Funcom's The Secret World Announces Early Access This Friday

 Agreed. I played all of Kingsmouth and almost every quest was fun and interesting, especially so for the investigation missions. This game has it all but combat on its side and that’s enough to keep me playing at least for the first month.

> Is this your first mmo?

Considering I specifically compared TSW to at least another MMO in the post you replied to (and mentioned several others on other posts), I’ll assume that was a rhetorical question.

> MMO’s can adapt and change so would
> not judge the first few “lvls” so harshly. 

I don’t see what’s harsh about my “judgment”. I played them, they were extremely linear, with a fixed sequence of steps and extreme hand-holding (arrow pointing to the objectives, interactive objects highlighted, etc.), and the combat was robotic and floaty.

All those are pretty objective facts. Now, some people might enjoy that kind of gameplay; I don’t (that part is a matter of opinion). 

I’m obviously not going to buy a game, pay a subscription and play through 50 or 100 missions where maybe 4 or 5 are enjoyable, in the hopes that the game might “adapt and change” after that (which would be a betrayal of the people who do enjoy the linear gameplay, and bought the game expecting more of that).

The only investigation mission I had a problem with was “The Kingsmouth Code”, in the previous beta weekend, because all the paintings in the town hall were completely black with the default “ultra quality” graphics settings. But I guess that was a bug; it seemed to be fixed in this last beta.

Well, and there was the last clue in “The Vision”, which doesn’t make any sense unless you’ve already visited the location and read the plaque. It wouldn’t surprise me if they actually change the last location to one that makes more sense after release (I read that some clues / locations were just placeholders, so that people who solve the missions during the beta won’t know the solution after release).

Investigation missions are indeed the best ones, but there are very few of them. The combat missions would be more bearable if the combat animations weren’t so robotic and if the enemies actually reacted to your blows. Most of the time I felt like my sword was just passing through their bodies without hitting anything.

> Or that it was obvious where the hidden
> Illuminati vault was for the Kingsmouth Code?  

Well, I went there as soon as I suspected the priest was a member of the Illuminati. My suspicions about it became even stronger when I saw that the plaque at the harbor mentioned “the sleeping priest” (where does the priest sleep, if not in the house next to the church clearly labeled “Priest House”…?). But I couldn’t actually interact with anything there until I did all the previous steps.

In fact, I couldn’t even read the plaque before doing the step before that. The plaque is there, I can see its low-resolution version in the game world, but it’s “unreadable” unless I’m on the “right” mission step. 

It’s unrealistic and patronizing, as if they’re afraid the players will panic if they’re given freedom to read things that aren’t relevant to the exact step of the exact mission they happen to be tracking. It turns the concept of “investigation” into “follow the instructions we give you, one step at a time”.

> that statement is just patently false.

The statement is pretty easy to test. Go to Priest’s House and try to interact with the keypad before clicking the painting to complete the previous quest step. Nothing happens.

Complete the previous quest step and the keypad not only becomes interactive, but actually becomes highlighted, making it completely obvious.

> To complain that a themepark MMO has features of
> a themepark MMO is like taking a car for a test drive
> and then bitching that it has four wheels

Bad comparison. It’s more like taking a car on a test drive and then having the salesman tell you exactly where to go, which route to follow, and what to look at along the way. 

> read the portions of his novels but everything you
> do there makes perfect sense in the context of the story.

Really? So which portion of his novel said that I had to kill 10 zombies of one kind, then walk to a boat (that was magically pinpointed on my map after killing the 10th zombie), and then kill 15 zombies of a slightly different kind?

> Perhaps if you had paid closer attention to
> what was going on and took some time to
> think about it, you might have enjoyed it more.

Or perhaps if you had done a few more missions you would have realized how repetitive and linear they are. Or perhaps you did notice but enjoy that kind of “gameplay”, where you just follow a list of instructions that you’re fed, one at a time. I don’t.

> TSW is not a sandbox MMO and it never claimed to be,

I don’t think the game ever “claimed” anything, one way or the other. There were certainly articles saying the game would have “strong sandbox elements”, before the open betas. 

> but that seems to be what you expect. 

I don’t “expect” anything. I _hoped_ the game would be more interesting and would give players more freedom to interact with the world and more ways to achieve the goals.

But it isn’t, so I’ll save my money and do something more enjoyable with my free time.

If you like TSW, then great for you. I really wanted to like it, and I really think it had potential. Which only makes the final product more disappointing.

> So say you were able to click
> on keypad earlier… what then?

Then I would go talk to the priest, looking for clues as to what kind of code he could have picked. Or maybe try the numbers on the hymn board in his church. Or maybe I would have looked for other Illuminati symbols around the city, and found the painting at the Town Hall. Or maybe I would try to crack the code by brute force.

You know, like in an actual investigation.

In other words, “then” I would have actually made a decision about how I wanted to approach the problem, instead of being merely an intermediary between the instructions on the right side of the screen and the “send report” button at the end of the mission.

> welcome to themepark MMOs.
> Surprise, there’s questing!

Are you trying to avoid the issue, or did you really not understand? The issue isn’t “questing”. When some NPC tells you “we’re being attacked by spiders, please help me by killing 10 of them”, that might be boring and grindy, but it’s honest. Same when they ask you “bring me 10 spider legs so I can make a stew”. You know your objective and your motivation.

But when a quest tells you “locate a mass grave” and gives you a waypoint to the mass grave (in other words, the person telling you to locate it already knows where it is), then tells you to “kill 5 zombies” when you get there (without any explanation of what that’s supposed to achieve), and makes you repeat that five times, that’s not “questing”. That’s just being a puppet.

> You’re going to play the semantic game of
> “expect” vs “hope”? Should I take that as
> a cue to walk away because you’ve run out
> of legitimate things to say?

I’m actually going to play the “semantic game” of explaining that when someone disagrees with you (and especially if that person presents the objective facts that underlie his or her opinion, as I did), that doesn’t mean that what they have to say is “illegitimate”.

Oh, and I’m still waiting for you to tell me where do Sam Krieg’s novels say anything about killing a certain number of zombies or what is the connection between killing the 10th zombie and being given a waypoint to a rusty boat. The issue isn’t the specific number of zombies, the issue is the connection between the conversation with Krieg and the decision to go kill zombies, and the connection between killing (any number of) zombies and being given a waypoint to a rusty boat.

You said “everything you do there makes perfect sense in the context of the story”, and accused me of “not paying attention”, so I expect you’ll have no trouble explaining the logic behind those connections.

A truly devastating argument.

Still waiting for you to tell me where do Sam Krieg’s novels say anything about killing a certain number of zombies or what is the connection between killing the 10th zombie and being given a waypoint to a rusty boat. 

You said “everything you do there makes perfect sense in the context of the story”, and accused me of “not paying attention”, so I expect you’ll have no trouble explaining the logic behind those connections.

I must be going blind, or something, because I still see no explanation for _why_ I’m told to kill zombies of a specific kind.

“Because a book vaguely mentions killing zombies”…? Please, that’s not a reason to _do_ something; you _do_ something in order to _achieve_ some goal – what’s the _goal_ of killing those zombies?

I also see no explanation for why killing a certain number of zombies results in being given a waypoint to a boat. What’s the connection between killing zombies and discovering boats?

I guess your definition of “it makes perfect sense” is fundamentally different from the one used by the inhabitants of my universe.

> you seem to
> be more ok
> with MMOs
> that’re far more
> explicit in
> telling you
> what to do
> and why. 

The key being that last word.

> So, as far
> as I can tell,
> your complaint
> is that TSW is
> too subtle
> about how it
> gives you
> mission
> objectives.

Yes, “too subtle”. It only tells you exactly where to go, exactly what to do, and exactly which intermediate steps you must follow.

Yeah, really subtle…

Well, that was certainly as insightful as your previous explanation.