Secret World Legends First Devstream

I am totally including this as a DAW entry, because I love The Secret World, and Romain "Tilty" Amiel, is one of the few MMO developers I had the pleasure of personally interacting with, thanks to my stint on the Beyond the Veil webcast.

So, back at the end of February, Funcom announced through a quarterly financial report that they intend to relaunch The Secret World with new combat systems, a reworked new player experience, and a free-to-play business model. Concerned voices raised the specter of Sony Online Entertainment's "New Game Engine" for Star Wars Galaxies. Relaunch activities were set to begin in late March. Bloggers at the time assumed this meant an actual relaunch of the game; however, it was apparently only a reference to the start of closed beta on 28 March.

I've adopted a wait-and-see approach to the news. I've been resubscribed as of early February, but have only been able to play a few times in the intervening weeks. So I totally missed last Wednesday's Letter from the Producer. Having a little time today, I logged in to play me some TSW, and discovered the beta had started already. They did a devstream on Twitch that I had just barely missed by a few minutes. Of course, I was able to watch the recording, which featured community manager Andy “Odonoptera” Benditt, newly promoted community team member Nicole "Spynosaur" Vayo, and game director Tilty. The stream was fairly informative and included a bit of character creation and gameplay.

The most striking thing I learned about the new Secret World Legends (SWL) is the forced reticle combat mode, where there is a small target circle in the center of the screen which represents roughly where the player character is aiming. I say roughly, because the actual target box is much bigger than the reticle itself (which many people in the chat felt was too big as it was). If you're not sure what reticle mode is, think of how you might play, say, Call of Duty on a console. Belghast once called it "Action mmo perma-mouselook interface." The Elder Scrolls Online uses reticle mode (or, it did when I tried it a few years ago), as does Neverwinter Nights.

Now, TSW already has a reticle mode option that can be toggled by hitting the "T" on your keyboard (by default). But I generally stick with the regular MMO (read: "WoW") style of moving and controlling my camera and cursor. I haven't really liked reticle mode in the past, so I am skeptical about it being the only mode for movement and combat in SWL. But I signed up for the beta in hopes of checking it out.

But not so hidden in the Producer's letter mentioned above is the following:

"This will not erase your progression in The Secret World though! Secret World Legends will exist on a different server than The Secret World, meaning you will still be able to play your old character on The Secret World server."

In many ways, I still feel woefully uninformed as to the direction Funcom is taking with their IP. It seems that they'll be putting TSW into maintenance mode; that is, all new content will be presented in SWL instead. But they seem to have learned at least one thing from SOE's NGE debacle: Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Maybe I'll get LoneStarBelle to Panoptic Core after all.

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Scooter proofreads almost all my articles before I post them, for which I am very grateful. However, any mistakes are mine and mine alone (unless otherwise noted). If you are reading this post through RSS or Atom feed—especially more than a couple hours after publication—I encourage you to visit the actual page, as I often make refinements after the fact. The mobile version also loses some of the original character of the piece due to simplified formatting.

Another Dead Horse: "Clunky Combat" in TSW

It being the Halloween season, both Syp and Belghast (You may be able to tell how many blogs I actually manage to read on a regular basis. It isn't a long list.) have posts up today  about The Secret World. Belghast's post was a recruitment piece, promoting the virtues of the game. While Syp had some creepy screencaps. Perhaps inevitably, the topic of TSW's "clunky, slow combat" came up in the commentary, and Tanek finally offered up a possible explanation, at least from his perspective. I decided to write a rebuttal; however, Tanek did point out that TSW is one of his favorite games. But it is in spite of the combat, rather than a result of it.

Impact:
"Fighting with fist and blades I have not felt like most skills give any feel you are actually fighting anything. For most of my skills [those that don't involve knockdowns, etc.] there is no feedback beyond watching the enemy health bars tick down."

Name a game where this is not the case. None of the MMOs I have ever played effectively mimicked how a real battle with swords would play out. SWTOR, for example, makes some attempts to vary the animation to account for blocks, etc. But all too often the characters swing their lightsabers and weather blaster bolts with only a floating red number and a gap in the health bar to show for it. WoW was even worse, with dodge calculations happening entirely in the background.

Targeting:
"Some of this may come down to play style and choice of weapon, . . . the game decided that instead of your assist target being yourself or a group member, it picks the enemy or an inanimate object."

If you're trying to directly target characters in the battle area, I can see how this might be a problem. As a healer, I target using the party/raid frame (the default will do). This is an old habit I picked up playing WoW.

Mouse-look/target mode:
"I have come to like using what some call mouse-look mode. . . but it seems to only work when that was exactly where you had your cursor when you went into mouse-look. There is no easy way to temporarily use the cursor if needed to do something like click a loot roll button on screen (to be fair, the only game I have seen do this in a way I like is DDO. . .) Switching targets can seem a bit random. . ."

This seems to come down to preferred playstyle. I've never used "mouse-look" as described. (When I left-click-and-hold, the camera moves around my character. Right-click-and-hold causes my character to face the same direction as the camera. Holding both down, makes my character move. (Yes, I realize this is fairly normal behavior for MMOs post-EQ.) By default, reticle-based Target Mode in TSW is toggled by hitting "T" on your keyboard, and works consistently as far as I can tell. Toggling out in order to mouse click the UI or whatever is no more difficult than many other games where Target Mode is the norm and not just an option (e.g., The Elder Scrolls Online). As an aside, reticle targeting being the default is the reason Scooter and I never got into TESO. And if Tanek hasn't found a satisfactory toggle method outside of DDO, that's cool. But then TSW's is simply one of many combat systems he must not like.

Movement: 
"This is not always a problem specific to combat, but movement is TSW can seem somewhat 'floaty.' When fighting multiple enemies in an area that is not flat, this can lead to some interesting situations where you might have trouble avoiding environmental damage because you just… can’t… jump… on… that… ROCK!"

Again, this is not a problem unique to TSW. I've played plenty of games in which jumping and uneven surfaces were problematic at times. This is due to a discrepancy between the generally more intricate visual details of the game world vs the generally much simpler polyhedrons used to calculate collisions in the game environment ("hitboxes"). Hitbox Dissonance affects everything in this list, really.
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Overall, I would say that combat in TSW is on par with most other MMOs I have played. Having said that, I do have my issues with it. Though I still consider it one of my favorite games, I haven't played TSW in quite a while because I developed an extreme dislike of the AEGIS system the devs implemented with Issue 9 ("The Black Signal") and the Tokyo zones, making an already fairly long per-mob time-to-kill even longer.

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DAW2015: I Am TSW

What is DAW?
Dang! it's already Tuesday of Developer Appreciation Week, and other than soliciting posts from my fellow bloggers on Friday, I haven't really done much. I blame the folks that actually pay my wage. Busy, busy day yesterday.

A few years ago, not long after I started blogging, the MMO Gamer Chick brought to my attention the efforts of The Blogger Formerly Known as Scarybooster. He set aside a Week every March to explicitly show Appreciation for the Developers who make our favorite games, and encouraged other bloggers to make similar posts to their blogs. Since then, TBFKaS, has decided to shed his "Bad Boy of the Blogosphere" image, but the spirit of DAW lives on. I hope if you're reading this, you make a post, on whatever soapbox you use, thanking the Devs of your favorite game(s).

Funcom, The Secret World

In the summer of 2012, I played the public beta for a new game, different than any other MMO I'd been involved with, from the setting (Modern-Day Lovecraftian Horror?!) to the character progression system (Take a spin on the Ability Wheel of fortune!). It is perhaps a tribute to the abilities of Ragnar Tornquist, Joel Bylos, and their team that they built a game that thoroughly enthralled me in a fictional genre that does not really appeal to me at all.

I am more attached to my characters in TSW than I am to other characters I spent much more time with. With deep backstories (of my own creation), they move through stories crafted by Joshua "Scrivnomancer" Doetch that are are creepy and wonderful. Romain "Tilty" Amiel and the rest of the TSW dev team have created an astonishingly detailed world, depending in part on our own, but incorporating our legends and myths into a credible cosmos of horror, intrigue, and grand adventure. A realm that is both in the now and firmly rooted in our own often nightmarish folklore.

Thanks to my association with the crew from Beyond the Veil, I have had opportunities to interact with Joel, Scriv, Tilty, and the community managers Laurie "Sezmra" Payne, "Tomium," and (formerly) "Morteia." They are all gracious folks, working hard to bring us a little scary and a lot of fun. Even though I am not currently playing, some of the best times in my life during the past three years—and certainly the best times playing MMOs during the same period—are thanks to these wonderful people and the effort they have made to make my hobby more enjoyable. Damn if I am not going to have to re-up now.

P.S. Belghast, of Tales of the Aggronaut, has made another logo for Developer Appreciation Week. Feel free to use either mine at the top of the post or his when you write your own DAW post.

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Whence Progress?

The Aggronaut has a post out singing the praises of a World of Warcraft currency exchange proposed by Blizzard that Bel has dubbed BLEX. In it, Bel mentions a mentoring system as part of his wishlist for WoW innovations. Lord Tridus from A Goon's Day Off thinks that such a system is simply a bandaid, for the problem of levels and old content. I threw in my two cents. (Quotes are his.)

"Flatten or wipe out the level curve entirely and content now becomes scaled on gear"
This system has worked fairly well in The Secret World, but the classless Ability Wheel and Skill System are very different from the classful system of WoW. I wonder if there would not be balance issues if they didn't completely redesign Azeroth from the ground up (and not just the landscape). And in TSW, you still cannot walk into the top areas in low level gear and expect to survive.

"as gear stats are all based on easily scaleable formulae already"
But that scalability depends on levels—that is, a single stat unit on gear has greater impact at lower levels than it does at max. Without levels, what would they scale gear-stats to?

For better or for worse, MMORPGs seem to be about all about character progression. Progression through gear can work, but there might be an upper limit to it that would be just as bad as plain ol' levels. And then, like Funcom's AEGIS for TSW, Blizz would be forced to come up with some other new system to represent progress to satisfy those players that are at the leading edge of content/stats.

The nice thing about a mentoring system like Rift's (unlike GW2's, for instance) is that you can choose whether areas you have already surpassed will be trivial or a continued challenge. There are plenty of times where I just want to beeline my way across a low zone rather than deal with the trash mobs milling about. Other times, I want to participate in the content at level; zone events, for example, or dungeons. Mentoring allows me to do so.

Like Tridus, I would like to see a truly level-less game. But I wonder if we're in the minority.

As far as BLEX, it sounds like a good idea. I've never gotten involved in that type of market, but I have considered it in order to get some quick game currency. And if it beats criminal gold farmers at their own game while replenishing the development coffers, so much the better.

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Quotes of the Day: Bribing Rogue Coders

How much fun is this? What I originally thought was light banter in the TSW Twitterverse turned out to actually be a thing.

     To those considering bribing rogue coders to circumvent Council of Venice certification: please first consider your conscience as a Templar.

~Richard Sonnac, Twitter, April 1, 2014

Apparently, the Rogue Coder in the Sunken Library has a Forged Council's Seal amongst his wares for a measly million Pax, and there are some who are none too happy about it. The ability to actually purchase the Forged Seal will require purchasing the Mission Pack that is meant to tide players over for April, which is one source of the angst. People don't think they should have to pay actual money to bypass the scenarios.

     I guess the point from our end is that there is a "free" way to Tokyo so we didn't feel under any obligation to ensure fairness by not having the alternative behind the paywall.

     But yes, it always hard to please everybody. I still think calling the 80 tokens required to buy Tokyo certification a "grind" is a stretch.

~Game Director Joel Bylos, responding to the hubbub.

I really hope that the mission pack includes new scenarios because I personally am weary of the "Seek and Preserve" scenario, randomly the same thing over and over. And I'm saying I told you so on that front.

Now, granted that I fully intend purchase the DLC mission pack regardless, and I already have a "Real" Council Seal on two characters, I think those looking for both a lunch free of effort and cash are bellying up to the wrong counter. As Joel said, getting the Seal will not cost you anything but time, assuming you are at the end of the story missions through Transylvania. Avoiding the scenarios but still getting a "Seal" will and should cost you. After all, the Devs need to eat lunch, too.

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Secret Monday: The Big Apple Takes a Bite Out of Us

Despite a little confusion and slow start, Secret Monday was full of activity. Unfortunately, Syp had to bow out early due to ailing offspring, but we hope he can join us next week. The rest of the Knights of Mercy got on about an hour before Flappy was scheduled to start, split into a couple groups and nailed the Mansion Scenario. (I won't say on what difficulty, but it wasn't Novice.) I had Scooter, Ocho, and Piddy in my group and we rocked it, even though I had severe enough lag that I got booted from Team Speak. Then it was time for Flappy(!), which we also rocked, though of course we had plenty of help from a very large group of people. Sorry, no pics of Flappy from tonight, but here's one from my first foray into the instance on LoneStarBelle when I happened to see Klaus Von Richter (a pillar of the Twitter RP community) running past.

Both Dex-y and Dortmunder got black turtlenecks from the writhing bladders that Flappy drops, which is cool, since Scooter and I are that dorky couple that often wear matching T-shirts. Ocho was the big winner though with a pair of Night Vision Goggles. I'd have a Monde la Mode shot, but I forgot again; and now it's late. Ocho then had the bright idea of checking out the NYC Raid. What follows is a series of shots from our trip through downtown to Times Square, which Ocho assured us is very faithful to the real thing, right down to some creeps you might actually find in the Big Apple.

This first shot shows our only two actual female players in the cabal: Laeyn (Mogsy) on the left, taking the heat off the rest of us; and Dex-y (Scooter) on the right, bringin' da forty-five caliber pain! I believe that's Thermic (Mr. Mogsy) there laying down on the job. Maric and Tenten rounded out the group, as seen below.

It didn't take long to get to the final boss (though we did die quite a few times on the way). These pics don't even do the environment here justice. Funcom has done an incredible job with this raid (not to mention the rest of The Secret World.)

We had absolutely no hope of defeating Mr. Grumpypants, given that we were three short and barely geared for nightmares. But it was fun running and spamming F12 to get all the screenshots we could before dying.

We totes look like we're ready for him. No? Not even close?

The halo around Dortmunder's head signals his impending demise, yet again. But that shot alone was totally worth the repair bill.

Haha, dead before I even hit the ground.

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Beyond the Veil Tier 74: Lost in the Sands…

I am pleased to announce that Beyond the Veil Tier 74 is now available for download. In "Lost in the Sands," the BtV crew discusses the second region, Egypt—focusing on the Lore of the Atenists—as well as the new items in the Item Store and the Twitterverse experiment.

We're still working on Tier 75, the interview with Scrivnomancer, so be on the look out for that.

You can subscribe to the show through Holosuite Media's RSS feed, through iTunes (with older episodes here), and now through Stitcher. Be sure to catch the live show every Thursday at about 7p.m. EST (12 midnight, UTC) on Holosuite Excess. Beyond the Veil is produced by "Xander Hayes" and Holosuite Media.

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. If you are reading this post through RSS or Atom feed—especially more than a couple hours after publication—I encourage you to visit the actual page, as I often make refinements after the fact. The mobile version also loses some of the original character of the piece due to simplified formatting.

Lessons in Scrivnomancy

This Thursday evening, the BtV crew will be interviewing Joshua "Scrivnomancer" Doetsch, currently serving as Loremaster-in-Chief for The Secret World. We have set up a forum thread for fans to ask Lore and Story questions. If you have any questions for Scrivnomancer, you can ask them through the thread, or in the comments below.

You can catch the live show this and every Thursday at about 7p.m. EST (12 midnight, UTC) on Holosuite Excess. You also can subscribe to the remastered episodes through Holosuite Media's RSS feed, through iTunes (with older episodes here), and through Stitcher.

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. If you are reading this post through RSS or Atom feed—especially more than a couple hours after publication—I encourage you to visit the actual page, as I often make refinements after the fact. The mobile version also loses some of the original character of the piece due to simplified formatting.

Beyond the Veil Updates

After a break last week due to technical difficulties, the BtV crew was back in force last night discussing Egypt, Atenist lore, and upcoming events in The Secret World.

Meanwhile, I am behind again in promoting our previous Tier 73, "A New Year," when we discussed the ever tardy Game Director's Letter, this time with Tilty subbing in for Mr. Bylos, as well as the Krampusnacht/Holiday Hel event and more.

Be sure to catch us next week on Thursday, 30 January, as we have a live chat with Joshua "Scrivnomancer" Doetsch, the lead writer for The Secret World. All your Lore questions will be answered, but only if you ask them. (I may want to caveat that with, "We probably won't get a ton about future (e.g., Tokyo) Lore.")

You can subscribe to the show through Holosuite Media's RSS feed, through iTunes (with older episodes here), and now through Stitcher. Be sure to catch the live show tonight and every Thursday at about 7p.m. EST (12 midnight, UTC) on Holosuite Excess. Beyond the Veil is produced by "Xander Hayes" and Holosuite Media.

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Beyond the Veil Is Back!

After a brief hiatus for the holidays, the BtV crew reunited last night in our first episode of the new year, the 73rd of the show. We have outlasted some heavy hitters with quite a bit of financial backing, perhaps because this is a labor of love for a game that deserves it. None of us are going to get rich playing and talking about The Secret World, well, monetarily at least.

But more than any other MMO I have played, TSW is about community. Players regularly organize to assist each other in taking down epic world bosses, some of whom require coordination just to summon into the world. Top players work with relative newbies (and not just their friends) to guide them through the most difficult content in the game. I have never seen a game where the top devs interact so directly with the players. Perhaps it is the position I am in as a member of a talk show, but folks like Tilty, Joel Bylos, Sezmra, and Scrivnomancer are frequently seen in game. When was the last time you saw the lead writer or lead designer walking around the player hubs or playing a fan created mission/quest in WoW or SWTOR?

And Beyond the Veil is about community, a group of people who were gathered together by Xander Hayes and Antida Ayel to share our experience and enthusiasm for the game. They both do so much; and while I feel I contribute, I feel sometimes that I have let them down as my ADDled, yet perfectionist, mind flits from one interest to another, leaving half-done projects in my wake. I can tell you already that Xander would deny that I have ever let him down; but that feeling remains.

So here's to another exciting year for Beyond the Veil. I'll link last night's show as soon as I am aware it's been posted.

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If you are reading this post through RSS or Atom feed—especially more than a couple hours after publication—I encourage you to visit the actual page, as I often make refinements after the fact. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Beyond the Veil: Stir of Echoes Redux

On Saturday night, the BtV crew had an exciting event (well exciting for us, anyway), a reprise of "Stir of Echoes," the investigation mission we presented on our Anniversary show. Due to other (official) events going on at the time, many people didn't have the opportunity to complete the mission in July.

The BtV crew warmed up by running Slaughterhouse Elite, and I have a better idea now how to organize this evening's NKL-107 fight with Dortmunder and the Knights of Mercy's Fire Team Bravo. Pumped up by a successful run, we got in position to start the "Stir of Echoes—Redux."

A large (for us) crowd had gathered in Agartha by the currently unused portal "down the hill" from Seoul. We were joined in game and on the show by TSW's Lead Designer Tilty, Community Manager Sezmra, and Lead Writer Scrivnomancer, who all played through the mission, as well. I was especially nervous about Scrivnomancer's participation because, while Xander outlined the plot of the mission, much of the text was written or refined by this humble blogger. But Scriv reassured us that we had done well in capturing the feel of TSW and particularly the "voice " of Mme. Rogêt.

All in all, about 40 people ran through the mission over the course of two hours, with members of the BtV crew serving in the roles of various NPCs. They braved zombies, haunted houses, and the dreaded boss encounter, "Error 500," in search of a lost soul with a dark destiny. Everyone who completed the mission received a brand new "Beyond the Veil t-shirt, black" directly from Tilty himself. And a special congratulations goes to our winner, Alicia "Momentary" Villicana, who not only completed the mission first, but also beat the BtV crew record by about ten minutes. She would have been done even sooner if I had been in position a little earlier, myself. Momentary received 1200 Funcom points to spend in the Secret Store, a $10 value.

Thanks again to everyone who participated, we had a blast that night and were very humbled by the enthusiastic response from the totally awesome TSW community.

Secret Monday: Cast Off Works of Darkness, and Put on the Armor of Light

I wasn't going to write about Secret Monday because I felt like I was barely on last night, but Ten Tentacles and MMO Gamer Chick inspired me. Scooter and I finished two of our last three Issue missions on Dex-y and Dortmunder, just as the rest of the Knights of Mercy were coming online. For Dortmunder, I still needed Darkness War Elite, and both Dex-y and Dort need Slaughterhouse before confronting the Gatekeeper. With Thanksgivukkah this week, our schedules are a little wonky, and Scooter bowed out of the KoM speed-record-breaking trip through Darkness War. I felt a little bad getting help from my friends and then not sticking around, but my departure did make room for Ocho to join the group for a breezy Ankh run.

According to Tenten and Mogsy, the conversation after I logged off turned to the Augment system and the enormous grind for AP it is. Like me, Mogsy is not really focusing on it right now, because she is not finished with the regular ability wheel either. While I am sure there are obsessive fans who will have their Augments complete before Tokyo opens, I believe the developers' intent is for the Augment system to serve as a point sink for the foreseeable future. That is, player characters will not need to be decked out in full top tier augments and gear to do well in Tokyo. Missions in Tokyo will also be a significant source of points, so players will have the opportunity to fill in their aux and aug wheels organically rather than grind specifically to get them.

Props to Tilty and crew for fixing a few quality of life issues and player requests in the latest patch, including the proper stacking of disassembled mats, weapon skins in the Secret Store, and (ironically) hiding weapons out of combat.

Mon de la mode was not that avant-garde for me, as I spent the evening in Exorcist garb, even though I was not the group healer. Thanks to Mogsy for the top pic, and Tenten for the one directly above. Also, thanks to Maric and Thermic for filling out the DW group.

Tenten promised to tank a Slaughterhouse run next week for me and Scooter. I'll likely heal, rather than DPSing as I did for DW. Then I am planning to do the Healing version of Gatekeeper, since I did DPS on LoneStarBelle. I think I will also research a bit more prior to meeting him, so I can optimize my build and strategy ahead of time.

Beyond the Veil Take 59: We got DEVed!!

A very exciting episode, Beyond the Veil, Take 59 is now available to download on Holosuite Media. The BtV program got hijacked in the best way possible by TSW Lead Game Designer Tilty and Community Manager Sezmra. Listen as we (and our live audience) get answers to burning questions answered straight from the horse's mouth, plus a lengthy discussion on the choices for TSW’s Get Your Art in the Game Finalists.

Ten male and ten female designs were chosen by the Funcom development team from hundreds of email and forum submissions. The contest just ended with a vote from the players. Head on over to see the winning designs.

You can also subscribe through Holosuite Media's [EDIT: new feed link] RSS feed, through iTunes (with older episodes here), and now through Stitcher. Be sure to catch the live show every Thursday at about 7p.m. EDT (11p.m. UTC) on Holosuite Excess.