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MMOs Worth Playing: The Secret World

October 15, 2015October 9, 2015 by Belghast

The Games Pusher

I need a new mmo in my life

— Z (@zerena_hoofs) October 7, 2015

One of my friends coined the term “Games Pusher” to represent the force I have when it comes to getting people to try a game. She said she called me a drug dealer in the nicest possible way, but the term has stuck in my head. It is true, I get super excited about games and enjoy trying to introduce people to ones they are not currently playing. The thing is… originally I thought this was just me vying to get more people to join me in the game I am currently playing. However I feel like there are dozens of MMOs that are really good and that people should play all of them at least for a bit. So we zoom to earlier this week when a friend of mine… one @zerena_hoofs made the innocuous comment that “I need a new mmo in my life”. At which point I ended up flooding her with suggestions. I jokingly said that I could keep it up for hours… and in truth I really could. While I generally suck at sticking with “columns” I always have the desire to spawn them. This time the idea is to do a short run of posts each Friday talking about the awesome things relating to one MMO that is “worth playing”. Since it is October, I thought I would start things off with the most Halloweeny of all MMOs… The Secret World.

The Plot

The game is set essentially in an alternate reality version of our own world, and with that comes a lot of pop culture references. When your character is awoken to your own latent abilities by a mysterious bee flying into your mouth while you are sleeping, you are recruited by one of three different secret organizations. It seems while the world “slept” there has been a secret cold war going on between three ancient powers: The Knights Templar, The Illuminati and a mysterious and relatively unknown organization called Dragon. Each organization has its own agendas… for the Templar based in London it tends to be to keep the order. For the Illuminati based in New York it is all about hoarding knowledge and making a profit. For Dragon based on Seoul it is about sowing the seeds of chaos throughout the world. This secret back and forth between these clandestine entities would have remained like this for continued centuries were it not for the fact that something is changing. A darkness is bubbling up from the bowels of the earth in the form of “The Filth” which is this black ichor that infects anyone who touches it with a sort of deliberate madness. Now each organization is trying to get to the bottom of what is going on, while at the same time protecting their own assets and vying for supremacy over the other orders.

The game relies upon urban legends and myths to weave a tapestry of strange happenings throughout the world. One moment you are investigating a small town in New England overrun by Lovecraftian horrors and zombies, and the next you might be uncovering a lost city in the Egyptian desert forgotten to time and filled with its own unknown dangers. All the while you are trying to sort out what is happening to the world and what you and your chosen order can do to fix it. What makes all of this work is the fact that this game has some of the best writing I have seen in any game, MMO or not. The quests are interesting and actually require some pretty damned devious puzzle to solve. There was one quest in Egypt that I remember vividly that actually provided data that you had to decode that was included in a number of real world encoding mechanisms. Only after decrypting all of them could you get the clue needed to solve the riddle. To make life easier on you, the game provides an in game browser and Funcom operates a number of “fake” websites for people and corporations in game that contain clues that are needed to solve certain quests.

The Mechanics

The game claims to not have levels or classes but in truth… neither of these are absolutely correct. What the game offers is a free form character creation system, but that freedom is actually fairly dangerous. You can in theory build a character that is so screwed up that you cannot actually function in the game. The game provides a few specific templates for each of the professions and earning all of the abilities for this template gets you a nifty costume. These also serve as relatively functional builds for you to work towards, that will hopefully prevent the problems of absolute freedom. The challenge here is the fact that there is no “respec” or skills reset system. Doing things in the world gains you ability points and skill points, each with their own uses. Ability points are spent learning new abilities in several different weapon based trees, and Skill points are used to level your ability to equip higher tiers of gear. In its most basic form a “build” is a combination of up to seven active abilities on your hotbar, and up to seven passive abilities that hopefully interact with the actives you chose. Later in the game they introduced new weapons that also take up space, but those won’t unlock until you have completed a quest.

The game itself feels almost like a card building game like Magic the Gathering or the Guild Wars 1 skill system… where you are trying to build a “deck” of abilities that interact in interesting ways together. For example you might have a passive that does something really interesting when you push an enemy into a “hindered” state, and then you would want to use that with abilities on your hotbar that trigger that hindered state. What makes this extremely interesting is the fact that you can swap your abilities at any time out in the world, and when we were running dungeons we often found ourselves swapping around what specifically we were using to better synergize with what other players were bringing to the table. The biggest problem is that the game takes a lot of careful research to play well. One of our challenges was the fact that we each had a specific idea of what we wanted our character to be… and some of those options simply were not viable when you got to the hardest content. I have not played the game in some time, but one of the challenges was that there were certain required abilities and not every weapon tree could provide those.

The Style

One of the best aspects of the game for me personally, were the awesome cosmetic gear options. I am a huge fan of transmogging or whatever a given game calls it, and if my character looks awesome I feel awesome about playing it. One of the coolest things that The Secret World has going for it, is that essentially all visible gear is cosmetic by nature, and you can swap between looks freely while you are out in the field. All items you pick up go into a dressing room and you can swap bits whenever you feel like it. The actually “gear” that gives you statistics are your weapons and a number of talismans… necklaces, bracelets, rings etc… that are other than your weapon non-visible gear. To make weapons cosmetic as well, they give you the ability to create a weapon mold that can chance the appearance of an item. Combined this gives players extreme freedom in expressing their characters… but sadly that means that the majority of players are going to be women running around with as little clothing on as humanly possible. The above screenshot is one of my favorites, because my friend Tam and I essentially both arrived at super similar looks while doing a mission completely accidentally. We jokingly dubbed this our Blues Brothers pose.

Another great thing about the game is that it is truly a mega server experience. There are “servers” but they really don’t actually matter. All of the characters span all of the servers, and you can group freely with anyone regardless of faction. This means that there is never a situation where two friends playing this game won’t be able to play together. The only negative is that Cabals themselves aka Guilds… don’t span multiple factions. I’ve spent most of my time playing for the Templar, but I know just as many diehard Illuminati and Dragon players. The only problem is with the Cabals not spanning factions, it made it mildly frustrating for the folks who didn’t want to play Templar, since the guild was in that faction. The workaround is that the game supports social channels and we used them prolifically when we were playing actively. Another really cool thing about the game is that it has an extremely devoted and active role-playing population. If you wander around London you are going to find pockets of players acting out their characters, and that adds a certain depth to the environment.

Expansion

The growth of the game comes in the form of comic book like “Issues” where a batch of content is released with a common theme. To date there have been twelve issues spanning from July 2012 to August 2015, each with their own themes and usually their own comic book cover to go along with it.

Issue 1: Carter Unleashed
Issue 2: Digging Deeper
Issue 3: The Cat God
Issue 4: Big Trouble in the Big Apple
Issue 5: The Vanishing of Tyler Freeborn
Issue 6: Last Train to Cairo
Issue 7: A Dream to Kill
Issue 8: The Venetian Agenda
Sidestories: Further Analysis
Issue 9: The Black Signal
Sidestories: Love & Loathing
Sidestories: The Last Pagan
Issue 10: Nightmares in the Dream Palace
Issue 11: Reaping the Wind
Issue 12: To the Dark Tower Below

Monetization for this game comes primarily in the form of purchasing these issues, and in the various cosmetic items that you can purchase only through the store. They have a number of really cool themed outfits that you can pick up, and for subscribers they give you a unique batch of items each month. I purchased a lifetime subscription when the game was released that converted when the game went free to play to one that gives me access to all the subscription content, and a stipend of cash shop currency each month to spend. While we call this game “Free to Play” it is in truth “Buy to Play” meaning you have to purchase the base game in order to do anything. From there to get these new stand alone issues you have to purchase them one by one. Right now on Steam the game is running $29.99 but quite often it goes on sale for as little as $10. Similarly there is an ultimate version available for $59.99 that includes all of the content as well as a custom costume and some other consumables. I fully expect that as we get closer to Halloween we will see both of these versions get discounted heavily. The long and short is.. this is one of the most enjoyable questing experiences I have ever had in any game. The story content is amazingly well written and the quests themselves are extremely inventive. That said occasionally the solutions are insanely difficult to figure out. Thankfully there are plenty of awesome guide sides out there like Unfair.co for if you find yourself stuck. This is one of those games that I think everyone should try, just be willing to devote some effort into sorting out just what kind of character you want to build. Once you get into the game world however… it becomes extremely infectious… just like the Filth.

Sithmas Time Is Here

October 8, 2015 by Belghast

Merry Sithmas

It has been so surreal since the launch of the Force Awakens toy line. Everywhere I go the world seems to be teeming with Star Wars enthusiasm and with that… comes a bunch of priced to own kitch. While we have yet to reach anything close to the hype bubble we experienced before the release of Phantom Menace, it is still extremely noticeable. A few weeks ago I wrote about re-watching the prequels and how I had wondered if maybe I was just too harsh on them at the time. After re-watching I decided that no… they really were horrible films. The problem is that for years I let them have control over my enjoyment of the Star Wars universe as a whole, and that frustrates me. If you were to completely ignore their existence, then honestly the rest of the Universe is still pretty great. Sure there was some strange stuff on the fridges of the Expanded Universe, but I cannot discount just how phenomenal the Old Republic Era has been. I remember picking up one of the first Tales of the Jedi comics and being completely blown away at this concept of a universe set essentially 4000 years before the time of Skywalker. Then as that universe blossomed over the course of sever comic series, and then came to life in the form of the Knights of the Old Republic game, I was absolutely hooked. Now that I am back roaming around SWTOR, I am realizing I care about this universe far more than I ever realized.

When the game mentions Freedon Nadd or Exar Kun… I remember who they are and what they did in this worlds history. I remember awesome characters like Nomi Sunrider from the comics, or Jolee Bindo from KOTOR. When I see a reference to Casus Fett or Mandalore the Ultimate in game… I know who those characters are and can remember reading about them in the comics. The thing is… it is not just the Old Republic era that is amazing. Essentially each time another creative force has been given free reign in the fertile Star Wars universe… really awesome things have happened. For example while the official Prequels are pretty horrible, the Clone Wars cartoon series is amazing. No one can deny just how awesome Ahsoka Tano as is a character, and just how much more interesting the interaction is between her and Anakin… than pretty much ANYTHING in the Prequels. Now if we scan forward we have Star Wars Rebels… also being allowed free reign in the universe, this time within the constraints of the more well known modern era. Similar to Shadows of the Empire it is weaving its way in and out of events we already know, and doing a great job of making us care about this new cast of characters.

Excitement Grows

Which leads me to realize… the times I have really loved Star Wars lately is when someone has been able to wriggle out front under the grasp of George Lucas and run freely creating their own plot lines and characters. Essentially this is exactly what is happening with Force Awakens… it is all the goodness of the Star Wars universe with none of the harmful effects that Lucas has forced upon it in recent years. In fact Lucas has been more than a little bit salty when talking about Episode VII and the fact that for the most part Disney ignored his plans to create a movie focused around teenagers. What is happening is that Disney has become the most powerful marketing juggernaut on the planet, and at the core of their methodology is protecting the bottom line, and with it the long term profitability of the franchises they own. I am sure there is some computer program somewhere that knows precisely what fans will like, and just how far they are willing to allow the themes to be stretched. While at some point down the line this might be a bad thing for innovation… I sincerely doubt they will allow anything even vaguely close to midichlorians to ever happen again.

The only frustration I have with the Disney approach however is that so much of the Universe became ruled “non-canon”. There were characters like Mara Jade and Grand Admiral Thrawn that were absolutely amazing… in fact I have action figures for both of them hanging on my wall as well as Clone Emperor Palpatine, Dark Jedi Luke, and Jedi Leia. Those stories meant a lot to me, and while there were parts of the Expanded Universe that were completely unfollowable… most of it made a certain logical sense at least at one time. The problem being like most fan centered fiction, it iterated on itself causing the characters to become more distorted and unbelievably heroic as time went on. It is my hope that they will figure out how to work some of the best characters into the new tales. There has been rumors that Mara Jade will be introduced as an Inquisitor instead of the Emperors Hand for example, which is fine with me… so long as she is introduced at all. Basically I find myself in a strange place, of having hope for Star Wars… when for so many years I lacked it almost entirely. I imagine as we get closer to the December release of the movie, the cross promotions and Star Wars branded soup cans will start to get annoying. However in the meantime… I am reveling in Sithmas.

The Professional

As of last night I have finished Balmorra and Nar Shadda on the Bounty Hunter and just went through the “intermission” that generally occurs there. I didn’t really expect to be all that into this storyline, because essentially it was one of the ones that I never intended to actually complete. While I enjoyed the Trooper storyline, the class itself was not that compelling to me. Largely I think this was the reason why I ultimately fell out of love with SWTOR after pushing three characters to the then level cap of 50. Bounty Hunter however feels completely different, and much more action packed. There are little things like rocket punch and the jet pack charge that make it feel more brutal… even if the attacks are essentially the same as my trooper vanguard. The funny thing about the storyline is just how much of myself I can pour into it. I am playing a very grey bounty hunter, who does not kill anyone for free. Also as the story goes on I am becoming a bit of a softy, and I am wondering exactly when that will bite me in the ass. Essentially it does not seem like a very “sith side” storyline so far other than the fact that essentially I am doing everything for the sake of payback… and for a girl.

I imagine over the next few days I will rip through the content quickly and before the end of the weekend start work on the last of two classes. Not sure what I will be doing next, if it will be the Inquisitor and its constant shock treatment… or if I will go for the Imperial Agent. As it stands now… I am starting to lean towards Agent. Whatever the case playing all of these stories is making me fall in love with the Bioware writing all over again. It is also making me look forward to Fallen Empire and its more story driven focus. When you ONLY play the class quests, SWTOR becomes a much better game because it has a nice clean story arc that does not get muddied by repeating the same planetary quests over and over again. At some point I will go back and play some of the quests I missed Sith side, but for the time being I want to push through the classes because each one feels like it adds another piece of a puzzle to the central story arc of this game world. This is also making me want to go back and get KOTOR 2 working, and actually attempt to beat it this time. It feels like there is a chunk of storyline that I am missing there, and with it several characters that I really only know by name. Essentially I am saying by all of this… that once again I am proud to be a Star Wars junkie.

Warriors and Bounty Hunters

October 7, 2015 by Belghast

A Day Off

Last week as you might be able to tell from the posts I made during it… was extremely stressful. As a result I ended up taking off yesterday as a sort of “mental health day”. It was absolutely glorious, because essentially I sat around playing video games and watching Netflix. I won’t talk about the Netflix viewing because I will save that for Saturday, but I will talk about the games I played. More than anything yesterday was a day devoted to Star Wars the Old Republic. I have this mad mission to somehow finish the rest of the class storyline that I have not completed before the launch of Fallen Empire at the end of this month. I know that seems a bit mad, but I am enjoying myself especially since we are in this length lag period in Final Fantasy XIV content. Over the weekend I finished up Smuggler, and yesterday I completed Sith Warrior. At this point I have completed Jedi Knight, Jedi Consular, Trooper, Smuggler and Sith Warrior… and I think quite possibly the Warrior is the most satisfying conclusion yet. The most interesting thing to me is how the Jedi Knight and Sith Warrior class stories end up making a nice set of bookends.

The Jedi Knight storyline is deeply impersonal. It always felt less about your own exploits and more about you essentially saving the galaxy. What I mean is that the Jedi Knight storyline, IS the story of the game. Every major story arc event that trickles down into other characters seems to stem from a conflict brewing for the Knights. The end result is that it feels like you are more a slave of events and you doggedly follow the main story arc as the Republic war progresses. Sith Warrior on the other hand is a completely different experience. It is more personal, and more about your ambitions and your power as you ascend from an apprentice all of the way through essentially the Dark Council. I don’t want to go into a ton of detail but the end result is a much more satisfying experience. Every obstacle in your path you personally get to remove by your own hand. Last night I mentioned to a friend that the Sith Warrior storyline felt more “Sithy” than the Jedi felt “Jedi” but I guess in the grand scheme of things that isn’t true. The Sith are by nature about thinking inwards, and the Jedi are about thinking outwards… and the Jedi storyline being detached from more personal vendetta… I guess IS what a Jedi should be.

The interesting part about playing a Sith is that you know someone is always about to betray you. So you go into the equation knowing that none of your allies are really ever your “true” allies. As the story progresses they really find ways of driving this point home, and in many ways you have to deal with that fact or at least find ways to get past it. In the end however every decision made leads you towards an epic conclusion allowing you to take out all of your frustrations. The Sith Warrior story may be my favorite so far, just because there are so many epic moments where I absolutely feel like this avatar of wrath blazing a path through my enemies. I started off trying to play a mostly Light Side Sith… but as the events started reaching their conclusion I found myself succumbing to the darkside and began taking those “red” options to dispatch those who betrayed me. In truth I ended the story line in a fairly “grey” state, which I guess is fitting. In truth if I were a force user I would more than likely be a renegade that tried to live between the two factions, because it feels like the true path of the force is to find a balance between the two extremes. To draw on the dark side and your rage when you need to defeat an enemy, but draw on the calm and peace when you need to solve issues. My friend Tam mentioned something and it is absolutely true… making a “good” choice Sith side feels more rewarding because people are shocked and amazed that you did not force choke them into submission… whereas everyone expects it of you on the Jedi side.

Hunting Prey

After finishing off the Sith Warrior I decided to flip over and start working on my Bounty Hunter that was just now getting to Dromund Kaas. I figured I wanted a bit of a break from the “Sith” thing and having just finished playing a Smuggler I did not really relish playing a cunning character quite yet. This leaves the Bounty Hunter, which has always felt a little odd to play. As a Trooper the abilities felt like they made more sense, so I will have to sort through the bar and try and figure out what abilities I actually should be using. I did not want to re-roll my character so I am playing Powertech, but planning on going one of the non-tank options. At some point I am going to play a commando, which seems like it is far more satisfying to have a bit damned cannon than two pistols of the bounty hunter equivalent. I think I will be fairly happy as a bounty hunter as soon as I can get my hands on some armor that LOOKS like a Bounty Hunter. If I could run around in a color variant “Boba Fett” Mandalorian armor… I would be super happy to play this character. Until that happens however… I think I will ultimately be rather disappointed.

That is honestly one of my big complaints replaying content is that SWTOR should have made the getting of your class armor more of an important thing as you level. There is an iconic look for each of the classes, and as you travel through the content you should start adding pieces of moddable armor to allow players to complete that “fantasy”. Smugglers do a fair job of getting a few pieces of Han Solo-esc armor, and Jedi Knights eventually get a set of armor that feels like the armor+robe appearance you often see. However the other classes… seem to be a little less determined. Jedi Consular is the story of having to suffer through a whole series of stupid looking armor sets, never quite finding one that really fits the class. Bounty hunter so far, feels like I got my armor by scavenging bits off of my kills… and I guess in a way that fits. All I really want is to look like Boba Fett… is that too much to ask? I need to sort through my various cartel market options and see if I can find something I will be happy with. If my characters look good I enjoy playing them regardless of how they perform, and my fear is that I won’t really get into this class until I can make him “not look stupid”.

Day of Destiny

October 5, 2015 by Belghast

So Much Fireteam

Pause in loading gave a rare screenshot opportunity.

It seems my recent Destiny addiction has rekindled the fires in a handful of my friends. As a result over the weekend I spent most of it in a Fireteam with Damai attempting to help level our friend Carthuun represented above by his PSN name Saldonas. Saturday night my wife was freezing, so I got drafted into going to bed the moment our podcast broke up to provide “warmth”. As a result I had to spend a good chunk of Sunday morning editing the podcast, creating the YouTube version, blogging about it and broadcasting it to the world. After that I of course has to throw out my own Aggronaut post… which means that I was fairly late getting started on playing anything. By the time I logged into Destiny Damai and Carth had a fireteam going and were working on the last few missions of the original storyline. From there we pushed through The Dark Below and House of Wolves expansion content as a group, which honestly had been a bullet point that I wanted to get through at some point. The problem is with so much new and exciting stuff to do and gear to get… I never quite got around to making the time for it. However with Carth leveling for the first time… all of the items you get through those storyline elements were actually relevant. I finally st0pped grouping around 7pm when my wife got back home, and I went off to fix dinner for the two of us. At that point I think Carthuun was sitting around the level 25 mark which is not too shabby for a day of grouping.

The big thing that I sorted was how to use PS4 party chat comfortably. I have a Logitech G430 sitting relatively unused because after swapping to using a Blue Yeti microphone on my machine upstairs, I swapped to simply using a pair of Behringer HPS3000 studio headphones. The sound output was better and they are nowhere near as heavy as the Logitech pair because they don’t need an attached boom mic. Ages ago I ordered a few pairs of adapters that take a standard headset and converts it down to the single jack style input that modern phones and the PS4 controller uses. Yesterday I took the time to dig out my G430 and one of those adapters and after some fiddling and piping all of the game audio through the headset… I finally arrived at something that was fairly comfortable to use. I don’t seem to mind the fact that playstation chat is mono audio… when I have the rest of the game audio coming through my headphones as well. Additionally having something other than my dedicated PS4 headset… makes them far more comfortable to use for several hours on end. Also this finally allows me to crank up the game audio without frustrating my wife, who has on occasion asked me to turn it down when a really crazy moment happens and the audio is booming. Now that it is sorted I feel more comfortable using a headset with the console, and am also more likely to just hang out in party chat for awhile. I am wondering what the upper bound on a party group is, and if you can have more than just the three fire team members.

Swapping Companions

When I got downstairs last night to prepare for the season finale of Fear the Walking Dead, I of course booted up and started playing Star Wars the Old Republic. Now that I have finished with my smuggler, I am picking up where I left off on my Sith Warrior. Through the course of the evening I worked my way through the rest of the Nar Shadda storyline and just now starting on Tattooine. I have to say it is very nice to finally have all four buffs after beating one of each base class. I am a bit saddened however that I am finally reaching the stage of the game where it feels like having a healer is a very useful thing. This means relegating Vette to crafting and spending the majority of my time with Malavai Quinn. In the grand scheme of things I have no problem with Malavai, because he seems like the honorable Imperial Soldier type. The problem being that I just like running around with Vette, because I always loved Mission Vao, and honestly for me… she was always Mission 2.0 rather than her own character. Instead she will farm up companion gifts… that I will ultimately give to her later… which seems a little strange?

Basically if I have a shot in hell of getting the special legacy unlock thing for beating all of the stories, that means I have to play through the rest of Sith Warrior, Imperial Agent, Bounty Hunter, and Sith Inquisitor all before the end of the month. I am seriously doubting I will be able to do it, but…. that said if I ONLY focus on the story missions I might be able to make it. When you only focus on the class story the early planets at least go extremely quickly and you stay at a decent level. I might need to spend some cartel coins however to unlock more mod gear to throw on my characters. The plan I arrived at on my smuggler of upgrading my armor every other planet seemed to work pretty well and I would really like to do that with my Sith characters. The problem being the game is not extremely forthcoming with armor options. There are sets available for pretty much any level range on the Cartel Market, but each of them cost a fair amount of coin. So I guess we shall see what ultimately happens. I guess if I got desperate I could make them wear the free moddable flight suits they give you, but that is not exactly a great option. I might use the imperial pilot suit for Malavai Quinn however.

YouTube AggroChat

The funny thing about AggroChat is that in the grand scheme of things… we don’t actually get that many listeners… or at least not enough listeners to go through the trouble of some of the things that I do. For example… our YouTube videos maybe get a dozen views a piece. That said I like doing them, and I am not sure why. I guess they are just far easier to link to someone when they ask you about the show than linking the actual podcast page. Also I like embedding a youtube video far more than I liked embedding the Libsyn player. I feel like I could probably do better about advertising our show. I tend to do it in a rather haphazard fashion, because I feel rushed to get each show out the door and ready. By the time I finish editing, uploading, and doing all the other things… I reach this point where I just want to be done with it for another week. It is not necessarily the most enjoyable period of my week. I love making the show, but the tedium that comes from doing all the fiddly bits to make it happen… gets annoying. So I reach this point where I just want to hurl it out into the world and hope someone finds it interesting. The hardest part is it feels like we don’t have a lot of feedback. Podcast listeners tend to listen silently, and while we have a few people that comment here and there… you don’t get the sort of commentary that you do when you have a blog. There are weeks however like this week, where I feel like we got into some extremely interesting conversations, and it is well worth listening. I love the folks I podcast with, because ultimately they are the folks that I hang out with on a daily basis.