Thoughts after The Secret World’s First Month

Last night I finished the first part of the story quests in The Secret World on Tallulabelle. It’s been a long learning curve, but I have been sticking with it.  Loving the game even with its challenges. Or maybe because of them and the superb storytelling. Superb storytelling in every quest. Engaging environment. Just great.

There are some pictures from the storyline below, but I don’t think they are spoilers.

Now onto my little bit of criticism.

My greatest challenge has been dealing with the Ability Wheel.  After the initial skills are acquired, there is a huge assortment of skills to choose from. It’s almost paralyzing in its vastness. Funcom offers ‘decks’ - complete builds - to work towards. And for these I am grateful, although I may end up personalizing my own ones in the end. Yes, ones because your character can have as many builds as your heart desires. 

What I struggle with, within the ability wheel, is the lack of any kind of road map from point Kingsmouth to the completion of the deck. I am certainly not averse to thinking for myself, but I have found this to be a very difficult situation. In traditional (can you say traditional about something that has been around for less than a few decades?) MMO’s there is a clear progression of skills - apply this skill instead of the previous one, and you will do better. Not so in the Secret World Ability Wheel. In fact, putting a skill that requires longer to get to into your rotation on it’s own might really screw everything up. All your abilities rely on each other - work together if you assemble your ability bar correctly - and if you change out just one, it might just not work as well.

It took me many hours of play and lots of trial and error to realize that rather than equipping abilities as they become available, you really have to save up for a bigger change than that - save up abilities that will work together as well as your old ones before swapping out. It seems a simple concept, but took me a long time to come to terms with. And requires a lot of playing around with some of the awesome fan made deck builders available out there.

My other criticisms are tiny - little bugs in quests that can be incredibly frustrating - that sort of thing. 

seriously, I love this game. I don’t know how re-playable it is in the long-run, but Funcom is promising new content frequently - they’re saying monthly! And that’s promising. They delivered this weekend with awesome new quests after only a month of release. Really good.

You should definitely check it out.

  1. strumpetsfunandgames-blog posted this