Building character in The Secret World.

Hachiro

A nice article at IGN.

http://pc.ign.com/articles/118/1181400p1.html

Something i found interesting...

This freedom works well when shown off by Funcom in a demonstration. They set up their own character builds and trounced all the enemies in their way. But from everything I've seen so far, I'm still unsure of how players will react to this freedom – after all, players tend to break things and find exploits. Funcom discussed player roles with terms like tanks, aggro, healer, and more common categorizations. While this is a way to place the game's discussion in a familiar genre-language, it makes me wonder if players won't automatically build the same roles over and over again regardless of their options.

Figure

For an example of a similar system that's already extant in a current MMO, consider Champions Online and their freeform archetype.

As I'm a fan of it, and it's powers, forgive me if I sound biased or anything.  I'll try to be balanced.

 

Balancing becomes incredibly difficult with a massively freeform gameplay style.  What will end up happening very quickly is that different templates and 'expected' (as in generally adopted) builds will be balanced against one another, but by virtue of the nature of the rigors of balance, the 'hybrid' models will not be as balanced. (Common wisdom: Make the stuff that you want to work, work well first, before refining the stuff that you didn't intend to work)

Some different builds will be discarded entirely as they are seen as too weak or ineffectual. (The chances of this happening increase for TSW, due to the sheer number of different powers available.  The likelihood of some powers to be considered by the majority of players to be 'weak' will be very high (regardless of if they actually are).

However, the freeform system does a lot to make good on it's promises.  Even now, you'll find discussions, nearly 2 years after launch, of the 'best' builds for different roles in the game. (Talking about CO).  While many builds and even some powers themselves have been relegated to the scrap heap of discussions, a substantial amount of the powers remaining are always talked about and ititerated on at great length. Total Freeform really changes the whole evolution of builds, primarily by increasing possibilities and thus slowing down the ititerative nature of build refinement.

It turns out that by matching different powers within a specific role, and then balancing them against one another is actually a somewhat easier task and compartmentalizes a lot of balancing work that would otherwise be required.  As Funcom has stated that their approach to design and development of powers is similar to that of a collectible card game's philosophy, they will probably be okay, however do not be surprised if at least 100 or so skills are completely ignored by the community (with good reason in some cases).

sacredfool

Well, I want to be given the freedom, and as long as there is enough people in the community thinking the same way as me, we will not be forced into pure tank/dps/cc/healer roles. And thats enough for me.

Blindchance

He has a point, that exactly what happened in Darkfall. Everyone was the same.

sacredfool

Originally posted by Blindchance

He has a point, that exactly what happened in Darkfall. Everyone was the same.

In DarkFall you can use everything at once. In TSW you can only use 14 out of 500 skills.

Phry

Originally posted by sacredfool

Originally posted by Blindchance

He has a point, that exactly what happened in Darkfall. Everyone was the same.

In DarkFall you can use everything at once. In TSW you can only use 14 out of 500 skills.

actually that kind of freeform i like.. SWG used to have that kind of thing with all the different skill trees etc.. and it was one of the best parts of the game - losing that functionality was really 90 percent of what killed it off..  sounds good to me anyway

sacredfool

Originally posted by Phry

actually that kind of freeform i like.. SWG used to have that kind of thing with all the different skill trees etc.. and it was one of the best parts of the game - losing that functionality was really 90 percent of what killed it off..  sounds good to me anyway

Just to clarify.. in TSW you can only have 14 skills at once, but can have all 500 - you just need to respec (and as we saw in the vid, you can do that even in dungeons)

Vened

TSW  system reminds me EvE - freeform of progression, but limited by ship parameters. You can mount lasers in caldari frigate, but better option is mount railguns or missles.

I bet in TSW it will be working good, same it works in EvE.

arieste

Originally posted by Vened

TSW  system reminds me EvE - freeform of progression, but limited by ship parameters. You can mount lasers in caldari frigate, but better option is mount railguns or missles.

I bet in TSW it will be working good, same it works in EvE.

EVE is a good comparison.  You can have all the skills in the world for flying a stealth bomber, but if you're flying a battleship, you're not using any of them.  Obviously some skills will be more complementary.  Hopefully there will be multiple options.

 

Plus, if a lot of the game is soloing, you can run with some really wacky specs like people do in Rift.