The Secret World

Sylas said:

Or Guild Wars 2 or Elder Scrolls Online or Neverwinter or....you see where i'm going with this.

Someone changes something a little bit then everyone else takes that and puts their spin on it and incorporates it into their game. Every great "new" idea is just borrowed/reskinned from somewhere else. I remember when ESO came out was playing the beta and I thought they had this super cool thing, what became known as "phasing" which was itself just an iteration of adaptive, contextual layering (which itself came from instancing, which came as a form of less permanent server sharding to handle population density), Anyway I thought phasing was the coolest new thing ever until someone pointed out that it wasn't a new thing at all, WoW had accidently invented it a few years earlier.

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Oh, I agree. I mean if I was a development house making an MMO, why wouldn't I try to take the best design aspects from other games and try to incorporate them into my own.

I'm pretty sure GW2 and ESO came out after TSW. TSW had such a unique blend of the puzzle and story stuff that I don't remember another MMO ever doing. Couple that with the skills wheel and three faction PVP, it was great.

Was it the greatest MMO ever, of course not, but was it the one that I had the most fun with and really enjoyed, absolutely, and I played those other two along with a bunch of others. I just like the fact you were actually running around in the "real" world for once. Also at least on whatever server I was playing on, the community was pretty tight-knit, and most people knew each other, easy to get groups together for dungeons and PVP. The first couple of years were just a lot of fun.

Sylas said:

nah it was a great game and it did a lot of things well i'm not knocking it, it was really one of the only mmos i can think of that leaned into the whole investigative/alternate reality style game (ARG). it suffered from being a funcom game, which was a small publisher known for innovative yet buggy releases and it released 1 month before GW2 which stole all of its thunder, like EQ2 when it tried to launch 2 weeks before World of Warcraft.

It also was the only game that I can remember that had active gatekeeping built in to the game. ie the tank/heal/dps trials you had to do, that kept the casuals from playing any group based content which at the time, most everything led up to group based content.

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What was the gatekeeping? I don't remember there being much other than your typical progression with gear levels and unlocking the skills for a decent build for your preferred role.

Not trying to be an ass, I just don't remember. Hell, it's been what, over a decade since I played the original. Are you talking about Legends? If so, that makes sense. I can imagine them implementing something like that.

When I'm talking fondly of the game, it's strictly the OG.

Sylas said:

they literally had a solo trial you had to perform to unlock big group content called "The Gate Keeper"

The Gatekeeper - The Secret World Guide - IGN

is a boss encounter that takes place in the Agartha. At the starting platform for the Agartha, take a left to the elite/nightmare dungeon area. From there,

www.ign.com

I thought there was a smaller version just for group content but that's my memory being hazy.

You had to complete each dungeon in heroic mode (says they called them elite mode) to unlock this trial and you had to complete this trial to do raids.

it was literally a mechanics check to keep scrub casuals from being able to join raids.

Most games only about 50-75% of your raid slots have to be competent and even less have to be good in order to progress which lets you carry casuals but this game literally prevented them from even playing. it was a friction point for an already small playerbase that drew in mostly casual murder mystery readers and other scrubs who weren't really all that good at quasi-action combat video games.

edit: actually i dont remember if this game even had raids actually? maybe it was to unlock hard mode 5 mans? its been a while and I could of sworn this was required to do groups

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Yeah I must have stopped playing before any of that happened. The only raid that I remember is the New York one where you fight the big Cthulhu dude, and I never did it. Maybe there was one of Japan, but I didn't see any of that content.

I know when we played there weren't difficulty levels for the dungeons either, so maybe that was something they implemented later. I just remember it was pretty easy to go up to a dungeon entrance, announce you were looking for people and I could go in and tank and lead a random group no problem. Some fights were a little tricky if somebody was bad or just hadn't seen the fight before, but most of them were pretty forgiving and fun. I just really enjoyed the dungeons when the game came out.

Sylas said:

So yeah i'm starting to remember/google better. This trial was definitely in at launch and there were no raids. there was just 5 man dungeons, normal leveling dungeons, "elite" which were just the normal ones scaled up to level cap (50 iirc?), the last 3 dungeons were in the last zone so their normal version was already considered "elite" and then hard mode versions of the lvl cap dungeons called "Nightmare" and you had to do all the elite dungeons first to unlock this trial and had to do this trial to do hard modes.

They may have added multigroup raid content later after i stopped playing but at launch it was just 5 mans and this was definitely a thing you had to do in order to do what was their "end game" ie hard mode 5 mans

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Man, I don't remember that at all, but if I had the hazard I guess I probably did this stuff with my little group. I mean I would MT, we had a healer, and I'm a couple of dudes that were DPS and would pick up another DPS for healer.

I mean I kind of remember that you got better loot or something run in the elites. Maybe it was purple gear versus blue. I don't know it's been so God damn long ago. I think the last zone I was doing anything in was the final area of Transylvania, and then for whatever reason I think I got busy with work, and then my buddy is all jumped ship for the Old Republic maybe. I know we played that game for a while.

That's like you were saying earlier, all the MMOs kind of blend together, or at least when they came out and when I played them. I know we were pretty heavy in the DCUO for a while, and and a pretty big guild, and doing the raids and stuff every week. That game actually had some of the funnest raids I remember in an MMO.

I'd honestly have to pull up a timeline of when all these different MMOs were released, and I could probably figure out when we jumped between them.

Sylas said:

Only reason I even remember the trials is because I had some kind of funky build, idk it was like hammer/chaos or something, some kind of spin to win tank build that did good but it didnt have the 2 interrupts or whatever the fuck you needed so I had to go farm skills or something to unlock a different build.

Also I want to say you had to do all 3 trials to unlock hard modes which wasn't that hard to get a decent heal/dps spec going but I remember dps crying because they didn't know how to tank or heal and it was a real fucking cockblock for a while.

the hardmode runs were a very small community on the server and by the time enough people got caught up and got them unlocked to start gearing up in them, GW2 dropped and like half the people stopped playing and the game just never recovered.

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I read that deal that you posted, and now I kind of remember it. I remember it being pretty tough, but if you had most of the wheel unlocked there were definitely builds or combos you could do the stuff pretty easy, and you're right there was a tanking one and a healing one and a DPS one. We got all of our group through it eventually.

I just don't remember some of the later aspects of the game just been so long ago and plus I'm getting old. Then you can start getting the good gear when you could start running the harder dungeons.

I know when they introduced Japan, they had some sort of aegis system that was kind of a big bone of contention with the community, and it was a whole other line of progression, but I never did any of that stuff, but would occasionally just read up on what was happening with the game thinking that we might jump back to it at some point, which we never did.

I just remember the last thing I was really working on was getting enough PVP rep so I can wear the PVP tanking gear in the open world. Templars had that pretty badass knight armor set.

Also, Dragons were gaysian.