Erkki

The Secret World

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Hey, AoC was good. For the first 20 levels.

Anyway Funcom are essentially just the publisher, and although they have poached some of the ex-conan team (apparently so as to avoid its mistakes) it is a different developer, and Rangar Tornquist is a very different lead.

Funcim isn't "just the publisher," Funcom is the developer and publisher, as it was of Conan. Surely there's a lot of disparity between the teams, but it is the same company in each case. They hardly have to loach their own existing employees.

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No Dan. Case not rested.

Listen, my post was just a lame jokey one-liner but I think you know what I meant, even though you immediately took it entirely the wrong way. You incidentally made a false assumption regarding my personal taste. And a "threat to me"? What are you talking about?

Also jesus what the fuck, stop telling people to chill out. No one responded to some of your snarky comments in this thread, of which there are several. :shifty:

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Funcim isn't "just the publisher," Funcom is the developer and publisher, as it was of Conan. Surely there's a lot of disparity between the teams, but it is the same company in each case. They hardly have to loach their own existing employees.

Yeah I wasn't certain about that so I through in the 'essentially'. My qualifiers mean something!

No Dan. Case not rested.

Meh, I just get sick of all the 'MMO's can fuck off' attitude and pessimism.

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Tornquist is great at settings and overall plots, but his characters are irritating and his dialogue makes me want to vomit. I've never played an MMO but I'm guessing the vast majority of the people you interact with will be other players, rather than fictional characters, which will play to his strengths as a writer.

I'm cautiously optimistic.

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Joss Whedon in the way he really doesn't have a clue how women really talk and interact?

Anyways, I think the guy gets a lot of hype for a lot of nothing. He's a lot like David Cage to me. Or Charles Cecil. Or Benoit Sokal. The love is bountiful at adventuregamers.com, but I should care less.

I also finished that Casper game Tornquist made in the 90s a while back. Even then you can see how he has good ideas to base his design, but it all kind of explodes into a nonsensical mess. All of that with hardly any dialogue.

Edited by syntheticgerbil

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(...) but I could care less.

Couldn't. Couldn't care less. As in, you care so little that you couldn't care less than you already do. If you "could care less", that means you actually care about it to some extent. How does everyone on the internets get this one wrong?!

[/rant]

Mo

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Couldn't. Couldn't care less.

It's an American thing. They find 'couldn't' to be equally odd. It's been discussed here before.

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Joss Whedon in the way he really doesn't have a clue how women really talk and interact?

Basically yeah, although Tornquist is an order of magnitude worse than Whedon in this regard. Also, Whedon is extremely funny and has a knack for carefully weaving symbolism into his stories. Tonquist tries to ape this but his comedic repertoire consists entirely of sarcasm and his attempts at metaphor are clumsy and ham-fisted.

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Couldn't. Couldn't care less. As in, you care so little that you couldn't care less than you already do. If you "could care less", that means you actually care about it to some extent. How does everyone on the internets get this one wrong?!

[/rant]

Well if I really sit here and think about it, I really could stand to care less about it. So what I'm going to do is edit my post to say, "I should care less" and then we will all be in love.

Tonquist tries to ape this but his comedic repertoire consists entirely of sarcasm and his attempts at metaphor are clumsy and ham-fisted.

They also say, "You go girl!" This is the stock phrase that people use when they are writing for a younger woman/teen and have no clue what it is they actually say. I think it's generally used less these days, but that phrase and variations of it keep popping up in the contracted scripts for the edutainment games/shorts at my work.

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MMOs deserve to be hated. :hmph:

I presume you gave up on Eve to never go back. I've never seen you online. Was the reason time/learning curve/care?

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Heh, I think EVE is an MMO that deserves to be respected. I dropped out (got sidetracked by some real-life things and then my trial had expired) but I may give it another go some day.

By the way, I genuinely think The Secret World is an interesting project. I have my reservations but a couple of things said about it in the press (as well as things I've heard personally) sounded good, at least in theory. They also claimed to have learned a lot of lessons from Age of Conan.

Given the large number of failed games in the MMO genre in recent years though I think it's fair to be a bit skeptical about MMOs in general.

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Given the large number of failed games in the MMO genre in recent years though I think it's fair to be a bit skeptical about MMOs in general.

Depends what you mean by 'failed'. I can think of only two off the top of my head that have shut down completely. A fair few have had to merge some servers, but that really only shows that they were properly prepared for the glut of players at launch.

But yes, it is a tricky genre to tackle, no doubt about that.

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Another interview.

Keeps sounding better and better. Still at least a year off though, I reckon.

One thing I will say, after reading that interview, is that if new MMOs want to 'learn from WoW' in any sense, then they need to pay more attention to it. WoW has actually made some changes to the world. Maybe not so non-players would notice, but then why would they?

OK I'm going to stop defending WoW around the place now. Just know that if you spout something about it and you haven't played it for over 6 months, then you are probably wrong.

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I considered buying this today, and even did a back-and-forth with Funcom support to re-open my old account, which was associated with an old email account I could no longer access (which reminds me once again that, if I lose my gmail account, I'm going to die fatally), but when I was asked to chose my "edition" I gave up. There are all sorts of additional packs you can buy that include lots of bonuses and stuff, and I suddenly felt that buying the regular, el cheapo package was a bad idea. I really got the feeling they're after my money this time. Not only do I have to buy it at full price; there's a monthly cost too, and now they're immediately rolling out pay-to-win packages...

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If I had the money and time, I would be on this. I'm not as stoked about as I was (looking back over this thread) because what I have seen of the gameplay looks pretty average. But the world and fiction still interest me.

But yeah I am priced out of MMO-ville for the current era (I haven't even played TOR! :blink: )

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Is there an embargo on this or what? It's out today, but no reviews anywhere.

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There must be a conspiracy...

I blame the Illuminati.

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There's a WoT I Think and a "live review" over on Rock Paper Shotgun.

From my time in beta I would recommend against it.

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I'm this close to buying it. Why shouldn't I?

The combat is clunky and doesn't have any feeling to it, it's a pretty standard MMO fare in terms of quests, it's an incredible pain in the ass to quest with even a few people around.

The dungeons are cool, but are pretty much the only redeeming feature I found.

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Ooh! Do us a Toblogtm as you play. I'm interested in what it's like too.

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