MMORPG.com is committed to giving our readers the best and most informative reviews of today's hottest MMOs. With that in mind, we're beginning our multi-part series on The Secret World. In today's installment, we take our first baby steps into The Secret World and give you our thoughts about the game. Read on!

Where characters really get a chance to shine as unique individuals is with clothing. The options at creation are pretty broad though most of the apparel is “the same thing in a different color”. Still there are tons of choices from the get-go. I dressed my girl up in a nice pair of cargo pants and a tank top with a pair of glasses and she was ready to roll. And I could have lived with that for a long time until I discovered Pangaea in London. Honestly, it’s a good thing that TSW players have a clothing store to shop in because, at least to now, I have not had a single item of clothing drop off a monster. But that’s just fine now that I have some ready cash to hit Pangaea’s. I could have spent all day there…well, I actually spent most of my day off there looking at and trying on everything. Talk about choices galore! I ended up buying a few things but am saving my money for a trench coat which just suits my overall mysteriousness in TSW.

Read more of Suzie Ford's The Secret World: Review In Progress - Part One.

Finally got to load and start playing for real after a little taste of beta. This is a very honest review of a very good game. Loaded the game yesterday built my so so character like the review says and out i went. I looked up and I had been playing for 5 hours without a break and I was like wth? Got in another 3 hours before logging off and taking a shower : /

Woke up in the middle of the night last night and logged on again for another 2 hours. Can't wait to get off work and get back into this amazing game.

Peace

Lascer

Just one comment regarding the lack of respec: you can usually just modify your existing build if it's a bad one. It's a bit like Diablo 3 where you get access to more and more skills, and some just don't work well together. Swap out a couple of abilities with ones you have from earlier or buy some new one with the AP you get as you play.

Originally posted by david361107

Finally got to load and start playing for real after a little taste of beta. This is a very honest review of a very good game. Loaded the game yesterday built my so so character like the review says and out i went. I looked up and I had been playing for 5 hours without a break and I was like wth? Got in another 3 hours before logging off and taking a shower : /

 

Woke up in the middle of the night last night and logged on again for another 2 hours. Can't wait to get off work and get back into this amazing game.

 

Peace

Lascer

I've noticed that time does fly by when I play this game. So surprised at how much it pulls you in when playing. It's a very well made game so far. Let's see how long it lasts. Hopefully Funcom can pump out content on a regular basis ala TRION so it keeps us subscribed for months and years to come. If not, it may stop when the quests stop and we'll see you in F2P land down the road. Hoping it doesn't happen but you never know.

Good game .... no ... GREAT game so far!

ill make it short: after 5 days, it seems to be the best mmo ive played since anarchy online. so far, funcom (again) made the right choices in every aspect.

"there is no going back. This was an intentional game design on the developers’ part as they felt it would break immersion. I suppose I can understand that but I don’t know that I agree with it. If a player makes poor choices or “experiments” and those choices result in poor or ineffective builds, not being able to respec one’s character punishes players for trying to do something unique"

This is not a valid complaint. If you picked wrong abilities and wasted a few APs, you can just rerun a couple of missions, and get those AP's back. First I ran through Kingsmouth as a DPS character, then at Savage Coast I realized I want to be a healer, so I reran several important Kingsmouth missions that give a lot of XP - and guess what, in about an hour I had all the AP's to make a viable healer's build, along with healer-item rewards from those missions. 

Now  one could say that I've wasted about 150 APs so far on abilities I'm not using, since they turned out to be not that good, but they are not really wasted points. Eventually, maybe in the later stage I decide to re-do the entire build and focus on different synergies, and find those abilities useful. Who knows.

My only issue with the game while I was in beta (In beta for the past 2 months or so, little more) was the lack of variety in the lower levels. I know the game opens up later on but I got kind of sick of Kingsmouth. The ambiance was GREAT for what was there...but I found myself really wanting to be able to explore other places/sceneries before I was able to...and even when I did get to the next zone it was just a lot more of the "New England" feel.

I think the complaint is very specific to myself but I really love to explore and it's really important to me to have a very large world in an MMO with a variety of locations and settings. I know later on in the game there are other places (Egpyt, Transylvania) and those are great, but I think the lower levels needed more variety. Like in AoC; Sure everyone starts out in Tortage but pretty quickly you are given the choices of 3 pretty distinct areas to start your lower levels. If you get sick of one (which I did when I played AoC), you can always change and follow a different story for awhile.

Basically I was just a little underwhelmed by the amount of "content" for the lower levels. What was there was great, but honestly I got sick of it. There were many play sessions where I would have kept playing if I could have switched to another area and worked on something different but instead when another quest sent me running across Kingsmouth I just couldn't handle it and logged off. I will definitely check out the game in a year or so and see if they add more to it (I would love to see 2 more starting zones to add variety). Right now that Icouldn't imagine purchasing the game and replaying through Kingsmouth (after playing it through in beta several times) just because I've done it all before and there would be really nothing different in another go around.

I agree this game is awesome , I also agree with the reviewer about the Character creation , I was really hoping they would push the boat on this one , its hard to believe that a game with settings and storylines like this that they didn't,  but apart tfrom that gripe I love it . :-)

I hope they fix the Character creation soon so we can start having some truly strange and wonderful characters !

Originally posted by Dunkare

ill make it short: after 5 days, it seems to be the best mmo ive played since anarchy online. so far, funcom (again) made the right choices in every aspect.

When you said again, I hoped you meant Anarchy Online and not Age of Conan the video game. :)

Straight down the line. Good review Bill. 

As far as the respec, some will complain. The further they play however, they will come to learn there are "no bad choices" Some choices may be more timely than others, but in the end that 4 point ability they thought they wasted 4 points on may become the corner stone of a later build. 

In the long run you only gain. In the short term, sure it can be frustrating. That's how learning works ;)

Originally posted by bcbully

Straight down the line. Good review Bill.

Suzie is reviewing this! ;)

I don't think it would be that simple to allow us to change our body types. Now I'm no programmer, but wouldn't that needlessly complicate cut-scenes and/or clothing sizes? Regarding cut-scenes at least, I figured that's why SWTOR didn't allow body size customization. On the other hand, Aion has the most extreme variation of body sizes you'll see, and it didn't seem to impact their cutscenes; there are very few cinematics though, not like SWTOR or TSW.

enjoy those that can play. me and some more dudes get crashes all the time, and their tech support sucks monkey ass.

Originally posted by Senadina

I don't think it would be that simple to allow us to change our body types. Now I'm no programmer, but wouldn't that needlessly complicate cut-scenes and/or clothing sizes? Regarding cut-scenes at least, I figured that's why SWTOR didn't allow body size customization. On the other hand, Aion has the most extreme variation of body sizes you'll see, and it didn't seem to impact their cutscenes; there are very few cinematics though, not like SWTOR or TSW.

I think i read someplace that they had different body types in one of the early betas of alphas..

Clothing and stuff would be fine, as well as cutscenes.. but we will ahve to wait and see..

Yeah there will be a ingame barber shop and plastic surgeon to change ur appearance for ingame pax romana the ingame currency (not $$ like some people are wrongly saying). Theres a nice post on the official forums of how it ties into the game with the lore not just some quick throw in a quick fix to the character creation problems theres a story behind it.

Nice write up. I love the setting and lore. But, what I like the most about this game: It's actually taking time to learn how things work. I don't feel like I'm being spoon fed. I have to think about what I'm doing.

I think everything was right on in this review, but there is no need to respec in my opinion.  On a daily basis you can do the first quest which gives you a choice of any starter weapon in the game you want.  If you decide to play the game for a long time, you are going to level up all the skills anyway.  You can change all your gear and abilities with one click of the mouse when you save them in memory slots.   It takes only a few hours at best to grab a weapon, and build up a full set of basic skills.  If they put respec in the game, all you would have to do is build up one set of skills to epic level then respec whenever you need.  They would have to make it a one time only, or extremely expensive choice if they ever implemented respec.  In a sense, once you build up enough skills you can respec to the other weapons and abilities anyway as much as you want.

Wow!! So much positive on these boards, I have trouble believing i'm on MMORPG.com.  But it feels good!

About the game: I only played for a few hours during a BWE, and I completely lost myself in the world, it is very immersive.

Originally posted by Warmachinez

 

About the game: I only played for a few hours during a BWE, and I completely lost myself in the world, it is very immersive.

Well, the world is very instanced, though TSW isn't bad. I was closed beta tester, but I am not playing at launch. Game is a mishmash of esoteric and occult ideas. Ultimetely,t hough, it isn't anything particularly new, so as an mmo I think it likely niche to those interested in the subject of the mmo. There are some iritating features to the game which are touch upon in review part one, and also there are some bugs present.

My review score 7/10