Tag Archives: The Secret World

Games of 2012 in review

Posted on by
Reply

An article on Metacritic lamenting that the game releases in 2012 did not do very well for video games is generating some degree on controversy, partly because it is Metacritic, whose scores of games from big publishers always seems to be higher than they deserved, and also partly because some feel that indie games were not well represented.

More importantly, it is controversial because it is true, at least in this author’s opinion.

2012 had a lot of big titles, but what happened?

By no means was there a lack of titles for 2012. On the contrary, 2012 saw a large number of huge titles being released, but the majority of them either missed the mark, or hype surrounding it died soon after its release, along with the players actually playing it. Mass Effect 3′s ending disappointed. The long anticipated Diablo 3 proved fun for about 2, maybe 3, weekends, and then everyone got bored of the grind. Likewise for Guild Wars 2, which despite a successful launch and overloaded servers in the initial week, had most people reached level cap soon enough and then disappeared. Max Payne 3 departed too much from its previous installments in the franchise, and became Just Another Shooter™. Warfighter bombed, and sunk the entire Medal of Honor franchise along with it. Hitman Absolution, to quote PCMag’s review, is ‘bland and uninteresting’, despite having a trailer that offended quite a number of people.

The real losers? Subscription based MMOs.

The most expensive game produced (not just counting MMOs), Star Wars: The Old Republic, went free-to-play in slightly under a year after its launch. This was then followed a month later by The Secret World, a game only a few months old, dropping the subscription model and going with only the box cost. While I’m not ready to herald that that the free-to-play model will be the future of MMOs, and I still have my doubts about such a model being sustainable AND still producing quality games, the MMO bubble that has been growing ever since every company tried to jump on the bandwagon after World of Warcraft’s success had finally burst. WoW and EVE still have their stable populations, but the barrage of titles coming out in rapid succession year after year has halted. In fact, I can’t think of any title off hand from a Western publisher that’s coming up in 2013. A quick look up just reminded me of The Elder Scrolls Online, but the reason I didn’t think of it in the first place is that I have doubts about the game being able to capture the spirit of The Elder Scrolls series in an MMO setting.

So, what was good?

Some might argue that the best game for 2012 technically isn’t a 2012 game at all. Persona 4: The Golden, an improved port of an older game for the PS2, has been the largest time sink for me. I’ve clocked 89 hours on my saved game thus far, and I’m still not done with my first playthrough, and with plenty of ideas for the next. I don’t think I’ve sunk that many hours into a handheld game since Pokémon. For a single player game, I think it’s probably around the 3rd with the most number of hours clocked, behind Morrowind and Skyrim.

Dishonored was also a great title, which I covered in a previous article. I’m led to believe that Borderlands 2 and XCOM were also excellent titles, which I couldn’t quite get into. You apparently had to be a fan of the 1994 XCOM to appreciate the current title, which I wasn’t, having never played it then.

Sleeping Dogs is apparently a sleeper hit, but I can’t give my opinion on it yet since I’ve yet to play the copy I picked up during Steam Winter Sales. That is what I suspect I’ll be doing over the next few days.

Not quite Tahrir square

Posted on by
Reply

Not quite Tahrir square

The fog gave way to a sandstorm, and I found myself in Egypt. Egypt, which itself is subdivided into a few zones, is the second major setting in The Secret World, after Solomon Island. Having grown weary of Ak’abs and mountainous regions, a vast, open and mostly level desert was much welcomed.

Here in virtual Egypt, the people have much worse than Mubarak or the military council to contend with. Other than being besieged by a doomsday cult, Egypt is a picturesque place, more reminiscent of One Thousand and One Nights than the Arab Spring. Quests often had me navigating areas in a Prince of Persia fashion, or had me take on Rick O’Connell’s role in The Mummy.

Egypt continues the story arc involving black oil The Filth, and the first zone in Egypt culminates in a dungeon, The Ankh, a zone evocative of Nazi occult fantasy, with the big bad aptly named ‘Doctor Klein’. After a few runs of the instance, I was mostly in QL8 gear and had also completed my soldier deck, unlocking a nice looking appearance set.

Reward for completing the ‘Soldier’ deck

I can’t decide what deck I should go for next. Magus comes with a outfit that I like, and the elementalist spells look fun, but it would be wiser picking up a healer or a tank spec instead of another dps spec as that would give me more options for grouping. Picking up the assault rifle/blood magic healer spec wouldn’t be too hard as I already have one of weapons, as well as the inner ring of assault rifle completed. The other specs would take more work.

Hmmm, decisions.

Pixel Hunt

Posted on by
Reply

Adventure games can be broadly divided into two different categories, namely, guess the verb, and pixel hunt. A large number of The Secret World’s investigation missions fall into the latter.

That’s not to say they’re all bad. I’ve a few favorites, like decoding a radio transmission in morse code, and placing a subset of objects in a certain order to open vaults, but some of them, or some parts of the quest, unfortunately, degrade into a painful and retina traumatizing pixel hunt. It’s not that bad in the old days when you only had somewhere in the area of 300,000 pixels (640*480) to work with (okay, it is bad), but now there’s 2 million (1920*1080) of them, and these wonderful Direct X 11 effects don’t make things any easier.

Some items are helpfully outlined, some are not. Despite, the outline, some are woefully small enough only to be obvious when zoomed into first person view and hugging any objects in your vicinity. The ones which aren’t outlined require a combination of mouse dexterity and fortitude as you make a scan of the entire area until you notice your cursor change into that of a gear, meaning you found something that you can interact with.

I’ve played a fair share of adventure games in the past, including those from CD-ROMs that came tucked in cereal boxes. Despite the huge nostalgia I have for the many tropes of the genre, pixel hunting is definitely not one of them.

The (previously) Secret World

Posted on by
1

Because Ragnar Tørnquist smashed my heart into a thousand little pieces by pretty much announcing that he wouldn’t be working on the sequel to Dreamfall in a response to an interview on Rock Paper Shotgun, an excerpt of which is provided below, and also because Aelyrra wouldn’t stop pestering me, I picked up The Secret World.

RPS: Do you ever plan on going back to single-player games, especially single-player adventure games?

Tornquist: I think right now I’ve made an MMO, and it’s taken six years of my life. I’m going to stick around and stay with The Secret World for a while, but I would love to do something [single-player again].

Congratulations, Ragnar Tørnquist, you just made it on to my mortal enemies list.

The Secret World’s no longer so secret world is a refreshing break from the littered landscape of fantasy MMORPGs. The game belongs to the urban fantasy sub-trope, something that’s surprisingly not at all common these days, glittering teenage vampires not withstanding. Casually, I can only think of one game, Vampire: The Masquerade, and one author, Laurell Hamilton in the genre.

Being based on a modern world setting has it usefulness, such as making cultural references and other allusions to things that would have been anachronistic in a usual fantasy setting. There’s a character named Ann Radcliffe, who is uncomfortable with having being named after a person of such accomplishment. There’s also a store that sells outdoor supplies named ‘Call of the Wild’. And then there’s this.

Reference from Fight Club

My character, Calreth, is a Templar on the Huldra server. I also have an Illuminati alt, and I seem to prefer the Illuminati story more, but since my friends are on the side of the Templars, that is where I spent most of my game time. As an initiate of the Templars, my handler seems to be a technologically incompetent M, and the head guy (I have no idea what to call him), a Samuel L. Jackson impersonator. Unlike the other two societies (Illuminati and Dragon), the Templars seem be living out the in open, with their headquarters as a copy of the Vatican City but smack down right in the middle of London, and populated by the entire cast of Downtown Abbey.

On the other hand, the Illuminati, headquartered in an up market part of New York City’s sewers, has it parallels with the Syndicate in X-Files, which is perhaps what drew me to it. I can go around pretending to play the role of the Cigarette Smoking Man, a character of questionable qualities that is involved in every major conspiracy, and in a world whose future is determined by my words.

We predict the future. The best way to predict the future is to invent it. Good day, young lady.

The setting of the story, written by someone who used to do adventure games, is elaborate and rich in lore. If you spend the time to explore, there’s history behind almost everything, and knowing some of them is going to be crucial when it comes to solving investigation quests. Or you can just Google it

Knowledge is power, especially with Google on your side

.

Vanity is a huge part of the game, and if dressing up in Second Life was what you liked to do, you’d find similar options available here.

Game mechanics wise, there is some change, but nothing too huge of a deviation from other MMORPGs. You have hot bars, you devise a rotation, and you rinse and repeat. There’s perhaps more movement than usual in the sense that instead of kiting, I find myself having to circle strafe endlessly. With regards to the game having no levels, that’s over-hyped. Although levels aren’t explicit, Skill Points (SP) more or less determine your level. Progression is still more or less on rails, meaning you finish up one area, and then go to another, all in a linear order. The only major difference is that if you choose to spend enough time grinding, you could ultimately have all the skills available, which is break from the traditional character creation process. Asides from that, the holy trinity of tank-healer-dps is still there, so don’t expect a revolution or anything.

I’m not going to pass any judgement on the game, as spending two days playing an MMORPG is too early to divine the future of it. Funcom has its share of both successful (Anarchy Online) and failed (Age of Conan) MMORPGs in portfolio, and there’s no telling where The Secret World would end up.