Go to any forums for MMOs and you will eventually find people bemoaning the fact that every MMO out there is the same. Maybe they use words like “WoW clone” or “copycat” but the idea is always the same, there just isn’t enough variety in MMOs. And yes, the industry is filled with one fantasy game after another. But there are other games that get over looked. Whenever I see someone complaining all MMOs are the same I ask them, “What about The Secret World?”
It's that I read about the game on this site, otherwise I would have never heard of it.
It's a game that is still staying under the radar I think. and usually a game that is not being advertized enough means the developers are new/on low budget with the known consequences -a poor product.
There are exceptions ofc; I have see many overhyped MMOs fail in the past and some unknown MMOs rise to fame.
"going into arguments with idiots is a lost cause, it requires you to stoop down to their level and you can't win"
I bought a lifetime sub for this game. I really was intrigued with conspiracy theme of the game.This game was more a horror based theme with some conspiracy thrown into the mix. It felt more like a Hellgate London wanna be.
Sadly it just fell short of my expectations. and the game seemed unpolished. The animation looked stiff, and the human models looked lackluster. The UI took me a while to get a hang of.
The combat is just not up par with other mmos that I subscribe to like FFXIV reborn.
Maybe they should go back to the drawing board on this one like SquareEnix did.
Use some imagination, man -- you've got 7 active slots (8 with the aux weapon), not to mention the 7/8 passives. Do something with them. You get complete freedom, over 500 abilities to choose from, and then you use that freedom to bore yourself by using only 3 abilities? You are your own worst enemy.
This says more about lazy gamers than it does about TSW.
There is only one single reason I stopped to play. And that is I really dislike (maybe hate would be to strong word) BUTTON MASHING desings of games. And 7 buttons were as some point simply to much for me to handle. I lost all wish to play. I return from time to time just to check if more buttons are added. As they are not, I quit immediately afterward. I'm afraid I will soon have enough of this and TSW will join cemetery of games I once played but never to return.
I see people complaining about quest hubs. There aren't any real quest hubs in TSW and were never supposed to be any. You’re supposed to pick up quests on the landscape as you explore and stumble across things. It's not a linear game, as the skill wheel demonstrates. I think they just didn't do a very good job getting this across to players.
People have always complained about Egypt but I don't get why. Personally, I loved Egypt because I was engrossed in the story, the music and the landscape. People also complain a lot about the lack of crafting, but it was never going to be crafting like other mmos. It was just to make a few things to buff your gear and discover recipes along the way.
No tutorials and poor marketing plus a really bad call on opening up beta with terribad character creation really seemed like they shot themselves in the foot. Hard to recover from that with so many layoffs.
For me the thing that lets the game down is the combat.
1. It is clunky, repetitive & the flow is stilted, kinda like stop-motion done badly
2. The game needed a bigger range of movements & the setting called for vehicle use
3. Mob density is ridiculous in some areas, kiting is often the only strategy you can uses but kiting in the game is like trying to pull out your own teeth with a needle while wearing arctic mittens.
4. Weapon differentiation, the exact same builder routine for every single weapon is a total buzzkill.
5. Difficulty ramps up insanely due mostly to the lack of a flowing combat system & the density of mobs, when a single mob requires substantial skill to kill only for a passing mob to wander into aggro radius & escape only means running back through previously cleared areas now again densely packed the futility sets in rapidly. If you don't have a group set up to plough through packs of enemies you best go play another game. Open world needs more viable single-player because the player density is not enough to "open up" the game to grouping often or to areas being kept depopulated enough for a soloer to handle.
I found the combat horrible in any weapon combo that I tried . The combat animations and actions always seemed very laggy and slow. It felt like it took forever to actually kill something and I'm talking about basic trash mobs not bosses or elites.
I liked the story telling and the way they decided to monetize it. I like the idea of paying for content as it get's released and with no other monthly fee it's not a bad deal. I just can't get past the clunky slow combat and as others have said no end game to speak of. I would just play this for a few weeks at a time as new content is added just to do the quests and see the story progression. It might as well just be a single player game. I actually think it would have been more successful if it was marketed as a single player game.
My reasoning as well as a friend of mines is that while the game is good it also has a slew of issues realistically. They did not put enough content into the game so questing and leveling up further became running back to the start and getting things up more. This killed it for a lot of people. They need to expand what zones you play in and stop revisiting locations you already went to all the time. People do still play it but they would get more coming back if they actually expanded the scope of where you visit and everything.
Originally posted by Vonatar Combat was and remains terrible, at least for me. The animations are clunky and severely outdated, weapons lacked impact (e.g. firing a pistol sounded like a cap gun) and there was no fluidity. I tried a few times to just play and get past it, but combat is a big part of an MMO and I couldn't.
Same for me
It is extremely fluid and not clunky. The problem is the builder combat. Spamming the same button over and over to build up gets old really fast. I must say I did love the open world difficulty and modern setting though. I hate when you blow through fifty mobs and not even break a sweat. Not sure why everyone wants MMO's that way. I don't think people want difficulty in any form in their games. They want to autopilot from mind numbing quest to quest.
Edit: I also loved the first Egypt zone...amazing. It was like running into a warzone. The most immersive zone I've been in an MMO in a long time (until I played DFUW). It was also great as it had some fun jumping on rooftops, that weren't easy to find.
"Then they run through mobs of zombies spamming one single attack over and over because, “slicey good.” Of course this is boring! But it is boring because the player makes it boring. In The Secret World you can have two weapons (excluding auxiliary weapons). You have options to make any sort of character you want. Have up to seven abilities at a time, and seven passives, from over 500 skills. But people insist on spamming just one over and over. The Secret World has a complexity in its combat that I feel like these people are all missing. Combat is as boring or as complex as you make it. And for that, The Secret World deserves praise."
No. The fact that you CAN just spam one skill over and over and have success is a monumental failure in the combat.
Actually that's called freedom spamming one "slicey good" attack all the time is boring and also ineffective, you'll be facing different mobs during your play... but of course there's the freedom (not the failure), you CAN, if you want.
Apologise in advance for the lame example, but let's say you have a screwdriver. Yay, you start to use it everywhere, because you can. There's a small hiccup when first bumping into a torx, but muscle and will combined you beat the obstacle. ( )
Then you get the task, to make some holes. True, you CAN achieve that with turning around your trusty screwdriver (a lot), but wouldn't be more effective and much less boring to simply switch for an electric drill?
This. Probably the best analogy I can think of for all the "boring, repetitive" comments. There's always this quote too:
"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."
I enjoyed the story and NPC interaction of TSW. The writing was amazing, as was most of the voice acting. But TTK is too long when soloing and mob density is also an issue. Sometimes it felt like I was reading a fantastic novel that required hitting my thumb repeatedly with a hammer before I could turn another page. I highly recommend the game to people who play with friends. Us loners? Only the really patient ones.
Aside from that, I'm tired of MMOs with no housing options. Decorating my apartments with loot was one of my favorite activities from Anarchy Online, despite how limited it was. I'll forgive a lot of flaws in a game where I can place a freshly looted lamp just so.
My issue with the game as well. It was a good horror game with all the worst parts of an MMO bundled with it. Trinity combat that felt silly in a modern setting (which also made for bad AI) and too many kill 10 rat quests madet the cool quests grueling. Another game that wanted to do something different but gave in to making a generic mmorpg. with a paint over.
I tried TSW and honestly, it's a few hours of my life that I will never get back. The game just isn't fun. However, I have a friend that has been playing it since release and he loves it, and that just about sums the game up nicely. It's the Marmite / Vegemite of MMO's, you either love it or hate it. I place myself in the latter group and I still have the nasty aftertaste that it left behind.
....."So many people dismiss The Secret World before they even try it."
TSW needs to have a free trial or something. I tried to use buddy keys (2) different times and both were expired (one was my fault because cpu was down for a few weeks).
I would be more inclined to check it out if they had something like vanguard or eq2's trial of the isle.
I love TSW. For it's unique qualities, like the setting and story and weapon and skill variety. But endgame is really boring. There are essentially 6 dungeons that you have to repeat to progress. And the end-game progression is sloooooow. Not that other games have slow endgames too. But one does the calculation that one could spend the next couple of days to make the most minor progress in TSW, or one could play a different game and in same time period, make more progress.
Also, the faction restrictions are bad. I'm a Dragon. So that means that if I find some good players that I like to play with and they are one of the other 2 factions, I can't join their league (forgot the TSW name). I can never find an active group of Dragon that has enough members that I can jump into a group with them at any time.
All of my complaints could be remedied with a robust auto-group system. The 3rd party system that is available is worse than spamming the LFG channel.
I'm a Grandmaster (lifetime) member, and have no regrets about TSW, but it's just not a game to play every day. The missions and NPCs are great, and if Joel Bylos had even remotely held to the "content every month" goal that he committed to, then I'd be logging in every month. The new episodes (except Issue 8) are so good that I plan weekend events around them so I have time to play. But . . . it's been 4 months since Issue 7 "Last Train to Cairo" . . . all we've gotten since then is a token grind non-story issue and a lame "Kill Flappy" event.
Funcom's budget woes have obviously impacted TSW as well, and the gameplay alone isn't enough to keep me at least logging in.
The combat is still the issue even if you're not spamming one skill and you're using all of them. First, you have to know how to use skills that compliment each other.. meaning one exploits the conditions others cause. Some people don't realize that or it forces them to use combinations they don't prefer. And the combat animation... you do not look epic with most of the skills. It looks like my legs and upper body are two separate entities struggling to coordinate.
I'm no programmer but I'm assuming improving animations is a costly improvement that's just not going to happen at this point. At least for the builder skills it would have been nice to see varied animations (like GW2 does with their base skill -- not saying GW2 is better just using it for this one specific example, so calm down). When you have to wait for power to build, its the same animation, same sound effect over and over and over.
I do think its a quality game in terms of the story and world they've built. I don't mind the cut scenes to get missions and the variety of things you can do is a plus. But most of the game is still combat, and combat needs to feel more fun. TSW clogs each map with mobs on your way to missions, which also slows you down and enforces the fact that the combat needs to be more entertaining. You start asking "How can I avoid these mobs?" Not because you're going to die (well sometimes, that's the case), but because it's tedious. Most MMORPGs do a better job of masking the fact that you're doing the same thing over and over.
I like the Secret World, but on the other hand there is no way to make anything your own. In other words, as far as I am concerned, if you don't have at least player housing in your mmo, don't bother releasing it to the market.
It actualy is a good game. Bummed I lost my account only ever got up to Egypt anyways with those weird cultist people. It's worth looking into even with shitty animations and clunky playstyle.
Been playing since beta, and still enjoy it to this day.
Quests are the best around, especially if you slow down and listen to the cutscenes and read up on the lore. It really does play more like a single player game in this respect, and even take notes from time to time.
The combat, oh the combat... Okay, for all those who complain about it, I always ask:
TSW is pretty demanding from a graphic card/cpu standpoint, how old is your rig?
I was about to list all my specs, but it's unnecessary. I get pretty good fps with this game.
Are you running on Win8 DX11? Yes
Are you complaining about the animations/feel of connection?Not really, but yeah, now that you mention it, there is a disconnect.
Are you complaining about builder/consumer?Not as a concept, no.
Are you complaining about the rotation? Every game has a rotation, but good games have a number of other systems involved.
Do you know you can equip 2 weapons? Yes
Do you know you can mix and match passives from any weapon and create more effective decks?Yes. This isn't new to MMO's.
Do you understand the active/passive synergies?yes. Again, not new to MMO's.
Did you only play with the pre-made decks? They are notorious for being not terribly effectiveNo. But now that you mention it, isn't it strange that the people who created the game created bad builds?
Do you know you can equip every weapon and unlock every ability? Yep.
Do you know you can swap out abilities and decks at any time if you want to try something different?Yep.
I think the real problem with TSW combat is that there's quite a learning curve, and the game doesn't have the best tutorial in the world -- in fact the hand holding is pretty light all around. So it's up the community to explain a lot of the mechanics. Most players simply don't have the patience to tackle it. That said, those who do tend to stick with the game. When it clicks, it clicks.
This game has no harder learning curve than even Star Trek Online. Many MMO's have damage types, AoE variants, resistances, vulnerabilities; actives and passives working together... mass hysteria!
People who defend the combat in this game keep bringing this stuff up as though it's a concept that MMO players haven't dealt with before. It's absolutely totally not.
A heap cheap game like STO has several different damage types. Several player skills which effect those damage types. Several different consoles which effect those damage types in different ways. Several options for resistance through skills and starship equipment. If you don't know them, you'll suck in co-op and PvP.
Don't get me started on Eve Online...
The game's combat is BAD, and it's boring, even when I might die. Transylvania mobs are simply a war of attrition that in 95% of cases I'll win. But combat in any zone just takes several times as long to get through than any other game and mobs don't know when to stop chasing me across the zone.
Stupid game design.
The writers and storymakers of this game need to dump these combat leads, find people who are even mildly competent and make the greatest game of all time.
Comments
Well, not enough marketing exposure imo.
It's that I read about the game on this site, otherwise I would have never heard of it.
It's a game that is still staying under the radar I think. and usually a game that is not being advertized enough means the developers are new/on low budget with the known consequences -a poor product.
There are exceptions ofc; I have see many overhyped MMOs fail in the past and some unknown MMOs rise to fame.
"going into arguments with idiots is a lost cause, it requires you to stoop down to their level and you can't win"
I bought a lifetime sub for this game. I really was intrigued with conspiracy theme of the game.This game was more a horror based theme with some conspiracy thrown into the mix. It felt more like a Hellgate London wanna be.
Sadly it just fell short of my expectations. and the game seemed unpolished. The animation looked stiff, and the human models looked lackluster. The UI took me a while to get a hang of.
The combat is just not up par with other mmos that I subscribe to like FFXIV reborn.
Maybe they should go back to the drawing board on this one like SquareEnix did.
Use some imagination, man -- you've got 7 active slots (8 with the aux weapon), not to mention the 7/8 passives. Do something with them. You get complete freedom, over 500 abilities to choose from, and then you use that freedom to bore yourself by using only 3 abilities? You are your own worst enemy.
This says more about lazy gamers than it does about TSW.
I see people complaining about quest hubs. There aren't any real quest hubs in TSW and were never supposed to be any. You’re supposed to pick up quests on the landscape as you explore and stumble across things. It's not a linear game, as the skill wheel demonstrates. I think they just didn't do a very good job getting this across to players.
People have always complained about Egypt but I don't get why. Personally, I loved Egypt because I was engrossed in the story, the music and the landscape. People also complain a lot about the lack of crafting, but it was never going to be crafting like other mmos. It was just to make a few things to buff your gear and discover recipes along the way.
No tutorials and poor marketing plus a really bad call on opening up beta with terribad character creation really seemed like they shot themselves in the foot. Hard to recover from that with so many layoffs.For me the thing that lets the game down is the combat.
1. It is clunky, repetitive & the flow is stilted, kinda like stop-motion done badly
2. The game needed a bigger range of movements & the setting called for vehicle use
3. Mob density is ridiculous in some areas, kiting is often the only strategy you can uses but kiting in the game is like trying to pull out your own teeth with a needle while wearing arctic mittens.
4. Weapon differentiation, the exact same builder routine for every single weapon is a total buzzkill.
5. Difficulty ramps up insanely due mostly to the lack of a flowing combat system & the density of mobs, when a single mob requires substantial skill to kill only for a passing mob to wander into aggro radius & escape only means running back through previously cleared areas now again densely packed the futility sets in rapidly. If you don't have a group set up to plough through packs of enemies you best go play another game. Open world needs more viable single-player because the player density is not enough to "open up" the game to grouping often or to areas being kept depopulated enough for a soloer to handle.
I found the combat horrible in any weapon combo that I tried . The combat animations and actions always seemed very laggy and slow. It felt like it took forever to actually kill something and I'm talking about basic trash mobs not bosses or elites.
I liked the story telling and the way they decided to monetize it. I like the idea of paying for content as it get's released and with no other monthly fee it's not a bad deal. I just can't get past the clunky slow combat and as others have said no end game to speak of. I would just play this for a few weeks at a time as new content is added just to do the quests and see the story progression. It might as well just be a single player game. I actually think it would have been more successful if it was marketed as a single player game.
It is extremely fluid and not clunky. The problem is the builder combat. Spamming the same button over and over to build up gets old really fast. I must say I did love the open world difficulty and modern setting though. I hate when you blow through fifty mobs and not even break a sweat. Not sure why everyone wants MMO's that way. I don't think people want difficulty in any form in their games. They want to autopilot from mind numbing quest to quest.
Edit: I also loved the first Egypt zone...amazing. It was like running into a warzone. The most immersive zone I've been in an MMO in a long time (until I played DFUW). It was also great as it had some fun jumping on rooftops, that weren't easy to find.
-ugly characters
-broken pvp
-not enough clothing to loot
-every zone is the same: zombies and hellspawns
-after kingsmouth the zones don't make much sense anymore
-it's an mmo best played solo
-necessity of equipping 2 weapons
-assassin deck forever broken
This. Probably the best analogy I can think of for all the "boring, repetitive" comments. There's always this quote too:
"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."
My issue with the game as well. It was a good horror game with all the worst parts of an MMO bundled with it. Trinity combat that felt silly in a modern setting (which also made for bad AI) and too many kill 10 rat quests madet the cool quests grueling. Another game that wanted to do something different but gave in to making a generic mmorpg. with a paint over.
....."So many people dismiss The Secret World before they even try it."
TSW needs to have a free trial or something. I tried to use buddy keys (2) different times and both were expired (one was my fault because cpu was down for a few weeks).
I would be more inclined to check it out if they had something like vanguard or eq2's trial of the isle.
I love TSW. For it's unique qualities, like the setting and story and weapon and skill variety. But endgame is really boring. There are essentially 6 dungeons that you have to repeat to progress. And the end-game progression is sloooooow. Not that other games have slow endgames too. But one does the calculation that one could spend the next couple of days to make the most minor progress in TSW, or one could play a different game and in same time period, make more progress.
Also, the faction restrictions are bad. I'm a Dragon. So that means that if I find some good players that I like to play with and they are one of the other 2 factions, I can't join their league (forgot the TSW name). I can never find an active group of Dragon that has enough members that I can jump into a group with them at any time.
All of my complaints could be remedied with a robust auto-group system. The 3rd party system that is available is worse than spamming the LFG channel.
I'm a Grandmaster (lifetime) member, and have no regrets about TSW, but it's just not a game to play every day. The missions and NPCs are great, and if Joel Bylos had even remotely held to the "content every month" goal that he committed to, then I'd be logging in every month. The new episodes (except Issue 8) are so good that I plan weekend events around them so I have time to play. But . . . it's been 4 months since Issue 7 "Last Train to Cairo" . . . all we've gotten since then is a token grind non-story issue and a lame "Kill Flappy" event.
Funcom's budget woes have obviously impacted TSW as well, and the gameplay alone isn't enough to keep me at least logging in.
I think there's 3 things Funcom could do to improve understanding of combat (not the combat system itself):
The combat is still the issue even if you're not spamming one skill and you're using all of them. First, you have to know how to use skills that compliment each other.. meaning one exploits the conditions others cause. Some people don't realize that or it forces them to use combinations they don't prefer. And the combat animation... you do not look epic with most of the skills. It looks like my legs and upper body are two separate entities struggling to coordinate.
I'm no programmer but I'm assuming improving animations is a costly improvement that's just not going to happen at this point. At least for the builder skills it would have been nice to see varied animations (like GW2 does with their base skill -- not saying GW2 is better just using it for this one specific example, so calm down). When you have to wait for power to build, its the same animation, same sound effect over and over and over.
I do think its a quality game in terms of the story and world they've built. I don't mind the cut scenes to get missions and the variety of things you can do is a plus. But most of the game is still combat, and combat needs to feel more fun. TSW clogs each map with mobs on your way to missions, which also slows you down and enforces the fact that the combat needs to be more entertaining. You start asking "How can I avoid these mobs?" Not because you're going to die (well sometimes, that's the case), but because it's tedious. Most MMORPGs do a better job of masking the fact that you're doing the same thing over and over.
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This game has no harder learning curve than even Star Trek Online. Many MMO's have damage types, AoE variants, resistances, vulnerabilities; actives and passives working together... mass hysteria!
People who defend the combat in this game keep bringing this stuff up as though it's a concept that MMO players haven't dealt with before. It's absolutely totally not.
A heap cheap game like STO has several different damage types. Several player skills which effect those damage types. Several different consoles which effect those damage types in different ways. Several options for resistance through skills and starship equipment. If you don't know them, you'll suck in co-op and PvP.
Don't get me started on Eve Online...
The game's combat is BAD, and it's boring, even when I might die. Transylvania mobs are simply a war of attrition that in 95% of cases I'll win. But combat in any zone just takes several times as long to get through than any other game and mobs don't know when to stop chasing me across the zone.
Stupid game design.
The writers and storymakers of this game need to dump these combat leads, find people who are even mildly competent and make the greatest game of all time.
This isn't a signature, you just think it is.