A couple of days ago, the world was treated a first look at the Scorched Desert, an Egyptian locale from The Secret World. Today, Funcom has partnered with MMORPG.com to give our readers and inside look at the Scorched Desert and at the horrors that await. Check it out and then leave us a comment or two.

An ancient darkness festers in the heart of Egypt. For eons the evil has been kept at bay by valiant guardians, but now their defenses weaken and falter. This corrupting malevolence threatens to spread its black tendrils out across the world. The future of all is at stake.

The battle for the soul of Egypt begins anew. The ensnaring and destructive power of the cruel god Aten were thought defeated long ago, but his worshippers, minions and servants must be faced on the battlefield once again. And so the call goes out to the Chosen of Gaia.

Read more of Tor Egil Andersen's The Secret World Location Preview - The Scorched Desert.

looks like nice detailed graphics.

I don't think graphics had much to do with getting the fail in Failcom :D

Hope they learned from their previous games...

Love the deep and complex storyline. Also the ambience of each location revelaed thus far seem incredible!

• Fundamental concept of the game: love it.
• Character progression model: love it.
• Setting: love it.
• Environment art: love it.
• Player models: don't love it.
• Combat: Waiting to try it.

Funcom has done a really bad job with both of their MMO launches, but honestly the games themselves are not bad. I loved Anarchy Online and Age of Conan has touches of brilliance.

I'm still keeping my hopes up for this. And anyway, I'd buy it just to see what Ragnar's come up with. After all, he's made one of my favorite games of all time (The Longest Journey), so he's earned it. :)

 

The only real complaint I have after watching the latest video is the stiff combat animations - especially shooting guns. When you fire guns in this game, basically your entire body from the waist down doesn't move at all. On top of that, people are shooting flat footed - it just looks silly. It's like your lower body is strappd to some table and only your upper body is having any recoil from shooting. 

Yeah. Animations are always a thing that is generally touched up at the last minute but there's been countless amounts of games where this was "going" to be done and then never happened. And years later, the animations remain the same. Hopefully they do some improvement here before release.

I agree with Kappadonna. Bad animations, IMO, can leave an utterly dreadful taste in peoples mouths. Not only have all the gun wielding animations looked less then realistic, but most of the other animations just don't look very well made in general as well.

I guess one could overlook these problems if the game plays well and is fun all around....and your weapon doesn't sit a foot away from your body as if it's being held there by some invisible force; AoC

I won't touch this game until they show us that the world is NOT broken up into thoughtless chunks like Age of Conan was.

Age of Conan's greatest downfall was that it was broken up into thoughtless, seemingly unconnected, zones that made no sense in their location. It felt like I was simply trolling around a world that was so badly instanced that I could never get into the game.

They claim there is little instancing in this game. Well, if that is true then show us!

Originally posted by Fadedbomb

I won't touch this game until they show us that the world is NOT broken up into thoughtless chunks like Age of Conan was.

 

Age of Conan's greatest downfall was that it was broken up into thoughtless, seemingly unconnected, zones that made no sense in their location. It felt like I was simply trolling around a world that was so badly instanced that I could never get into the game.

 

They claim there is little instancing in this game. Well, if that is true then show us!

 

This game, as far as I can see, is all instanced zones. The game will be pretty much like AoC where you travel to each local through a hub zone network that connects everything together. IMO it's a poor choice but only because I've been playing Skyrim since it came out and I just feel it's impossible to go back to instanced zones no matter how nice the local graphics are.

Originally posted by xenorace

Originally posted by Fadedbomb

I won't touch this game until they show us that the world is NOT broken up into thoughtless chunks like Age of Conan was.

 

Age of Conan's greatest downfall was that it was broken up into thoughtless, seemingly unconnected, zones that made no sense in their location. It felt like I was simply trolling around a world that was so badly instanced that I could never get into the game.

 

They claim there is little instancing in this game. Well, if that is true then show us!

 

This game, as far as I can see, is all instanced zones. The game will be pretty much like AoC where you travel to each local through a hub zone network that connects everything together. IMO it's a poor choice but only because I've been playing Skyrim since it came out and I just feel it's impossible to go back to instanced zones no matter how nice the local graphics are.

 

It's not all instanced. Yes, the dungeons are, but the main zones are not, such as Kingsmouth and the Scorched Desert. Also, the warzones will not be instanced either.

You don't play graphics, you don't interact with pixels. Potted infomation on storyline tells you nothing about what it will be like to quest that story in game. We know the graphics are good, but how about not talking to the LCD in players and tell us more about the actual gameplay?

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Originally posted by Scot
You don't play graphics, you don't interact with pixels. Potted infomation on storyline tells you nothing about what it will be like to quest that story in game. We know the graphics are good, but how about not talking to the LCD in players and tell us more about the actual gameplay?

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Catch Up

Originally posted by Fadedbomb

I won't touch this game until they show us that the world is NOT broken up into thoughtless chunks like Age of Conan was.

Age of Conan's greatest downfall was that it was broken up into thoughtless, seemingly unconnected, zones that made no sense in their location. It felt like I was simply trolling around a world that was so badly instanced that I could never get into the game.

They claim there is little instancing in this game. Well, if that is true then show us!

I don't agree.

AoC's greatest downfall was the game was basically unfinished in several key areas:  Infrastructure -

Bank / Mail / Auction House dynamic was god awful.  You put stuff "up on the auction house" by leaving it in your pack . . . with a for sale sign on it.  Egads.  The mail system was also tied to your available pack space.  If you had full packs, no e-mail attachments for you.

Instancing was buggy.  You needed to sync up with your buddy "standing right next to you", but in different instances?  It sometimes didn't work and you never phased together in the same instance.

Faulty grouping/travel features/paradigm.  Specifically, forming a group for a dungeon, then waiting for EVERYONE TO GET THERE was sometimes horrible.  Some zones had convoluted, dead-end ravine riddle terrain, with no portal stones/summons at instance entrances.  As a result, you'd wait FOREVAH sometimes for peeps, particularly those new to the zone, try to work their way to you.

Too high a degree of buggy quests, sometimes of key importance inside instances.  There was a Pyramid somewhere I recall, where you could NOT complete the quest line to the final boss or something due to a bug . . . and it wasn't fixed for a long time.  One example of too many.  Many quests worked, but just too many tripped you up after you had humped to get it done.

Otherwise I felt zone designs were quite well done, didn't really have a problem with their overall world design, etc.

It was the 1/2 finished game feeling, at key infrastructure points, that killed AoC for many.

Originally posted by xenorace



This game, as far as I can see, is all instanced zones. The game will be pretty much like AoC where you travel to each local through a hub zone network that connects everything together. IMO it's a poor choice but only because I've been playing Skyrim since it came out and I just feel it's impossible to go back to instanced zones no matter how nice the local graphics are.

Well, for some reason I can't get the edit through to my above post.  So:

To the above poster who made a comment about Skyrim as a benchmark of comparison for world design vs the secret world:

Isn't Skyrim a single-player game, NOT an MMO?

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Originally posted by Silverbranch
Well, for some reason I can't get the edit through to my above post.  So:To the above poster who made a comment about Skyrim as a benchmark of comparison for world design vs the secret world: Isn't Skyrim a single-player game, NOT an MMO?

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Yes it is. But sadly thats how a lot of people play MMOs now.

Originally posted by Beowulfsam

I don't think graphics had much to do with getting the fail in Failcom :D

Hope they learned from their previous games...

 

+1

Has anything been said about the possibility of Cantina brawling with other players?

first star wars, then this

Originally posted by Beowulfsam

I don't think graphics had much to do with getting the fail in Failcom :D

Hope they learned from their previous games...

 

They have. Gaute Godager isn't the GD or associated with TSW in any way, which proves that they have, indeed, learned.