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Just going to copy/paste here what I wrote in a post over on Facebook:
So here is my impression of The Secret World based on the day and a half or so of the weekend Beta that I played of it last weekend:
It didn't really super-wow me. I think part of that has to do with my expectations probably being a bit too high due to pre-release hype interviews and the like with devs and such. To be fair, a lot of stuff was apparently disabled (or broken) during the Beta, so it obviously wasn't going to be the full experience.
I didn't read a single bit of the Lore stuff, since I knew that if I started getting into that, that would have been my entire Beta weekend, instead of actually playing the game. (The fact that finding this lore stuff was just a matter of clicking on a big floating video-gamey-looking icon was a bit off-putting, but eh...)
Combat seemed rather lame at first. You trigger a group of enemies (zombies in the case of Kingsmouth), they swarm you, you press the 1,2,3,4,etc. keys until they're dead, rinse, repeat. It was kind of like trying to play something like Dragon Age or KotOR or something, but without the ability to pause it like you can in those games, which made it a bit more challenging/aggravating. Still, after a little while, it almost became second nature, and you can still move around and such while fighting. It's mostly inoffensive, I think. Not terrible, but not anything to write home about either.
Despite the fact that most of the pre-release interviews have said that the quests would be more than just FedEx quests or "go here and kill 10 (insert monster here)" quests, the vast majority of the quests that I took in Kingsmouth seemed to be exactly that. There was one quest that had me finding ingredients to build explosives which then actually let me play with the explosives for a bit, so that one was cool, and there was another that had me find a keypad and then have to look around to find the code to unlock it, and that one was somewhat interesting, but most of the others were just generic "Find this thing and bring it to this other place" or "Go and kill 15 blah blah blah" quests. That said, however, there was a bit of talk in the chat which seemed to indicate that the more interesting "investigation" missions had been disabled for the Beta due to them not wanting spoilers to be going around even before the game was released. I don't know if that was actually true or not, so I dunno about that, but I do know that I never encountered a quest that required me to go look something up on Google or whatever (which is just as well, because the in-game browser was broken and would just show a red screen).
One of the upsides was that all of the NPCs I encountered were rather interesting, and that almost all of them had several (optional, fluff) dialog choices, all fully voiced. However, it was kind of distracting to try to listen to them, while at the same time other players were zooming about, and fighting nearby enemies and such. At least the quest giving bits were actual cutscenes, so that you didn't have to worry about that.
On the whole, from what I played of it, it seemed less like what I would have expected a MMO to be (this being my first attempt at playing a MMO, of course) and more like me playing a singleplayer game at the same time that dozens of other people just happened to be playing the same singleplayer game in the same instance. Aside from the occasional time where I'd roll up on someone being dogpiled by zombies and helping to thin the herd a bit, or someone coming up on me in the same situation (not that I ever really needed the help), I never really interacted with anyone else at all. I've been told by some people that have played other MMO games that this is fairly typical of the early-game for most MMOs though, and that later on when things start getting tougher, that's when the multiplayer aspect kicks in, so... again, I dunno.
With all of that said, I'm still kind of intrigued by the game, I just don't know if I'm intrigued enough to actually buy it now, especially with the subscription fee. :/ If I do get it, it will be sometime after release. I don't think I'm going to be pre-ordering it or buying it at launch at this point, though. Going to take a more measured wait-and-see approach with this one.
So here is my impression of The Secret World based on the day and a half or so of the weekend Beta that I played of it last weekend:
It didn't really super-wow me. I think part of that has to do with my expectations probably being a bit too high due to pre-release hype interviews and the like with devs and such. To be fair, a lot of stuff was apparently disabled (or broken) during the Beta, so it obviously wasn't going to be the full experience.
I didn't read a single bit of the Lore stuff, since I knew that if I started getting into that, that would have been my entire Beta weekend, instead of actually playing the game. (The fact that finding this lore stuff was just a matter of clicking on a big floating video-gamey-looking icon was a bit off-putting, but eh...)
Combat seemed rather lame at first. You trigger a group of enemies (zombies in the case of Kingsmouth), they swarm you, you press the 1,2,3,4,etc. keys until they're dead, rinse, repeat. It was kind of like trying to play something like Dragon Age or KotOR or something, but without the ability to pause it like you can in those games, which made it a bit more challenging/aggravating. Still, after a little while, it almost became second nature, and you can still move around and such while fighting. It's mostly inoffensive, I think. Not terrible, but not anything to write home about either.
Despite the fact that most of the pre-release interviews have said that the quests would be more than just FedEx quests or "go here and kill 10 (insert monster here)" quests, the vast majority of the quests that I took in Kingsmouth seemed to be exactly that. There was one quest that had me finding ingredients to build explosives which then actually let me play with the explosives for a bit, so that one was cool, and there was another that had me find a keypad and then have to look around to find the code to unlock it, and that one was somewhat interesting, but most of the others were just generic "Find this thing and bring it to this other place" or "Go and kill 15 blah blah blah" quests. That said, however, there was a bit of talk in the chat which seemed to indicate that the more interesting "investigation" missions had been disabled for the Beta due to them not wanting spoilers to be going around even before the game was released. I don't know if that was actually true or not, so I dunno about that, but I do know that I never encountered a quest that required me to go look something up on Google or whatever (which is just as well, because the in-game browser was broken and would just show a red screen).
One of the upsides was that all of the NPCs I encountered were rather interesting, and that almost all of them had several (optional, fluff) dialog choices, all fully voiced. However, it was kind of distracting to try to listen to them, while at the same time other players were zooming about, and fighting nearby enemies and such. At least the quest giving bits were actual cutscenes, so that you didn't have to worry about that.
On the whole, from what I played of it, it seemed less like what I would have expected a MMO to be (this being my first attempt at playing a MMO, of course) and more like me playing a singleplayer game at the same time that dozens of other people just happened to be playing the same singleplayer game in the same instance. Aside from the occasional time where I'd roll up on someone being dogpiled by zombies and helping to thin the herd a bit, or someone coming up on me in the same situation (not that I ever really needed the help), I never really interacted with anyone else at all. I've been told by some people that have played other MMO games that this is fairly typical of the early-game for most MMOs though, and that later on when things start getting tougher, that's when the multiplayer aspect kicks in, so... again, I dunno.
With all of that said, I'm still kind of intrigued by the game, I just don't know if I'm intrigued enough to actually buy it now, especially with the subscription fee. :/ If I do get it, it will be sometime after release. I don't think I'm going to be pre-ordering it or buying it at launch at this point, though. Going to take a more measured wait-and-see approach with this one.
