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So I got to try The Secret World at PAX
Sovrath
Member LegendaryPosts: 32,002
I'll assume that discussing what my experience at PAX entailed is "ok" since they didn't have us sign anything.
They were having players play on a multitude of maps. I got the play in the "Maine" map (Innsmouth? something like that) and didnt' get to make a character, just used what they had at hand.
The booth gm set me up and I was off. I have to admit that my playstyle is to ignore some of the beaten path and just go in a direction I want so I'm sure I missed many quests along the way.
The graphics are decent but if you are into HD graphics where you can practically touch every fiber of the clothing then you might be dissapointed.
The characters moved fluently and the attacks were very immediate. Meanign that if I pressed an ability it went off quickly and smoothly.
It seemed you could remap your skills and I probably would as some of them seemed a bit odd. Like ~ to take out my weapon.
There was some gltichiness. I don't know where they are in their beta process but the first glitch was one that I saw on another player's monitor. Was actually very funny. He ran into a room and suddenly a cut scene started. A person behind the desk was talking, and as the camera swung around the player's avatar came into view frozen in mid-air in a running stance.
I had to laugh at that one.
as for me, sometimes the map wouldn't close when pressing "m" and sometimes it did. At one point I couldn't run up a slight incline and thought that someone had accidentally dropped an invisible wall there. Just a glitchy area I assume. I ran into a skateboard park and found a guy there who wanted me to do something for him, again, a little cutscene. Problem was that when the cutscene stopped so did the game. I could use the keyboard controls to bring up the options but couldn't move or jump. The boothgm then tried to use her gm powers to move me but that didn't work so we had to restart. At the same time two other people lost connection so I will assume that was what caused the issue.
After that I explored a bit.
There were definitly dangerous areas and I had my butt handed to me a few times when these zombie things came chasing after me. I wasn't quite sure how to tell if a mob was too high for me so I made a "few mistakes" there.
The atmosphere was good and the voice acting was also good. If you had problems with SWToR's quest cut scenes you might have issues with this. You didn't have a choice on where the cut scene went but it was a voiced, cut scene to deliver the quest.
Not all the quests were like that and some you just chose, got a text box with a difficulty rating and you accepted or declined.
I was also able to bring up a wheel of choices that "I think" had to do with your skills but I was more concerned with exploring the area. You really couldn't get into most buildings but I was able to get into a church. They also did a presentation of some game play with a really cool chimera kind of "Boss" that was huge.
My thought is that if you are the type of player who likes atmosphere and story telling then the game might be for you. If you are really looking for "a sandbox" or are hate cut scenes/story then you might have issues. Oh, and the sound was pretty good, very visceral.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
Comments
Thank you for the info, very helpful.
Another thing I might add, and I'm sort of on the fence about how to interpret it, is that when I panned my camera around, it was pretty smooth but on occasion the game with freeze up for a nano second as if it needed to load something.
Additionally, there were a few times when I panned the camera around where I felt the computer that the game was running on wasn't quite up to snuff. Not sure how to describe it but its' as if the scene "shook" with the rendering.
The camera was smooth but the passing scene was a bit "jagged" as if the computer couldn't quite render the scene smoothly.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
Thank you both, so far it sounds prity much as I exspected to be, it is FUNCOM so the instanced world is standard and it probably taxes the hell out of present day computers, as Conan did.
Thanks for the info, both, nicely done.
Very disappointing news about the game being heavily instanced.
Have you played Age of Conan, the world is instanced, but it is by zone and they feel quite large.
No open world exploration and heavily instanced makes me a sad panda but we knew that already. Im just wondering how linear the entire game truly is.
I cant wait to give it a go my self none the less.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shadow_Over_Innsmouth
Nice to see Lovecraft influence in any game
Here's a dream: I would love it they had learned from the starer city in AOC and the entire game world ran like Tortage
The game is full of Stephen King and Lovecraft influences: town's called Kingsmouth, it has streets like Lovecraft Lane and Arkham Avenue. Some of the monsters also look decidedly Lovecraftian, as if coming straight from the Cthulhu Mythos world.
All regions seem to have a theme though: The New England/Maine region has Lovecraft and King influences, while the Egyptian region is more about the good old mummy stuff and curses and such.
I absolutely love the themes and inspirations of this game, yet something is still failing to ignite my passion for it... Not sure what.
Keeping an open (though cautious until I see the NDA dropped) mind though. Fingers crossed.
I have, and I didn't care for the zones being instanced. Then again, I'm not sure there is any other way it could have been done for TSW because of the way it's set up, with different regions in the real world that don't border each other. I took the "heavily instanced" comment to be more than just instanced zones. If the instancing is confined to different zones, and not sub-zones, then I can live with that.
Nice to have some firsthand gameplay information about the game.
You may not be able to answer fully, but from a character development perspective (skills, gear, any other development systems), did it look as though it would be particularly deep and interesting to develop your character in the long term?
Hell hath no fury like an MMORPG player scorned.
From what my friend explained to me, it is similar to SWTOR. Seems like as a SWTOR fan you'd probably enjoy it.
"Gypsies, tramps, and thieves, we were called by the Admin of the site . . . "
Did you play when AoC supported a large enough playerbase that zones had multiple instances? That the only reason you won't see much instancing nowadays in AoC it lacks the playerbase to enable them. That doesn't mean it's not in the game.
The way AoC world was setup was also one of my bigger gripes about the game. The world is disjointed and as such doesn't feel like a world to me. TSW is the same from what I gather.
Unfortunately, it's one of my major gripes about SWTOR. I'd prefer not to play another game that has that many instances. Being a fan of the game doesn't mean I don't have some serious issues with some aspects of it.
Ah crap like SWTOR i was thinking of buying this,please don't ruin it for me !!
No I did not play AoC till the F2P.
It seems as if you might mean fazing (as WoW does now) or do you mean what Aion did where you has to realy shift servers? to be with a friend in the same zone?
Could you give me an example please.
IMO, character development is pretty interesting, you have a lot of combinasons as you can learn all the skills (magic, rifle, pistol, shortgun, blade, etc.), which means you don't need to reroll another character in order to learn another skill (classe).
about gears , I don't get any for now, but I noticed that you can build custom presets to be able to switch quickly depending on situation or you combat style (close combat, magic, etc.).
and you have the items of chakra to enforce your abilities such as health,attack rating, etc. these items can be found from loot or quests.
I dont know the specification of the Rig the gameplay was tested on, but I expect it to be high end. This does not bode well for for what I consider middle of the road or even low end, say a Windows 7 Home Premium 32-bit, Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU E4600 @ 2.40GHz (2 CPUs), 2048MB RAM, and NVIDIA GeForce GT 440 (1760 MB).
If the game "occasionly will freeze up", on what I expect to be near perfect conditions (network and machine both high end). My past experience is that at this poingt in development, all optimization has been done. That is to say, little has been done to an out of the box game engine. Maybe it wasn't optimal conditions. Also understand, TSW is in my top 3 games I am looking forward to playing and I am not a hatter. But I am worried. BTW, Heavy lean toward Templar, with a urge for Dragon.
Boy: Why can't I talk to Him?
Mom: We don't talk to Priests.
As if it could exist, without being payed for.
F2P means you get what you paid for. Pay nothing, get nothing.
Even telemarketers wouldn't think that.
It costs money to play. Therefore P2W.
Aion would be similar yes.
But you can still see it yourself, go to poitain and stand on top of a respad. Press the orange triangle next to the minimap to see all the different instances.
More than likely the network is not near perfect. The backend server infrastructure is probably in their data center and not at PAX.
Thanks for the insight.
I really like to have a lot of depth in character development, and a lot of avenues to travel in doing so. I know crafting is supposed to be pretty involved, and supposedly has a good synergy with the skill-based design of the game. Hopefully there are a good range of worthwhile and fun activities available to the player in developing a character.
It's hard to determine all that without a comprehensive test of the entire game, but this is good information nonetheless.
Hell hath no fury like an MMORPG player scorned.
What are some of the King influences? What you mention are all Lovecraft related except changing the name of Innsmouth to Kingsmouth. But that's not realy an influence. It's more of a tip of the hat. Is there anything that actually seems to be inspired by King, or maybe even Clive Barker, which would also be very cool?
The game is just as instanced as Age of Conan, but because of a design descis...Grsssh! *NDA - sorry* ..it doesn't even get close to breaking the immersion as in AoC. I for one couldn't stand the instancing in AoC, but in The Secret World it actually doesn't really bother me - though I'd still prefer it to be seamless
And one more little NDA-leak; They just revamped the entire network-architecture a little month ago, while they admitted that it would result in worse performance than before, till they would have optimized the new architecture. Something they're still working on. Myself for instance, still have much worse performance now than before the architecture update.