1. #4421
    Quote Originally Posted by unholytestament View Post
    Well then, derp. That throws a wrench into some of my plans, wasn't planning on jumping in til July but guess now it's bumped back up to June. Damnit, thought I had more time for ESO -_-

  2. #4422
    Quote Originally Posted by Edge- View Post
    Well then, derp. That throws a wrench into some of my plans, wasn't planning on jumping in til July but guess now it's bumped back up to June. Damnit, thought I had more time for ESO -_-
    If you are talking about the expansion for ESO, you'll have plenty of time. It's nice but lacking in content

  3. #4423
    Quote Originally Posted by Valeron View Post
    If you are talking about the expansion for ESO, you'll have plenty of time. It's nice but lacking in content
    Naw, just in general. Don't plan on picking up Morrowind for a while since I've still got the base game and the other DLC to get through.

  4. #4424
    The UI looks kinda out of place, like a Guitar Hero bar on the screen. Hope we can mod it.

  5. #4425
    The Unstoppable Force Kelimbror's Avatar
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    Well, I actually like the look of it and the combat changes so far. This was a video allowed through the NDA, that was mentioned earlier in the thread:

    BAD WOLF

  6. #4426
    Quote Originally Posted by schwy View Post
    The UI looks kinda out of place, like a Guitar Hero bar on the screen. Hope we can mod it.
    There were a decent number of mods for TSW so I assume the ones that still work will also work with Legends. I hope with the revamp some of the mod makers come back.

    - - - Updated - - -

    Quote Originally Posted by Kelimbror View Post
    Well, I actually like the look of it and the combat changes so far. ........
    Agreed. I never played TSW for the combat but it does look to be more fun and visually more interesting.

  7. #4427
    I am not sure how the new, non-wheel system works in relation to the current one, but I am hugely disappointed to see the Ability Wheel go. In terms of game systems, it was perhaps the singular element that was truly setting the game apart from every other MMO. I will still give this a go next month, but not with much enthusiasm now.

  8. #4428
    Quote Originally Posted by Fkiolaris View Post
    I am not sure how the new, non-wheel system works in relation to the current one, but I am hugely disappointed to see the Ability Wheel go. In terms of game systems, it was perhaps the singular element that was truly setting the game apart from every other MMO. I will still give this a go next month, but not with much enthusiasm now.
    While I loved the concept of the Wheel it's execution was faulty IMO. There was too much filler designed to slow your progress and far too many similar skills. It was fake depth.

  9. #4429
    Quote Originally Posted by mkultra55 View Post
    While I loved the concept of the Wheel it's execution was faulty IMO. There was too much filler designed to slow your progress and far too many similar skills. It was fake depth.
    (Disclaimer: This is totally "inferred" I'm definitely not breaking the NDA. I don't even know why I'd mention it, I'm totes not in the Beta so I can't break what I probably maybe don't know about.)

    There may have been some filler, but with the new system there is no practically no depth.

    Two weapons no longer work together, the secondary weapon is mostly for filler. Passives are ability specific, you have X ability and you will likely want X passive as it is the only passive that properly affects it.

    One can not even have two basic abilities at once. So you can't have a basic heal as Blood if you plan on questing, as you'll want your basic attack. This forces you into one of two other healing abilities, with one being the only decent option.

    Due to the new level up system on weapons and armor, players will be forced very early on to invest heavily in a specific path. If you go healer or tank without a couple friends to back you up, it will become a worse experience than when you tried something similar in TSW.

    --------------

    The UI has slowly been going through iterations in design. It has somewhat improved, thankfully.

    Weapons have no synergy, because the developers didn't want the game to be complex. In an interview, they said that players were incredibly good at making bad decisions, which caused many players issues when leveling up. This new system puts you on a track with training wheels with no way to remove them. It's good in some ways, but greatly takes away from what some in the end game found very enjoyable. Creating unconventional builds that went against logic, but worked because you invested enough time to unlock everything. And had the gear to mix and match.

    There doesn't seem to be a solid evolution of your character as your progress now, it feels very much the same, with some progression that is counteracted by enemies also making their own gains.

    The main story is now gated behind a level wall, requiring you to do more quests in the area outside of where you normally explore. The issue is you don't explore naturally, you're simply forced to to find the quests for XP and reach a point where you can progress again. Or you have to wait for missions to go through their resets and repeat them for XP.

    -------------

    The reticle and action combat isn't really too good without all abilities have some way to naturally cleave. Players will find themselves forced to take AoE/Cone abilities to handle dungeons, because attempting to focus fire a specific mob in a pack can be both a hassle and difficult.

    -------------

    I love the game, I truly do. I've been playing since release, proud to be a Grand Master, obsessed with the story and love its progression, I loved the ability system with crazy synergies and those super strange builds that somehow work against all logic.

    This new release takes away a lot of what helped make Secret World unique. As it stands, all it feels to have going for it is the story.

    The idea of it coming out in a month makes me worried. The game runs fine, the combat is average to below average(depending on what MMO's you've played before. And if you have played other reticle-using MMO's, you will be disappointed.), and the story remains the same.

    I feel they need a month of open beta and to listen intensely to player feedback. There's a lot of small fixes that could greatly improve the quality of the game, which could lead to a much better starter experience and hopefully hook new players rather than moving old veterans of the game from one version of the game to the other.

    With their delay on Steam, it feels like they'll put players who download it when it officially releases(before steam's date) and make them do the open beta testing. Which feels like a poor choice. It will put veterans off quickly. I'd much prefer to see it delayed another month, placed into open beta and to begin looking into all the feedback.
    Last edited by Sixnalia; 2017-05-29 at 05:41 PM.

  10. #4430
    Quote Originally Posted by Sixnalia View Post
    snip
    I am really disappointed to read about this. I guess all the whinging, including people here on MMO-C, worked wonders in the end. We can't have a game that asks to spend a bit of time out of it to try and figure out ways to put a deck together and then go an create it and test it. No no, we have to be on-rails because WoW does it and it has 10 million players (this is not a slight against wow, but rather the dev team of this game)!

    If that goes live, then RIP TSW as far as I am concerned.

  11. #4431
    Man I loved this game at release, investigation quests are true fucking gems, story was pretty damn good. Imo it worth to play it like a single player game. Gonna give it another try.

  12. #4432
    Quote Originally Posted by Fkiolaris View Post
    I am really disappointed to read about this. I guess all the whinging, including people here on MMO-C, worked wonders in the end. We can't have a game that asks to spend a bit of time out of it to try and figure out ways to put a deck together and then go an create it and test it. No no, we have to be on-rails because WoW does it and it has 10 million players (this is not a slight against wow, but rather the dev team of this game)!

    If that goes live, then RIP TSW as far as I am concerned.
    I agree that the synergies of the Wheel was one of the best features of TSW. Coming up with cool decks that allowed us to focus on a particular playstyle was something that set TSW apart from the WOW Clone crowd. The issue with that system was it was a bit obtuse and made it too easy for a new player to really mess up their early build. There were never enough in game explanations of the intricacies of the wheel and those of us who stuck with the game learned through outside sources.

    In the end though if there were too few of us playing to make the game successful and one of the things keeping players away was the complexity of the Skill Wheel I'll take a simplified system so I can have TSW around longer with hopefully new story content.

  13. #4433
    Quote Originally Posted by mkultra55 View Post
    I agree that the synergies of the Wheel was one of the best features of TSW. Coming up with cool decks that allowed us to focus on a particular playstyle was something that set TSW apart from the WOW Clone crowd. The issue with that system was it was a bit obtuse and made it too easy for a new player to really mess up their early build. There were never enough in game explanations of the intricacies of the wheel and those of us who stuck with the game learned through outside sources.

    In the end though if there were too few of us playing to make the game successful and one of the things keeping players away was the complexity of the Skill Wheel I'll take a simplified system so I can have TSW around longer with hopefully new story content.
    Basically this. I didn't play the original and looking forward the re-release, so i won't have real meanings to make a comparison. But i play PoE, which system is basically as complex and if you don't know beforehand how the various affixes affect your character and their synergies, your char can end just broken and useless. It's common to give advice to new players by saying "don't worry, first char is always broken".

    Point is, if a game has a steady community that keeps it alive, then resources build up over time making the gap less and less. If TSW had playerbase issues and needs a fresh influx of new players, then streamlinign stuff is the way to go. This means less complexity and likely less interesting builds, but on the other hand you give player the possibility to choose what they want to do and focus on that with less risk of creating a character that won't be able to fare well in later game.

    F2P with microtx means that devs have to churn out new content regularly to keep people playing hoping they spend some money on it. If the build system is too complex/convoluted players will stop playing since this has nothing to do with additional content.
    Non ti fidar di me se il cuor ti manca.

  14. #4434
    Quote Originally Posted by Fkiolaris View Post
    I am really disappointed to read about this. I guess all the whinging, including people here on MMO-C, worked wonders in the end. We can't have a game that asks to spend a bit of time out of it to try and figure out ways to put a deck together and then go an create it and test it. No no, we have to be on-rails because WoW does it and it has 10 million players (this is not a slight against wow, but rather the dev team of this game)!

    If that goes live, then RIP TSW as far as I am concerned.
    The issue I had was the massive, unexpected and arbitrary ramp up in enemy difficulty in Blue Mountain, which I understand happens again in Cairo, IIRC. My deck worked just fine up until Blue Mountain (Blood/ Sword) with me being able to quite easily quest and take on multiple enemies with little or no preparation. I got my ass handed to me on the very first quest on a single mob in Blue Mountain using the same strategy I had used quite successfully all through Kingsmouth and Savage Coast. Even after considerable preparation, I was at risk of dying in every single fight. After reading up on it a bit I found I needed to tweak my build a little and get some better gear, the build tweaking option would take a number of hours grinding xp so I could get the required AP and SP necessary to buy the appropriate skills with another couple hours dedicated to gearing up.

    After thoroughly enjoying the game up until that point only to hit a hard wall with no warning, for no reason, and then finding out that I had basically wasted my time building that deck was extremely disappointing and turned me off of the game.

    It shouldn't take hours of testing and reading on websites which skills and passives to buy and use in order to simply be VIABLE. I am sad to see the flexibility go, but I'll take simplified viability over arbitrarily complex "flexibility" for the sake of flexibility. Especially when that flexibility is essentially false. Sure you COULD create a bunch of unique builds, but a large portion of them weren't usable for progressing the story and playing the game. Couple that with how long it could take to create one of these seemingly viable builds, only to find out that it's useless in areas like Blue Mountain and you're talking dozens of hours of investment utterly wasted with no in game way to find out except for getting your ass beat by a random mob you SHOULD be able to easily vanquish just like the hundreds of them you came across in a previous zone. That is not a good way to introduce your game to players who want to check out the game.

  15. #4435
    The thing is, they could have kept the complexity and the wheel. And instead limited new players from absolutely destroying themselves early on. This was accomplished with the class system they implemented. But they never make it more complex as you progress.

    Honestly, champions online tackled it fairly well. Using prebuilt sets for players, telling you the role, and so on. Or you could go Freeform and build your own way. It felt like a very intelligent way to please everyone.

    ------
    I just hope the story content flows steadily to keep my interest. As the only thing that kept me playing during those dry spells was making goofy builds and testing it in pugs or with friends when running nightmares.

  16. #4436
    Quote Originally Posted by mkultra55 View Post
    I agree that the synergies of the Wheel was one of the best features of TSW. Coming up with cool decks that allowed us to focus on a particular playstyle was something that set TSW apart from the WOW Clone crowd. The issue with that system was it was a bit obtuse and made it too easy for a new player to really mess up their early build. There were never enough in game explanations of the intricacies of the wheel and those of us who stuck with the game learned through outside sources.

    In the end though if there were too few of us playing to make the game successful and one of the things keeping players away was the complexity of the Skill Wheel I'll take a simplified system so I can have TSW around longer with hopefully new story content.
    Ok, to take things in order:

    1) Which game provides all the needed info to play the game IN game? Even WoW, which currently has the biggest amount of info in any MMO I have played, still needs external reading/guides for most new systems that are introduced with every expansion. What tells you that the new game will have enough info within itself to make perfect sense to everybody trying to play for the first time?

    2) The system never fucked up any player in their progression, misinformation and laziness did. I remember that many reviews of the game when it first came out were blasting the Ability Wheel because they were taking it as "you buy an ability, then you HAVE to have that ability on your deck". They never got that the abilities you buy are OPTIONS for finding synergies and building decks as you liked. For most of the story-based gameplay, the inner wheel was more than enough to get you almost all the way to Transylvania and by that point you probably had enough to put together an advanced deck anyway. From there on, if you didn't have enough understanding to start putting things together that made sense, then I don't know what to say.

    3) I get your final statement, I really do, but the real question is: how much of what made TSW can go before it stops being TSW and is it really worth the (probably small) number of new players that it will bring in? I understand that it is a subjective POV, but I guess what I am trying to say is that this change, for me personally, is too much.

    Quote Originally Posted by Katchii View Post
    The issue I had was the massive, unexpected and arbitrary ramp up in enemy difficulty in Blue Mountain, which I understand happens again in Cairo, IIRC. My deck worked just fine up until Blue Mountain (Blood/ Sword) with me being able to quite easily quest and take on multiple enemies with little or no preparation. I got my ass handed to me on the very first quest on a single mob in Blue Mountain using the same strategy I had used quite successfully all through Kingsmouth and Savage Coast. Even after considerable preparation, I was at risk of dying in every single fight. After reading up on it a bit I found I needed to tweak my build a little and get some better gear, the build tweaking option would take a number of hours grinding xp so I could get the required AP and SP necessary to buy the appropriate skills with another couple hours dedicated to gearing up.

    After thoroughly enjoying the game up until that point only to hit a hard wall with no warning, for no reason, and then finding out that I had basically wasted my time building that deck was extremely disappointing and turned me off of the game.

    It shouldn't take hours of testing and reading on websites which skills and passives to buy and use in order to simply be VIABLE. I am sad to see the flexibility go, but I'll take simplified viability over arbitrarily complex "flexibility" for the sake of flexibility. Especially when that flexibility is essentially false. Sure you COULD create a bunch of unique builds, but a large portion of them weren't usable for progressing the story and playing the game. Couple that with how long it could take to create one of these seemingly viable builds, only to find out that it's useless in areas like Blue Mountain and you're talking dozens of hours of investment utterly wasted with no in game way to find out except for getting your ass beat by a random mob you SHOULD be able to easily vanquish just like the hundreds of them you came across in a previous zone. That is not a good way to introduce your game to players who want to check out the game.
    Those zones were concrete walls for most people regardless of the Ability Wheel, they were simply overtuned and you needed to play differently and grind more gear to get through. Otherwise, you could just mix your deck a bit (some self healing and cc would help a lot) and you were fine. You know, just like you are supposed to do with this system? The Ability Wheel had very little to do with why those zones were such a headache, it was almost purely to too many, OP mobs that were spawning way too fast. Finally, those zones where nerfed to the ground because the devs acknowledged that they were overtuned so they posed no big jump in difficulty.
    Last edited by Fkiolaris; 2017-05-30 at 04:56 PM.

  17. #4437
    Quote Originally Posted by Fkiolaris View Post
    Ok, to take things in order:

    1) Which game provides all the needed info to play the game IN game? Even WoW, which currently has the biggest amount of info in any MMO I have played, still needs external reading/guides for most new systems that are introduced with every expansion. What tells you that the new game will have enough info within itself to make perfect sense to everybody trying to play for the first time?

    2) The system never fucked up any player in their progression, misinformation and laziness did. I remember that many reviews of the game when it first came out were blasting the Ability Wheel because they were taking it as "you buy an ability, then you HAVE to have that ability on your deck". They never got that the abilities you buy are OPTIONS for finding synergies and building decks as you liked. For most of the story-based gameplay, the inner wheel was more than enough to get you almost all the way to Transylvania and by that point you probably had enough to put together an advanced deck anyway. From there on, if you didn't have enough understanding to start putting things together that made sense, then I don't know what to say.

    3) I get your final statement, I really do, but the real question is: how much of what made TSW can go before it stops being TSW and is it really worth the (probably small) number of new players that it will bring in? I understand that it is a subjective POV, but I guess what I am trying to say is that this change, for me personally, is too much.



    Those zones were concrete walls for most people regardless of the Ability Wheel, they were simply overtuned and you needed to play differently and grind more gear to get through. Otherwise, you could just mix your deck a bit (some self healing and cc would help a lot) and you were fine. You know, just like you are supposed to do with this system? The Ability Wheel had very little to do with why those zones were such a headache, it was almost purely to too many, OP mobs that were spawning way too fast. Finally, those zones where nerfed to the ground because the devs acknowledged that they were overtuned so they posed no big jump in difficulty.
    I'm glad to know that those zones were re-tuned. I honestly am a little sad about the wheel because it did provide some cool synergies, there just wasn't enough information easily accessible to make it easy to understand and visualize which skills synergized the best. Reading through dozens of tooltips to see how things are connected, and then reading up on the different debuffs and procs that each ability could have that may or may not have synergy with other abilities and then make a deck using that information is not straight forward, though it may be simple (just read the tooltips) but most players have no interest in doing that and should not be required to in order to make a viable and effective deck.

  18. #4438
    the wheel was one of my favorite parts, rather disappointing news there. The issues that I had with combat were the overall animations, sound design, and aesthetic. The build crafting and skill choices was some of the best parts of the game

  19. #4439
    Quote Originally Posted by Fkiolaris View Post
    Ok, to take things in order:

    1) Which game provides all the needed info to play the game IN game? .......
    2) The system never fucked up any player in their progression, misinformation and laziness did. ......
    3) I get your final statement, I really do, but the real question is: how much of what made TSW can go before it stops being TSW and is it really worth the (probably small) number of new players that it will bring in? .........
    .
    Does it mater what other games have done? The Ability Wheel was unique and even experienced MMO vets had trouble grasping all the nuances at first. Maybe having legit pre-built Decks would have helped instead of the junk they shipped with.

    And the system did screw up players. No one liked having to redo previous content because they messed up their first Deck and couldn't progress. That alone pushed away a lot of players.

    In the end TSW (for me) is about the story and atmosphere. It's about the Investigation Missions and the great VO. I enjoyed making Decks but in the end most of us were running similar Builds because of how much filler was in the Wheel. I just wanted a Deck that let me continue the Story TBH.

  20. #4440
    Quote Originally Posted by mkultra55 View Post
    Does it mater what other games have done? The Ability Wheel was unique and even experienced MMO vets had trouble grasping all the nuances at first. Maybe having legit pre-built Decks would have helped instead of the junk they shipped with.

    And the system did screw up players. No one liked having to redo previous content because they messed up their first Deck and couldn't progress. That alone pushed away a lot of players.

    In the end TSW (for me) is about the story and atmosphere. It's about the Investigation Missions and the great VO. I enjoyed making Decks but in the end most of us were running similar Builds because of how much filler was in the Wheel. I just wanted a Deck that let me continue the Story TBH.
    Bolded for emphasis. I personally play the game to experience the parts I'm interested in, such as the story and atmosphere. Making viable skill decks, while a cool option, has no interest to me. Others apparently feel the same way. As cool as the wheel was, and how much freedom and flexibility you had with it, I would give that up in a heartbeat if it meant just being able to pick choose a skill set that just let me experience the parts of the game I wanted to experience. I'm not even really that picky about which deck that might be.

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