When an MMO launches, it does so trumpeting the boldest of intentions for its continuing evolution and development. That’s especially true for a game launched with a subscription model, like The Secret World. Sure enough, when Funcom released the game 16 months ago, Game Director Ragnar Tornquist bravely predicted monthly content updates would follow.
You could almost see the disaster coming here. An ill-advised publishing deal with EA produced no significant pre-release marketing, but may have contributed to the game being rushed to launch. As released, The Secret World was plagued by frustrating bugs to fundamental things like quests and chat that the Funcom team struggled to fix over a six week span of time. Sales were awful, large-scale layoffs at Funcom ensued, and when Tornquist abruptly “stepped aside” a year ago, I’d have laid even money that The Secret World wouldn’t live to see 2013.
After the jump, it’s not a bad little tree at all, Charlie Brown. Maybe it just needs a little love. Continue reading →
Tom: Secret World is not an easy game to jump into, especially after you’ve been away for a while. You only ever have a few skills slotted, but the array of skills and how they fit together is incredibly meticulous. This is a tinkerer’s game. Or a game where you just load one of the preset templates and mash the buttons. But who wants to do that?
After the jump, let’s get meticulous. Continue reading →
Tom: While Secret World is uniquely suited to solitaire play — at least at a thematic level — it doesn’t always work out that way in terms of gameplay. The scenarios, for instance. But even in the wider world, it’s nice to have a sidekick. Or be a sidekick. It depends on which one of us you ask. Personally, I think Hornbostel (pictured, left) is trying a little too hard with the eye patch. That’s like something a sidekick would do.
Chris: The eyepatch makes me look tougher! Plus I’d just gotten it as a drop and it matches my outfit. The hell is that burqa ninja getup you’re wearing, anyway?
Tom: I’m a nun. A bad-ass nun. Or maybe a chick jedi. I haven’t quite decided, but either one of those is better than a transgender Snake Plissken.
After the jump, me and one-eyed Jane. Continue reading →
This is a sad tale of both how great and how awful The Secret World can be. It is a tale of the investigation missions, which are unique in a genre when so many missions involve collecting ten boar hides or delivering a doo-dad to the next quest hub. It is a tale of backstory and clues and demonic rune alphabets and world building and characters. It is a tale that spans the globe. It contains spoilers. And I should warn you that it does not have a happy ending.
After the jump, meet Daniel Bach, who’s covered hell, you know. Continue reading →
Now that the scenarios are live in The Secret World, I realize I’m not ready for them unless I have help. I was hoping they would be accessible enough to my character, since I’m definitely at the level where I want to start using augments, which you can only find in scenarios. But I can’t get through a single wave of enemies on normal difficulty in a solo scenario. There’s no way I’m going to survive the later waves, much less the bosses.
Fortunately, I can easily handle the scenarios with a group. But then I’m competing with up to four other players for the dropped augments. In my last group scenario, eight augments dropped. Since Secret World is still one of those MMOs where you have to choose need, greed, or pass every time a trinket drops, I rolled “need” on all of them. As did everyone else, naturally. I got zero of them. I’m willing to keep trying, but because I’ve spent almost all my time in The Secret World playing solo or with real-world friends, I have no idea how to go around finding a group. The protocol is different in every game. The lobby for the scenarios, the Sunken Library in Venice, makes me think I should have no problem finding a group. Look at all those people (pictured)! They obviously want to play scenarios, too. But why is no one LFGing in the general chat? Am I supposed to LFG? Is there an LFG channel? Should I be using the built-in LFG tool that no one else seems to be using? Is there a separate website somewhere? I type secretworldscenarioslfg.com and get nowhere. Maybe it’s a .net address.
It’s like walking into a crowded restaurant and not being sure if you’re supposed to seat yourself. This sort of content, which is a great addition to The Secret World and a fantastic exercise in group combat, needs a better infrastructure for those of us used to playing this as a solo game.
3 stars
PC
Up next: to hell, but not back
Click here for the previous entry.
Secret World has been out for about a year and a half. In an MMO, this normally means the population has fallen off and maybe a bunch of servers have closed. It can be hard to find people to group with. Maybe you can’t talk your friend into playing because he’s playing something else. So you’re on a lonely journey through what should be a thriving world built for parties of adventurers. It’s depressing. Like Baltimore.
Well, as you can imagine, the player population of Secret World isn’t what it used to be. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.
After the jump, alone in the dark. Continue reading →
Videogame site Polygon has paved the way for reviews to be living breathing documents, like the Constitution, the Bible (the Catholic one), or a Star Wars movie. Their reviews can evolve and grow, like a Mitt Romney position. One day, SimCity is a nine. The next it’s a four. Tomorrow, it might be a seven. What’s Battlefield 4 today? Let’s check. It’s a very Buddhist approach to reviews: the only constant is change, never stepping in the same river twice, let a thousand scores bloom, yadda, yadda, yadda. Where some people might see a lack of commitment, others see a willingness to change one’s mind. You say potato, I say waffle.
Fair enough. Why hold a game accountable for any given single state? Let’s roll with it by re-reviewing Funcom’s Secret World, a game I really wanted to like when it was released, but couldn’t because its launch issues undermined what was great about it (although I followed the two-star review with about ten articles detailing what was great about it). Now that Funcom has had about a year and a half to tidy everything up, let’s take another look and give it a new rating.
After the jump, a first chance to make a second impression. Continue reading →
I wouldn’t classify myself as the type of person who feels graphics make or break games, but one of the best things about Pokemon X/Y is how the upgraded visuals and changes to visual style make the game feel so much more alive. Don’t get me wrong, past Pokemon games always had their own cute touches, but for all of those touches, lately they were still DS games shoved on to the 3DS’s screen. There’s only so much you can work with there, even with the expanded real estate of the 3DS XL.
After the jump, switching systems and switching styles. Continue reading →
Every generation of Pokemon games adds new creatures to the mix to the point where the total number of Pokemon is over seven hundred. Take a moment and think about that. Seven hundred different character designs, many of which have been updated with new animations and new visual touches as the years have gone on. Can you think of any other game franchise that sports over 700 character models? I can’t. Heck, I’m happy if I get maybe two dozen different enemy types in a game. Sure, not all of them are going to be winners, but even if only half of them were good, that would still be over three hundred winners. That’s a heck of a lot of pocket monsters.
After the jump, what good are new creatures if you can’t train them? Continue reading →
The early sections of past Pokemon games all followed a similar path. You met a professor of Pokemonology, he gave you a starter and then tasked you with going out in the world to fill the Pokedex. Once you found a nice patch of tall grass you would start hunting beasts. You’d find a rat or gopher or prairie dog looking thing and capture it. You’d find a caterpillar and capture it. Usually a pigeon of some sort would come along for the ride. Eventually you would stumble across some fighting type and so it would go until your first team was fielded. Your starter would have an elemental attack but the rest of your misfit crew of vermin would feature a commonplace collection of boring, normal moves. Lots of leers, tackles, scratches and growls. Hardly the stuff of a championship team.
After the jump, Chespin, I choose you! Continue reading →
I hadn’t planned on playing Pokemon Y. I started Pokemon Black with gusto but only got about about 13 hours into it before the sameness got to me. I was smart enough to rent Pokemon Black 2 and putter around with it before realizing that the same thing that I didn’t like about Black was also in play here. Along the way to the release of X and Y, I read about small changes made to the formula to streamline things. Nothing that would send the series off into a radical new direction but some things to modernize a game that has been in desperate need of modernization for some time. Take running. In Pokemon Y you can run from the outset, no special shoes require. Also, now your Pokemon get experience from capturing other Pokemon, so no more epic battles that end in nothing but a a new creature you probably won’t use due to how under-leveled it is. As exciting as these things sound, though, what finally pushed me over the edge was the experience share.
After the jump, what the heck is an experience share? Continue reading →
Card Hunter features one of the most unique deck building mechanics I’ve experienced in the collectible card game genre. In most strategy games, the difference between a short sword and a mace would largely be in the damage dealt and possibly the damage type. And actually I think a short sword and mace usually deal the same damage. Anyway, Card Hunter instead assigns cards that are the very actions you perform during combat to a given piece of equipment, and these action cards form the deck you draw from while you engage in battle.
After the break, what makes this system work so well. Continue reading →
With Card Hunter out and running very well since it’s had a bit of time to stabilize, and now that I’ve talked about the basic mechanics on how to play, I thought I’d next take a minute to look at the actual cards themselves.
After the jump, card mechanics and details Continue reading →
Today’s diary entry will focus on the meat and potatoes of Card Hunter –the combat. When I first watched some gameplay I was able to figure out the general idea behind how the game works – you play a movement card to move, you play an attack card to attack, simple. However, it was confusing to try and wrap my head around who was taking a turn, when a turn ended, and why someone would want to pass their turn with a handful of cards. Roll up your sleeves and grab a beverage and I’ll take you through a tour of what is happening during a match of Card Hunter.
After the jump, to arms! Continue reading →
Not long ago I would roll my eyes at a free-to-play game, web based or otherwise. This year has seen a few terrific gems that have changed my mind, such as Path of Exile, Neverwinter, and Mechwarrior Online. But the only free-to-play game to actually get money from me is Card Hunter. A few days ago, I spent $20 on in-game currency, called pizza, even though I’d seen most of the game’s content already in the beta.
After the jump, why would I do such a thing? Continue reading →
