First impressions

[Elrojo]

Ok so i know some things will be ironed out/expanded etc for the open game. But here is what i liked and dislked and maybe chris can tell me which are beta things and which wont be changed.

Good Bits

1) Less "grinding"

Somewhat like SWTOR you can pretty much stay self sufficient with your armour and weapons. Unlike AO where if you wear what you pick up you will be gimp and die. Also the money thng seems to be easer to come by. I think I have about 60K or so in the bank and most things cost between 100-1000 credits or what ever they are called. the a hae xp comes fast enough and with little time you can start to have a handy skill set.

2) Atmosphere

I've only played kingsmouth so far, which seems to have this 28 days later vibe to it. Kinda like there was an outbreak or some vrus or something but zombes and undead rule the place. Its pretty cool, though the range of mobs in that zone is qute low. The music is nice and eerie and it has captured the RPG sde of things that can be missing in an MMORPG. Like you look at a phone book to find the address of a shop or w/e, little detals like that make it feel a bit more of a story, rather than just relying on cutscenes or alike to tell you things.

3) Combat.

So far its simple to pick up, but lacks the complexity of SWTOR so far. This may improve with the full game. But for a pck up and go sort of thing it works, its not too complicated and you can pew pew pew.

4) Quests

This is a good and bad for me. But the good is that its not just a run to this waypoint sort of thing all the time. There is a bit of working out the clues, follow the blood without waypoints. So it does keep you thnking. The quest types also seem to vary well. Some escort, some kill, some discover, some collect etc. So it keeps it from being the same over and over.

5) Achievements

Like GTA you have some stats like "kill 100 zombes" that just keep ticking over, its different and I like it. i'm not sure what reward you get for doing them, but its a cool novelty

6) Crafting

Its not really implemented yet, but I do like the straghtforwardness (is that a word) of the crafting and the general idea. this seems to be that you take an item, you break it down to its base component (water, fire, metal, dust etc) and then for every 5 of the base items you can make an imperfect, for every 5 imperfect you make the "element", 5 elements for a sacred and thats as far as I got. I like that its an accumulation over time thing, though I dont much like having to keep many varieties and the icons arent easy to determine. But its more predictable than SWTOR and generally makes more sense than AO. watch this space i guess.

The no-so-good bits

1) Questing

My BIGGEST annoyance is the fact you can only have like 5 quests at a time.... you always have a story/class quest so you can only pick up 4 more before you have to pause one. Its a bit silly. In the sheriffs offce there are already 3 quest givers meaning you can only pick up 1 more Quest on the way before you are forced to pause, or back track later.

There is no clear cut way of knowing which people have quests they can offer you. I like the SWTOR map that shows you quests that you need to pick up. The problem with TSW is that the quest givers and pick-up quests are scattered and its a PITA to run all the way to somewhere only to fnd its locked, or on a tme out. Also if you pause a quest you have to run back to the NPC to resume, you cannot click it in your quest window.

When having multiple quests you can only show waypoints for 1 at a time. Silly. Often 2 or more quests will have a waypoint very close together, but you have to keep flicking between them to see. Again I think SWTOR got this one right, and TSW didnt.

2) Logic...?

Some of the quest clues are useless at best. Referring to time, so you look at the time, but the time is a reference to a biblical passage. I mean did anyone actually know that, or has it been passed down from spoiler to spoiler? This game has the worrying signs of one that will force people to log off due to frustration, or make them google spoilers in a disappointing anti-climax. Perhaps the clues should progress and the more you need the less XP you get or something.

3) Longevity?

I see that you can train all possible combinations of weapons and skills etc, but why would you want to? I like having a few different guys for different things. But the quests mean that once you know the answer some of the fun is now taken out of the quests. I am just worried as I generally get a bit sick of playing the same character over and over, and as things start to move slower (longer gaps between upgrades) I tend to roll a new toon to just break it up, ths game doesnt seem to be geared towards that.

All-in-all its a good game, not sure how long I will/would play it as there are some very frustrating aspects to the questing system, but perhaps as the game opens out some more it may offer more of the positives to drown out the whopper of a negative that is the current questing system

[Rembaldi]

I tried it for about an hour. I didn't really get very far. But my first impressions are somewhat... bleh. I don't particular like the graphics style, and I hate the moon walking animations that characters have when running and strafing (reminds me too much of AoC). But I'm sure it's a game one can adapt to like over time. I doubt I will though.

Think I'll stick with Diablo 3 and Guild Wars 2 for now

[Chrisax]

Good to have some reactions already. I know Bredin will post soon and also Crash sent me this in PM about PvP (it's not private so I can post it):

I played a bit of closed beta pvp tonight. We Templars took over all 3 facilities. (woot!)

Man, that playfield is massive. Pretty fun, but some performance issues with about 15 of us running around.

With my hatred of zombies & such, I predict I'll be spending a lot of time in PvP.

@Rembaldi : not to defend TSW in any way but I honestly think that one hour or so didn't allow you to see much and you probably got over-focused on a few things that annoyed you. Also, although the "real world" look is very nice, a little town of New England is, by definition, not very spectacular in itself. But I assume you didn't see the Polaris dungeon and, of course, you couldn't see the other zones or the "Hell raised" dungeon either, or the PvP zones like Eldorado.
That said, characters and character animations are questioned ATM (not mobs), nothing dramatic but clearly less natural than motion-capture in AoC (it's fun it reminds you of AoC as, precisely, it's currently inferior and use no or little motion capture)
I don't know what the next weekends will be. I think you should either give it another look if the content is different or have a look at the whole game later. And then make your "complete" opinion.

1) Less "grinding"

Somewhat like SWTOR you can pretty much stay self sufficient with your armour and weapons. Unlike AO where if you wear what you pick up you will be gimp and die. Also the money thng seems to be easer to come by. I think I have about 60K or so in the bank and most things cost between 100-1000 credits or what ever they are called. the a hae xp comes fast enough and with little time you can start to have a handy skill set.

So far, loot is good, so there is no mandatory loot grind, especially if you take the time to get powers and items and don't try to rush to the next challenge. Still, you can go for awesome gear in some hard dungeons or challenges.
Money is nothing final at all, so it's impossible to say anything.
XP will always be gained. It never stops, so you can keep on getting new powers.

2) Atmosphere

I've only played kingsmouth so far, which seems to have this 28 days later vibe to it. Kinda like there was an outbreak or some vrus or something but zombes and undead rule the place. Its pretty cool, though the range of mobs in that zone is qute low. The music is nice and eerie and it has captured the RPG sde of things that can be missing in an MMORPG. Like you look at a phone book to find the address of a shop or w/e, little detals like that make it feel a bit more of a story, rather than just relying on cutscenes or alike to tell you things.

The atmosphere is very nice. Let's specify that "28 days later" is a modern zombie quite realistic movie (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0289043/).
Unfortunately, having 30 persons running with you in the city in open beta spoils a part of it. I can assure you that walking the streets of Kingsmouth alone was a totally different experience!
Sound is also quite stressing, and it goes worse in other places, like Innsmouth Academy.
That said, players need to pay more attention to the story, the lore entries, and what NPC's say. You would know more about what happened to Kingsmouth; you missed some parts, especially the one describing what happened when the fog came and the link between zombies and the creatures from the sea.

3) Combat.

So far its simple to pick up, but lacks the complexity of SWTOR so far. This may improve with the full game. But for a pck up and go sort of thing it works, its not too complicated and you can pew pew pew.

Kingsmouth is a start zone, although bigger than any start zone in any game I guess, so combat is relatively simple.

Nevertheless remember how the Broodmother was bad to you in the sewers?

One thing to understand though is that in TSW, preparing a combat is also an important part of the fun: you freely change your equipment and sets of powers to create the most effective combination to fight big enemies or special configuration of enemies. In dungeons, it often happens to have a team pause and figure out a powers setup strategy. It's not game breaking at all and you have all the action you want BUT it's something new.

4) Quests

This is a good and bad for me. But the good is that its not just a run to this waypoint sort of thing all the time. There is a bit of working out the clues, follow the blood without waypoints. So it does keep you thnking. The quest types also seem to vary well. Some escort, some kill, some discover, some collect etc. So it keeps it from being the same over and over.

Yep, it's really different each time. We'll see your concerns in next part of your post.

5) Achievements
Like GTA you have some stats like "kill 100 zombes" that just keep ticking over, its different and I like it. i'm not sure what reward you get for doing them, but its a cool novelty

There are exploration achievements and Lore achievements too... More to come about that at some point, likely.
Take the time to read the lore entries and discover stories parts "in disorder", leaving you thinking of the untold parts.

6) Crafting

Its not really implemented yet, but I do like the straghtforwardness (is that a word) of the crafting and the general idea. this seems to be that you take an item, you break it down to its base component (water, fire, metal, dust etc) and then for every 5 of the base items you can make an imperfect, for every 5 imperfect you make the "element", 5 elements for a sacred and thats as far as I got. I like that its an accumulation over time thing, though I dont much like having to keep many varieties and the icons arent easy to determine. But its more predictable than SWTOR and generally makes more sense than AO. watch this space i guess.

See my post about crafting here http://www.athenpaladins.org/forums/vie ... 116#p54116
The good thing is crafting is NOT random at all, like in SWTOR. If you know how to make something, you'll make it. If you disassemble, you will laways get what you are supposed to get. That said, the system is very very open.

1) Questing

My BIGGEST annoyance is the fact you can only have like 5 quests at a time.... you always have a story/class quest so you can only pick up 4 more before you have to pause one. Its a bit silly. In the sheriffs offce there are already 3 quest givers meaning you can only pick up 1 more Quest on the way before you are forced to pause, or back track later.

It's a bit surprising at start, yes. But it has been tweaked already as devs listened to beta testers so it can likely be tweaked again. The system can be improved, yes.

The idea is each quest has a story and the devs would like players to also enjoy stories and not just "farm" xp and loot. In other words, TSW is not designed to be played like WoW or SWTOR where you stack up quests and do anything in disorder, totally out of content of the universes surrounding you.

Actually, you have anyhow NO advantage in playing TSW like SWTOR, WOW or even AO. It's much more get a quest while doing another one (you'll encounter many), and not get a stockpile of quest at the "second village" and run them.

Actually also, a lot of quests leads you to a place where you can pick new quests.

Switching quests display id done quickly with the icons on the right of the screen; switching active quest is the same.

Also, some quest auto-activate if you do something required in them, even if they are not the active quest. for example, you have an investigation mission active and a kill zmobie mission too. If, while investigating, you meet and kill the right zombies, the zombie kill quest will auto-activate and validate your kills.

There is no clear cut way of knowing which people have quests they can offer you. I like the SWTOR map that shows you quests that you need to pick up. The problem with TSW is that the quest givers and pick-up quests are scattered and its a PITA to run all the way to somewhere only to fnd its locked, or on a tme out. Also if you pause a quest you have to run back to the NPC to resume, you cannot click it in your quest window.
When having multiple quests you can only show waypoints for 1 at a time. Silly. Often 2 or more quests will have a waypoint very close together, but you have to keep flicking between them to see. Again I think SWTOR got this one right, and TSW didnt.

Well, that's two different conceptions of questing: SWTOR shows you all the available quests and somewhat spoon-feeds the player. AO or AoC don't and you have to discover them although TSW shows the NPC's (but not the quests available in the wilderness, like a rotting body, a lost item, a strange device,...)

The idea is you discover quests "naturally" and you just can't make a "zone list" and farm. You can always discover a new quest. Be sure maps will be eventually available with all quests though.

You can mark your mini-map to remember a quest giver. But it's not persistent.

I'm split about all this: I do enjoy discovering things, and, sometimes, I'd like it to be simpler.

Note that only some paused quests need to be reactivated by the NPC.

2) Logic...?

Some of the quest clues are useless at best. Referring to time, so you look at the time, but the time is a reference to a biblical passage. I mean did anyone actually know that, or has it been passed down from spoiler to spoiler? This game has the worrying signs of one that will force people to log off due to frustration, or make them google spoilers in a disappointing anti-climax. Perhaps the clues should progress and the more you need the less XP you get or something.

So far, the enigmas are close to the ones you could find in some adventure games, except that you may have to search for information on the web sometimes. Kingsmouth city even has its own web site! http://www.kingsmouth.com/

I'll be clear: I do not like this kind of enigmas that are extremely twisted and sometimes illogical.

3) Longevity?

I see that you can train all possible combinations of weapons and skills etc, but why would you want to? I like having a few different guys for different things. But the quests mean that once you know the answer some of the fun is now taken out of the quests. I am just worried as I generally get a bit sick of playing the same character over and over, and as things start to move slower (longer gaps between upgrades) I tend to roll a new toon to just break it up, ths game doesnt seem to be geared towards that.

Most quests are not enigma ones though, by far, very far. So it's not an obstacle to starting a new character.

You can perfectly have several characters, but each one doesn't have to be over-specialized in a role. You can always change, always improve. That's the difference.

All-in-all its a good game, not sure how long I will/would play it as there are some very frustrating aspects to the questing system, but perhaps as the game opens out some more it may offer more of the positives to drown out the whopper of a negative that is the current questing system

When you get to play it without trying to reproduce the gameplay of SWTOR or even AO, most objections drop by themselves. You saw little so far, too.

That said, of course, we can't say about how fast will new content be added... But you didn't even see 1/50 of TSW.

[Bredin]

I have been playing in closed beta for a few weeks now, and have participated in the first weekend beta. Here are my impressions:

The game is great visually. My most recent experience was with SWTOR and I think TSW matches up nicely. This is a big achievement, since I'm sure that the SWTOR budget was much much larger. In addition to the graphics, the music and over all "vibe" of the game is spot-on for me. I find myself really immersed in the game when running around solo. The writing and design of the quests in Kingsmouth (the starting area) is really well done imo.

Overall performance of the game has been mostly solid. I have a pretty beefy computer, however. I normally do experience a lag spike about once an hour. It's not that big of a deal. Hopefully more volume at launch will not bring more lag.

Character build mechanics (for lack of a better description) are really REALLY cool. I love the skill system. I love the fact that one character can do every skill in the game. I love that there is so much diversity in character build-outs. The bottom line is that there is room for complexity in this aspect of the game, and that is very good for the longevity of the game. One of the best things about Anarchy Online is the complexity of gear, stats, and "tweaking". It's what keeps the game interesting at its core. I feel that TSW has this same complexity at its core. One thing that is a bit of a pain is that to my knowledge there is no skill reset, like in AO and SWTOR, AoC, etc. This is not the end of the world since all skills in the game can eventually be learned, but I think a reset would be nice. I built a character on Closed Beta with two skills that really don't work well together. It would be nice to be able to unlearn my points so I could quickly change direction on my character.

The trade-skills are different in TSW. I like the system so far but its nothing overwhelmingly great in my opinion. I liked the SWTOR system just as much. The best thing about TSW trade-skills is that, like so many other aspects of TSW, it is different that most games. I like that Funcom took many new spins on parts of the game instead of making another WoW clone.

The combat in TSW so far is fun, it is not too much different than other MMOs though. I was really hoping for something more like AoC where there are active key presses involved. I LOVED the combat system in AoC. Oh well. I guess the thing with TSW combat is to mate up your equipped passive skills with your active ones to achieve the best effect.

One thing about SWTOR that sucked in my opinion is a lack of "social magnets". When I say that I mean that in SWTOR you could solo pretty much all the way to endgame. On the one hand, this is nice. I often found myself in AO just standing around doing nothing because nothing was going on. In SWTOR you can always solo. I just think that SWTOR took it too far and there was not enough of an incentive (a magnet so to speak) to meet other people, to interact with strangers in the game world and make friends. I don't know if TSW will encourage social interaction more than SWTOR did. I hope so, I hope that they can find a balance between social encouragement and support for solo play.

I am probably missing some stuff, but I need to get back to work . Bottom line: the game is exciting and fun for me so far. I am missing a fair bit of sleep, and that's a good mark for a video game for me lol

[Crash]

I haven't been able to invest very much time, but so far the story in TSW beats the living daylights out of SWTOR. It's not complicated plot-wise, but they create a context & atmosphere that's simply outstanding at implying a rich, complex world where events pass largely outside our observation. Secret World indeed. I find it vague enough to provoke my imagination, yet filled with very enjoyable details. For instance, I've lingered in areas just because I like the song being played many times.

I think the overall ambiance of TSW greatly overpowers the tedium of mechanics. In SWTOR, a burly or unbeatable mob mostly felt like a task or chore. It was something to respond to on an mildly intellectual level & "solve", just because I had to to progress. Classic grinding, I guess.

But in TSW I'm often kicked into total "GAH!!!" mode. (EFFING RUNNNN!!!) It may only be a momentary feeling of semi-panic, but it's super cool a game can do that. Part of that is prompted by not having formalized levels for either toons or mobs, but I think it mostly reflects how successful TSW is at injecting general tension into game play. If I'm honest, the times I run aren't because I think I'll be beat. It's because the game gets under my skin a bit.

Now I just need RL to quit kickin my butt so I can play.