Anyone else playing The Secret World?

[flexy]

For some reason I bought me a TSW key on Tuesday, it was rather cheap ($15) and TSW is a "buy once play forever" game which sounded appealing.

I wanted to take a look at it because the majority of reviews are very positive. I am still trying to get a hang of it.

I "kind of" like it although a lot of things remind me of Wow and I am not really the type of guy who enjoys tons of Zombies for hours/days on end. I haven't done raids/instances yet and I did not try PvP yet.

One thing which strikes me is the insane SIZE of the game on disk...while Wow was already massive with 20GB, this thing has a whopping 35GB. The loading times are #+%$!*!!! and the games literally SCREAMS to be put on a SSD, sadly I still have only an old 64GB SSD where there is no room for it. So I put it on a normal HD and heavily optimized it with Ultra Defrag, put loading times still want me to jump out of the window.

Graphics are ok I guess for a MMORPG. Wish TXAA wouldn't blur so much.

 

[Cuular]

It's got a lot of story, and ok combat. It's been a while since I've played it, since I got bored of soloing stuff.

 

[blackened23]

I bought it at full price @ launch. It's a fun game with interesting mechanics. Deviates from the MMO "norm" quite a bit.

Haven't played it in a long time, though. Game world seems empty these days as compared to launch.

 

[Markbnj]

Bump because I just started with this over the weekend. Enjoying it quite a bit so far. As mentioned above it is quite different from the ordinary MMO in a lot of ways. The game is very pretty, and it sounds particularly awesome. Audio and graphics are on the short list of things Funcom's engine does really well. Atmospherically it's got a little Stalker, a little Left for Dead, a little Fallout, a little Bioshock, etc.

The architecture of the game world is constrained by the Funcom engine, which has lots of little idiosyncrasies and instabilities. It's still the same basic hub + zones model of Conan, but it is oriented around this "hidden pathway" system that takes you from place to place, called Agartha ("The Hollow Earth'). It's all pretty neat, and it works much better design-wise for this game than in Conan. In TSW it feels immersive to move from the London zone to the New York zone, for example, using the secret paths. You don't expect broad vistas and uninterrupted travel from within these dense urban environments. In Conan the world should have been open and instead was chopped into little pieces. It just works better here.

The mission system is where this game really shows some innovation, imho. The same basic MMO mechanics of killing stuff and getting stuff are still underneath it all, but the missions weave these activities into a really well-written plot with some of the best voice acting and storytelling I've experienced in an MMO, and they use some unusual mechanics, or at least somewhat unusual. I've had to do things like follow a flock of ravens through a forest, hide and listen to a conversation, kill a bunch of zombies, collect ingredients. It's all varied and it all ties into the overall story. It's one of the first online RPGs I've played that comes close to being a great single-player game that happens to have other people in it to do stuff with.

As for pop, I just started so it's hard to tell, but there seem to be quite a few people in Kingsmouth on Daemon server.

Edit: should say something about the combat and character progression, but this would be three times as long. I'm getting used to the key mashing combat style, and I kind of like it. I thought Conan was better, and that style worked better for those weapons. But it's good enough. It's the story and missions systems, and exploring the creepy world, that are the main attractions for me so far.