The Secret World, Beta Impressions

After playing for about 10 hours, I think I can make a slightly naive assessment of the game.  I did not play PvP, and spent almost all of my time in Kingsmouth Landing and the Savage Coast.   The story and atmosphere are extremely good, whereas the character customization and combat were pretty underwhelming.   The three factions offer an interesting choice, but I found for the most part, faction doesn’t really matter.  There is fun to be found in this game, but it is hidden behind frustration, agony, and turmoil of poorly implemented features. 

Edit:  This by no means a full, or even knowledgeable review of the game.  The opinions below are merely my first impressions of the game!

I played to tier 12 of the story "Dawning of the Endless Night", sadly no one could continue because one of the zones was not open during this beta. This storyline offered some of my favorite moments in the game. Fantastic, horrifying, satisfying. There were several other quests that were pretty fun too. Having to dodge lights, navigating around booby traps, solving puzzles. I love how the game gives you enough information to find what you are looking for, but not enough that you are ever quite sure what you are doing. For example, it provides a circle over a gas station and tells you to find a camera. After a while and no luck, you start walking around the gas station, only to find you can jump up on the roof by jumping on a dumpster, and on the edge of the roof is a camera. Quite fun, but it can be frustrating. Sometimes the AI will tell you find something specific, but it will provide you a giant area to look in. Many of those quests, I simply cannot find the quest target and I am forced into switching to a new quest. Other quests, are simply bugged. There’s one quest that asks you to follow a raven, and every time I started the quest. Instead of flying off, the raven would just disappear.

The cut scenes ranged from fantastic to slightly average, but were almost always interesting to watch.  In the first two minute of the game, my character had oral sex.  While slightly strange and off-putting, I can’t say I was bored.  Other times the cutscenes were terrifying, and many of the character’s personalities were complex and interesting.  However, I would like to see the character we control to have more of a response.  In every cutscene, I just stare blankly at the person talking, give me some dialogue and action please.  Connection with your character is important, and the Secret World falls extremely flat in this category.  The character creator is rather bland and boring.  Many of the characters in-game end up looking alike, and it’s sad to see such poor implementation.

On the other hand, the combat has improved since the previous iterations I've seen in videos of other beta events.  Specifically the animation quality has definitely improved.  However, let me be clear, this is not great combat.  TERA and Guild Wars 2 are on a completely different level when it comes to animation, impact, and the flow of combat. 

One of the biggest frustrations in my experience was the lack of quality vendors and access to upgrades.  So this beta, I liked to use an Assault Rifle and Blade, however I could not find an upgrade to my starting weapon.  Let me explain, since there are no levels in the game, the restriction on use of items are through skill points.  There are 11 levels of quality of gear, Q0-Q10, with 10 being the best.  However, to use a Q4 gear you would then have to make sure you had enough skill level for that slot.   Sure, I could find Q4 blood focus, Q3 elemental focus, but I feel like I was forced into using them.  Even worse, to use the different weapons I would then have to sacrifice skill points in order to use them.  So I could either waste skill points on a weapon I did not like simply because it had a much higher offensive rating than my standard assault rifle, or I could stay with my weak rifle.   Worse when asking around general chat and finding vendors in both my home instance of Seoul and throughout Kingsmouth Landing and the Savage Coast to find no way to upgrade. I had nearly 100,000 coins and yet they couldn’t buy me a single upgrade in gear.  And the tokens that I gained from quests were not nearly enough to buy an upgrade.  I was stuck into playing a weapon I did not want and wasting skill points, or forced to play the weapon I wanted that was weaker than what it should be.  I chose to stick with my rifle and blade combo, and I was forced to trudge through rather difficult content.

The difficulty in this game is pretty slanted towards a higher level of difficulty. However, while I like high difficulty in the game, it must be justified.  In this game, I’m not really sure if it is.  It’s one thing to have a complicated puzzles with good directions to follow.  It’s another to have a relatively simple puzzle with absolutely atrocious directions to follow. You will spend 10-15 minutes trying to figure out an objective to a standard quest, sometimes this is fun because you are trying to find clues or think your way through.  Other times, it’s because of frustratingly poor instructions to a meaningless quest.  It can be fun, but it often is not.  Another problem is that there often is no way to tell if mobs are higher “level” than you.  The only way to find out is to charge in and hope you don’t get your ass kicked.  If you do, then you have to ignore that area until you find some upgrades. 

In PvP, the Dragon faction was getting absolutely obliterated.  While I never joined it, it was very easy to tell from the browser that we had no chance in any of the arenas/battlefields/some big area zone field thingy.  Worse after watching some videos, it seems that there is no queue.  Which is fine, but when the two opposing teams have ten people, and yours has three, is that really fair?  Shouldn’t you just have a queue to at least have fairly even teams?

I think what the most revealing aspect of this weekend was how relatively rough the game is, especially since the game is launching next week.  On the opposite side of the spectrum we have Guild Wars 2, that really at this point has extremely minor issues, and we still don’t even have a launch date.  The game has potential, and I do believe it will have a niche following, but God is this revealing.   I don’t think the launch will be nearly as bad as Age of Conan, but this game could see some problems.  During Beta, the game went down at least once for four hours of maintenance.  You know how long Guild Wars 1 was down in the entirety of its seven years of existence, 32 hours. 

In fairness, this game is not a bad game.  The Funcom team definitely created a compelling story with a very lively, interactive world.  However through poor implementation and combat, much of the magic is lost.  This game is one of the strongest of the new releases of MMOs in the last couple of years, however that being said, I don’t think the game is worth buying. (Especially since there is a certain game coming out this year, you may have heard of it.)  The fact that the Secret World has a subscription fee, will have a niche following, and is frustratingly rough at this point in time, I would advise most of you to stay away from the game.  I highly recommend that you try the game when there’s a free trial, but don’t pay money for it.   A few of you will like the game, but many of you will not.