Stephen King Simulator: Let's Play Secret World Legends

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Mycroft Holmes: Mar 26, 2010; by Azathoth

Hello, my name is Mycroft Holmes and alongside my co-commentator Falconier111 and editor Pilchenstein, I'll be doing a let's play of Secret World Legends, an occult based MMO.

What is this?
This is Secret World Legends, a reboot of The Secret World as a free-to-play MMO. They made combat in this version not terrible!

What sort of LP is this?
This is an informative LP in which we will be going through all the single-player content of the MMO. Edit: I am doing dungeons.
Spoilers?
Feel free to discuss lore about places we are in or have been to. By the third area, all spoiler restrictions are lifted.

Playlist

Mycroft Holmes fucked around with this message at 07:33 on Sep 8, 2021

# ? May 7, 2021 14:29

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# ? Apr 19, 2024 00:07

rastilin: Nov 6, 2010

I'm glad to see this being played. I got as far as the second area in "The Secret World", and tried to get back into it when it turned into "Legends"... but at that point it was grindier and less fun than before so I was never able to get any further. The fact that it tries to be "dark" is a bit of a turn off, though it probably hit a bit differently before the lockdowns started.

The idea is so very clever.. but the execution is a bit lacking.

# ? May 7, 2021 14:36

Cythereal: Nov 8, 2009; I love the potoo,
and the potoo loves you.

I got through the story in the original Secret World, and bounced pretty hard off the group content and endgame. Never played the Tokyo expansion or Legends.

Interested to see where this goes.

# ? May 7, 2021 14:46

Falconier111: Jul 18, 2012; S T A R M E T A L C A S T E

I�m Falconier111, co-commentator and resident lore repository. The Secret World is a game about the occult � not just demons and witches, but the concept in its deepest, etymological sense: that which is hidden. TSW is packed to the gills with legends, secrets, codes, and mysteries, many borrowed from real folklore. Heap in conspiracy theories, magic, and some wild worldbuilding and you get a heady stew that fans have spent the better part of a decade puzzling out.

You can�t get more into the spirit of the game than by trotting out your own stories and theories. As the LP goes on, I�ll elaborate on some of the stuff we bring up during the videos in the thread, writing out loreposts and linking them from here. But one person does not a conspiracy theory make! With the poster�s permission, I�ll also link to any loreposts I see, whether they apply to the game (without spoiling anything) or the real world. Taste and see!

Falconier111 fucked around with this message at 23:36 on May 7, 2021

# ? May 7, 2021 14:59

Cooked Auto: Aug 4, 2007; If you will not serve in combat, you will serve on the firing line!

I love the setting for this game (even if its a bit too gloomy at times) but my god do I loathe everything related to mechanics.
I managed to get early into the Tokyo zone, on my second playthrough, before dropping it because the extra mechanics there were a bit of an extra chore over the dire combat mechanics.

And then Secret Worlds became Legends and all my progress got wiped and I tried the combat tutorial and found the revamped mechanics to be not much better I never bothered with it.

Still, the setting is fantastic. Just wish it was attached to a better game.
Sorta like APBs character generation and emblem creation when talking about F2P MMO's that never went anywhere.

# ? May 7, 2021 22:18

MH Knights: Aug 4, 2007

I played TSW way back when but got stuck in the "New England" zone and gave up. The zone went on for way too long for my tastes. I went with the Dragon faction and got a laugh about how my character was uh..."Initiated" into the faction.

# ? May 8, 2021 00:27

Cooked Auto: Aug 4, 2007; If you will not serve in combat, you will serve on the firing line!

Yeah that one is special from what I've heard. I just went with Templars for my first go and then the Illuminati (or similar) for my second, more successful, run.

Also Egypt was a far, far longer drag than New England. Which is a shame since Transylvania is really good. For the most part. But that's getting a bit ahead of things I feel.

# ? May 8, 2021 00:34

Mycroft Holmes: Mar 26, 2010; by Azathoth

London

# ? May 8, 2021 02:24

Cooked Auto: Aug 4, 2007; If you will not serve in combat, you will serve on the firing line!

Speaking of the Stealth missions there were plenty of them. The moment I saw the mines I went "Oh boy" as I recognized that from the gameplay area it references. But yeah, they're always really badly done.

Also yeah, that whole mythos beast fight was definitely new because the previous tutorial was a subway segment featuring the characters in the first loading screen.
Also related to the whole thing in Tokyo that the D.I. mentions in the opening cutscene for the London part.

Also I'm pretty sure I did Shotgun/Elemental back when I played, mostly because I kept hearing how effective it was.

Cooked Auto fucked around with this message at 03:09 on May 8, 2021

# ? May 8, 2021 03:06

MadDogMike: Apr 9, 2008; Cute but fanged

MH Knights posted:

I played TSW way back when but got stuck in the "New England" zone and gave up. The zone went on for way too long for my tastes. I went with the Dragon faction and got a laugh about how my character was uh..."Initiated" into the faction.

Yeah, that scene was an... interesting choice, though talking with that professor guy was kind of interesting in the Dragon intro. But yeah, combat was terrible (not just being bad at it, but having literally no way to even understand it before getting dumped into the game and getting mauled a bunch by basic mooks), so my one attempt died very early. When I can't even tell HOW to play your game you've got issues. Too bad, the lore seemed kind of intriguing, although I got the general impression no matter what factions you worked for you were with the bad guys (against the even worse guys, admittedly).

# ? May 8, 2021 08:45

Cooked Auto: Aug 4, 2007; If you will not serve in combat, you will serve on the firing line!

Then there was also the thing that combat lacked any kind of feedback to it, and always felt stiff and joyless. It had a certain rhythm to it based on whatever powers and abilities you had, but for the most part it was just that you pressed a button and something happened with some semi-flashy effect to it.
Something that hasn't really changed with the revamp, it lacks something to make it look or feel fun.

# ? May 8, 2021 11:09

Falconier111: Jul 18, 2012; S T A R M E T A L C A S T E

Cooked Auto posted:

Then there was also the thing that combat lacked any kind of feedback to it, and always felt stiff and joyless. It had a certain rhythm to it based on whatever powers and abilities you had, but for the most part it was just that you pressed a button and something happened with some semi-flashy effect to it.
Something that hasn't really changed with the revamp, it lacks something to make it look or feel fun.

Supposedly the selling point is positional combat; the game throws out area of effect attacks all the time and you can move around them without having to stop to use abilities. It's� Arguable how much of an impact that actually makes.

Also, in the first video I called Revenants �English vampires�, and while from a folklore perspective that�s a reasonable thing to say, from a modern pop culture perspective that�s complete nonsense. So, let�s take a look at that.

Pretty much every culture has myths about the vengeful dead. They vary in details from place to place and some versions get pretty wild � Penanggalans lift their heads off their bodies and go hunting for babies, flying through the night with their shriveled organs trailing behind them � but they usually have a few things in common:

Well, uh, they�re dead. Usually recently and/or traumatically dead, otherwise they�d have moved on already.
Something that happened to them upon their death gave them unnatural and disturbing features and abilities. If they look pretty, it�s a disguise.
They make things around them less. This can mean just killing their victims, but usually they do something that either damages their victims (consume a specific body part, taint or steal their soul, take their sanity away) or the natural world in general.
They�re both malevolent and proactive � they�ll seek out victims on their own initiative and without provocation. Even those bound to places or buildings attack anyone that swings by.
They�re mostly active during the night. They may be vulnerable to sunlight, or they may just like to hide. If they can go out during the day, they�re probably unusually powerful.
They�re associated with a specific place, community, or group of people important to them; some target specific individuals or travel around, but even those tend to stick to people or places they knew. Sometimes they�re bound to buildings or the sites of major events; usually, though, they�re bound to a group of people, generally whatever community they belonged to while alive.
Though they might be borderline invulnerable to anyone who doesn�t know how to deal with them, they can be foiled or killed without outside authorities getting involved. Like, maybe they�ll have to call in somebody to deal with a curse or something, but any individual monster is vulnerable to the kinds of tools and techniques an ordinary peasant could use.

Many vengeful dead break one criteria or even two (especially given how details change from story to story), but for the most part those rules hold together no matter what region or era you�re talking about. The English revenant is a dead member of a community that torments its former neighbors at night with violence, noise, and disease; it can be killed by hacking the corpse apart in the day with a shovel. The Indian bhoot often haunts specific places and targets former family members (they like to go after their exes apparently), contaminates milk with its essence, and shapeshifts, with only its backwards feet, nasal voice, and habit of floating giving it away; you can ward it off with iron or salt and exorcise it with a modified funeral ritual. The Greek vrykolakas eats the livers of its neighbors and swells like a balloon from all the flesh it consumes until someone cuts it apart. The modern Western ghost haunts a place where it died (usually suddenly and tragically), breaking interlopers mentally or physically by warping reality around them. Even pop-culture zombies apply. Dead? Yep. Disturbing features and abilities? They�re walking corpses that never tire and take frightening amounts of punishment. Symbolically defile their victims? They eat their brains and spread the curse. Malevolent and proactive? They hunt. Active during the night? They�re active during the day, too, but since they never sleep the protagonists always have to hide after sunset and hope they don�t find them. Killable? You gotta shoot them in the head. Hell, even though they might seem to target everyone and everywhere indiscriminately, look at how writers structure stories around them: what�s going on out of sight rarely matters to the story unless it directly affects the protagonists. They fit the bill.

And, of course, so do the vampires of Eastern Europe. You can find whole books on the subject elsewhere, but basically there was a massive vampire craze that swept Eastern Europe in the early-to-mid-1700s, and English-speaking writers started producing fiction inspired by them at the tail end of that period. Romantic and Gothic writers got their hands on them and played their condition for tragedy because that�s kind of what they did, and that mixed with a reputation for hypnotizing their victims and fetishizing people who look like corpses to turn them from nightmare monsters to romantic villains. Add in time, shifting social norms, mass media, and bondage, and you get our familiar sexful fuckpires, largely unmoored from their origins. It�s a part of why everything vampire story needs to spend screen time establishing weaknesses � they�ve gone through so many stages of evolution you need to pin down where your versions fall along that line. When I called Revenants English vampires, I was aiming more towards the original folklore than this modern pop-culture version.

Instead, I implied the evil crow man we blasted off a steeple really fucks :v:

# ? May 8, 2021 17:11

Cooked Auto: Aug 4, 2007; If you will not serve in combat, you will serve on the firing line!

Falconier111 posted:

Supposedly the selling point is positional combat; the game throws out area of effect attacks all the time and you can move around them without having to stop to use abilities. It's� Arguable how much of an impact that actually makes.

I will admit combat in TSW was a bit more mobile than others MMO's I've played. Mostly because there are, as you say, being far more AOE's being thrown around by pretty much every mob you fight.
But at the same time that doesn't do much when combat lacks impact. From what I can remember the hit sounds were weak or barely there and the mobs just kept on attacking until they died and didn't really react to anything you did.

One fun thing to note about Eastern European vampires is that people who were werewolves usually turned into vampires after death.
Which would've had some interesting implications a zone we'll (hopefully) see much later.

# ? May 8, 2021 17:45

Regallion: Nov 11, 2012

I would recommend an amendment to the rules - while elite dungeons, elite raids and all of the lairs are irrelevant to the nature of this LP, several dungeons follow up or close certain storylines, so they would otherwise abruptly stop.
As for raids, a casual raid does have a bit of a story to it, so it might be worth showing off.

# ? May 8, 2021 19:02

EclecticTastes: Sep 17, 2012; "Most plans are critically flawed by their own logic. A failure at any step will ruin everything after it. That's just basic cause and effect. It's easy for a good plan to fall apart. Therefore, a plan that has no attachment to logic cannot be stopped."

Ah, The Secret World, the only MMO that ever came close to being as enjoyable as City of Heroes for me. I played the original version back when it was buy-to-play, so I can't speak to how Legends works, but I recall the old combat system being fairly similar to Guild Wars (you stuck a bunch of abilities on your hotbar and the general goal was to synergize effects and make a loop of Click Buttons). It wasn't good, but it also wasn't what I was there for. I had a ton of fun with the writing (also the dress-up, TSW has a ton of clothes without needing to spend a dime and I'm a sucker for robust dress-up options), and enjoyed the puzzle missions where you actually needed real-world knowledge to solve them. Wasn't a fan of the platforming/stealth missions because, like most MMOs, the movement controls were not as precise as one might like for that kind of content, and there often weren't clear indications of the line between "safe area" and "instant death area".

That said I had a great time in the original zones and the first few expansions, but Tokyo was where Funcom caved in to the "hardcore gamers" and ramped up the difficulty of the combat significantly (not trying to start a debate, but I was personally not a fan), and it's like, why? The whole selling point of The Secret World is that it has a stronger emphasis on non-combat gameplay, and then they go and actively try to push away players to whom that would appeal. So, I stopped playing, but, maybe I'll give Legends a try sometime, if they really revamped the combat to be better. Then again, I can't say I love the idea of having to start over, since it looks like, aside from transferring some cosmetic items, you otherwise lose everything about your old characters since it's new servers and such (I suppose since the quests don't look like they line up 1:1, they couldn't really make character transfers work).

# ? May 9, 2021 21:51

Pilchenstein: May 17, 2012; So your plan is for half of us to die?; Hot Rope Guy

EclecticTastes posted:

Tokyo was where Funcom caved in to the "hardcore gamers" and ramped up the difficulty of the combat significantly (not trying to start a debate, but I was personally not a fan), and it's like, why?

I think the horseshit combat in Tokyo was entirely to try and slow players down so the devs could catch up with content production, kind of like how the previous update wanted you to run a thousand lovely scenarios to earn the "certification" required to be allowed to visit Tokyo (which they started basically giving away once Tokyo went live lol). Anyway the AEGIS system didn't survive the relaunch, to almost universal rejoicing from the playerbase :v:

# ? May 10, 2021 00:10

Cooked Auto: Aug 4, 2007; If you will not serve in combat, you will serve on the firing line!

Oh thank gently caress for that since I did not like it at all and just found it an extra bother on top of an already clunky system.

# ? May 10, 2021 00:25

EclecticTastes: Sep 17, 2012; "Most plans are critically flawed by their own logic. A failure at any step will ruin everything after it. That's just basic cause and effect. It's easy for a good plan to fall apart. Therefore, a plan that has no attachment to logic cannot be stopped."

Pilchenstein posted:

I think the horseshit combat in Tokyo was entirely to try and slow players down so the devs could catch up with content production, kind of like how the previous update wanted you to run a thousand lovely scenarios to earn the "certification" required to be allowed to visit Tokyo (which they started basically giving away once Tokyo went live lol). Anyway the AEGIS system didn't survive the relaunch, to almost universal rejoicing from the playerbase

That is very welcome news, the aegis system seemed interesting on the surface, but quickly proved tedious and lovely. I actually just got done logging into Original Secret World and selling literally everything my character possessed to buy a final handful of clothing items. I'd bought out literally the entire stock at Pangaea back when I was actively playing (the "main" clothing shop in terms of visibility, though actually the least expensive), as well as a healthy portion of the clothes sold in the train station, so my dressing room will be nice and full when I start up SWL (plus, I'd used leftover points from buying expansions to get a few bits of Real Money Clothes that I'll be happy to see again). Actually, I only just today learned there's a clothing shop in the Haitian market I never even noticed, so I'll likely buy them out before I resume acquiring everything from the absolute thieves in Ealdwich Station.

# ? May 10, 2021 01:26

Cooked Auto: Aug 4, 2007; If you will not serve in combat, you will serve on the firing line!

There was? poo poo, I only knew about the main ones that I bought most of the interesting stuff from.
And nabbed a few things from the real money store with e-money I got from something or when I bought the upgrade pack to get all the expansions. It's been a while since I played it. I know I did the transfer but I honestly have no idea how much of that survived.

This was like the last outfit, out of many, that I had before I stopped playing. I was very good at taking screenshots while playing this because I always end up doing that whenever I enjoy the writing.

# ? May 10, 2021 02:14

Cythereal: Nov 8, 2009; I love the potoo,
and the potoo loves you.

To chime in on the lore, I also like that TSW - bearing in mind I only played the original - started with zombies. Now, I've come to loathe zombies as enemies in games, but in this case I think TSW makes them work really well for reasons I suspect the next video will show. Everyone knows what zombies are, and if you're into urban fantasy you probably figure you know what's going on here. Not... quite.

That feeling of "Not... quite" with TSW's story and lore was something I loved about the original, as an assault rifle/blood magic main, even if I wound up bouncing pretty hard off the endgame and dropped out before the Tokyo expansion.

I can also confirm that that big monster in Manhattan was in the original - in the first raid released for the game, Manhattan Exclusion Zone.

Edit: I did like that if you dug into the lore of the Illuminati, they're currently based in America but the group was started and originally based in Egypt, until the Templars kicked them out. And when they were exiled to the New World, they picked up a lot of know-how and magic from various Native American (including Central and South American) cultures.

Cythereal fucked around with this message at 02:37 on May 10, 2021

# ? May 10, 2021 02:30

EclecticTastes: Sep 17, 2012; "Most plans are critically flawed by their own logic. A failure at any step will ruin everything after it. That's just basic cause and effect. It's easy for a good plan to fall apart. Therefore, a plan that has no attachment to logic cannot be stopped."