORPG (particularly TSW) games should be like, especially with such huge investment capital being used.

 

I'd like to buy you a tipple OldTimeGamer

OldTimeGamer

The Secret World does try to grasp the concept of role-playing but instead substitutes static character performances for offering any real choices. Your character is always mute and you have to follow the storyline if you opt for a quest.

You can't really express your character by just combat, clothing and quest choices.

There was one mission where you actually delivered a package for someone who seemed to be working for the bad guys but this was treated just like all the other missions.

From my experience of playing The Secret World, even though I had to replay the intial content at least twice, a lot of that extra background (outside of the game areas) was wasted. This was a real shame.

Even some of the things that the Secret World did well, such as constantly restocking slain creatures, often spoilt the plotlines as some of the problems you are called to solve were demonstrably unsolveable.  For example, one task to theoretically strengthen the graveyard seemed to do nothing but summon the end of quest bosses to fight.

During my play time I learnt to rescue people who were at some of the clinch points where a starting or unimproved character would struggle such as the fire station, the beach and the end of the pier near the Bed and Breakfast. This was enjoyable in a cooperative sense but nowhere near proper role-playing.

A proper role-playing MMO would be challenging. You can't have all the flexibility of Nethack*, where your actions affect the game to quite a deep level, in an MMO because of the mass audience - it simply can't be all about you.

The best you can hope for is that some of the writers involved in an MMO are better writers than most. The Secret World seems to be a half-decent attempt to cross Cthulhu Mythos with The Matrix but it still falls short for me. 

Classic role-playing is getting together with your friends and playing through a group story at your own pace. Human moderated they can be flexible, social and explore themes that have evolved from play. Having played role-playing games since 1977 the content, mechanics and direction of a game matters to me.

A game where you are just a pile of stats, constantly fighting amid a fixed plot is unlikely to be all appealing.

* Nethack is still available these days for people to download and play but the principle version remains an ASCII game, albeit an ASCII game with an incredible amount of depth.