There were some things I like about the game for sure. The puzzles and riddles where pretty good except that not everything was in game. There was some expectation of solving these things with like Google essentially, and that was a bit on the weak side. But the inclusion of puzzles and riddles was nice for a change.
There’s lots of power in the crafting system, lots of customization and things of that nature….if you can figure out how it works. To be honest, I didn’t even know there was a real crafting system till Sunday and then it took me awhile to figure out how it works. While it is beta, for release they’re going to actually have to explain it. The game does become excessively gear based. There are no classes, which is kinda cool, and everything is based off of skill selection and gear. So you really have to be on the ball with crafting else you’ll find yourself in a world of hurt. While there is a lot of flexibility with the crafting system, it is very complicated and clunky. Lots of potential, don’t know if it will be pulled off.
The no classes thing was pretty cool. The ability to switch around your gear and skills is pretty nice too. There is a lot of flexibility and option in setup. There will become cookies, however, even in this game. Particularly in games with lots of options, there is one that will have the slightest of edges and gamers will figure it out and most people will adopt it. Still, pretty cool. I felt that my first choices for skill points were all “forced” lets say. I added one to blood damage, but then I started finding gear that I needed to have points to equip, so those had to go in first, then I had to take a second weapon and needed a skill to use it, so I didn’t get to focus on the blood tree as I wanted to till a bit later. But that was alright. I was impressed with the classless system and can see a lot of fun in that.
Combat….it can suck my balls. The casting on the fly thing….pretty handy. The requirement that you have to be running around all the god damned time while casting and trying to actively dodge and blah blah blah; kiss the whitest part of my ass! Macros were not existent, key bindings mostly not that useful. I couldn’t bind Shift+ my mouse buttons. I could shift + other keys; but it wouldn’t always work. For instance, I tried to bind a few action buttons to shift+q and shift+e. You have to run around a lot (and I took a caster, so yeah….you have to run around a lot), and since I couldn’t bind any more than 3 to my mouse for some reason, I still wanted the keys close by. But those bindings didn’t work. Meaning if I was holding down shift and hit Q or E, it would strafe the normal way Q and E do. For a game with such customizability, they need to work on their bindings and macros. I really did not care much for the combat.
OK, so the game is called Secret World, right? So why in the entire beta did I only fight zombies? WTF is up with that? There was no PvP in the open beta, which is fine I actually can’t stand PvP…but how about a bit of secret world type ****? I’m as big a fan of shooting zombies as the next guy, but several hours of it from a game I was expecting to be a bit more than standard zombie shooter is maybe a bit too much. Missions were in general fine, some pretty entertaining. I felt that there were so many in that starting area that I couldn’t really get to the next area. I had spent all weekend almost entirely in that first area of zombie killing and that was it. I still didn’t finish all the quest lines in there. I see where they were going with the limited number of quests you could accept, but it did get annoying funning across quests that you couldn’t pick up because you were already running a story quest or whatever; so you have to make note to come back and pick it up. Even more infuriating, and something that seemed rather common was that quests you could only do one at a time would often send you back to the same area you were just in. If you could have multiple quests, you could clean up the area without all the repetitive back and forth.
Character models are limited and rather generic. Jumping around and such…I don’t know, felt off. Lots of cool stuff with the game, but a lot of distractions too. Some stuff while cool was needlessly complicated which normally isn’t terrible, but it was also not explained so it made it real tough. Overall for a MMOG, not my cup of tea. I think the story line could be cool for a single player game. I haven’t heard much about instances and dungeons and I didn’t really get a chance to try them out; but I can’t see end game longevity for this game. Neat concept though, maybe some of the better ideas can find their way into another MMOG in the future.