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theflyingorc posted:I promise you that this is not what they are trying to do, they're just not very good at making successful things. This is peak SomethingAwful[dot]com, where an employee posts to a thread, and everyone argues with them  .
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Apr 28, 2022 19:12
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Len posted:I just want a MMO with a modern setting to come out and not immediately die. Everything about the setting of TSW/SWL is very much my jam Agreed. I’d absolutely love a MMOish game set anywhere on the streampunk to urban fantasy to near future spectrum but I don’t think it is meant to be. Even outside of a traditional MMO frame work, most modernish live service or large rpg games have failed pretty hard as well over the last few years. We’ve just reached peak high fantasy games both single player and multiplayer and the genre more boring and saturated than zombie games. The only upcoming game that comes close to the same modern fantasy/horror feel is Nightingale later this year or early next year. But it looks like it swerved very survival heavy so who knows.
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Apr 28, 2022 20:47
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Len posted:I just want a MMO with a modern setting to come out and not immediately die. Everything about the setting of TSW/SWL is very much my jam I was psyched when BioWare Austin announced that Shadow Realms game that looked a lot like TSW. Then it got quietly canned in development.
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Apr 29, 2022 02:35
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Exmond posted:This is peak SomethingAwful[dot]com, where an employee posts to a thread, and everyone argues with them Honestly, lawlicaust pontificating a made up scenario to a person who worked there is the best thing I’ve seen out of secret world in a long time
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May 22, 2022 21:06
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Ichabod Tane posted:Honestly, lawlicaust pontificating a made up scenario to a person who worked there is the best thing I’ve seen out of secret world in a long time He's not actually wrong to offer constructive criticism though? Hell, even Funcom's upper management seemed to be worried about the game being crappy out the gate to the point that their former CEO basically did the equivalent of a pump and dump scheme using TSW's pre-release hype. https://kotaku.com/funcom-under-investigation-for-trade-violations-1511459402 quote:The charge, which can be read in full at the Oslo Stock Exchange website, calls into question the financial information given the market regarding paranormal MMO The Secret World from August 2011 to two months after the game's July 2012 launch. Økokrim also suspects the company may not have maintained proper financial logs of the period in question. Direct from the economic crime unit posted:ØKOKRIM has imposed a fine of NOK 1.5 million on a listed company that develops computer games for market manipulation and lack of listing. The company has adopted the fine. Basically, upper management knew the game was going to have issues, so FlyingOrc's statements about the devs and lower management trying is true --- but that doesn't mean the executives have always been on board or that he has the full picture. It's also not the first time Funcom has gotten into trouble over shady behavior regarding the company and how they've handled their games. As I mentioned, AoC got raked over the coals for misrepresenting the final product and bilking tons of people out of their money. Hell, we had people on this very forum pissed about it back then, to the point that I remember one poster mentioning that the only satisfying thing in the game was donkey kicking people off of bridges and cliffs...before they patched that out. Incidentally, back when AoC was a thing and people were wondering why it was such a trash fire at release one of the founders (Godarge, who was also the project lead from what I recall) of Funcom basically all but admitted that Funcom basically had for the longest time coasted off of investor cash. Even he didn't know why they keep giving them money outside of a sunk cost fallacy since their games almost never turn a profit. In fact, he said that none of their major products ever had made money as of that interview. Which suggests that they probably didn't have much experience in actually managing costs in relation to profit on release of the product. I mean, when your CEO was literally dumping their stock illegally to save a buck shortly before release without giving advance notice to the stock exchange then I have to say that people at the top end knew TSW was hosed from the word go due to bad management decisions and a lot of what he's saying simply doesn't apply in terms of countering the criticism folks have levied at Funcom. Doesn't mean that anyone is blaming him (Quite the opposite in fact!) but with what has been made public since then there were all sorts of red flags.  Edit: And Funcom blamed GW2 and D3 for detracting from their launch in official press releases/statements. Which was holy poo poo levels of dumb when you consider that TSW was a subscription MMO that you had to buy and then pay a sub for competing with a buy to play MMO and a (at the time) juggernaut of the ARPG genre. I know Funcom has blamed GW2 and D3 for the issues as well but even then this goes back to what people are saying that that is in fact on Funcom itself for doing something very dumb that they should have avoided if at all possible. And that's before you factor in the above stuff regarding the CEO and the stock sale that suggests that people higher up than TheFlyingOrc knew poo poo was going to go south. Which makes this post of his completely irrelevant to the overall issue of defending the actions of Funcom, even setting aside the other responses folks gave: theflyingorc posted:Yeah, this is a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of how game development works on multiple levels. I called it greed because the former CEO literally cashed out his stocks right before TSW's release specifically in a way that was in defiance of the law. I never said that you or the other devs specifically were the ones doing the greedy bullshit that sabotaged the products and screwed over the employees. Rather, given what came out in the news since then (along with past incidents) that management at the top end around that time appears to have been incredibly lovely and seemed more self involved than looking at the viability of the final product or the company as a whole. Which it seems is something that ultimately caused issues for TSW. Just as it did in Age of Conan. Whether this was Trond himself that was at fault for setting the general direction of how project oversight was handled or someone else I don't know, since i'm not privy to the inner workings of Funcom's decision making process. But other people on here have pointed out that properly managing expected financial results of a product is very much on the company itself and not the market or devs as a whole. Meaning if TSW was being designed in such a way that it had to be a smash hit to recoup it's losses then someone ought to have stepped in and toned down the final costs by looking at what was eating up so much money and scaling things back instead of creating a product that assumed amazing success out the gate to recoup the expenses. That's a requisite of any for profit project and it's long term success, and not people making up elaborate conspiracy theories or whatever like Ichabod said.
Archonex fucked around with this message at 09:10 on May 28, 2022 |
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May 28, 2022 08:02
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quote:And Funcom blamed GW2 and D3 for detracting from their launch in official press releases/statements. While I don't think TSW would've performed notably better if GW2 hadn't launched at the same time, this does remind me of seeing people in the TSW beta and early days insisting that TSW didn't have the holy trinity. Naturally that didn't persist past Kingsmouth. I think it's because TSW didn't have hard classes, combined with them thinking of GW2's marketing. Not GW2's fault, and like I said, I don't think it made any sort of difference re: TSW's failure. I do remember being both amused and frustrated though
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May 28, 2022 16:09
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FrostyPox posted:While I don't think TSW would've performed notably better if GW2 hadn't launched at the same time, this does remind me of seeing people in the TSW beta and early days insisting that TSW didn't have the holy trinity. Naturally that didn't persist past Kingsmouth. I think it's because TSW didn't have hard classes, combined with them thinking of GW2's marketing. I mean, those people are dumb. The group dungeons literally were usually only workable/not tedious as heck in randoms if you had a healer and someone that could tank damage while the rest DPSed. Don't know about what the high end folks did in premades and if they had a better way but yeah. The freeform nature of it probably muddled things a bit for people not familiar with the genre outside of the cookie cutter MMO's common at the time but it's not like it's the first game to have customization insofar as character powers and blending roles goes.
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May 28, 2022 22:08
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I mean even with the freeform skill system it was very clear entire weapons or at least large sections of their skills were focusing on tank or healer stuff.
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May 28, 2022 22:54
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AoC was closer to not having the Trinity with how absolutely dogshit healing was at launch. I don’t think that was the intended experience though, just bad design and everything being totally broken. “Ok, only the male bear shaman is allowed to cast big heals. Don’t want any of you weaker females wasting our 1 heal a 30 seconds.” You could sort of break the Trinity early in TSW’s launch with some overpowered heal tanks or dps. And then once people got geared, it was fairly common to run 4 dps + heal or heal tank. Any game that has persistent unavoidable damage and threat tables is generally going to require or be better with a trinity. You have to completely change how combat flows to eliminate it. Lost Ark is the best example in years of a game that manages to eliminate the mandatory trinity but still make non or lower dps roles important. Lost Ark is only successful in it because combat is complete different than any other mmo. TSW would have been a much better game if it had a ditched the trinity and had a combat system more like Lost Ark. The anima wheel would have lent itself really well to more interesting combat mechanics.
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May 28, 2022 22:56
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Remember the aux weapon wheel? Chainsaw was too good for this world
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May 28, 2022 23:19
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Aux weapons were such a disappointment. I joined just after the quantum brace (?) was added and it sounded like a cool concept and looked cool but was very specifically a healing weapon and a complete trap that early in my TSW career when AP still mattered. And the terrible balance just meant every tank used chainsaw, every DPS used rocket launcher.
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May 28, 2022 23:36
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orcane posted:Aux weapons were such a disappointment. I joined just after the quantum brace (?) was added and it sounded like a cool concept and looked cool but was very specifically a healing weapon and a complete trap that early in my TSW career when AP still mattered. And the terrible balance just meant every tank used chainsaw, every DPS used rocket launcher. could you even do facility nightmare without the rocket jump?
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May 29, 2022 00:05
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Honestly no idea, because I was either not online or not invited along when goons did more than 18s (is that what we called the easy nightmares people did regularly?), and pugging nightmares was extremely toxic thanks to Funcom's idiot encounter designers.
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May 29, 2022 00:10
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Yeah if you were over "leveled" for dungeons you could do some nasty stuff. I did run nightmares and I remember always needing a tank and healer. I also remember certain Nightmares needing very specific skills. IIRC you did need a rush/blink skill for NM Facility, but it didn't have to be Rocket Jump. I think I did it with the blink from Elementalism.
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May 29, 2022 00:12
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Len posted:could you even do facility nightmare without the rocket jump? Oh we definitely did in beta while testing them and during issue #1. It was miserable but possible. Edit: As said above, you could manage it with one of the blinks or dashes. The blade dash was good enough maybe? Saltpowered fucked around with this message at 00:16 on May 29, 2022 |
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May 29, 2022 00:12
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Oh yeah RL wasn't even in until Issue 2.
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May 29, 2022 00:22
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Once Mycroft ends his Let’s Play, I’ll probably close this thread. There’s really not much left to say about the game that hasn’t been said multiple times and the last new player in the thread was about a year ago. Maybe Len or Drinkfist can make a piss on the grave thread when this finally shuts down.
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May 30, 2022 02:15
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I have a dream that if this shuts down they'll do a matrix online style end event. But that would require a budget
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May 30, 2022 14:24
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They’d probably just spawn a few Trex on each zone and call it good.
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May 30, 2022 14:41
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Golems, imo. Or Super Jack-o-Lantern.
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May 30, 2022 16:47
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orcane posted:Golems, imo. Bring back the harbingers, only I don't think the new system can properly handle that Also put they should harbinger that uses Wayebxuls model in savage coast. The thing flying over an amusement park was part of the launch trailer and on the back of the retail box yet when they had him wandering the world it was in one of the Transylvania zones
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May 30, 2022 16:57
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Len posted:Bring back the harbingers, only I don't think the new system can properly handle that There was a lot of media material things like that which were never in the game in any form (or at least not until waaaaaay later).
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May 30, 2022 17:53
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Lawlicaust posted:Once Mycroft ends his Let’s Play, I’ll probably close this thread. There’s really not much left to say about the game that hasn’t been said multiple times and the last new player in the thread was about a year ago. Maybe Len or Drinkfist can make a piss on the grave thread when this finally shuts down. Honestly, i'd keep it open. There's always the extremely slim chance that someone will buy up the license and do a proper rebranding with a real reboot/a proper sequel (probably with a time skip given the Tokyo ending implications) rather than a cash grab that's missing features. Having the thread open until then will at least keep the game visible, similar to what happened with City of Heroes.
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May 31, 2022 02:25
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I hate to break it to you but if someone bought the licence and did a proper reboot, that would also be a "cash grab" because 
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May 31, 2022 04:01
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I don’t know how much value is even in the license. You could make an urban fantasy game with a very similar premise without running into any copyright issues with just some small tweaks. The filth is probably the most unique element in TSW. And brand equity is basically zero at this point. Funcom would also likely set some outrageous price for purchasing the license anyway so it’s really not gonna happen. I’ll leave it open though. Maybe Funcom will do something else hilariously bad at some point.
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May 31, 2022 15:13
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I support keeping it open. It's nice to reminisce about old times once in a while, and there are a few lucky people out there who still haven't played the game that might stumble on the thread.
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Jun 2, 2022 03:19
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Pilchenstein posted:I hate to break it to you but if someone bought the licence and did a proper reboot, that would also be a "cash grab" because As far as I know this is still happening https://twitter.com/AnvilStar
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Jun 23, 2022 20:47
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It's based on 5e d&d though
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Jun 23, 2022 21:22
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The Talos golem event is up and running, for anyone who still cares
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Jun 27, 2022 22:46
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That's the great part of about TSW being in maint mode with maybe one person keeping the lights on part time. The last news update on Steam was for Rosenbrawl in February. I think there is one specific subforum on the funcom community site you need to visit to find out what events (if any) are running and the whole thing is in a sort of automatic loop. If this was a single player game we'd all be singing it's praises to the high heavens. But a decade later here we are, somehow, with a brilliant narrative cut off at both hamstrings by the mmo format.
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Jul 11, 2022 13:06
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I miss this game and I'm very sad that the TTRPG is loving 5e.
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Jul 13, 2022 08:25
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some friends talked me into playing wow classic with them and i have yet to do a dungeon that was as fun as any of these
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Sep 17, 2022 15:34
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Len posted:some friends talked me into playing wow classic with them and i have yet to do a dungeon that was as fun as any of these As someone who's played an unreasonable number of MMOs, no game has dungeons as good as Secret World.
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Sep 17, 2022 16:06
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FrostyPox posted:As someone who's played an unreasonable number of MMOs, no game has dungeons as good as Secret World. i keep asking things like "does this fight have mechanics?" and the answer has always been "no" even polaris, babys first dungeon, had mechanics in the fights also there's a story behind the dungeon other than "hey so there's some bad guys in here and they look pretty much like very other thing in the dungeon go kill them i guess"
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Sep 17, 2022 16:22
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Len posted:i keep asking things like "does this fight have mechanics?" and the answer has always been "no" FFXIV dungeons probably come closest to Secret World dungeons in that most of them tie into the main story and bosses have mechanics but they're still not nearly as cool. The Ankh will forever be my favorite dungeon, period, and all the Hell Dungeons and the Facility hold a special place in my heart.
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Sep 17, 2022 18:52
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FrostyPox posted:FFXIV dungeons probably come closest to Secret World dungeons in that most of them tie into the main story and bosses have mechanics but they're still not nearly as cool. The Ankh will forever be my favorite dungeon, period, and all the Hell Dungeons and the Facility hold a special place in my heart. Hell fallen is the only dungeon I remember hating
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Sep 17, 2022 19:28
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Yeah, I should've excluded Hell Fallen. I like it but I just read through it and realized none of the Hell bosses I remember are from Hell Fallen. It's still good IMO, but not as goon as Raised, Eternal, the Ankh, or the Facility.
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Sep 17, 2022 20:08
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 coming up on two years
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Sep 21, 2022 02:42
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Len posted:
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Sep 22, 2022 01:31
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is this still a game you can play i remember buying this and thinking it was sick when it came out but i didnt have time for an mmo i mean i still dont but would try it to do that jeffery combs level again
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Sep 27, 2022 15:46
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