Secret World Legends Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

Yesterday was an exceedingly stressful day, and that combined with the fact that my wife is out of town… lead to a sudden bout of turtling. For those unfamiliar with the nomenclature… I go through these periods where I feel like I need to pull my head into my shell to attempt to remain sane. I’m thankful that I have a few friends that get it, and don’t give me too much hassle about it, but every so often I just reach this point where I need to disconnect from humanity. Last night was one of those nights and I cycled restlessly through a whole bunch of games to see if I could find something that would fit well enough to pass the evening in. The negative is that in theory this should have been a night I was tanking in Final Fantasy XIV, but I just could not handle communicating with others… or having anyone I cared about relying on me. The irony is that I wound up for a bit early in the evening in Destiny… and absolutely wound up carrying two other players hard through a random strike. I took a screenshot not because it is impressive… but because it shows the massive difference between my participation and that of the other two. This was on the Wretched Eye strike… and I wound up kiting the Ogre… and DPSing most things down… and resurrecting the other two people constantly. Now I know what Squirrel and Jex feel like when I run with them.

From there I wound up back downstairs and watched the last episode of Handmaid’s Tale… which is maybe not the best idea to watch when you are already feeling depressed. While doing so I ended booting up Rift and playing around some there. I am still level 67 and working on the Gedlo Badlands, which is not exactly my favorite zone so far. Moonshade Highlands is my jam, and I have never been that big of a fan of desolate desert landscapes… especially not ones where everything is on fire. That said I did make a lot of progress knocking out various quests and while it still feels like my experience bar isn’t really moving… the constant ding of planar levels seems to help the feeling of being mired. I have been running around with a heavy Warlord hybrid build, and while I have been absent it seems to have been buffed significantly. Previously I had a lot of problems with struggling to kill a given mob in time before it killed me. Now I seem to be able to run around and wreck things pretty safely. My biggest complaint with Starfall Prophecy now Prophecy of Ahnket… are the legendary morphs of abilities. Each of them seems to read like it is going to be universally better than the original… but after taking a few of them they seem to FEEL worse. The biggest problem here is that you cannot undo them without paying for a respec…and then you have to remember what the hell you chose as a spec down to the point where you screwed up and chose the wrong legendary morph. Personally I think the system should just be a toggle, and that you can have X number of legendaries toggled on equal to the number you have earned.

I also played a little Secret World Legends, which is something I seem to do just about every day… or at the very least I am logging in to get the rewards. I am not completely sold on the game but I am enjoying it enough to keep showing up and experiencing it. The combat feels fresh enough to make going through a bunch of quests I did long long ago feel worth it. My key complaint however is the game still does a piss poor job of clearly identifying which quests you have completed and which ones you have not. That was one of my biggest problems with the game is to log in and roam around through a sea of cutely named quests… that all sort of blend together in my head making it impossible to sort out if I have or have not completed them. This was even worse when it came to expansion content going into the game, and blending in among all of those other quests that I did a year ago. So far blade and elemental is fun enough, but I find myself really missing the shotgun… and with the way gear levels up in this game I feel like I am really not in a great place to switch gears at any point soon. I do have an extremely low level shotgun sitting in my inventory and I might try swapping it out at some point soon just to see if it is viable. I’ve moved on to the Savage Coast but there is honestly still a lot in Kingsmouth that I have never really gotten around to completing. My biggest complaint overall is as compared to the original… the drop rates of anything meaningful in the world is nonexistent. All of your gear seems to come from lootbags gained through doing quests… so I have a feeling that a big part of the “endgame” is going to be repeating quests on the daily reset to get more stuff to fuse into your gear. That doesn’t really bode well for those players that are not a big fan of grindy mechanics.

This morning like so many mornings I have been feeling largely uninspired in my attempt to find something to write about. In Star Wars the Old Republic I am in an odd space of doing some miscellaneous clean up before moving on to the Knights of the Fallen Empire content. This is enjoyable but not exactly the sort of thing that makes a good blog post because it doesn’t necessarily reveal anything worth mentioning. As a result I have spent way too much time looking at twitter, and almost like a miracle a tweet came across my timeline. It seems that Secret World Legends is releasing on June 26th, which is admittedly way sooner than I was expecting. It seems like it literally just went into beta about a month ago, which means one of two things. One either the beta has gone so amazingly well that they are moving up their time tables… or two that they were always going to launch on the 26th regardless of what happened in testing. Admittedly I have a lot of mixed feelings about this game relaunching.

I have a lot of love for The Secret World… but much in the same way as you might love that one movie you saw back in your childhood that you through was really damned cool and remember fondly as a sequence of memories. It will probably always be one of the best story driven MMO experiences I have had. They also did some interesting things with the deck building style ability system that let you mix and match actives and passives until you crafted a character that fit your specific play style. For example I fell in love with Blades/Shotgun which was this amazingly fun build with a mix of ranged and melee abilities that let me adapt to pretty much any open world situation. The problem being that these extremely custom builds all fell completely apart when you entered the end game. The game saw every single one of my circle of friends, having to abandon whatever path they were on to choose something new and group friendly to be able to even start to make a dent in the nightmare content. This is the point where most of us checked out, because we loved being whatever character fantasy we had built for ourselves… and having to abandon that just ruined the game experience.

All of that said… my twitter time line is full of moments when I broadcast the game out to my friends in an effort to get everyone to experience it. Each time it went on sale I talked about how good of a deal it was. I love the setting and I love the challenge of some of the quests that force you to figure out how to do silly things like decode things from base 64 encoding. In the trailer above they talk about switching the game from an MMO to a shared world action RPG… which largely sounds like marketing nonsense. They are switching the game to be reticle targeting, which can be a positive if all of the movement and interaction keys work nicely with it. In many ways this could be an attempt to make it a more console friendly design, because that sort of a control scheme seems to simply work better with a controller than it does with mouse and keyboard. All of the individual weapons seem to have a mini game aspect. About a month ago Elemental was shown off on the dev stream to have a “heat” mechanic that you are trying to keep in check. This makes me wonder however how well custom builds like my beloved Blades and Shotgun will work in this scenario. Will we have to choose a single weapon and stick to that?

Mostly I think I am going to have to fall into the “wait and see” camp at least until I get my hands on the game. I want it to work well, because I would really love to see a game like The Secret World succeeding. It did a lot of interesting things that no one else is still doing, and presented a game setting that is unique and interesting. The big problem however is all of that interesting bits came in a package that never quite worked as well as I thought it should. The user interface was always a bit of a disaster that you learned out to work around, rather than something that really reinforced the enjoyment of the game. Similarly the combat was scattered with a bunch of really great ideas that never quite coalesced into something that felt really good to play. There were elements of sheer brilliance, but those were what helped you get past all of the things that you found yourself barely tolerating. My ultimately hope is that with Secret World Legends they can go back and fix all the bits that never quite worked right, and then arrange the copious amounts of story they already have into a cohesive narrative. If they can do that and give me fun moment to moment play… then without a doubt I will be playing a lot more Secret World in the near future. They are however launching during a super tight window following ESO Morrowind on the 6th and FFXIV Stormblood on the 20th. That fact means without a doubt that while I might be playing this game… it is not going to even come close to being a primary game for me.

Assorted Turtling

Mixed Feelings