Funcom reveals 'The Secret World'

Paingod · Post by **Paingod** » Mon Jun 30, 2014 8:41 am

Picked up the "Massive Edition" on Steam's sale and have been having a lot of fun with it - however, I have a big complaint when it comes to the video settings. I have a 4 year old Radeon HD 6970 that's been rock solid for every game up to now...

... I cannot get the game to run cool, and I don't want to make it look like crap to do that.

My first run resulted in a system meltdown after about an hour. The PC audio speaker started freaking out and needing to be removed because it wouldn't shut up (ever, I think it broke). My mouse's right-click stopped working properly (must have been a coincidence). My video card's fans were trying to exceed 100% speed but couldn't. The video drivers crashed.

I cleaned everything up; removed the PC audio speaker, replaced my mouse, realigned wiring in the chassis for more airflow, updated my video drivers, and vacuumed out all the dust from my air filters. What a chore.

... but the game works. The video card still runs tremendously hot, and I've turned down everything I can without simply not playing the game. Room temperature determines how long I can play. If the room is cool, the video card can stay cool enough. If the room is 80º or more, the video card can't cope and overheats. I've turned off a lot of settings... minimal AA, tessellation off, ssao off, bloom etc off, visuals at "2" except for Draw Distance at 4, told my video card to for v-sync (recommended, so the game doesn't try and run at 300fps)... anything I can find. My chassis has 5 fans blowing air in (2 on the side, 2 in front, and 1 on top), along with the power supply and video card fans blowing air out... it's just not enough.

It may also be time to look into getting a new computer as I've had this setup now for 4 years and I'll admit it's apparently getting old.

So I'm having fun, when my computer will let me.

My character is focused on Elemental with a touch of Blades (I wanna be a Ninja). I just got the last Elemental abilities needed to unlock the next tier. He does well enough, as long as I don't get cocky or bring down massive thunder on myself by over-pulling. Having to pick just 7 skills has already caused some painful choices. As of now, my hotbar has two "building" attacks, a hold, a power-up, a single-target strike, a chain, and an PBAoE. The power-up lets me use Thor's Hammer (strike, consumes 5 Elemental charges) twice in a row, with the first hit a guarateed critical hit. Alternately, it lets me use my Chain attack 3 times in a row, with the first a crit. The PBAoE is a sword ability, and I use it when I'm surrounded and want to make sure the Chains kill everything. Since I want to be a Ninja, I'm going to focus on getting to the couple Elemental abilities it requires and then shift to Swords as a primary.

ColdSteel · Post by **ColdSteel** » Mon Jun 30, 2014 8:58 am

Paingod wrote:I cannot get the game to run cool

If the game has a setting for ambient occlusion make sure that is off also. I found that was the single one thing causing overheating for my system in Neverwinter MMO. Once I turned it off, it ran very cool.

Another thing is to check your frame rates in-game to make sure vsynch is actually working. Turning it on should have seen a big improvement for you. If there wasn't an in-game setting for it, it might not have taken. If you have a GPU monitor like EVGA Precision you can also limit the frame rate to something lower than that (like 45 FPS) and that should also make it run much cooler.

One other thing to try, if you haven't, is to turn reflections and shadows completely off and see if that helps. Good luck.

Daehawk · Post by **Daehawk** » Mon Jun 30, 2014 9:25 am

I was wondering how much this cost to play so looked it up. Seems it is buy once and free after that..like Guild Wars and such. But dont buy it from the website. Its still $30 from them. best Buy has it online for $8.99 so that would be the place to buy it.

Is this even worth that? I didn't car for the beta at all and in fact stopped playing it. Has it improved? I see it says it is DX11 but the videos I watched dont seem to be very pretty.

Paingod · Post by **Paingod** » Mon Jun 30, 2014 12:56 pm

ColdSteel wrote:Another thing is to check your frame rates in-game to make sure vsynch is actually working. Turning it on should have seen a big improvement for you. If there wasn't an in-game setting for it, it might not have taken. If you have a GPU monitor like EVGA Precision you can also limit the frame rate to something lower than that (like 45 FPS) and that should also make it run much cooler.

One other thing to try, if you haven't, is to turn reflections and shadows completely off and see if that helps. Good luck.

I'll give it another stab. I believe one of the complaints I found was there the game offers NO VSync option, either by config files or in menus and you *must* use your hardware controller to do it. I've done that with the Catalyst Control Center, but I haven't checked to see if it's working.

Daehawk wrote:Best Buy has it online for $8.99 so that would be the place to buy it.

Is this even worth that? I didn't car for the beta at all and in fact stopped playing it. Has it improved? I see it says it is DX11 but the videos I watched dont seem to be very pretty.

I'm not disappointed that I spent $17 on it - but I got the base game plus 9 expansions for that price on Steam. I haven't even cracked the expansion content yet, and may not for some time.

The character development is different - which is very good. You buy skills using SP's that you get as you progress, and these enable you to use more powerful weapons and gear, while providing a buff to your stats. There are 9 different kinds of weapons and you mix & match them to choose two you want to use together. Your abilities are based on your weapons, and you spend AP's to get these, unlocking abilities upwards towards the top-tier. I believe you can unlock every single ability and every single skill in the game with one character - but you'll need to decide which 7 skills and 7 passives you actually use at once since you can only slot that many at once.

The combat is block, move, cycle/spam attacks and abilities - which is average to me. You can build up combos, and need to accumulate "combat" resources to use for some attacks; these limit the spamming of high-end abilities. There's no "mana bar" or similar thing - you fight until you're done or dead. At worst you have an ability with a long cooldown, but those seem to be fairly potent things you shouldn't ever spam - like Holds and Power-Ups. Your skill with a weapon determines both the ability to use it and how well you'll use it. The only negative I'd give it is that you really more or less spam your combat scenario the same way each time as long as everything goes well. Boss fights take a little more effort, and getting out of bad pulls can be tricky.

The death mechanic is quite tolerable - you die when you do something not-so-bright and respawn as a ghost back at a waypoint, which you can select but it always seems to default to the closest one. These are sprinkled around the map. You run back to your corpse and re-animate it at half life. When you do this, all your equipped items lose 10 points out of 100 durability. I'm assuming, given the scale, that you can eventually find things to lower the cost from 10 to something else or find items that go over 100. I don't believe there's any lost experience, but I haven't paid attention for it.

Creature variety is okay, but because combat is a planned cycle of abilities for me, I mostly kill them all the same way with some exceptions. I've killed undead corpses, infected citizens, undead witches, mutants, mutant breeders, squid lords, squid mutant breeders, mutant spellcasters, cultists, wendigos, shambling mounds, junkyard golems, 'roid raging zombies, etc... and I'm still in the first area. I've killed them all mostly the same way, with some dodging to get out of "broadcasted" attack zones. A rare few, mostly the bosses, call for something different. For example, one boss was a nightmare at range, but when I got in his face I floored him easily.

The narrative is interesting, so far at least. The beginning zone starts with what seems to be an undead infestation that turns into some Lovecraftian horror. There's no shortage of missions and content to use to gain experience... and since you can't really "outlevel" an area, you can do it all. You can even go back and do some missions over after a day's time - but it's not like you're doing "Dailies" - you're doing it because you want to. I don't know yet if there's a mechanic like "Dailies" to accumulate credits/points/tokens/crystals/whatever.

Solo friendly so far, no problems doing anything by myself. I've seen a couple teams of 2 running around together, and they certainly killed things quicker than I could.

There is an item store, but it appears that everything sold there is either completely cosmetic, consumable, or offers a low-yield bonus, like +5% to attack. I've yet to feel any compulsion to buy anything and nothing has prompted me to...

So - "Is it worth it" - I suppose is highly subjective. If I had known the game would be this good, I'd buy it for $9 to get the base game. I'd probably hem and haw over the 9 expansions unless I got really invested in the base game. Getting it all for $17 was a steal.

Pyperkub · Post by **Pyperkub** » Sat Aug 09, 2014 10:12 pm

Came back to this for the second anniversary, and I'm still loving it as a huge rpg wroth great stories and quests.

Carpet_pissr · Post by **Carpet_pissr** » Tue Apr 21, 2015 3:05 pm

Arise, thread! Anyone still playing this? Noticed the sale on Steam, and have not ever heard of this game for some reason. Sounds appealing.

ColdSteel · Post by **ColdSteel** » Tue Apr 21, 2015 5:59 pm

It's a very good MMO. The only reason I stopped playing it was because I got distracted by something shiny. I've always planned to play it again one day.

AWS260 · Post by **AWS260** » Tue Apr 21, 2015 11:38 pm

Carpet_pissr wrote:Arise, thread! Anyone still playing this? Noticed the sale on Steam, and have not ever heard of this game for some reason. Sounds appealing.

I just picked it up in the sale -- I've heard enough positive things to give it a try. So far, I've barely gotten past character creation, so I have no useful insights to share.

EzeKieL · Post by **EzeKieL** » Wed Apr 22, 2015 4:39 am

ColdSteel wrote:It's a very good MMO. The only reason I stopped playing it was because I got distracted by something shiny. I've always planned to play it again one day.

Ditto!

Carpet_pissr · Post by **Carpet_pissr** » Wed Apr 22, 2015 12:06 pm

AWS260 wrote:
Carpet_pissr wrote:Arise, thread! Anyone still playing this? Noticed the sale on Steam, and have not ever heard of this game for some reason. Sounds appealing.
I just picked it up in the sale -- I've heard enough positive things to give it a try. So far, I've barely gotten past character creation, so I have no useful insights to share.

Let me know if you want to romp around together. I am considering buying it here since it's never been lower. Something about it has really grabbed me. Hopefully the low Metacritic score is mostly indicative of a buggy release at launch.

Tao · Post by **Tao** » Wed Apr 22, 2015 10:13 pm

I really enjoyed this game as well for a while. The ability to acquire lots and lots of skills and the vast potential for different builds really appealed to me. Eventually I hit some of the harder areas/quests which were less fun solo and drifted off to other games. I would definitely be up for some group play.

Carpet_pissr · Post by **Carpet_pissr** » Mon May 11, 2015 3:44 pm

Well, I have tried to get into this, but I have to say the control scheme is pissing me off. Why in the world is "shoot/fire" mapped to a 4th mouse key, for one?! Argh.

I briefly looked, but not sure I can even adjust the settings to a more normal, industry standard:look with mouse, WASD, shoot with LMB, maybe have RMB as secondary weapon, etc. Just irks me that it's so....non-standard. Fine, if you think you have a better way, that's ok, but please don't make it the default, or at LEAST have a settings load where the player can "load alternate mappings" (which would be the more standard mappings).

Whatever...seemed like a great idea for a game in theory...if someone has some cures for my bitchy ailment about the controls, I would love to hear them before I relegate this my "ARCHIVED" Steam folder of doom where bad (and sometimes just "iffy") games go to die.

coopasonic · Post by **coopasonic** » Mon May 11, 2015 4:02 pm

It has been a hundred years since I have played this, but it's an MMO with action buttons, not an FPS. Left click is to select a target in most every MMO in the universe isn't it?

TheMix · Post by **TheMix** » Mon May 11, 2015 4:09 pm

Carpet_pissr wrote:Well, I have tried to get into this, but I have to say the control scheme is pissing me off. Why in the world is "shoot/fire" mapped to a 4th mouse key, for one?! Argh.

I briefly looked, but not sure I can even adjust the settings to a more normal, industry standard:look with mouse, WASD, shoot with LMB, maybe have RMB as secondary weapon, etc. Just irks me that it's so....non-standard. Fine, if you think you have a better way, that's ok, but please don't make it the default, or at LEAST have a settings load where the player can "load alternate mappings" (which would be the more standard mappings).

Whatever...seemed like a great idea for a game in theory...if someone has some cures for my bitchy ailment about the controls, I would love to hear them before I relegate this my "ARCHIVED" Steam folder of doom where bad (and sometimes just "iffy") games go to die.

I'm not sure I even understand your comments. I was playing it recently, and I did have to retrain myself on the controls. But coop is right on, this isn't an FPS. You don't attack with the mouse buttons. You either press the number keys that correspond to the abilities, or use the mouse to click the buttons on the screen.

So you select the mob (Tab, mouse, whatever), and then click the button that corresponds to the attack/skill you want to use. So if you want to shoot the mob, you'd put some 'shoot-related' skills on the action bar and then click the appropriate one.

I have no idea what mouse 4 is doing....

Carpet_pissr · Post by **Carpet_pissr** » Mon May 11, 2015 5:21 pm

coopasonic wrote:It has been a hundred years since I have played this, but it's an MMO with action buttons, not an FPS. Left click is to select a target in most every MMO in the universe isn't it?

And therein is the problem...I suspected it was something simple. Having never played an MMO, this explains why it seems so foreign to me.

But...why? Why have the mappings different for an MMO vs. an FPS? Hell, why even the need to "target" anything? Simply point and shoot too brutish?

coopasonic · Post by **coopasonic** » Mon May 11, 2015 5:45 pm

MMOs are typically less action oriented than an FPS and they also tend to have a greater variety of attacks with fewer weapons. Your mouse only has so many buttons. There are 10+ button programmable mice people use that come closer to the experience you are looking for. I've never used one but the die hards do.

Carpet_pissr · Post by **Carpet_pissr** » Mon May 11, 2015 6:21 pm

Good to know. I guess I went in specifically to play as SP, as many people said was possible, but was not expecting such a difference in mechanics. I will try a little harder now knowing that it's a "standard" but just in a different genre that I am not accustomed to playing.

Never knew I was such a control/mechanics curmudgeon!

Pyperkub · Post by **Pyperkub** » Mon May 11, 2015 6:38 pm

Yeah, I use a MOBA mouse with 6 additional mouse buttons by the thumb. Unfortunately I lost my mappings when I upgraded, and I haven't managed to reprogram them all yet. Stupid Razer Software didn't keep them saved in the cloud like I thought. It's actually kept me from getting back into it periodically, though I really plan to, as I love the game.

TheMix · Post by **TheMix** » Mon May 11, 2015 7:00 pm

That's the mouse I use. I also have the one with 12 buttons. But I just found it too difficult to figure out which button I was hitting.

Incidentally, for anyone that might be interested, a refurb is for sale on Woot right now.

The only issue I have with the mouse is that I wish it was a shade bigger. It's just a tiny bit too small for my hand.

Edit: Assuming you meant this mouse:

Pyperkub · Post by **Pyperkub** » Mon May 11, 2015 8:15 pm

TheMix wrote:That's the mouse I use. I also have the one with 12 buttons. But I just found it too difficult to figure out which button I was hitting.

Incidentally, for anyone that might be interested, a refurb is for sale on Woot right now.

The only issue I have with the mouse is that I wish it was a shade bigger. It's just a tiny bit too small for my hand.

Edit: Assuming you meant this mouse:

Yup - it's a bit too small for my hand too - it needs to be about 2-3cm longer to be perfect, though I do really like the mouse (and I have the green one).

TheMix · Post by **TheMix** » Tue May 12, 2015 2:06 am

Me too. I just grabbed that picture from the Woot sale. Not that I have anything against the red one.

But I'd be all over it in a second if they offered a bigger one.

Max Peck · Post by **Max Peck** » Thu Jun 16, 2016 9:48 pm

Time to patch up the ol' Secret World client...

The Museum of the Occult

The Museum of the Occult is a brand-new feature that allows you to collect, display, and customize exhibits of monsters in your own personal Museum. Earn new rewards, including pets, t-shirts designed by members of our community, and consumables that can call upon a monster to assist you! You can even invite your friends to your Museum and let them bask in your glory.

The Museum of the Occult may be found near Temple Hall in London. Tons of new achievements and hundreds of new Lore pieces await your discovery, agents! Good hunting!

Smoove_B · Post by **Smoove_B** » Wed Mar 29, 2017 10:56 am

Relaunching as Free to Play Secret World Legends (Youtube trailer) at some point this year.

Secret World Legends is a story-driven, shared-world action RPG that plunges players into a shadowy war against the supernatural, where ancient myths and legends cross over into the modern day. Armed with both weapons and superhuman abilities, you will build your powers, solve deep mysteries, and destroy terrifying evils to uncover a dark and captivating storyline that traverses the globe. Can you reveal the truth?

More details:

Spoiler:

Max Peck · Post by **Max Peck** » Thu Mar 30, 2017 12:20 pm

Apparently they are still going to operate the "classic" TSW servers alongside SWL, at least for the immediate future following the relaunch.

Max Peck · Post by **Max Peck** » Thu May 11, 2017 11:28 pm

Video: What is Secret World Legends?

Max Peck · Post by **Max Peck** » Fri Jun 23, 2017 6:52 pm

The Secret World Legends headstart began today.

If you have an existing TSW account, you can log onto your SWL account using your TSW credentials here. Information on the one-time legacy transfer of stuff from your TSW Classic account to your SWL account can be found here.

If you have the TSW launcher installed, it apparently is now acting as a SWL launcher and will allow you to install SWL. There is a link in the notes that explains that you can find a TSW Classic downloader from your TSW Classic account page, if that is a thing that you want.

coopasonic · Post by **coopasonic** » Fri Jun 23, 2017 7:42 pm

coopasonic wrote:I played this with pretty much all of my weekend gametime (which turns out to be a rather paltry 9 hours). I enjoyed it enough to buy the game and the lifetime sub. Of course that means I will never play it again. I now have 3 lifetime sub games. 2 of them are currently f2p and this one is surely headed there. Will I never learn?

There we go, 3 for 3 on lifetime subs for f2p games!

I am downloading just to check it out... and Smoove would be proud of my download speed... it's running around 2MB/s... that's approximately 1.6% of my max download speed.

Victoria Raverna · Post by **Victoria Raverna** » Fri Jun 23, 2017 10:05 pm

One time transfer is only until August 2017? If so those that have lifetime subs for TSW need to transfer it before that to get the lifetime Patron subs for SWL.

Max Peck · Post by **Max Peck** » Sat Jun 24, 2017 12:07 am

Victoria Raverna wrote:One time transfer is only until August 2017? If so those that have lifetime subs for TSW need to transfer it before that to get the lifetime Patron subs for SWL.

I guess so. My lifetime status wasn't picked up on my SWL account until after I did the transfer.

YellowKing · Post by **YellowKing** » Sat Jun 24, 2017 2:20 am

Rolled up a character. I'm actually somewhat regretting buying WITCHER 3 today just because I'd rather dabble around with this at the moment.

I played the game a bit at launch and a little around a year afterwards and enjoyed it. But not quite enough to pay for it.

Max Peck · Post by **Max Peck** » Sat Jun 24, 2017 9:59 am

I rolled up my character last night, played through the tutorial, unlocked my transfer goodies (clothing items and weapon access) and got as far as the first story location (Solomon Island). My TSW lifetime sub translated over as a Lifetime Patron account, which seems to provide a small (10%) experience buff and a bunch of other bonuses that didn't mean anything to me yet.

I'm still not sold on the new combat mechanics. It feels sort of console-ready, for lack of a better term. Hopefully it will grow on me.

Visually, SWL seems to be identical to TSW Classic. It appeared to install over-top/along-side my existing TSW installation, so I'm guessing it just uses the same art assets as the earlier version.

Max Peck · Post by **Max Peck** » Sat Jun 24, 2017 2:25 pm

Max Peck wrote:I'm still not sold on the new combat mechanics. It feels sort of console-ready, for lack of a better term. Hopefully it will grow on me.

I'm not sure why I was bouncing off the combat last night, but I played for a couple of hours today and it started to click. Maybe I was just too tired on the first go-round to get the hang of it.

wire · Post by **wire** » Sat Jun 24, 2017 5:13 pm

Do you still have to run around your target to try and stay out of their attack radius? The fighting was my least favorite part of TSW...loved the puzzles and the atmosphere.

Max Peck · Post by **Max Peck** » Sat Jun 24, 2017 6:06 pm

wire wrote:Do you still have to run around your target to try and stay out of their attack radius? The fighting was my least favorite part of TSW...loved the puzzles and the atmosphere.

Mobs will still telegraph their heavy/area attacks, and you need to move/dodge out of the area to avoid them if you don't want to take the hit. As I understand it, a big part of the reason for the relaunch as SWL is that they've revamped the combat to make it more accessible, so it may be worth giving it a shot to see if you like the new version more than the old one.

Max Peck · Post by **Max Peck** » Sun Jun 25, 2017 8:48 pm

Whoops! Good thing they caught this before the official launch.

As you may have noticed the servers have been down for most of today. I apologize for the extended downtime. Early today we discovered an error that caused the Exchange to break which made quite an impact on the game. When you log in you will find that your character’s Aurum has been reverted to the amount it was at before this occurred. Any valid purchase of Aurum made after this point will also be applied. Marks of Favour / Cache Keys will be also be reset for some players that used the Exchange after it was broken. We have also banned a large number of players that took advantage of the broken Exchange.

The Auction House and the Exchange are temporarily disabled to give us more time to test the fixes to them. We hope to have both features back and working very soon!

We are very sorry for the amount of time the server was down and the impact the event has had on any of you. Once the situation is resolved we will be rewarding players with compensation for the downtime!

Thanks again for your patience!

coopasonic · Post by **coopasonic** » Mon Jun 26, 2017 9:06 am

I played through the whole first area on Saturday which made up most of my day, but I stopped after transitioning to the second area as I remember playing it years ago and it being a pain. It has been so long since I last played I don't think I could make a useful comparison between old and new. It felt pretty similar to me.

YellowKing · Post by **YellowKing** » Mon Jun 26, 2017 11:08 am

I'm enjoying it a great deal. The combat is really clunky, but something about running the quests is addictive. My only complaint is that I ran into my first truly investigative quest last night, and there was no hand-holding whatsoever. While I'm fine with that in general, in this instance there would have been NO way I would have completed that quest without looking it up. It required game mechanics I didn't even know existed in order to progress. Would have been nice to have had them walk you through the first one as a tutorial before throwing you in the deep end like that.

Pyperkub · Post by **Pyperkub** » Mon Jun 26, 2017 11:31 am

YellowKing wrote:I'm enjoying it a great deal. The combat is really clunky, but something about running the quests is addictive. My only complaint is that I ran into my first truly investigative quest last night, and there was no hand-holding whatsoever. While I'm fine with that in general, in this instance there would have been NO way I would have completed that quest without looking it up. It required game mechanics I didn't even know existed in order to progress. Would have been nice to have had them walk you through the first one as a tutorial before throwing you in the deep end like that.

So they still have the in-game Internet search for the investigative quests?

YellowKing · Post by **YellowKing** » Mon Jun 26, 2017 12:40 pm

Not sure about that, but in this instance:

Spoiler:

Max Peck · Post by **Max Peck** » Mon Jun 26, 2017 12:44 pm

Pyperkub wrote:
YellowKing wrote:I'm enjoying it a great deal. The combat is really clunky, but something about running the quests is addictive. My only complaint is that I ran into my first truly investigative quest last night, and there was no hand-holding whatsoever. While I'm fine with that in general, in this instance there would have been NO way I would have completed that quest without looking it up. It required game mechanics I didn't even know existed in order to progress. Would have been nice to have had them walk you through the first one as a tutorial before throwing you in the deep end like that.
So they still have the in-game Internet search for the investigative quests?

Yup, complete with websites for in-game corporations and organizations. The settings, missions and storylines appear to be pretty much exactly the same as in TSW Classic. So far, the big changes appear to be in game mechanics, such as combat and crafting.