The Secret World

[Reinhardt]

Don't even want to start second location of Egypt after finishing first.

 

[DeepOcean]

Don't even want to start second location of Egypt after finishing first.

The second location is mildly more interesting but I get it, you get completely exhausted by the previous zone that you cant continue.

 

[Reinhardt]

It's not helping that i'm already lvl 50 and both my class weapons are maxed too.

 

[anvi]

Yeah that's cuz the game is weak. Play something better.

 

[Reinhardt]

I guess i finished this game. Didn't launched it since

Don't even want to start second location of Egypt after finishing first.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Been playing this a bit, slowly. Another "Why the hell is this an MMORPG?" game.
Quest design is really good, especially the investigation quests. If you don't ask for help(or use a guide, I guess) some of them will take you hours per mission. World design, environment, etc., are top-notch. As someone who doesn't play horror games, the intentionally spooky missions get me spooked. It's much more of a slow-burn creepiness rather than any jumpscares or such.
Typical MMO quests are relegated to "side missions" and a tiny part of the overall experience. Meat and potatoes are the main mission types(story, action/sabotage, investigation), and there's a lot of them.

Just grabbing any myths & legends they can get their hands on and putting it into their game's universe is... really good. It's not something I knew I wanted, but now I do.

Criticisms:
As with most story-focused MMORPGs(and quite a few RPGs), there's too many characters. Stop introducing new characters just for them to get a few lines then disappear forever.
Lack of followup on missions. I heard they planned on making versions of the zones set afterwards which might explain this? No chance it will ever happen though.

I'll give it the Rusty Seal of Approval. If you haven't played it yet and are reading this, go download it now. The quests and story are some of the best around.
The part of the game worth playing is entirely free. Wouldn't recommend spending a dollar on it as I doubt it will get any new content.

The fact that this will be unplayable some day -- probably in the not too far off future -- is pretty sad. This game would have been a hit as a coop RPG. Just forget it's an MMO, even Funcom decided to do this by making the zone population limit incredibly low so you feel overwhelmed and outmatched.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

bylam pull some strings and make a secret world 2 with better combat

 

[Siveon]

bylam pull some strings and make a secret world 2 with better combat

And make it single player and/or smaller co-op.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

bylam pull some strings and make a secret world 2 with better combat

And make it single player and/or smaller co-op.

Forgot to add that important part. There's absolutely no reason for this to be an MMO.

--
Even though the missions are almost all linear, they're still very enjoyable. Sometimes you just want a game to tell you a story, and this is an amazing game for it.
I go through all the NPC dialogue just because I find the world and characters interesting.

Something I forgot to add is that they did a really good job on something nearly every open-world video game fails at: scale. The hubs are all just tiny parts of larger cities, the zones are mostly a small town and surrounding area. If you put all the New England areas together next to FO4, they're probably not too different sizewise but one is obviously much more correct in scale. Kingsmouth is just a small, backwater town as they say rather than trying to represent something much larger.

New England areas -- overall design, theme, missions, characters -- are fantastic.
Fun trivia: go into spirit mode at the widow's mansion in blue ridge and explore it. She's right, the house is very haunted.
There's a lot of stuff that can only be seen while you're in spirit mode.

 

[Correct_Carlo]

I really liked this too when I tried it after the revamp. It's probably the best, old-school, style MMO out there. Problem is the combat kind of sucks and still very much feels like an oldschool MMO. So I lost interest, despite the story and setting being top notch. I agree that they need to release a redone, gutted, co-op version that updates the graphics and combat, but leaves all of the HUGE amount of wonderful work they did on the quest design and world in place.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Honestly, if you can slog through VTMB combat you can get through SWL just fine. It's not great, but I don't find it offensively bad. I just think the game would be better with more... eh, can't think of a proper word... realistic? combat. Less gamey. The design feels very MMO-y, which is not a good thing.
I don't think it has to be some ultra-realistic tacticool first person shooter, but it just feels very disconnected from the game itself.

But, yes, it's a storyfag game through and through. The investigation missions put most modern adventure/detective games to shame. It's such an interesting juxtapose to the action missions. Environmental storytelling, lots of hidden stuff, no handholding in where to go or what to do. It's basically the Constantine game mode.
I like when games offer a variety of content so you can alternate. Even inside the categories the missions are frequently very different though.

 

[Zombra]

Honestly, if you can slog through VTMB combat you can get through SWL just fine.

I agree SWL is a gem ... the difference here is that VTMB doesn't take 300 hours to complete

 

[J1M]

bylam pull some strings and make a secret world 2 with better combat

And make it single player and/or smaller co-op.

Forgot to add that important part. There's absolutely no reason for this to be an MMO.

--
Even though the missions are almost all linear, they're still very enjoyable. Sometimes you just want a game to tell you a story, and this is an amazing game for it.
I go through all the NPC dialogue just because I find the world and characters interesting.

Something I forgot to add is that they did a really good job on something nearly every open-world video game fails at: scale. The hubs are all just tiny parts of larger cities, the zones are mostly a small town and surrounding area. If you put all the New England areas together next to FO4, they're probably not too different sizewise but one is obviously much more correct in scale. Kingsmouth is just a small, backwater town as they say rather than trying to represent something much larger.

New England areas -- overall design, theme, missions, characters -- are fantastic.
Fun trivia: go into spirit mode at the widow's mansion in blue ridge and explore it. She's right, the house is very haunted.
There's a lot of stuff that can only be seen while you're in spirit mode.

Which skills are you using?

 

[Whisper]

Why this game wont get new content?

p.s. I played it some years ago, awesome game.

 

[Cromwell]

Why this game wont get new content?

because its dead. They finished what they called season one with tokyo. they then proceeded to do nothing for a very long while and afterward came out and said "we didnt do nothing, we did something absolutely useless, heres NuSecret world" and released the new version. They released some story missions and that was it. To my knowledge they didnt release any new story content. There was other new stuff like fiddling with game systems but as said above this thing is a storyfag MMO cut the story out and its just a shit game. The africa missions where somewhere around 2018 if I remember correctly.

 

[Delterius]

Why this game wont get new content?

p.s. I played it some years ago, awesome game.

While secret world never had a massive following whatever money it made was mostly funneled towards Conan projects. This was a good business decision. Whatever investment was put into secret world was either part of the original project design or a means to try and milk it's cult following for even more cash with minimal effort.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

I really liked this too when I tried it after the revamp. It's probably the best, old-school, style MMO out there.

you should have tried it before the revamp. combat was much better, and character development too.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Most of the cutscenes were written before the missions. I spent a lot of time pulling *anything* out of those cutscenes for mission designs.

Not sure which missions you were responsible for, but even the action ones are well above typical MMO quests.

e.g., the intro action mission for Transylvania has you find ghoul nests, cave them in, discover ghoul corpses, link it to the tree they're under, test the hypothesis by luring ghouls to the tree and fighting them under it(weakens them), then trace the tree's roots to which you find an encampment but it turns out you were followed by ghouls and have to help them defend it.

also, the commie Blajini got a good laugh from me.
"It is good they are sheep"

 

[rusty_shackleford]

It's kind of sad that they added quest GPS shit(it's not part of investigation missions tho) when they went through all the effort of creating actual in-game maps for quests

It's a nice map.

 

[Delterius]

the game's investigation missions are worth a playthrough. multiple if you have bad memory. its a fucking joy to be had and the fact funcom didn't continue with this design is why norway shall be purged.

 

[Zombra]

The fact funcom didn't continue with this design is why norway shall be purged.

I'd love to hear about all the creative projects you're still working on full time 10 years later despite them not bringing in any money or even recognition.

 

[Delterius]

The fact funcom didn't continue with this design is why norway shall be purged.

I'd love to hear about all the creative projects you're still working on full time 10 years later despite them not bringing in any money or even recognition.

there's dozens of them, why do you think i have no money or recognition

ps conan could have had cool puzzles too why not

 

[Kem0sabe]

Just let this shit die already. It's a bad game with some ocasional nice story elements that would be reviewed 3/10 at best by the codex if it was single player. Even story wise, everything after New England is fucking terrible.

Funcom are lying pieces of shit that treated their consumers as bad as I have seen any MMORPG developer treat it's player base, they deserve no sympathy.

 

[gurugeorge]

bylam pull some strings and make a secret world 2 with better combat

And make it single player and/or smaller co-op.

Forgot to add that important part. There's absolutely no reason for this to be an MMO.

--
Even though the missions are almost all linear, they're still very enjoyable. Sometimes you just want a game to tell you a story, and this is an amazing game for it.
I go through all the NPC dialogue just because I find the world and characters interesting.

Something I forgot to add is that they did a really good job on something nearly every open-world video game fails at: scale. The hubs are all just tiny parts of larger cities, the zones are mostly a small town and surrounding area. If you put all the New England areas together next to FO4, they're probably not too different sizewise but one is obviously much more correct in scale. Kingsmouth is just a small, backwater town as they say rather than trying to represent something much larger.

New England areas -- overall design, theme, missions, characters -- are fantastic.
Fun trivia: go into spirit mode at the widow's mansion in blue ridge and explore it. She's right, the house is very haunted.
There's a lot of stuff that can only be seen while you're in spirit mode.

I think the main reason for it to be an MMO is that the conspiracy theory content was very friendly to being extended into multiple potential storylines. But alas, it was not to be.

Yeah, when I first played the MMO, it was some of the most peak storyfag gaming I've ever had, and it's a real shame the combat was pretty bad and the game wasn't the hit that it deserved to be (from the story and puzzles side). The illusion of a vast world of arcane conspiracies was very well done - until it sort of petered out towards the end.

 

[infidel]

Stop introducing new characters just for them to get a few lines then disappear forever.

I'm wondering who are you talking about. As far as I remember, MSQ mainly has your handler as a recurring character. The rest are bound to their places on the map mostly, except Beaumont and his chick and they're part of the zone story. Same with Egypt and Transylvania, and I still need to play Tokyo.

Wouldn't recommend spending a dollar on it as I doubt it will get any new content.

If you're playing Legends, it's useful to get some coins needed for quicker upgrades. If not, then you'll need to buy DLCs, I think, they're p cool.

Also here's something that's very cool, an unofficial app that collects all of the ingame lore texts into one place:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sheyon.fivecats.legendslibrary&hl=en

The only thing they're missing are the dialogues.