MMUh huh 2 of 2

I said something once about splitting the aspects of storytelling into the story and the telling, and the importance of being proficient in both if you want a successful tale.

This applies to MMOs as well.

There. That's my figurative language opener for this chat. Why am I being brief?
BECAUSE THIS IS SERIOUS SHIT, MOTHER FUCKER. LETS TALK ABOUT SOME GOD DAMNED VIDYAGAMES AND HOW THEY WORK.
Buckle your fucking gamerhat on and lets talk some shop.

Specifically, lets talk MMORPGs, or "muh-morp-guhs", as they're known in the gritty back alleys of Glasgow, where they were invented.

We had a chat about The Secret World, after I spent a day playing it.
I only had a day, see. The trial was for a full 24 hour period and no further, which meant if I wanted to actually analyze the gameplay I had to go straight China in my endeavors.

This took some planning on my part, and some early research so I didn't spend A) a full hour staring in paralyzed indecision at the character creation screen, and B) another hour learning how to mine for fish.
So I actually entered the game knowing full well that I was Dragon4Lyfe, givemeagunletsgo.

It felt strange to flex my MMO muscles (mmuscles?). Strange but ultimately familiar.

See, that's the unpleasant current state of affairs in the MMO world. There are certain unavoidable tropes that you just have to deal with in order to build yourself a functioning game system that has a chance to compete with WoW.

That is exactly what it boils down to. WoW has been chugging along for eight years now. It is king.
It is, for better or worse, the metric that all new MMOs are going to be compared against.

Take TOR, for example. I was able to participate in an Old Republic beta test, actually, because why the fuck not. We all love Bioware, we all love lightsabers, how could this not be delicious?

...It was pretty delicious. But it was undeniably WoW. It was WoW with lightsabers.
Oh, it's got a pretty LucasArts sheen on its universe, and Bioware made a few excellent updates considering its main competition was eight years old and rickety, but if you take off the hood and look at the guts you will find that they belong to Blizzard.

I instinctively knew the keybindings. They were unchanged. The same hotkeys opened your bags, your map, your character sheet, your spell book, in both games.
The item ranking system was the goddamn same! I knew I got a better item because it followed greenbluepurple value system!
Shit was eerily familiar, except I was a twi'lek with a lightsaber.
And honestly, that was almost enough for me. Don't ever underestimate how satisfying it is to have the draw weapons button (and yes, it was the same as in WoW) let you whip out a double bladed lightsaber.

Now, TOR had one big thing it hung its hat on - the Bioware specialty, the voice acting and the decision wheel. This was pretty neat because it let you build a little more actual character disposition in-game, as opposed to in-head.
Even your own character had a voice actor! This is a big fucking deal! Giving each MMO character a voice? Being able to hear your character actually act out the script you give them? Very interesting.
Also very damning, because it effectively pigeonholes you into the number of available dialogue options. And even Bioware couldn't really save the hackneyed LIGHTSIDEDARKSIDE personality aspect, because....well, because it's a retarded system in the first place. You pretty much either save the wounded and heal them, or electrocute the shit out of them. A bit bivalent for my tastes.

But I didn't just play TOR. I just played TSW. That's actually the first time I've legitimized The Secret World as an MMO - the graduation ceremony is when people start using an acronym instead of the actual name. The word "wow" in conversation has had two meanings for eight goddamn years.

How is it as a game?

Well, for a start, it's quite pretty. And it ought to be, at this point. Some of the graphics were a bit cheap in the sense that "oh hey you bastards that's just a 2D skin!" but overall it carries itself well in that department.

More importantly, the UI and game mechanic system were newish enough to be less than reflexively familiar to me. I liked that! I didn't know what buttons did what, or how to take my pants off and dance on the nearest mailbox. (I later learned that this game has a Phantasy-Star-Online level compendium of physical emotes you can do, which I fucking love. You can make your character do a cartwheel, or actually perform a rude gesture, or do jazzhands. Things like this, while small, are incredibly effective in increasing the immersion level. During my short stint in Diablo 3, I found that dungeon crawls with friends were infinitely more enjoyable when you got used to using the voice-emotes to talk to each other. It didn't hurt that I was Princess Fucking Azula at the time.)

The initial quest line for new Dragons was interesting while being basic and lets face it, its a fucking MMO, it's going to have to walk you through the paces of THIS is your INVENTORY, THIS is your CHATBOX. But it managed to do it in its own special way and I thank them for it.

You don't have a delineated class in The Secret World. And, like EVE, you can presumably - given enough time - train every single skill in the goddamn game.
This is fucking huge. A mutable character allows for much longer per-character satisfaction and joy. It ensures that a greater percent of the playerbase is going to have a fluid game experience, and a broader slice of the game itself.
You basically just pick which areas you want to invest points in, and attempt to build a functional role for yourself. The basic MMO roles exist, but more along the lines of conceded necessary afterthoughts. You don't go "tank", you go "damage-taking-capable threat-generator".

"Classes" are more determined by weapon specialization. You generally pick two, since you can equip two, and the base questline basically tells you "hey, fuck, pick one of these and run with it".
It's three groups of three - three gun weapons, three melee weapons, three schools of magic.
Then, each one of those specializations contains two "trees", but they aren't really trees in the given (again, archetypal) WoW fashion. It's more like a...food web? It's actually a giant, shifting, tiered monstrosity called the "Ability Wheel", comprised of chambers of 7 or 12 active/passive skills grouped by flavor. It's complex and I'm totally okay with that.
I'm a firm believer in the concept that everyone should be able to do anything in an MMO, given enough skill and knowledge. They allow this. Pretty much every role is capable of laying down solid damage while performing either support buffs or healing functions.
I mean fuck, I took Pistols and I eventually got the ability to heal-over-time thanks to my little technomagic drone hovering over my shoulder. Or heal everyone in my group if I still had combat resources left over.

The combat resource system is the....entire combat system, in TSW.
Basically it's the rogue combo point system from WoW, split into two different things.
If you're melee/magic, you build them on yourself using certain resource-generating skills. Then, you spend them on other resource-consuming skills that scale based on the amount you've got.
....It is exactly like the rouge combo point system. There are builders and finishers and that's all you goddamn do.
If you're ranged, the combo points build on individual targets, meaning you can have 5 on one and 3 on the other simultaneously, but if they die you're shit out of combo points now. It does allow for a certain amount of combat flexibility but overall it was disappointingly simple compared to the mad wizardry Blizzard got up to in their later years. During my time as a Paladin I saw a pretty wild amount of combat-mechanic change, so maybe I'm spoiled. Give me some more resources to manage, is what I'm saying!
The stat allocation system is pretty dang simplified as well - you've basically got health, "attack rating" which affects all abilities, and hit and crit stats. That's about it. Weapon/gear rankings are from 1-10 and you have to have allocated certain level-tiered points into specific specializations to equip them. So you are shoehorned into a weapon spec, at least to a certain point. You can't just suddenly switch to shtoguns because you found a fucking badass shotgun inside of a ghostbear or something, unless you've been simultaneously building your shotgun skills. And that is a dramatic amount of resources required.

The only thing stopping you from eventually becoming a dark, all powerful god, and ensuring permanent imbalance based on disproportionate distribution of power stemming from a direct translation of skills-amassed and time-put-in (I'm looking at you, EVE Online) is the fact that you can only ever have 7 active skills (read: hotbar) and 7 passive skills at any given time.

Out of 525 skills.

HOW GREAT IS THAT.

Sure, they provide a dozen templates to choose from, essentially telling you which skills to take in order to achieve various "builds" (i.e. "go blood magic/pistols if you want to fuck shit up from mid-range and heal your friends at the same time!), but I have no doubt at all that end-gamers will start to alchemize some seriously insane combinations.

What I'm saying is, there is a potential here for theorycrafting that far exceeds the generic class spec/spell rotation found in classic MMOs. Whether it has the actual guts/depth to accomplish it is another story and fuck, I only played for a day.

Oh, and the crafting is Minecraft.

You fucking heard me. You want an assault rifle? Put metal into a roughly assault-rifle-shaped configuration on the crafting grid.
So it's innovative, but simultaneously overly simplified for my tastes. In a game where gear isn't as fanatically tiered and valued as classic MMOs, crafting as a legit game mechanic/reason to play loses some value. I was never a crafting maniac to begin with, though, so don't take my word as law in that regard.

All in all, it was fun. It was refreshingly innovative in enough ways that I was sucked right in for a day, and hitting basic Pistol Mastery felt like an accomplishment.
The story is engaging, the telling is a bit simple in places but still deeply satisfying.

Like I said, pity it's an MMO. Because no matter how deep you are in the bowels of a demon-infested decommissioned Soviet submarine off the coast of Norway, there's always going to be some fucker incessantly jumping around your character in a circle asking you to "gibe money plz? lolol I report you".
Admittedly, since the game was relatively fresh, adult, and cerebral, I didn't encounter anything so repellant as the generic MMO playerbase but rest assured. They will come. And they will come as a horde, as an unstoppable infestation.
Because they are the people who play these games.

Oh, also, it costs real people money per month!