Recently, NCSoft announced that City of Heroes Freedom is closing shop. NCSoft did this because it was trying to consolidate its properties, and (at least according to me) it chose to close a pretty profitable property to focus on its other crap…I mean games. In October, the game will shut down, and it will no longer be accessible.
Therefore, I decided to start searching earlier and try to find a new game. First, everyone who I know that games suggested Guild Wars 2, which was just released. But Guild Wars 2 is made by a company that is actually controlled by NCSoft, and after this announcement (and the closing of Tabula Rasa, another game I enjoyed), I’ve decided to avoid NCSoft products like the plague. That means no Guild Wars 2 for me. Besides, I’m really not in the mood to play another medieval-like game with orcs and elves (or some variation thereof).
So I came across The Secret World, which happens to be made by Funcom, which to my surprise happens to be owned by Electronic Arts. To be honest, EA doesn’t have a stellar record when it comes to MMOs. It was the company behind Earth and Beyond, which turned out to be one fo the first MMOs to shut its doors while so many others were struggling but remained open. Under its Maxis-bought brand, it put The Sims Online almost as fast as it closed it down. To be honest, I don’t know if The Sims Online is still around, but it’s such a failure that even if it is still around, no one cares.
But, with no other real options, I decided to try it out. I refuse to go back to World of Warcraft because of how limited it is in depth. Their recent addition (or soon to be addition) of Kung-Fu Pandas really has me scratching my head, wondering what happened to that company, but that’s another story.
So I picked up a copy of The Secret World at Wal Mart. Why Wal Mart? I don’t know. I was there looking for a bookshelf and then decided I’d just pick it up because at $50 of a release price, I honestly wasn’t going to get a better or worse deal anywhere else. Sure, I could have probably found a cheaper copy through Amazon or some other obscure online dealer, but sometimes the hassle just isn’t worth the savings.
I signed in for the first time on Saturday. Essentially, if you don’t know what the game is about, it’s a three sided game (a lot like Dark Age of Camelot and every realm versus realm-like game released since) in which you play either a member of the Illuminati, the Templars or the Dragon. I started off as an Illuminati, and it’s a hybrid version of the “real” Illumnati, except for reasons that I haven’t really figured out, they’re headquartered in New York City. The game makes the point of stating that this isn’t the Illuminati we all know and love, but I think that’s more for legal reasons than anything else (and a fear of the real Illuminati targeting developers for revenge or other such nonsense). The Templars makes a point of indicating that it’s not “really” the Templars of history but a new version of the Templars that has its origins recently, although their history stretches back through time and embraces the old ways (huh?). They’re headquartered in London. The Dragon is the “Asian” mystique group in which all sorts of Japanese-like mysticism are combined into a mish mash of ridiculousness, where voice overs recreate bad acting from the 1940s when white actors used to pretend to be Asian by speaking badly. The part that doesn’t make sense for me is that the faction is so grounded in Japanese-ish nonsense, and then the faction is headquartered in Seoul, which is Korean, not Japanese. I haven’t spent a great deal of time walking around Seoul yet, but I suspect that I’m going to see Japanese writing, although I hope the developers were smart enough to realize that some people might actually speak and read Korean well enough to recognize that Japanese isn’t Korean and Japanese writing in Seoul is pretty damn out of place.
Regardless of what side you choose, your starting character starts in Kingsmouth, Maine where zombies seem to be getting out of control. Yep, zombies. And ALL of the enemies you fight are essentially some kind of zombie or zombie-like hybrid. I understand that demons show up later in the game in other areas, but so far it seems very limited in the kinds of things you fight.
The story isn’t all that great either. Essentially it boils down to this narrative:
“Hey, you, stranger, you’re not going to believe what happened. This morning, zombies tried to take over the town. Nope. Not sure where they came from or why. But they’re everywhere and I really need a can of tomato juice from the local grocery store (that is overrun with zombies), so would you be a dear and head over there for me and get me some? If you do, I’ll give you a couple of bucks for your trouble.”
This may sound like a complaint thread, but it’s not really meant to be that way. First off, the game is interesting in that it’s in our time, not in some fantasy land that exists in some weird dimension. No, this world exists in our world and seems to be happening while the rest of the world is oblivious to what’s going on, thus, the secret world. The three factions are in conflict with each other, but when they meet in a place like Kingsmouth, they all work together but then go head to head when they end up in a pvp area (which I have yet to find being such a low “level” character).
Which brings up the subject of “levels”. In The Secret World, there are no levels. Instead, you get ability points (AP) and skill points (SP). You use those to buy new abilities and skills that help round out your character. It’s like someone who played Ultima Online liked the idea that there were no levels in UO, but you just improved your skills instead and tried to update that for the 21st century. It’s a noble idea, but the one problem it causes is that people aren’t exactly sure how they stack up with/and against other players. To be completely honest, I don’t know how I stack up against any creature I come across until I actually start fighting it. I went to the area next to Kingsmouth last night and killed the first mob of bad guys I came across. The second one schooled me like I was a converted ghost in a Pac Man revival. So, I have no clue how to figure out if the monster I’m looking at should be attacked, avoided or worshipped like the god it is.
Another problem I’ve come across is apparently a bug in the game design in how it interacts with a laggy system. I have an assault weapon specialist who has a leech heal ability, but it works about 70 percent of the time because I’ll be fighting a mob of zombies and then every time I press the button for it (and I press it a lot), it gives me a message of “you don’t have a consistent line to your target” or something equally unhelpful. This can happen when I’m standing in front of the target, poking his chest with my finger, and it will still not let me use the ability. Which means I either get lucky with my other abilities, or I die.
In this game, I die a lot. As a matter of fact, there’s a GREAT quest story of trying to find an old killer that was never brought to justice, and the only way to do it is to die yourself and follow a mysterious group of white ravens that help you solve the mystery. Strangely enough, that doesn’t actually count as a spoiler because so much more has to be done that you’ll kind of figure that out, or you’ll end up just quitting the game out of frustration.
One of the things that seems promising is the possibilities of unexplored ground in this game that I haven’t yet discovered. It seems to be very much like a game that has a lot of mysteries and secrets, which is generally my kind of game. But I’m fearful that it will collapse into one of those grinding MMOs where there’s no important concept that you’re exploring through the game. An example: I’m playing an illuminati character. I would like to see that the organization has many secrets that I have to uncover, and those secrets need to be important to the game itself, not just some lore I click on to add an entry to my lore book. I would like to see that new areas of the game open up after you figure certain things out. That, to me, would be so much cooler than finding harder to find lore buttons in the middle of nowhere and having no reason for doing so.
One of the real problems the game faces is that so few people seem to be playing it. The developers aren’t really responding well, playing the “nothing’s wrong…it’s going just as planned” card, which usually gets played right up until they shutter the store, And EA will shutter it. Don’t ever think anything different.
But I’ll let you know more as I get deeper into the game. I had a three day weekend to fully explore what I could. I suspect that there’s FAR MORE that I haven’t seen yet. My hope is that whatever I have yet to discover ends up being interesting and fun.
to love to hate. I mean, it has all sorts of things going for it: HP Lovecrat world, horror, zombies, guns and swords, and all that. But what it doesn’t have is a lot of new fun to it. I’ve felt like I’ve done most of what there is to do in that game. Everything new is just the next level of stuff I’ve done before. There are new lands to go to, but I haven’t felt like they’re all that special. The one event they did have that I truly enjoyed was a nonstop situation where huge golems attacked and you had to join with dozens of people and fight a long battle to kill them. That was a once a year thing, and now it’s over. So, it’s back to the grind. So I finally just stopped playing, looking for something new.
Which brought me back to Defiance. Defiance is one of those games that was a lot like the now defunct game of Tabula Rasa, where you basically grab your machine gun, shotgun or whatever, and fight invasions that are sometimes completely out of control. But you pull the trigger and let loose endless streams of bullets. It’s kind of fun. But it’s limited fun, in that it needs a lot of people on at all times, and these battles are sometimes harder to find than you would imagine. When they happen, they’re a blast, but other times, I find myself just staring at the world map (it’s mostly San Francisco, Marin County and Silicon Valley, or what’s left of them after an alien destruction thing happened) and hoping something pops. And quite often, nothing does. So a lot of this game is just me staring at the map, thinking, man I wish something would happen.