Reply With QuoteYeah, typical FunCom. Same damn thing happened with AoC, now that I recall. Took them a while to update when you changed payment plans or anything else. Probably Norwegian servers running on old Lutefisk.Originally Posted by strummer
You won't be seeing the AH in this patch. Those patch notes are from the beta board from a few days ago. Dunno about the rest of it.
Yeah, typical FunCom. Same damn thing happened with AoC, now that I recall. Took them a while to update when you changed payment plans or anything else. Probably Norwegian servers running on old Lutefisk.
Thanks for the responses about the PvE content. Looks like there's at least 100 hours.
So my next question is about the quality of the PvE content. I hear the raves but are there PvE missions that are essentially of the kill eight rats nature? I would tend to discount those since I want the atmospheric puzzle missions. I can play any MMO and get quests to kill eight rats.
Anyway, this one is looking like a must-play for me at some point down the line.
There's a lot of this sort of filler, but it's mostly optional. Once Funcom hammers out whatever bugs and scripting errors they didn't see fit to fix before releasing the game, there's plenty of non-traditional single-player content in here.
-Tom
Looks like Tom's review is out! lol
I most certainly did not give the game a 4/10.
-Tom
Dulath is your new alt, then?
There's a pretty amusing firestorm going on in the review comment section. I especially like the people that claim that there are no bugs. I'm not quite sure if they're serious or not.
Apparently, some people think that you should either know how every quest ends before you start it (and thus can find a dimension where it works with ease) or that you should happily waste lots of playtime banging your head against broken quests before figuring out they're broken (and if the quest isn't really broken when you give up and ask for help, you're a "moron").
I know I know it's been said before. Man what would incite people to track down Toms review upset that it is messing with the "aggregate"
Its interesting to see how many people posted in the review on the front page. Even more so to study the fanboys that always pop out of the woodwork for things like this :)
The ironic thing about fanboys, is that they alienate more people than the convert.
Personally, when I'm looking seriously at a new game, I seek out bad reviews to read. I don't want to hear ten guys tell me how awesome something is, I want to find the guys that will tell me all of the nasty dirty bad parts of the game so I can make an informed decision.
I'm glad for the honest review. Frankly I'm sick of the "this game is awesome! (well, actually, it will be awesome once it works)" shtick from reviewers. I want to know if I should run out and buy it today, wait and buy it in the future (when it's fixed or cheaper) or avoid it like the plague. Tom's review is an obvious "buy it when it's fixed. It has the potential to be great".
Honestly, if I bought this today and ran into broken quests, I would cancel my sub and put it on the shelf, likely never to play it again with me warning away potential buyers. But if I wait a month or two and it's in great shape, it could be a multi-month playing experience for me and something I advocate others to play.
I've been playing the game solidly since early access and I have only just reached the second continent area with some 122 missions completed. That's about 1/3rd of the game. I still have to go back to earlier areas to complete more quests. There is a ton of PvE stuff which is the main focus of this game. Each npc you meet has interesting stories to listen to and a number of quests. Plus like Guild Wars 2 you will stumble across quests outside of the quest hubs. Funcom has also stated they have an aggressive post-launch content schedule planned.
This game is a lesson in frustration. One minute it's the most refreshing MMO I've played in years, the next I'm sitting at a gravestone wondering what the hell I'm supposed to do next. As it turns out what I'm supposed to do next is wait for a patch. This game needed another pass or two and an August release date. The little niggles are starting to add up and wear on me, and eventually the highs are going to stop cancelling out the lows.
I've had that feeling multiple times. :)
Last night I died about 20 times on a quest. It was bitterly frustrating. Then I walked away from my computer for 10 minutes, came back, adjusted my spec slightly and I succeeded in winning the quest. It was a good feeling.
I have been frustrated at the completely broken chat system that "seems" to be working now since the latest server restart.
I have been frustrated many of the ability descriptions are not 100% correct and in some cases do not work correctly.
I have been frustrated that I have to actually work at staying alive now.
I have been frustrated I actually have to pay attention to quests now to nut out what to do.
I have been frustrated out of the 122 quests I have completed so far I have 3 that can't be completed due to buggy quest triggers.
I have been frustrated that I can't wait to get home every night from work and log in to The Secret World to play it.
I have been frustrated because I have had to unlearn 8 years of bad MMO design decisions and pure laziness on my part to do well in The Secret World.
I am frustrated that I personally give this game a 4/5 score (or 9/10) and I should give it less due to bugs but this game is just so f..king good.
So as you can see this is one hell of a frustrating game for me. Best damned frustrating game I have played in a long time. Damn you Ragnar Tørnquist and your personal version of hell you have dragged me into.
I've done over 1/2 of the areas (I'm in Egypt and I'd thought I'd done most of that zone until.... I found out how much more there is) and it's telling me I've done 4 days and 5 hours worth of playing. I've done a bit of PVP and spent a night on a dungeon. The rest has been PVE soloing or in a pair. There hasn't been any pointless grinding for achievements or meta stuff either, thank God. Treating it as a slightly buggy single player game, I'm still very happy with it.
I would also say that it's rarely quite as unapologetically "kill 8 rats" as all that. There's usually some sort of narrative context, there's blood trails to follow or doohickeys to poke at or monster ecology to learn about, etc. Unfortunately, occasionally it really is just that (e.g. Hell Has No Vacancy, the Overlook Hotel quest. What an unfortunate introduction to the Savage Coast.)
I approve of this post. It says everything I would say if I weren't too lazy to type it out and press Submit.
Having a few quest bugs as the underpinning for "the game doesn't work" - certainly seems like an emotionally driven exaggeration for a launch title. It's one of the smoothest launches I've experienced - and I'd take a few quest bugs over missing vital features or content any day.
It doesn't mean that such bugs are ok or that we should ignore them, but realistically - we're talking pretty small stuff - considering no quests are needed for progression, and you can easily do the VAST majority of the content without issue.
This game is refreshing in a number of ways, and it has deliberately targeted a smaller audience in an environment where most MMOs are about targeting the big bucks. It does very little "stretching" compared to almost all other MMOs - given how the content is delivered without needing a shit-ton of grinding. Seems to me that even SWtOR with its huge emphasis on story content has less actual story content and a LOT more grinding.
I'd say cut it a bit more slack, if you want to be a fair person.
I'm really hoping this patch fixes the chat issues and some of the quest breaking instancing issues because my wife and I have been having a blast running the PVE content, especially investigations. Yesterday, we spent 2 hours scratching our heads to progress the Lady Margaret quest line and Something wicked this way comes.
After running around for an hour or so, making progress on neither, we focused on the latter. My wife had found how to deal with our first stumbling block (the initial research was easy, it's what happens afterwards) in minutes. But then we didn't follow through on it and got stuck. Until she went "Wait a minute...." and we were back on the trail. Then the quest was bugged, hence my hope the known issue with instancing a zone breaking some quests gets addressed in 1.01.
Those eureka moments are something we've never known in an MMO and we love them. We absolutely don't mind spending a whole evening just progressing 1 tier in an investigation quest, just like we did for Dead Air. We'll argue back and forth on what the hint means (or decoding something). We research. We find solutions and make it through. Funcom has created something truly special and enjoyable here.
Chat really needs to get fixed though. Bcause we use a chat channel to speak cross faction with friends and that chat channel keeps disappearing, or we lose connection and can't rejoin. You can't even plan to meet up people for a group as even group chat regularly broke those past few days.
When those teething pains are in the past, the game will be fantastic though. It already is... Mostly.
Wendelius
I totally understand where you are coming from about the broken quests, Tom. I remember quite distinctly two different quests in Kingsmouth where my wife and I initially thought the quest was broken. Eventually, after trying to decipher it ourselves for a good while, we googled it and found a bunch of people that said it was broken and were listing incorrect answers. I went back in and searched around a little longer in game and actually found and figured out the correct answer, which was different than many posted online. And this time it worked! That was one of those very satisfying moments in the game that was really cool.
However, as soon as you run into one that is truly broke, it makes you give up all hope and efforts as you never really know if the next quest is one that takes more thought and analysis or is one that you could beat your head on forever and even figure out, but is hopelessly broken. It really takes out that immersion factor and almost forces you to use spoilers and google to progress and prevent extreme frustration. It may be true that there are only a handful of broken quests, but they seem to be inconsistent (sometimes some work, sometimes they don't) and it really only takes one to ruin the experience they are trying to build.
Ruin the experience? Aren't we talking about a frustrating moment that you get past pretty quickly?
Because if a broken quest ruins the entire experience, then I'm probably not as sensitive as I thought I was.
Still, no doubt it IS frustrating - and I've been plenty pissed myself from time to time (Something Wicked is my primary source of hatred). But I think broken quests are a part of every single MMO I've ever tried. The only reason it bothers me in Secret World is because it's the first MMO where I've TRULY cared about getting the whole story and finishing up an entire area.
I'm not going to bash the game extra for that, no way.
Yeah, it depends on how you want to approach the game. I am still having fun moving on and skipping the broken ones, but I feel I am missing out on a good adventure game by "cheating" all the time checking each time I am stumped a bit so I don't get too frustrated.
If you look at it as a "normal" MMORPG and don't put as much stock in each quest's quality, then it is in pretty good shape. I just wish they would fix these annoying bugs soon as I am afraid it will have long-term detrimental impact for the game and I would like to see it gain new content for a long time to come.
Supposedly, today's patch will fix a bunch of quests. Hopefully, it will not be long until there aren't any broken ones left.
I really dig the game, but I'm with Tom - this game cannot afford quest bugs, because hitting even one means that instead of being able to trust Funcom and assume that if you're stuck on a quest you're just missing something, you have to wonder if that quest is actually just not working. It does look like they're going to patch all the ones I've encountered, so that's good, but it's probably fair to suggest that they should have fixed them -before- launching if they didn't want to be reviewed based on them.
Fair enough, we each respond differently to various types of bugs. I'm just thankful that the reviews have mostly been very positive - because I think this game needs all the help it can get to stay healthy, seeing as how it doesn't target the main MMO crowd.
I don't think they intended for the bugs to be there, though, so stating that they should have fixed them is pretty redundant. Of course they should.
For the investigation missions (which seem to be the most affected) - they disabled a lot of them in beta - because they didn't want to spoil them for the players. This means they didn't have the opportunity to test them with a lot of players doing them simultaneously. This has been stated by Ragnar - and he promises that they've learned from it. I concede that it's especially unfortunate that it's the investigation missions - because it's very easy to assume you're doing something wrong. That said, there's an in-game browser where you can know if it's broken almost instantly - or you can ask in general.
Stupid mistake? Yeah, probably. But very understandable - and it seems they're fixing them as soon as they're able to.
Still, calling the game broken because of a few optional quests not working seems really petty when you look at what the game does offer. But that's just me.
Yeah, that would be my fear too -- puzzling over a broken quest. If I'm spending time trying to figure out a puzzle I want to be sure it's possible to solve and not just broken. I think if I wait another couple of months on this one I'll have a more satisfying experience when I play it.
Don't know if waiting a couple months is necessary. If today's patch hits most of the early bugs you would be safe to jump in while it is still fresh to the community at large. Many of the investigations don't have solutions posted on the net yet so you do feel super smart when you figure them out.
The review would have been much better if you had given specific examples of the quest bugs you encountered, how many of them you encountered and how frequently they interrupted your game play. As it stands, the review doesn't give me much info. Just speaking for myself, I've done all the Kingsmouth quests, and I've done about a half a dozen into Savage Coast, and I haven't encountered any broken quests.
That doesn't mean the bugs do not exist. And it is probably why Funcom didn't fix them, as they either did not detect them, or they knew about them and choose to ignore them because they had to launch in Q2..
This is true however I also haven't had any bugs yet so it shows how difficult it is to get it correct. I also understand launching when they have to, in this economic climate there isn't unlimited amounts of money available.
I would have liked some examples though, still 1.01 is live and lets see.
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