Secret World Legends

Mitch played The Secret World when it first launched, though wasn't all that taken with the MMO. However, he's jumping back in to give it another shot with Secret World Legends in this latest MMO ReRoll.

Secret World Legends has been very good to me. But it’s also been slightly annoying. On one hand, I’ve been enthralled with the game for the first time since launch. Combat, pacing, and adventuring all got a leg up over the original. But with this massive step forward came a big step back.

There has been a deluge of MMO releases these past few weeks. And yet, the one I didn't expect to get completely sucked into has been tying up all my free gaming time since Funcom let press in the doors early this week - Secret World Legends is a blast. In many ways, SWL is the The Secret World you know and love. But in all the best ways, it's also a more approachable and highly more engaging affair thanks to a revamped combat and progression system.

Much of The Secret World is the same no matter which faction you chose to go with. The open world where nearly all of the game takes place is identical no matter which group you pick. If you’re a Dragon you can even team up with an Illuminati and a Templar at the same time. So the question becomes, if most of the game is the same no matter which side you join, does it really matter? I would say that yes, it very much matters and not for the reason you might be thinking.

Last night I sat down at my computer to finally get my chance to dive into the Halloween story. Nevermind that it’s past Halloween now, it’s always Halloween in The Secret World. Or at least it feels that way. So I logged Penny in and hit the button to get it started. Wow do I regret that.

There really is no better MMO to play during Halloween than The Secret World. I’m even lucky enough right now to be playing in Kingsmouth thanks to Murphy’s Lawbreakers. Kingsmouth is of course forever stuck in Halloween. Not only is it actually Halloween there, see the pumpkins sitting on porches and a roadside stand as evidence of this. But the entire setting screams Halloween horror.

This weekend saw the first meeting of Murphy’s Lawbreakers, the official MMORPG Illuminati cabal. We had a fantastic turnout that had all of Kingsmouth talking. The first twenty minutes of the meetup were spent getting to know each other and inviting people to the cabal. By the end there were 17 of us, which had a few consequences that hadn’t been considered when the whole idea was thought up.

Item Stores are a funny thing. Some people love them, some people hate them. They offer a players the opportunity to get new items, and often even new content. They help keep the world of the MMO you’re in looking fresh. Or they can give you a boost to heal faster, or gain experience more quickly. The item store for The Secret World does all of this and more, and yet…there’s something missing.

Now that convention season is coming to an end MMORPG is slowly getting back to the normal routine. This means we’re back to our every other week schedule! And just in case you missed it I got to interview Joel Bylos about all things related to The Secret World. This of course happened before he released his August Game Director’s letter which came out at the end of last week.

Opinions are like…I’m not going to finish that sentence for the sake of the future of my career. But you know how it goes. And it seems a lot of people have opinions on The Secret World. In fact a lot of them are bad. So bad they bear repeating at least every two weeks. Or so they seem to think. So I’m going to break down a few of the ones I keep seeing over and over.

While doing my regular forum browse on the official forums for The Secret World I came across someone who was looking for a roleplaying group. They laid out their character concept and called it boring. But I don’t think it is boring, in fact I think it could possibly be one of the most interesting ideas out there. You see, his character is himself.

Two years of The Secret World. It hardly seems true. Though it is still a baby next to its Funcom brothers Age of Conan and Anarchy Online The Secret World has certainly had an exciting life so far. We’ve faced the end of the world while cowering in our basement, there has been controversy, there has been terror, there has been joy, and artists have been given freedom to run wild. All of this happening while the MMO is still learning to walk.

I recently had the most meta experience of my entire gaming life. There I was, relaxing after the insanity of E3 and ready to settle into The Secret World’s Tokyo. Then I learned, you need to earn access to get there. It makes sense, they don’t want any noob to just wander in. So I started doing a bit of research. I had two options. The first and possibly most popular was to do scenarios. They aren’t really my thing though, so I opted for the second way.

As we enter the final stretch before Tokyo I’d like to pause for a moment to pay tribute to our favorite Redshirts, the Orochi. We will be heading straight to the heart of Orochi headquarters to find out what exactly happened. There is no doubt that we will meet many Orochi along the way. And maybe, just maybe one will survive. But we aren’t going to hold our breath.

While we continue to wait for the moment when we can get into Tokyo I thought I would take a bit of time to skip ahead and look at things that would in my mind take The Secret World from fantastic to out of this world. These are all things that would keep people playing or improve the quality of life and could possibly be implemented post Tokyo. So in no particular order here are seven things I’d like to see introduced to TSW.