Patrick Vuleta: I was pacing myself.

I did hear mention of sexy red hair….

The only saving grace is a ATI HD5800 video card, but that in itself is two years old.

I can still run it on max settings (ultra) at 30FPS, though tesselation added on top strains my PC.

I can run it on ‘high’ settings at 50FPS.

So I’ve been trawling the web for a while now and I think you have convinced me to at least give it a go. For $50 for a month I can’t really go wrong.

I do want a new pc first so I can squeeze as much shininess as I can out of it. What did you play it on and how did it run?

arkanis:
Piesexual: Yes the beta client does update to the full release client

Good to know. I was also getting horrible speeds through the patcher, will grab the beta from GON instead

ooshp: And no explicit mention of a certain couple of female characters… perhaps the therapy is taking hold.

I was pacing myself.

You convinced me to try it, hopefully it’ll tear me away from Civ 5… a new expansion and temporary unemployment have done some pretty horrible things to my sleep patterns. At least in an MMO you know it’s time to go to sleep when you’re getting ganked by trash.

I prefer TSW to GW2. I do try to stay objective in these reviews and not come across as a salesman or anything, but this is the best MMO I’ve played, even after the GW2 beta.

I’m still buying GW2 because, well… I preordered it and they don’t take refunds. ;) It’s still shaping up to be a good game, but I just prefer TSW. The combat’s a lot more balanced right now, and the setting is a lot more intriguing.

Plus, GW2 doesn’t make you do things like find out how electrical circuits work just to finish a quest… that was ridiculous, in a good way. :P

Thanks for the article. I’ve been hearing about this game for a while now… But have been forcing myself not to look into it as ive been eagerly awaiting GW2. You are starting to convince me otherwise.

I’m torn as I’m one of the people who only has very limited time to play, and now i fear that I may have to split my time between two MMOs.

This sounds pretty awesome though and I may just pick it up to play as a SP game with some grouping on the side.

I especially applaud your decision to move away from scoring reviews.

With regards to TSW; this really is a great MMO. I retired from WOW about 6 years ago and have struggled to get into any MMO since. I thought that SWTOR would have changed that, however after a few weeks I had lost all interest.

TSW is completely different. Being full time employed (with girlfriend), I rarely get more than an hour or two to sit down throughout the week, and might find a few hours on the weekend to play a game. Every time I log into TSW it feels like there is something new and exciting to do. I haven’t needed to run around for half an hour just to get into the action, and the story is compelling enough to keep me so engaged that I can pick up from where I left off.

Highly recommend that everyone tries it out, if only to experience the atmosphere of the game or amazing sound quality, artwork and enemy design.

Great Review Patrick, This is honestly the most fun MMORPG i’ve played to date, and that includes WoW, Vanguard:SOH, Warhammer Online, Eve Online, Rift, SWTOR, TERA… maybe a few more

Things to add about it would be that you can either pay $50 and pay a monthly subscription, or pay $200 off the bat and you’re subscribed for life. I’m not sure if you can upgrade to that later, but considering that if you go the latter route and play the game for 6months at least you’ve paid it off, that’s not a bad deal. Especially when you can come back to it at any point. I also wonder if GoN might be able to host the files? Apparently it’s 15gb or so and my brother had been downloading at a trickle off the official site. [Unless that beta client updates to the full release client?]

Yeah, maybe. I think I just don’t like MMOs in general. :\

It improved a lot from the beta, actually. :)

I doubt it will go F2P anytime soon. AoC only went F2P after three years, and The Secret World’s player retention is a great deal higher than AoC’s at launch.

It will go F2P just like AoC did, so might retry it then.

So I’m going to have to stand by the original article comment, though I can always edit it to make it more specific. :)

And really, the concern is more with the spike freezes. I’ve looked into ways to stabilise the ping, but none of the tunneling services offer for The Secret World. I was kinda hoping that if Funcom actually knows this is a problem, they might do something about it, since it’s literally the only technical problem I have with the game right now.

Don’t encounter any bugs, and the latency is perfectly playable in general. It’s just frustrating to get a spike at a critical moment.

The alt statement in context was really about that there’s no content difference between factions. Once you’ve decided on your build and fashion there’s little reason to stick with an alt.

This is especially the case given that by building up an alt, you’re reducing your main’s power. Many of the strongest builds use passive skills from all over the place, which takes time to earn, and if you want access to 3-4 very powerful builds, you’re effectively going to have to work on every single weapon type. Takes too much time to play an alt at the same time imo.

But great to know you’re enjoying the game. :) I am too, but I have to document all faults as I find them.

And I don’t think I agree with the alts statement. I have used up all four of my character slots, just so I can try out different beginning builds to see what suited me best. Also, one is Male and the other Female so I can take advantage of both sides of the fashion spectrum.

Yes, this is a PC game – subscription-based MMO.

Great performance for a launch title basically meant that unlike Diablo 3 (for example), the game just worked almost perfectly from the very minute it launched – I was there. :)

There were some bugs with missions, but Funcom fixed them really quick – all of the ones I reported in my time playing were actually addressed in the patch that went up just before I finished writing this article.

So you have a game that looks great and fairly bug-free, and the only technical issue is really the occasional lag spikes. (Generally you won’t notice the latency)

And you’ve probably not heard of it because Funcom hasn’t done a lot of advertising. GW2 is getting major hype behind it, but Funcom has followed a more word-of-mouth marketing style for The Secret World.

Patrick’s ‘performance’ comment refers to most MMO’s falling flat on their faces at launch.

‘Great performance for a launch title’

How have I never heard of this game before…