Secret World II: The Legend of Amiel's Monetization

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > The MMO HMO > Secret World II: The Legend of Amiel's Monetization

orcane: Jun 13, 2012; Fun Shoe

GEMorris posted:

That's a significant improvement.

It's still not really good though :v:

# ¿ Aug 10, 2017 12:11

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# ¿ May 15, 2024 00:55

orcane: Jun 13, 2012; Fun Shoe

Len posted:

To be experiencing the mission flow for the first time with Tokyo already finished. I bet it's a great experience.

Us old timers got issue 7 (Silent Lullaby) then nothing for many months and then issue 8 (Scenarios) and then a short event stretched out to a ridiculous length because Tokyo kept getting delayed. And then a stripped down barebones issue 9 where you couldn't even do the whole thing right away because you needed to do the tower defense mission 6 times in order to get a full aegis set.

I'd say "short event stretched out to a ridiculous length" doesn't describe how loving dire that period was. Scenarios made me hate the game enough on its own, but the endless filth and golem event stretch was icing on the cake.

# ¿ Mar 20, 2018 10:12

orcane: Jun 13, 2012; Fun Shoe

Ah wow that sucks. The first Egypt zone was my favourite area in TSW even despite the garbage early sabotage mission in Last Train to Cairo. I was reminded of it while playing Assassins Creed Origins (which is the better Akhenaten simulator by far) and considered checking it out in SWL but it sounds like it's not worth putting up with all the rest I don't like about the relaunch for it.

# ¿ Mar 30, 2018 10:44

orcane: Jun 13, 2012; Fun Shoe

Len posted:

That someone let Joel be in charge and I'm still bitter that all the cool fun goons I used to play with stopped because of that

I loved how "Tokyo soon, promise" turned into "hey I guess you guys like golem events" for over a year. That said, the early golem events (anniversary golems, then the halloween event with Super Jack) started out fun, but got overly grindy. And even though the game clearly couldn't handle having more than a few people in an area fighting big bosses, they kept having them because they had nothing else at all. And then they dropped the godawful wave defense scenarios and those together with Joel being a smug rear end in a top hat about everything (and prioritizing taking ill-gotten achievement reward gear away from people over fixing any of the poo poo that was wrong with the game), I think that's what broke the game for me.

# ¿ Jul 15, 2018 02:53

orcane: Jun 13, 2012; Fun Shoe

Len posted:

With the quarantine someone should stream riding a train for 12 hours. It got us some Tokyo teasers maybe it'll get Congo teasers

Haha someone in a different thread mentioned how a Thief bank level progresses to the bank opening after 8 RL hours and I immediately remembered the 12 (or was it 24?) hour train stunt in TSW.

# ¿ Mar 18, 2020 20:39

orcane: Jun 13, 2012; Fun Shoe

TSW's main lasting impressions for me were

24h live stream shenianigans on the last train to Cairo.
golem events

I hope they can capture that in a hypothetical next game, too.

# ¿ Jun 13, 2020 22:48

orcane: Jun 13, 2012; Fun Shoe

Len posted:

If by scenarios you mean the exact same batch from the original game only cut into smaller intervals yes

Oh man scenarios.

Remember when taking away people's cheevo reward skins they got from exploiting Funcom's precious scenarios was a priority for the devs because reasons :v:

# ¿ Jul 2, 2020 18:57

orcane: Jun 13, 2012; Fun Shoe

Len posted:

Me "I'm gonna get drunk and run Ankh like old times"

Funcom "nah man, we've managed to get our game flagged as a Trojan"

Your computers just want to protect you, even back when it was Ati drivers not working :v:

# ¿ Feb 27, 2021 00:19

orcane: Jun 13, 2012; Fun Shoe

Really? In vanilla TSW I loved the first zone in Egypt because the bottom half is somewhat normal with the town and civilians, and then the northern desert parts have various mysteries that got elaborated on in the DLC missions. And the 2nd zone is pretty cool with hidden secrets and ancient evils, mechanically it had a ton of annoying missions/enemies/areas though.

Did they meaningfully change them for the TSL relaunch?

# ¿ Mar 20, 2021 16:10

orcane: Jun 13, 2012; Fun Shoe

IIRC the quantum brace mostly had skills for heaing / support, you didn't use it over the other aux weapons with damage or movement effects. I liked the look of it but didn't use it much, the other aux weapons (rocket launcher, chainsaw, flamethrower, whip) were better for DPS and tanking or even just general use.

orcane fucked around with this message at 03:56 on Aug 15, 2021

# ¿ Aug 15, 2021 03:51

orcane: Jun 13, 2012; Fun Shoe

Lifetime Membership

:laffo:

# ¿ Aug 18, 2021 02:01

orcane: Jun 13, 2012; Fun Shoe

I kinda prefer the old skills etc. setup and I really disliked playing some of the DLC chapters so having those integrated into the story would put me right off.

Of course, that would require there actually being other people to play with.

E: But what you're REALLY going to miss in the classic version is the endless golem events they were running in the last year(s) before the switch to TSL :v:

orcane fucked around with this message at 20:52 on Aug 18, 2021

# ¿ Aug 18, 2021 20:49

orcane: Jun 13, 2012; Fun Shoe

I originally joined TSW during the mayan zombie event (the one they hosed up so much they gave out some of the rewards to everyone afterwards IIRC? or just didn't fix the exploits that everyone and their dogs used because they released it completely broken the day before they hosed off to a week or two of holidays), and the absolute ton of people in the streets and out in the field fighting zombies was pretty cool TBH.

When it was way, way more people taking down golems for 20 minutes every hour, that was not quite as cool though.

# ¿ Aug 22, 2021 22:34

orcane: Jun 13, 2012; Fun Shoe

theflyingorc posted:

Yeah, this is a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of how game development works on multiple levels. [...] The reasons that TSW failed are largely the things people like about it.

Not really. Game design is hard and expensive etc. but TSW didn't fail because of the parts people liked about it. Funcom failed at making it a game enough people wanted to buy and keep spending money on, that's directly connected to how much they hosed up their post-release support and the SWL reboot, but even more to how they hosed up the (pre-) launch period (and also previous games, so the started this with a penalty to their reputation that wasn't helping). It's also due to completely mismanaging their budget and resources and you can't blame any of that on the customers at all - the game as advertised was never sustainable in MMO form, they sold a lot of promises they must have realized they couldn't keep, considering how quickly the game had to go into barely above maintenance mode (the Star Citizen school of game design - lofty aspirations, no resources/skills to properly turn them into the game they're selling).

If you don't have the resources, don't make MMO combat with a freely customizable action/trait setup with hundreds of skills. Don't overdo those hand-crafted, voiced quests and promise years of more of them when you can barely afford the amount in the first release. Don't try to add challenging group content when that relies on said combat design with the hundreds of possible skills and combinations which you already can't properly balance elsewhere in the game, and your encounters are so convoluted or overtuned your own designers can't reliably beat them. Don't make games if you can't even afford technical support while a significant percentage of your customers can't play your game for months, while your game director shits on the affected customers' complaints on your hugbox forum. You don't get to pin that on players liking the wrong, expensive parts of the game that don't pay enough.

E: Even though it wasn't literal "greed", you can absolutely try to secure more funding to pay your developer (a valid goal, on its own) by predatory monetization that will be perceived as greedy.

orcane fucked around with this message at 13:57 on Apr 25, 2022

# ¿ Apr 25, 2022 12:50

orcane: Jun 13, 2012; Fun Shoe

DancingShade posted:

Suppose you did purchase (back when it was sold) or otherwise play TSW when it B2P. What exactly was the revenue steam once they got you into the door? Aside from cash shop outfits (that were frequently worse than the free or unlockable ones).

All I remember was once a month a new costume was added to the cash shop and most of them were "okay I guess" but not "spend money okay". Then after another year or so even new things to sell in the cash shop dried up.

I'm not sure they ever figured out how they were supposed to make a profit apart from "subs" and prayer. As was already mentioned on this page the sub model was long dead before TSW launched. Even the Matrix MMO with the power of that IP couldn't survive on the sub model.

After they dropped the subscriptions the idea was, people who subscribed or were grandmasters they got bonuses and free points, and everyone bought costumes and new content issues with points (B2P players therefore had to buy points).

Except there were not nearly enough content issues to keep this up.

orcane fucked around with this message at 14:04 on Apr 25, 2022

# ¿ Apr 25, 2022 14:01

orcane: Jun 13, 2012; Fun Shoe

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.

# ¿ May 28, 2022 22:54

orcane: Jun 13, 2012; Fun Shoe

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.

# ¿ May 28, 2022 23:36

orcane: Jun 13, 2012; Fun Shoe

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.

# ¿ May 29, 2022 00:10

orcane: Jun 13, 2012; Fun Shoe

Oh yeah RL wasn't even in until Issue 2.

# ¿ May 29, 2022 00:22

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# ¿ May 15, 2024 00:55

orcane: Jun 13, 2012; Fun Shoe

Golems, imo.

Or Super Jack-o-Lantern.

# ¿ May 30, 2022 16:47

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > The MMO HMO > Secret World II: The Legend of Amiel's Monetization