It's definitely the best MMO I've ever played, if not the best game I've ever played. I've never seen such a depth of the story-line in any game before. I think the game hits a special group of gamers. Personally I'm a sort of a hybrid MMO and adventurer. Therefore, it suits me perfectly.

Originally posted by rav500

It's definitely the best MMO I've ever played, if not the best game I've ever played. I've never seen such a depth of the story-line in any game before. I think the game hits a special group of gamers. Personally I'm a sort of a hybrid MMO and adventurer. Therefore, it suits me perfectly.

I agree 100%. The best MMO I have played in years.

Originally posted by vtravi

Originally posted by rav500

It's definitely the best MMO I've ever played, if not the best game I've ever played. I've never seen such a depth of the story-line in any game before. I think the game hits a special group of gamers. Personally I'm a sort of a hybrid MMO and adventurer. Therefore, it suits me perfectly.

I agree 100%. The best MMO I have played in years.

Yep I'm in, also best MMO ever. And I played quite a number..

Really like the game, atmosphere is excellent. Cut scenes are the best I have seen - the guy in the junk yard is awesome.

Combat needs work, skills are many but have a feel of being very similar to each other.

Should become a classic if they support it fully.

Atmosphere is excellent, the story line is good enough as well. I enjoyed it much more then SWTOR setting and the story line of my bounty hunter, which I found boring and repetitive.

Beyond that it gets worse. Combat which is easily 3/4 of your time in the game is a rather disappointing experience. Skills work and look really similar. Animations,sounds and feel of the combat are still lacking.

The whole mechanics of building your own build and passive synergies shoots itself in a foot by depending too much on passives and even that part is really semi. It's all about one effect  triggering another effect. WIth all the claimed freedom of building your own original build, you want to stay efficient you are restricted by a much smaller number of sensible builds.

In the end it all boils down to pressing a resource builder fives times, pressing two resource consumers and repeating the whole process until your target or targets die. Other four buttons it's usually one CC, one buff, one escape skill and possible one more damaging skill ( often elite ) which doesn't depend on the resources. 

I tried to make the combat as active experience as possible with my builds:

Pistol and shotty kitter which I later modified by sacrificing crit power for more penetration:

http://www.drakkashi.com/secretworld/wheel.php?58=0&56=2&48=2&52=4&56=4&61=0&48=6&58=1&58=3&11=2&11=0&9=0&60=1&57=6

but in long run it gets boring. I finished my first "free" month half way through the first Transylvanian zone and decided the game is not worth my sub after all. The combat experience is one thing, but the lack of content is another. I would most likely finish the available zone content in the next two weeks. There is no way Funcom is going to produce enough game content to keep me paying.

Dungeons don't interest me despite fact the few I tried were quite fun. The thing is that Funcom made a mistake of following the old tank, healer and dps silliness. It makes the group pve combat even more static and depended on available healers and tanks. I have no patience or time to wait until I manage to gather an appropriate group of pub heroes.

TSW pvp is another issue. It's gets down to zerg >> gear > skill.

Finally I don't intend to pay a sub for running over and over 3 pvp instances and some pointless dungeon treadmill for stats.

If I want pvp or multiplayer experience I have BF3 and soon PS2 . Repetitive subpar pvp and dungeon treadmill doesn't justify a sub. The game gets 7/10 from me.

Originally posted by BlackestNite

Originally posted by daystar18

Game must be doing something right. Its hype was around 7.1 and after time has went higher....also be reminded more people tend to complain and rate low than people come to actually give positive feedback.

they haven't even hit their target of 450K subs. at the current sales rate it will take another two months, if ever. that's why there's no announcements about commercial performance of any kind made. it has sold about 130K as of now and they are losing subs already. 

 

Not the most accurate of sites, plus its only retail figures.. dont believe they include digital downlaods or anything like that.. as they dont have that information from the digital retailers and especially from ea/funcom.

http://www.vgchartz.com/game/38647/the-secret-world/

kinda gives a bit of an idea.. so yeah i would think they have hit their target and probally have quite a few more..

Originally posted by Caldrin

Originally posted by BlackestNite

Originally posted by daystar18

Game must be doing something right. Its hype was around 7.1 and after time has went higher....also be reminded more people tend to complain and rate low than people come to actually give positive feedback.

they haven't even hit their target of 450K subs. at the current sales rate it will take another two months, if ever. that's why there's no announcements about commercial performance of any kind made. it has sold about 130K as of now and they are losing subs already. 

 

Not the most accurate of sites, plus its only retail figures.. dont believe they include digital downlaods or anything like that.. as they dont have that information from the digital retailers and especially from ea/funcom.

http://www.vgchartz.com/game/38647/the-secret-world/

 

kinda gives a bit of an idea.. so yeah i would think they have hit their target and probally have quite a few more..

If I'm reading that site correctly, and please forgive me if I'm not, it seems that TSW sold only 40,000 retail copies. How is that an indication that they've hit their target of 450,000? Or are you trying to say that TSW's retail sales did not even reach 10% and the rest were digital distribution?

Originally posted by heartless

Originally posted by Caldrin

http://www.vgchartz.com/game/38647/the-secret-world/

kinda gives a bit of an idea.. so yeah i would think they have hit their target and probally have quite a few more..

If I'm reading that site correctly, and please forgive me if I'm not, it seems that TSW sold only 40,000 retail copies. How is that an indication that they've hit their target of 450,000? Or are you trying to say that TSW's retail sales did not even reach 10% and the rest were digital distribution?

its not a good site to go by

for Diablo3, Vgchartz claims D3 has sold 2.5million  ..  1/4 of what D3 really sold

http://www.vgchartz.com/game/24178/diablo-iii/

The game its just amazing and fun, the quest are extremely fun a mostly repeteable.  This game its like Silent Hill and RE has a MMO Son. Its a dream come true.

The problem? the game has only 1 month old and you want to compare it with WoW (like 10 years old) ... actually i played WoW and last expansions are crap (since WOTLK). The WoW quest had nothing to do with TSW (TSW has Cinemathis and more than the usar dragons / goblims crap).

TSW its an original Game with an original (for a MMORPG) storyline. 

The Skill system its nothing like i ever do before. Nothing like the restrictive skill tree in other games. If you wanna make an unique and original char TSW gives you all the options....

Totally agree with this review.

(NCSOLF and Blizzard marketing guerrilla on?.... )

Seriously... people complain about graphic and intereface in beta... where they are testing and improving them....

Really? I have yet to see a game thats graphic did not improve from beta to launch.

Originally posted by I_Return

Pc Gamer gave it a 6.9. The mmorpg.com review makes more sense.

      Thats actually a little higher than I would have given it..... TSW just wasnt a very good game....I can see maybe a niche crowd getting soemthing from it, but overall it was a bad game.....IMO it was so bad I didnt even play for free after the first 2 weeks I was in beta......No way was this game worth what they were asking their customers to pay for it.

i've been playing this since start but really beginning to get bored with it.

just too many bugs:

- bugged weapons (not producing ressources like they should), people shooting blanks since last patch

- bugged skills (using them would be exploiting and not using them makes things unnecessarily difficult for undergeared teams)

- bugged attributes (hit rating) and attribute summary is bugged since early beta now !!!

- bugged bosses make easy stuff randomly stupid (invisible filth, los-cheating, agro dropping, zero HP bombs)

- bugged items/talisman (tanks with high blockrating still get penetrated until they reequip every item)

- bugged quests, some quests still bugged since beta or bugging out occasionally (e.g. 'too deep' usually works once after server restart or if a gm spawns the mobs)

- bugged mobs, some mobs required for achievments just dont ever spawn (verified by GM)

- bugged dungeons: nightmare HF is a pile of shit its so bugged FC must be insane to release this

and nothing to do after you beat all quests:

- nightmare dungeons (5 per day)

- signet farming

- pointless pvp (too many exploits, and pvp gear is not compatible with pve gear)

- repeating quests over and over

- farm 10k mobs of each kind all achievements

- farm lair mobs for more achievements ?

result of bugged encounters and skills btw. is that half the population doesnt give a rats a** about exploting the s*** out of this game.

hitting your head against the same 5 bugged dungeons every day because endgame doesnt offer more, made 75% of my cabal empty over the last 2 weeks.

the big joke is that some of the bugs are fixed acording to funcoms patchnotes. and another funny thing is the recent "content-update", which is just the release of stuff that was too bugged at start and was held back.

with 50% of the fc staff gone now, what do you think will happen to this game ? remember how AO started with videos and content updates ?

Originally posted by Fadedbomb

None of your scores make sense.

Aesthetics – 9.5??

 

How in the bloody hell did you find it "ok" to take what essentially boils down to "Graphics" and turn it into a major scoring point for TSW? Graphics =/= a game. This shouldn't be a scoring point!

Game Play – 8.5??

This is a highly opinion based score area given the fact that people whom like WoW will like TSW's gameplay, but generally speaking people whom like DAOC, EQ, SWG, or even Age of Conan's combat system will dislike it immensely. You should put near the beginning of your article which game you mostly relate to for your scores. Obviously I don't agree at all with an "8.5" given TSW's horribly clunky & non-intuitive combat system. Not to mention the horrible animations.

Value & Longevity – 8.0??

Your primary reason, as stated, for this scoring point was based on SWTOR's recent announcement about F2P and that since TSW already has a cash-shop it'll make a clean transition to F2P should subs prove to dip too low?!

Value & Longevity is a scoring point, in most reviews, that dictate replayability & end-game enjoyment. At the VERY LEAST it has nothing to do with the payment model associated with the game.

NONE OF THE POINTS YOU RAISED FOR SCORING MAKE ANY SENSE AS A PRIMARY REVIEWBASE!

Next, we look at your overall Pros/Cons that have zero connection to any of your previous scoring points:

 

Pros

Deep skill system - Just a facade, not actually "deep"  GREAT story - Agreed, but so did SWTOR  Meaningful dungeons - How exactly are they "meaningful", they have no impact at all on the world outside those instances?!  Tiered and unique questing - Same quest system used by WoW. Go to point A get quests 1 - 9, do quests, go to Point B for higher tiered/chained quests. Nothing unique here other than the occassional "gem" with a half-decent story behind it.

Cons

Lack of initial character customization - Yup  Lackluster PvP - Yup  Repetitive trash mobs - Yup

[mod edited - removed some spacing]

 

It's a reveiw... All his opinions...Just cause you don't like the game doesn't mean anything, I found all his points rather solid, not just the skill system is just a facade... Cause I said so.

Originally posted by Dren_Utogi

Pc Gamer gave it a 6.9. The mmorpg.com review makes more sense.

 I lean more towards the PC Gamer score...To me it just wasn't a very good MMO...the game should have been made as a single player....It had alot of weaknesses imo including animations, combat, overdone voice acting and cutscenes.....TSW is built for very short term and that just isn't how a MMO should be made....Also the cash grab that was made with this game was a big turn off.