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Impressions from the early access launch of TSW.
Connlai
Member Posts: 26
I have just been looking over my new home for the coming years. Funcom allowed their pre-orders access to The Secret World today. It was a day that I have both been looking forward to and dreading. Looking forward to because to me TSW is the only game this year that shows an ounce of originality, all the rest are just reiterations of a worn and played to death formula. Dreading it because as has been posted on these forums again and again, Funcom has had a few shaky launches.
Well, I am glad to say, it works, they've done it. Apart from a pretty annoying delay in claiming your preorder items, I couldn't find any glitches. They have delivered on their promises, animations have been improved. Character generation has been improved. There were no problems logging on to the server, but boy was it packed. 
Kingsmouth was teeming with players getting their feet wet and slaying zombies like there was no tomorrow, still, lag was not an issue I noticed. As an Nvidia owner, I did not experience any glaring graphical glitches. Combat animations have been improved, there is more weight to the weapons now, active dodge is in...
4 hours of playtime is not enough to do this game justice and write a proper review, but I thought I would share my experiences as there has been a lot of negative posts regarding this game. It is not everyones cup of tea, you actually need some patience, but it is a beautifully fleshed out universe. The amount of detail, especially lore wise is just staggering.
I just hate that I have to go to work in the morning, otherwise I would stay in TSW until the break of dawn. Funcom, you finally did it, two thumbs up for going above and beyond my expectations.
And now, I will leave this thread and pass the word to others that have played the early access, how has your experience been? Similar experiences, or am I just a smitten fanboy (I admit, Funcom has a special place in my gaming heart).
Good night, and may your path always be well lit, and the shadows weak and terrified.
Conlai Darkmoor
Templar
Comments
This might get ugly
Hehe@better than expected. I predict that as the clear winner.
Nice!!! no problem whatsoever. Preordered today, got in more or less instantly. They started leting people later then promised. But a part from that no problems.
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Had a great time. This was even better than I expected. Rather impressive how stable this game is. Can't remember any game beeing this good at launch
Two thumbs up! And good night
Having a blast so far, do not have the best pc on the planet and able to play everything in the highest settings possible without lag whatsoever. (other than one instance at the firehouse which scared the @#$# out of me) lol.. game runs smoothly, animations are fixed, better than i had hoped for and having a blast... stomach is growling so i got off the game to eat and saw this post popup. after food i will be gone for the whole weekend doing nothing but TSW.
Rofocal
Server: Grim
Lucifuge
Was going along fine until I accessed the in-game web browser and then went to The Secret World website to investigate the whereabouts of my pre-order stuff. The game crashed. Evidently Funcom has some self loathing issues. It took about 5 minutes before I could log back in after that. Other than this, the game ran fine.
I make spreadsheets at work - I don't want to make them for the games I play.
No option for waiting 3-6 months until its free. So i guess better than expected is probably the easiest answer. Ive never judged a game based off its launch though. Sometimes things just happen, sometimes they dont. Really has absolutely zero impact on whether its actually a good game or not.
Would i rate a boring, stale game that has a smooth lauch higher than an impressive fun and engaging game that had a rocky start? Hell no.
Does TSW fall under either of those descriptions? Yes it does. The latter of course. I love the game, could care less about Funcom or not, i beleive any company deserves to try to put out a good product, and the games will speak for themselves. In this case, the only problem TSW has is the subscription. The industry has changed in the last decade, hell the last couple years alone, and theres no room in the market right now for a subscription game. Theres just too many AAA games already released or even releasing soon that dont require a monthly sub.
So am i impressed with TSW? Yes. Will i ever pay for it? Not a chance.
Yeah, the item store is disabled and so is collecting pre-order items. Some people managed to get them.
Someone mentioned animations being fixed, this is simply not try. top and bottom bodies are still treated as seperate entities. (learned this while trying to platform jump to some honeycombs)
It is still true that they fixed animations, meaning they removed the placeholder ones and added more variety, different spellcasting moves, changing the jumping animation. What you want is something that Funcom has said they will be unable to fix, for you to be able to run and gun, cast spells and so forth, the upper and lower bodies will continue to be seperate entities.
To those that answered in the poll: a horrendous unplayable mess, I would like to see some constructive comments from you as well, or are you just GW 2 fanboys that went and pressed the poll anyway, even though you haven't actually played the game?
Even though a stable launch isn't the end all or be all of a game, I think it's pretty clear that Funcom finally has one of those to pin to their belt as well.
Conlai Darkmoor
Templar
There is no "Just show me scores" option...
Played for about 5 hours with not a single issue (ok a few minor ones but not game breaking).
The game suffers though from being seemingly boring and simple at first but a little play time reveals a slightly harsher learning curve than most mmo's and once the basics are down reveals a very interesting game. Still waiting on a few weeks of play time however before final judgement.
You stay sassy!
It's an alright experience so far for me. The game still has / needs room to grow. If they can slowly refine the animations and such for combat the game should be fairly healthy for some time.
The atmosphere is going to be the shinning point in this game hands down. Modern day, mature setting; no elves, dwarves or dragons (at least the scalely kind) is a good change of pace.
It's definately a game you want to take your time with. Investigation missions and grabbing up lore bits are a big draw that people should take advantage of. They absolutely did alot of research to piece together all the conspiracy parts to give the game life.
Will have to see what the deep "end-game" stuff has to offer. I haven't even done the first dungeon yet and am just enjoying building my character with the skills I want..
PM before you report at least or you could just block.
As far as end game is concerned, I am taking my sweet ass time with it. I also have holidays in a month where I won't log into a pc at all (I am a computer analyst ...I need a vacation from computers too).
You stay sassy!
Logged in for 5 minutes before going to work today and was able to get hold of some of my pre-order/The Secret War items, including my mmorpg.com t-shirt, so it seems that part is working as well now.
Now I just have to finish off my shift and I can get back to adventuring in style with my mmorpg.com t-shirt and genuine snake-skin jacket.
I just wondered, is there a way to count individual textures in a game? I am thinking that TSW must be one of the games with the most amount of individual textures ever, if not now, then some time very soon, if they keep adding wardrobe elements at this rate. Bunny slippers FTW.
For a Funcom MMO launch it was near perfect. Only problem was when CS crashed because everyone was trying to claim pre order bonuses. Other then that no issues.
I will put TSW launch up with Rift as one of the most smoothest launches ever for MMOS.
No crashes, no server outage, no horrible lag, minimal bugs and everything working just as expected.
I pre-ordered, because I was intrigued by this game, but now I feel sorry for my waisted money. During 4 hour play, game crushed like 10 times(and I have Nvidia 560Ti and sandy bridge i7 ). Moreover I could not complete some missions because of bugs(There was mission when you have to kill fire chief, and when I kill him nothing happens. And the one with puzzle about Gold,Girl,Sorrow,Secret when you have to click on ravens on the ground. In my version ravens started to multiply like crazy casing the entire system to freez). And the most frustrating thing was that I could not start another mission without discarding all my progress in the buggy one. So witing for GW2 I guess.
The times I have played voer the weekend I have not had any issues at all.. one of the best MMORPGs launches I have been a part of and I have been in quite a a few hehe
I thought as I had played through the beta weekends i would not want to watch the cut scenes again, but i dound myself watching them and not getting bored even tho i had already gone through most of them at least 3 times..
I think there was one or two buggy missions in the starter area, but there was no many more i had no issues with that.. no crashes or anything game ran stable totalyl maxed out on my ATI 6850..
Sadly ive had to go to work as well, tho the servers are down for a patch anyway.. but what makes it worse is that I got more work tonight LOL so prob wont get much time to play.
I have same cpu and GPU setup and having none of the isues you are describing... Sounds like your system has something else going on. This happen in both dx9 and dx11 clients?I angered the clerk in a clothing shop today. She asked me what size I was and I said actual, because I am not to scale. I like vending machines 'cause snacks are better when they fall. If I buy a candy bar at a store, oftentimes, I will drop it... so that it achieves its maximum flavor potential. --Mitch Hedberg
Well with dx11 it is known issue with Nvidia and TSW reliably crushes after 2-4 minutes. When in dx9 crush usually provoked by some other bug like multiplying birds or opening in game browser.
Great launch. Great game.
The beta was done right though. That had a LOT to do with the launch being so smooth.
BigCountry | Head Hunters | www.wefarmpeople.com
very odd seems you got something else going on.. this happen in any other games? i have about 15 hours played now and yet to have a single crash.. i had some crashing issues in beta with DX11 but never any issues with dx9
I angered the clerk in a clothing shop today. She asked me what size I was and I said actual, because I am not to scale. I like vending machines 'cause snacks are better when they fall. If I buy a candy bar at a store, oftentimes, I will drop it... so that it achieves its maximum flavor potential. --Mitch Hedberg
I am running DX11 with the latest NVidia Drivers on a GTX460 with out any crashes. I have been playing since BWE4.
Hmm me too DX11 runs flawless and looks drop dead gorgeous.
The statement I have bolded is incorrect: when you "pause" a mission you reset the current tier: so in the case of "Something Wicked," if you went off and did something else until you found yourself in a channel (I hate the use of "instance" in this context but it's become established terminology in TSW) where it hadn't bugged out, you could have gone back to Norma to resume the mission then gone straight to the ravens without needing to run around repeating tiers 1-3. On Arcadia last night there were frequent posts (bordering on spam) in general offering invites to "instances" where Something Wicked 4/4 was working.
Also re: "mission when you have to kill fire chief" if you mean Missing Persons: that mission does not update when you kill the named zombies, but when you "find" (which seems to mean, target) them. Also there are two zombie fire chiefs, are you sure you had the right one? I was in the last few weeks of CB & don't recall that one being the subject of many bug posts on the forums or complaints in general (unlike, say, Something Wicked, The Black House, Taking the Purple).
just saying, there is only ONE server. grim is your dimension
"I'll never grow up, never grow up, never grow up! Not me!"