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High Expectations, Sadly Unfulfilled.
TheAncient
Member Posts: 67
I had high hopes for this game and had been following much of the beta reviews and snippets here for the past year and so took the plunge.
The intial download took much longer than expected as the download rate see-sawed from min to max and back almost contantly until it was completed. Once installed and past the three short vids from EA, Funcom, Nvidia the game actually begins. Hmm, just three character slots, is this a slightly better Star Trek Online? It seems not as the character creation options are as limited as you'll ever find in a recent AAA MMO.
Now my machine isn't new, but also isn't a slouch, it happily copes with other MMO's on reasonable settings. Right there on the Character creation screen I could tell my fps was in single figures. Not good. So I enter the config and drop the feature way down and move onto actually playing, except the fps is still bad. So I quit/relog and lower feature still. Same problem, so switch to DX9 which provided a marginal improvement. For the next few weeks I'm going to see this fps problem and find out that some people with top end machines are having the same issue.
SW:TOR I apolgise for cursing as your loading screens as I didn't realise there would be another MMO in the pipeline that would steal your thunder. For example, at one point my characters faction standing required I travel to London. So I wait to load Argatha, then London, find out I have to go to New York, so load Argatha again, and now New York, and finally The solo instance. Each loading screen over a minute long.
The game is basically just a horror themed MMO with an adult Scooby Doo feel. It is very well written in places, and has some nice dialogue which chimes well with the part of the world you are playing in which is totally spoiled by cut scenes in which you character is static, mute and expressionless. All conversation with you is one sided.
The quests are also well written, but again let down by the clunkiest questing system out there. Why limit so severely, why have no quest drop option?
Now the quests do have a difficulty rating, but this is of no use if you have chosen unwisely in what role you wish to play. My first time round was based on a little research which recommended various decks, and generally taking a tanking role in MMO's I'd opted for Bodygaurd (a Hammer & Shotgun combo). This was not much fun for a beginning character as it has no threat and little dps made worse by the poor drop rate of appropriate gear. You find yourself in melee fights dying quite a lot as spend almost all your time avoiding the special monster attacks and hitting as hard as a concussed fly would.
And here's the rub. You cannot respec, and fair enough you will eventually learn every discipline, but if after a weeks play you realise that your choice has been a waste of time, you will have to spend another week just to get back on track as you replay most of the starter area again to gain points. That is if your second choice turns out well, if not...hmmm.
More clunk in combat. The fighting is pretty poor limited to seven active options, which is just button bashing against the badly animated Scooby Doo bad guys.
Frustrating as all this was, it was not helped by crashing especially after using the limited in game browser, nor with server lag (I'm a very old gamer and know when a server is struggling). And we wont say anything about the crafting, lol.
I really wanted this game to be one I could grow into, spend some time enjoying. The lore turned out to be just a mash-up of old conspiracy theories, a little classic horror, myth and borrowed movie ideas. As a result there was no surprises, no "Oh Wow" moments just an endless stream of cliche thrown around a poor MMO engine.
The Secret's Out.
Comments
the loading screen thing is no way near as bad as swtor - theres less of them and they complete much quicker.
also i dont think your pc is "fairly good", i have a mid range PC - FX4 and 6870 - i get 50fps on high.
A review written by someone who clearly didnt understand the combat, skill system, quest system, or point to any of it all.
Sucks you wasted your money though, you could have gotten a buddy key or waited for the august free trial event to find out that this wasnt the quest hub action-mmo you were looking for.
I did LOL at the scooby-doo reference...which is so far off its almost sad. Perhaps you understand scooby-doo as much as you understood TSW...the relation is non-existant.
Lucky for you the game your looking for is a dime a dozen, theres plenty out there for you, for those of us sick of the standard approach this game is fantastic.
I hated the combat too, untill i made a good build, then it was fun as hell, so i can understand how a quick try at the game could give that impression, as was the review of the skill system, which is pretty much dummy proof untill you get to the outer tier of skills. Even then a quick 5min read up on the weapon types, or even looking at the skills in game could help you avoid making poor decisions...a skill reset would only serve purpose perhaps within the first few hours of playing, and even then they make you try out all the weapons before picking...
Well, let's see here...
Download went really fast for me, I was maxed out at 4Mb/sec the whole time. I have everything set to ultra and though it starts to beat my harddrive to death after a couple of hours play, meaning I need more memory, I have no problems whatsoever with fps. The only loading screens are changing locations, like you said, either an instance or travelling through Agartha. You can spend hours in places like Kingsmouth without ever seeing a loading screen, so you may have exagerrated there.
I prefer the one sided conversations - which obviously aren't conversations, they're dialogue from an NPC. It lets my character be MY character, not a character a developer in a suit has made for me. What if I've decided my character is dark and broody but the cutscenes play her up to be light hearted and funny? Wouldn't that be worse than silence?
You should have researched your choices a little more as Bodyguard isn't a tanking deck, the Goon is the tanking deck of the Illuminati. It's no surprise you didn't get much threat from that deck. The crafting is good, the first crafting I've even bothered with in an MMO, but I guess if you spent time researching a deck that wasn't actually the deck you were looking for, then the more complex crafting system would have obviously been too much for you.
Well the game is a whopping 30 something gigs so it will take a while. I have the same issues with it dipping up and down sometimes down to bytes, ouch lol. I think it's best to start with a ranged weapons but might just be my personal preferance. The crafting is pretty good as well. Through the game I was able to make many useful things, rifles, runes, gadgets. I am not to big on the combat and think the character models are a bit uninspired as well as there animations but the good outways the bad to me.
I have a pretty decent computer, on the high end of "mid-range."
I7-2700k, GTX570, 16 gigs ddr3. I run the game with everything on Ultra at 50FPS, never dipping below 40. I have a buddy who has a lower end system, and he runs the game at 25-30 consistently. If you are coming from WoW @ 50FPS on a 5 year old PC and you're wondering why you are getting 10-15 FPS, I wonder why. As for loading screens, it sounds like a memory or hard drive issue to me. On fresh load after booting up my computer, it takes about 30 seconds to load into the game. From zone to zone, it takes about 15. I think you need a computer update bud, especially if you intend on playing GW2...
Additionally, although the game has its faults, basically every point you made is flawed imo. The pvp is a joke, and after you get through the pve content it turns into every other MMO end game, but getting to end game was quite refreshing. i didn't resub after my first month, but the game was absolutely worth $50 if only for the single player content I garnered.
Yah I would have to agree with your assessment of the game.
TSW has done some things really well and others really poorly.
I'll play it until GW2 comes out.
Then I'm gone.
Noone who played TSW longer than a few hours IS NOT ASKING FOR RESPEC. The game has respec built within its advancement system. Again, YOU CAN RESPEC in TSW, just play the game, that's a respec, YOU CAN'T DO any permanent damage to your character. The RESPEC in TSW is in fact, limitless, doesn't cost anything,you just need to do a couple of quests -- the more EXP you used on abilities you don't need, the more quests you need to do to RESPEC, For example, if you used 150 APs on abilities you don't need then you have to do about 5 quests to get 2 mil XP, which is enough to get "back" those 150 APs.
This is not a valid complaint. This is the most common complaint from people that actually never played the game, or very shortly, and just wants to troll it.
And if you REALLY REALLY REALLY want to try the abilities first before spending APs on it, you can go to the TRAINING ROOM in your faction area, spend the APs, fight the dummies there, and "reset" them when you leave the room. I guess, you never ever heared about that feature right? If you had read the info in the tutorial area YOU'D know that.
REALITY CHECK
i have a high end gaming pc with two 6970s and a OC 4.3 fx6100 TSW runs okay in DX9 it runs like a POS in DX11 . Tessallation is horrid at best , you run through a building your frames drop to 10 from 60 . About once a hour in DX11 the game used to lock up , not sure now as i havent logged in , in over two weeks. TSW may be a decent game to most but saying it has such great performance is telling a lie. Also ive played with multiple builds , they are not all that. I wont diss the animation because nowadays its Triple A standard to have crappy animations but to each their own. Also the loading screens are annoying as it can be pretty long sometimes but GW2 has them also and they can be long to so not sure OP if your going to like that much either with the loading times and I play GW2 , they have way more loading screens if you are doing WvW and PVE then the secret world.
Well this game is a lot like old EvE... It takes a very patient soul to not toss the game in the bin and write it off as a bad investment. Now this ofc works both ways for the game, the community on one hand are all mared by the same knife and thus have a sense of bond. It does limit the size of said community though.
Ofc not that this is any concern to the "community" that frequent this site but i would be kind of worrisome to the company making the game, not to mention any investor (ask mythic about that... WAR felt the full brunt of NIS (nervous investor syndrome) ) So enjoy it while you can because soon they will start tweaking it to be more newbie friendly.
This have been a good conversation
Weird I have a GTX 580 Super Overclocked 16 Gigs of ram and a 8150 eight core cpu clocked at 3.6 turbo to 4.5 and the game runs like a dream on Direct x 11 maxed out , top Frames were 90 , sometimes in certain areas they drop but every mmo is like that, however Cron I agree with you, I had a similar issue with it at the start where I was barely making 30 frames , so what I did I uninstalled the game ( because it was te beta client ) reinstalled it with my disk and uninstalled windows security essentials and now TSW runs at 90 FPS and I couldn't be happier, if you want to play later , give that a shot it helped me out.
its a tessalation error on their part and not a beta client i had the full client after release. I could turn off tessalation and it would give me 60 frames per second , i run frames capped at 60 so i dont get tearing after gaming for awhile so i will never get 90. Like i said the game might be different since the last couple of patches but the only thing that will bring me back to TSW is if they overhaul that horrible skill wheel and take out the filler skills that are everywhere and add in useful skills that merit investment outside of your typical cookie cutter 4 or 5 builds in melee and the same in ranged. Also they have tons of work to do on pvp before it will ever resemble fun to me. If that happens latter on down the road ill be inclined to try it again. But now that the shiny newness is wearing off after the first month more posts like this are popping up. Dont get me wrong TSW is far from a terrible game but their current skill wheel system has much to be desired and their pvp is horrible.
Oh man...you really are missing some major parts of the skill wheel.
Those skills are not fillers, they are either damage specific, work off a passive proc, or run off a different gear stat. Unless your talking about the inner circle of skills...yeah some are a bit redundant but i think they did that to stop people from gimping themselves in kingsmouth.
You really missing a lot of the skill complexity if you thing a builder is just a builder and a resource spender is just a rescource spender...
Sorry, thought that was pretty funny and see huge potential as the new TSW meme.
I like the idea behind the game and took a close look at it early on but I'm not new to FunCom MMOs so I stayed away. I think it's great that people can look past the bugs or lack of content and enjoy the game for what it is. It may end up being a niche game but that's not a bad thing. More variety in games is good for all of us and even a modest amount of success might encourage someone else to take the idea and go with it.