Dark or Light
logo
Logo

Meaningful Quality-of-Life Additions

Victor Barreiro Jr. Posted:
Category:
Columns 0

So, again I come to you with a bit of disclosure. I was supposed to spend part of my weekend playing The Secret World and testing Fusang changes, but I ran into some trouble patching. Simply put, I'm going to need to reinstall TSW, which takes at least 20 hours of uninterrupted downloading on my connection.

That said, you're not going to walk away without some food for thought.

I spent some time mulling over some ideas for meaningful additions to TSW that might shake things up a bit. While these ideas may have unintended consequences by virtue of their use and may not be easy to implement in TSW, they still should provide quite a bit of interesting discussion and quirky memories for players to think fondly of when they consider the game.

Idea One: Returning to your old apartment

This is fairly simple to imagine. What if your old home, whether that room you were in was a house or an apartment complex, became more than a backdrop for the game's opening?

I can imagine some possibilities for this. The first would turn your apartment into a quest location, where another person or group of people have become the owners of the place, and you're called to recruit them into your cabal because your place apparently likes making anima-infused people. What if your apartment was haunted? What if, like in Cabin in the Woods, you went back to get a memento, and the memento you choose in the game made you face a terrible horror based on that memento?

It's a fun idea, and one that tries to add layers to the backstory of your character.

Idea Two: Marriage

It's not a new idea, as I remember covering the intro event for RIFT's marriage system and others have done it too. At the same time, it's an intriguing concept if you add some wrinkles to it. Cross-faction and same-sex relationships can be represented, with cross-faction marriages requiring an entourage of at least 5 people, who have to defend the lovebirds so they can say their vows.

Best of all, everyone gets wedding loot as a result, like a free tux or dress or something. That'd make for interesting memories.

Imagine:

“Hey honey, remember that time when Sherwin cut that Dragon in half with a chainsaw?”

“Oh yeah! We had a beautiful fountain of blood that day! How... romantic!”

Idea 3: Music Making

I like music, and having musical systems in game can make things interesting too. You don't need to make an exceptionally tough system to master like that of LOTRO, but at the very least, the addition of a system that will let you play specific files with notations in it using an equipped faction-specific musical instrument (like a Templar bagpipe or a Illuminati harmonica) would be enough.

Heck, if you even let me play my own music through an in-game player, I'd be mighty pleased. Gangnam Gunman Style! HEEEEEEEY! SEXY LADY!

Again, these are just ideas. I doubt they'd be very intriguing to people looking for new action gameplay mechanics or PVP revamps (I've heard Fusang PVP isn't going great, but I'm hoping Funcom gets on that and changes things some more to remedy it), but if the Albion Theatre was an interesting addition, I don't see why some more fluff couldn't be added in 2013 to augment the game's systems. 



victorbjr

Victor Barreiro Jr.

Victor Barreiro Jr. / Victor Barreiro Jr. maintains The Devil’s Advocate and The Secret World columns for MMORPG.com. He also writes for news website Rappler as a technology reporter. You can find more of his writings on Games and Geekery and on Twitter at @vbarreirojr.