Friday, July 20, 2012

The Secret World: My Beta Weekend #4 Experience (Part Five)



Quests
The Secret World - Main MissionThe Secret World - Side Mission
Apart from the storyline mission, which cannot be removed, the quest system in The Secret World is structured in such a way that you can only take on 1 main mission, 1 dungeon mission and 3 side missions at a time.

Whilst I do not know the truth of this, from what I did seem to notice, main missions are most probably of the lengthy multi-part type which often requires the player to wreck their brains and burn off quite some brain cells. Dungeon missions would naturally land the player into some sort of "instanced" dungeon with a boss at the end of it while side missions are normally those that involve plain tasks like delivering mail parcels, hunt so and so monsters or finding so and so.

That being said, I can vaguely remember that a particular player made a post on the forums saying that one should not treat quests in The Secret World like those in other MMOs. Specifically, quests in The Secret World should not be taken in such a way that requires one to run all the way back to a "city" or "town", grab a few quests, run out to complete them and then run back and get some more.

Instead, what he mentioned was that the game was made in such a way that one would often be able to find a new quest lying somewhere close by after finishing one. And indeed, while I was playing in the game, I would oftentimes find some new side missions and whatnot just lying around when I was in the midst of one. And due to the plethora of quests I have found, I would just instinctively, drop an old one just to pick up the new one if I found it to be more interesting.

The Secret World - Missing Persons
Furthermore, the quests are not really that straight-forward. Most of the time, waypoints given in a quest only leads you to a general location instead of the exact position. You will have to walk around and "find" what your looking for. In fact, some of the quests (especially investigative type) would even require that you read and listen closely to whatever the NPCs said or documents found during the quest. Those information provided would then be needed at a later stage in the quest (for example code to unlock a password-protected door).

The quests found in The Secret World, in my opinion, is also part of the main attraction for this game. That is, of course, assuming that the quality of the quests persist beyond Kingsmouth. In order to illustrate my point, I have decided that it is necessary to "spoil" one of the quests so that you can understand what I meant.

The Secret World - Horror Show Retrieve Camera 1The Secret World - Horror Show Retrieve Camera 2
Let us take a look at the "Horror Show" quest. During Tier 1 of this quest, the player is asked to retrieve the contents of the security cameras at various locations. While some of the cameras were easy to retrieve, there were a few that were placed in slightly harder to reach places like that at the Sycoil gas station. In order to retrieve that camera, one would need to "survey" the general area of the gas station and look for a way to reach the camera. After circling the gas station, you would ought to notice that the garbage dump at the back seems to provide a way for you to climb to the top of the roof. Not quite what you would expect from a quest in an MMO game huh?

The Secret World - Horror Show Booby Trap 1The Secret World - Horror Show Booby Trap 2
During Tier 3 of the quest, I was asked to find a way to bypass the booby traps laid in the room. It was a large and dark room and when I tried to run along the corridor, an explosion would trigger blowing me backwards and taking quite a bit of my HP or even killing me. But it was just that. There weren't any other information lying around in the room that is telling me how to avoid the booby traps.

Frankly speaking, at some point I was even frustrated about it until when I suddenly noticed something. Several thin red lines were showing on my screen while I was moving around trying to see if I could find some clues to my predicament. These lines would disappear suddenly and only appear when my camera angle was shifted to a weird position. It was at that moment when I laughed out thinking...damn...so this was the trigger all along...those tricky people making this game sure made some interesting quests.

The Secret World - Horror Show Booby Trap 3The Secret World - Horror Show Booby Trap 4
From what I have observed, quests in The Secret World generally requires that you inspect your surroundings carefully and have your wits ready at all times. You would need to sift through all the information you have collected and arrive at a logical conclusion or solution. And in this case, knowing what triggers the explosions would mean that there's a way to avoid them. Maybe the triggers were time-based? That would mean that for a brief moment of time I might be able to slip pass the trap. Well, that was what I originally thought, but after standing there watching, the lines do not disappear at all. So the next logical thought for me was to look for a "gap" and true enough I did manage to find a break in the "wall of thin red lines".

If this was a teaser for what to expect in future quests, it shouldn't be wrong to conclude that the "quests" actually forms an integral part of the allure of this game called The Secret World.

PVP
The Secret World - PVP Map Selection 1The Secret World - PVP Map Selection 2
The PVP map selection can be accessed by either pressing "P" (if I'm not wrong) or by clicking on the "clashing swords" icon found right below the mini-map. At the current moment, there are only three maps available for selection, two battlefields map (El Dorado & Stonehenge) and one persistent warzone (Fusang Projects).

Due to time constraints, I could only choose to try out the persistent warzone, Fusang Projects. And from what I've encountered, there were a few noteworthy points regarding how the developers implemented the PVP in The Secret World.

The Secret World - PVP Map Selection 3The Secret World - High Powered Weaponry Uniform
Right before entering the warzone, one is able to choose which type of "uniform" to wear. The type of uniform you choose to wear would determine your role in the warzone and this should coincide with how you've built your character (so that you can maximize your potential within the warzone).

There are three types of uniforms, High-Powered Weaponry, Reinforced Armour and Integrated Anima Conduits. Each of these uniforms have their own appearances, bonus effects as well as penalties.

  • High-Powered Weaponry
    Damage done increased by 5%.
    Critical chance increased by 3%.
    Penetration chance increased by 3%.
    Chance to perform glancing hits reduced by 2%.
    Healing, barrier and leech effects reduced by 5%.
    Health increased by 5%.
    Damage reduction increased by 2%.
    The high-powered weaponry faction outfit is specialized towards dealing damage.
  • Reinforced Armour
    Health increased by 15%.
    Block chance increased by 5%.
    Evade chance increased by 4%.
    Chance of enemies glancing you increased by 2%.
    Healing, barrier and leech effects reduced by 5%.
    Damage done reduced by 5%.
    Damage reduction increased by 5%.
    The reinforced armour faction outfit is specialized towards protection against damage.
  • Integrated Anima Conduits
    Healing, barrier and leech effects increased by 8%.
    Critical healing chance increased by 6%.
    Critical power increased by 20%.
    Health increased by 5%.
    Damage done reduced by 4%.
    Damage reduction increased by 2%.
    The integrated anima conduits faction outfit is specialized towards increasing your healing, barrier and leech efficiency.

The Secret World - Equal Footing Buff
The next thing that I liked about was this "Equal Footing" buff. I'm not really sure how the developers had done it, but it was amazing to realize that even though I've just started the game for a few hours, had only a few active and passive abilities (not even the full 7 active and 7 passives yet) and also was using at best QL 1 equips...I was able to withstand as well as deal decent damage.

I'm pretty sure most of us as gamers have met circumstances where there's always a bunch of high level players who keep bulldozing over the regular casual people in PVP. That certainly wasn't a nice feeling huh? At the most we will just be grumbling..."Bah...just a bunch of no-lifers with a high level character and fancy equipments. If I had as much time as he does, I bet I won't lose to the likes of him. Not in terms of skills." So in my opinion, this buff is like a "godsend" which effectively rids us of the unfair advantage (perhaps not totally, but at least I feel like I wasn't too weak compared to the others).

The Secret World - Fusang ProjectsThe Secret World - Fusang Projects Map
Additionally, I also like the feature whereby we can see where all the "actions" are currently happening on the map. This, in my opinion, saves me the trouble of running around trying to look for a fight.

All in all, my experience of PVP in The Secret World wasn't too bad, but its hard to tell how it will develop in the future (from just a few hours of playing). And so, my verdict still stands. You should try out the game for a month or two to see whether this game suits you rather than jumping straight in for a grandmaster lifetime subscription.




Previous: The Secret World (Part Four)

Friday, July 13, 2012

The Secret World: My Beta Weekend #4 Experience (Part Four)


Abilities
To me, the abilities in The Secret World kind of feels like collectible cards in a Trading Card Game. It is in this similar fashion that we try and amass enough abilities and then mix and match them to come up with a set which compliments each other. Just as there are rules in a TCG to ensure that players fight each other on a leveled field, there is also a set of guidelines in The Secret World that exists for that purpose.
  • Guideline 1
    At any point in time, one can only equip 7 active abilities and 7 passive abilities.
  • Guideline 2
    The set of 7 active abilities and 7 passive abilities can only contain 1 active elite and 1 passive elite. You cannot have more than that number of elite abilities in a set.
  • Guideline 3
    One must have the appropriate weapon equipped in order to use an active ability. This restriction, however, does not apply to passive abilities. You can use passive abilities regardless of which category it came from. For example, one does not need to have a blade equipped in order to trigger a passive ability that falls under the blade category, but one would require a blade to use an active ability that came from the blade category.
The Secret World - Ability Wheel
All of the abilities available in The Secret World have been incorporated, by the developers, into the ability wheel as shown above. In this ability wheel, there are four major categories, melee (brown), magic (blue), ranged (red) and miscellaneous (green). All the categories branches out into three additional sub-categories and each of these sub-categories have their own "finer" sections except for miscellaneous.
Major CategoryMeleeMagicRangedMiscellaneous
Sub CategoryBlades
Hammers
Fists
Blood
Chaos
Elementalism
Shotgun
Pistols
Assault Rifle
Survivalism
Turbulence
Subversion
The Secret World - Ability Wheel Explained
From what I've seen after skimming through the abilities, those which are found in the outer circle are actually more specialized versions of that found in the inner circle. Next, I also realized that the two "finer" sections (of each sub-category) in the inner circle actually consists of abilities that are either offensive or defensive.
The Secret World - Ability TreeThe Secret World - Buying Ability
However, the buying of abilities isn't as simple as having enough ability points and then picking whatever ability you want off the shelf. It involves a tedious process of climbing "up" an ability tree (or down if your looking at the ability tree screenshot). For example, if you just want the ability "Stunning Swirl", you would actually need to have 19 ability points (AP) instead of just 7. This is because you would have to "buy" through all the prior abilities (from Delicate Strike to Sharp Blades) in order to unlock "Stunning Swirl". And you ought to have noticed by now, the outer circle is also shown with a similar "locked" icon. If unfortunately the ability you had been wanting to acquire is lying in the outer circle, the process would become even more tedious. You would need to have enough APs to learn all the abilities in the inner circle first before the outer circle becomes unlocked and available for you to learn. Finally, some quick points to add regarding abilities...
  • Active Abilities:
    Builders: These active abilities build resources either upon self or on enemy targets. The resources built can be for a single weapon or both equipped weapons. In general, resources that are built upon self are seen to be better off than those built on enemy targets. This is probably due to the fact that one does not need to rebuild resources every time an enemy dies.
    Consumers: These active abilities consume resources that were built. However, they consume not just any type of resource but a particular one. For example, active "consumer" abilities from the blade category would need to consume blade resources. Except for a certain few, like those from blood magic, most consumer abilities cannot be activated without the necessary resources.
    Others: These active abilities do not build or consume resources. They can be activated at will.
  • Complimentary Abilities:
    If you've remembered, I've mentioned earlier that we need to mix and match abilities that compliment each other. So how do we find abilities that compliment each other?

    Abilities which compliment each other would normally have some relation between them mentioned in their descriptions. Let us take the following three abilities as an example.

    Delicate Strike: A single target blade attack that deals moderate damage. Builds a weapon resource for each equipped weapon.
    Delicate Precision: Increases the chance for Delicate Strike to penetrate.
    Immortal Spirit: Whenever you penetrate, you will gain a short duration heal over time effect.

    So in this example, if we use the active ability "Delicate Strike", we will get a chance to penetrate due to the passive ability "Delicate Precision". And whenever we penetrate, the passive ability "Immortal Spirit" will trigger. So effectively, we have "chained" these three single abilities together and they form a simple complimentary set.

    As you progress, you should find ways to (if possible) "chain" all the 7 actives and 7 passive abilities together. By doing so, I believe that your character will be pretty strong and menacing.
Equipment
The Secret World - Equipment Window
From what I have roughly gathered, there are no stats points for you to allocate to increase your character's numerical numbers in The Secret World. Instead, your choice of equipment would determine how strong you are (if you take away random factors like SP allocation and synergy of abilities). For example, if two identical characters with the same SP allocation and ability set were to have a duel, the outcome would likely have to depend on their equipment choice. If Character A were to be using QL 1 equipment while Character B was using QL 10, the most likely victor would be Character B. This is due to the difference in their ability to deal and take damage. First of all, with a QL 1 weapon, Character A would deal less damage (despite using the same abilities) and also "glance" more often. To "glance" means that you somewhat missed in hitting a target, resulting in less damage dealt than compared to a hit. Secondly, with QL 10 talismans, Character B would have more health points and other bonuses to improve his combat ability. Naturally, this scenario is just unfair and the more likely encounter would be as follows.
The Secret World - Weapon QLThe Secret World - Talisman QL
If both the characters were to be using the same QL equipment (for example QL 10), then the outcome would depend on their equipment choice. Just like in having the need for abilities to compliment each other (their synergy), the compatibility of your equipment choice with your ability set also matters. In The Secret World, your character can equip two different weapons, one head talisman, three major talismans and three minor talismans. As your choice of active abilities is highly linked to your weapon choice, I will leave it out of this discussion (which is about two hypothetical characters using the same abilities) and instead focus on solely the talismans (armor). Generally, from what I've learnt, talismans can be roughly divided into three types, for tanking, for damage dealing and for healing.
  • Tanking Type:
    These type of talisman focus on increasing your maximum amount of health points to enable you to last longer in battles as well as avoid being killed in one shot.
  • Damage Dealing Type:
    These type of talisman increases less of your maximum amount of health points but instead grants you some bonuses in your ability to deal damage, for example increase hit rate (attack rating) or increase penetration ability (which results in dealing more damage than a normal hit).
  • Healing Type:
    These type of talisman increases the least to your maximum amount of health points. However, they will grant bonuses to your ability to heal (heal rating). Higher heal rating allows your character to heal more health points when using a heal ability. Apart from that, I believe that it will also increase the efficiency of certain type of defensive abilities like barriers.
So if you could already catch what I'm driving at, this is the reason why equipment choice is important. If the ability set is somewhat tankish, equipping healing type talismans would probably be useless as you would lack the health points to tank effectively. If the ability set comprises of healing abilities, then not equipping healing type talismans would penalize your ability to heal. Hence in this duel of two characters using the same QL 10 equipment, how compatible their equipment choice is to their ability set would become a factor to consider. But of course, that isn't to say that player skill doesn't matter. Definitely if your playing skills are better than your opponent, you can win against a stronger opponent even with inferior equipment...just that it might be a little harder (kind of like taking a handicap).
Previous: The Secret World (Part Three)Next: The Secret World (Part Five)

Sunday, July 8, 2012

The Secret World: My Beta Weekend #4 Experience (Part Three)




Game Interface & Character Control
The Secret World - Game InterfaceThe Secret World - Controls
The game interface, in my opinion, is pretty clean and does not clutter the whole screen. However, I do feel that it could be improved in certain areas, for example, making the hotkey icons and information displayed at the sides and bottom a little bit larger. Its pretty hard to read them despite me using 1024 x 768 resolution.

As for character control, I feel that its a little bit too focused on the left hand. Almost everything from moving your character, turning it left and right, going forward and backwards and using skills involve the use of your left hand.

There are times when I wish to use my skills and find it hard to maintain the movement of my character. On other times, I find it hard to keep casting my skills to deal damage while I am moving to avoid damage. This is pretty vital especially during player vs player battles where you will need to be quick on the move as well as constantly facing your target. All this while, the right hand holding the mouse practically does nothing apart from clicking and selecting stuff.

After playing for a while, I found that I could alleviate this problem slightly by making some minor changes to the controls.
  • First, I changed the bindings for "A" and "D" to "Strafe left" and "Strafe right".
  • Then, I changed the bindings for "Q" and "E" to "Use Skill 6" and "Use Skill 7".
The first modification effectively reverts control back to the familiar "FPS" version which most of us are more used to. The second modification concentrates all the active skills' hotkeys around "WASD" for easier access.

So essentially during combat, I will be using "tab" to cycle through enemy targets, "1 - 5, Q & E" for active skills, "WASD" for character movement and finally, holding the right mouse button, I can use the mouse to turn my character swiftly.

Experience Points, Skill Points & Ability Points
The Secret World - Experience BarThe Secret World - Experience Points
Although it is stated that there are no classes nor levels in The Secret World, I can't help but find some semblance of it while I was playing in the beta weekend. First of all, the all familiar experience bar could still be found. Next, whenever we kill monsters or complete quests, experience points will still be rewarded.

And on this experience bar, we can see three markings that divide the bar into three equal portions. Every time we reach one of the markings, we will be awarded with 1 ability point. Whenever we completely fill the experience bar, we will be awarded with 1 skill point. Therefore, if we relate the filling up of the experience bar to a "level up", you can safely say that for every level up, we will gain 1 skill point and 3 ability points.

The only thing that worries me at this point would be whether the amount of experience points needed to fill the bar scales as our character reaches higher "levels". If it doesn't, then we can freely buy and try out all those weapons and abilities available in the game to find our preferences. If it does, then perhaps we will have to worry about gimping our characters with foolish mistakes made earlier in the game.

Skills
The Secret World - Skill Rank WeaponThe Secret World - Skill Rank Talisman
The skill points you gain from "levelling up" is used to increase your skill rank in either a particular melee weapon, ranged weapon, magic or talisman (kind of like armor). If I were to simplify things, I would say that the skill rank here is sort of acting like equipment proficiency. But how does this skill rank thingy work?

As you can see in the above pictures, there is a skill rank for every type of equipment found in The Secret World. If you expand one of the skill ranks, for example blade, you can see that there are ten divisions for each of the two categories, Damage and Survivability. (For talismans, there will only be one category instead.)

Each of these ten divisions represent a skill rank and if you maxed all ten divisions in a particular category (either damage or survivability), you will be able to use the highest quality level (QL 10) of that equipment in the game. However, you ought to note that each of the ten divisions are of different lengths. What this means is that you will require more skill points to attain the next skill rank than compared to the previous. For example, you will need only 1 skill point (SP) to reach skill rank 1, 2 SP to reach skill rank 2 and perhaps maybe 5 SP to reach skill rank 3 and so on.

But be warned that for weapons and magic, the game only takes into account the highest skill rank you have (regardless of category) to determine the quality level of equipment you can use. For instance, if you have skill rank 4 in both damage and survivability in blades, you will only be allowed to equip up to QL 4 blades. However if you have skill rank 8 in damage or survivability, you can equip up to QL 8 blades.

Nonetheless, in my opinion, it is still better to pace yourself and not focus purely in damage or survivability in an attempt to unlock the higher QL equipment. You ought to take into account the passive ability that comes with each increasing skill rank in either of the categories in order to fully harness the power of the weapon.
The Secret World - Weapon Requirements
Finally, I would advise that you save up the skill points and let it accumulate while spending only what you need. There will definitely be a time where you wished you had the skill points necessary to use this or that particular equipment which you had found instead of wasting it on some other skill rank.


Previous: The Secret World (Part Two)Next: The Secret World (Part Four)