Out of Pod Experience

I have been playing it for a couple of days now,and im still trying to fully understand everything but i can try to explain things from my point of view.

Me and my husband was originally waiting for GW 2 to come out,but at this rate i doubt we will even bother to try it unless its some major sale on it somewhere

Now also note that we are both veteran EVE players who also has spendt about a year or so total in WOW,which is necesarry to know for the explenation.

First off make sure you have a GOOD computer! The game is very demanding,and i lucked out by being able to run the game with all graphic settings set down as far as they can go (i can run eve with high graphics).
If you have the computer to play it..wow its a new exsperiense.. We walked into it more or less blind only having seen a trailer for it but its very very complex. From the trailers it looks very basic like WOW..Run up to something and blow them up. Thats so far from the truth. You will follow quests along the way,some where you have to be solo and there is (so far) very little "Go and kill x amont of this and x amount of that" kind of quests. Many of them are more like riddles.

As an example; Time is the province of Kings and Gods. The hands of time point to truths written by Kings in the words of God. The path is opened to the enlightened.

These small riddles will point you towards your next clue,or where you have to go and what you have to do when you find the area. Luckely the game also has a built in browser and your more or less encuraged to use it if you get stuck.

You will also have other missions which involves you sneaking around,wearing discuises,getting around cameras,finding hidden paths and similar.

Basically...The game makes you think. You have to notice the small details,and you have to be creative and you will still find your self being caught by suprise. And so far i dont feel like im doing the same thing over and over again.

So far the game is also very dark. Its no running around and everyone is happy and bright colors. Its..dark. This adds to the whole atmosphere and it has been more then once where i got caught by suprise and nearly jumped out of my chair as i suddenly found my self ambushed by a monster of some kind.

The story is also very creative and i find my self fasinated by talking to the different characters (there is a LOT) and looking at the devesation that has been caused. You end up really feeling for the characters and loose your self in the game.

Now the skills.. This is something i really cant say much about because i feel i have just scratched the surface. No matter who you align your self with,or what you choose as your path to begin with dosent matter. Like with EVE you can do everything.
Want to be a healer? Sure go ahead. Want to be a healer and a tank? Sure np. Want to be in a support role? Or support and DPS? Or set up so you can do all of them? There is nothing stopping you. Because of this you wont have to make new characters if you get tired of one style.

Servers..There are different servers but this really isent a problem. Note this is another one of those things i havent looked much into.. If you go to the "travel area" everyone will be using the same one. For the general chat it is the same and you will be able to talk to people from the other servers whenever you feel like it. And from what i saw (only done one group instance) the same applies to groups. This reminds me about another neat feature.. The map is huge,but you have a "travel to" option which will spawn you at the closest "graveyard" to that person. The graveyards are spread around a lot so its a real time saver.
From what i was told the same also applies to guild.. In other words you can have a cross server guild

PVP.. So far i havent done any PVP so i can just base on what little my husband has told me..Basically it sounsd like its the basic capture the flag kind of maps and you will recive seperate quests that are purely for PVP .As a reward you will get special tokens used to but more advanced PVP gear. Sorry as i said i havent done it my self yet so cant say much more then that.

The communety also seems to be much better then what you would find in games like WOW. Im guessing because it really is such a deep game and the general WOW player does not enjoy this kind of objectives. (Sorry to any WOW players). They are very helpful,very very patient and more then willing to answear questions,even tho if people are very careful with giving away hints on how to solve the quests in general chat (which is a good thing). Granted the game is still very very new so people are still in the learning stage so this might change.

But basically... If you have the money,a good computer and like a mental challange its worth the high cost. Its not a game where you would have fun starting a brand new character and going trough it again (think about it like EVE..Everything is fun and interesting the first time but the second time you know what you want and you just growl while trying to close the tutorial).
Because of this i am worried that it will eventually turn into a "Ok we need 3 healers a couple of tanks and some dps! Best geared gets a spot,the rest of you better luck next week" raid thing like WOW is. But there is no way to know,and honestly with how much stuff there is to do i think it will be a LONG time before i would be at the point where i would be out of quests and new areas to explore.

So if you are looking for something different to do for a while,or just something to play on the side (its good like that as well,you can quit whenever you want to) but want something that has that darker atmosphere and challange you..go for it

thanks for the comprehensive write up. I think I might try it, but I just prefer free trials ya know I dont have money to burn :)

The quests are pretty damn good for an MMO of it's type. I played the beta for a week or two when it went live. However, it is not the type of MMO I want to play right now. But overall a good job from Funcom. Let's just hope that what is broken will get fixed...unlike Age of Conan. I went back to AoC when it went freemium last year and the same damn things were broken three years after I quit it the first time.

Played the last beta weekend and a bit of the early release, already bored and unsub'd.

Pvp - zerg vs. zerg
Pve - you vs. npc zerg (facing a single mob seems like a rare luxury it's usually 4-10 screeching zombies negating the need to have single target skills at all for the most part, just grab the best aoe skills you can and go spamming)

No classes - still see everyone jump on the fotm skills, pvp is just aoe sword spam with a ranged root/hinder to allow them to reach you for the spamming.

The only bits I like are the visuals/atmosphere (starter area is pretty much alan wake the MMO) and the investigation missions which require you to actually think and research some stuff (unless you have general chat open then every 30sec you'll see someone shouting the answers to all the missions)

Not a terrible game by far but not worth a monthly fee to me.

I think there's a 3 day buddy key that subscribers can hand out. The devs are talking about extending that trial time though.

As for the game itself, I took the leap of faith and bought it. I'm so glad I did. The game is amazing. If youve ever played Vt:M Bloodlines, TSW has a very similar dark theme to it exept no vampires... that I'm aware of. The game is definitely not safe for work (why would you be playing an MMO at work?) There are quite a few sexually suggestive things in the game as well as vulgar language and violence.

The game can get creepy and scary at times. Sort of like playing silent hill for the first time, alone and with the lights off in pitch blackness. It's definitely aimed at an older audience and I would advise caution to parents who let their kids play. Overall TSW is one of those games thats a major hit nobody knows about, which is sad.

And for the guys who do play: scarecrows with chainsaws and The Black House? OMG wtf?

Actually I wanted to comment on this.

Funcom fell into the same trap that most new MMOs fall into. They promise their investors that the game will overshadow WoWs subscription numbers right on day one which is an insane expectation.

Funcom was expecting around a little over a million subscribers at launch. After all, they had nearly a million people sign up for their beta, that means they'll all buy the game and subscribe right? Wrong. They got about 200k subscribers at launch.

200k isn't a bad number for initial launch. Hell, EvE thrives on around 300k subscribers and it's almost 10 years old. Expecting WoW numbers or even in the millions on launch is just flat out ********. Never in the history of MMO's has a game reached a million subscribers on launch. Not even WoW.

It took WoW years to build up to 13 million subscribers (and a lot of bad game designs to bring it back down to 9.1 million and still falling).

Funcoms TSW subscribers may not be in the numbers they wanted, but their retention rate is startlingly high and their cash shop for vanity items is quite popular (I myself dropped ten dollars into it). It was foolish for Funcom to expect this sort of success rate. The Secret World is a fun game, no doubt, but the company behind it is terrible at this sort of thing.


Anyways, I hope CCPs World of Darkness is similar to TSW's themes (not necessarily similar gameplay). Dark, mysterious, gruesome, and lots of horror everywhere.