I actually feel bad for WildStar,I felt like they tried so hard and pushed a really characterful product out that just died on the vine.
The game oozed style and character and I'd absolutely love to experience more of that world. Whether it be an extremely, extremely unlikely WildStar 2 (that avoids the pitfalls of the first) or a single player game.
It's an IP I want more of in some capacity and will hate to see it fade away.
A Capellan's favorite sheath for any blade is your back.
I didn't play WildStar because NCsoft were holding the reins. They had already betrayed my heart once.
"The western world sips from a poisonous cocktail: Polarisation, populism, protectionism and post-truth"
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
The other thing that killed WildStar in the crib is that all the early marketing was fun and goofy... and then it turned out that the devs were going for the hardcorrrrrrrre raider demographic from way back in the pre-expansion WoW days. And it turns out that isn't enough to sustain a game, especially since a lot of the people who used to be part of it grew up and got jobs, families, and other commitments that kept them from spending most of their waking time on an MMO. (Or they found out when they tried it that getting forty people together all on the same page for an hour or two wasn't nearly as much fun as they thought they remembered.)
If you weren't rolling a Brute, then you were just on the team to pad my spawns. Until they let me just set it to x8/+4, at which point you were invited to the team purely as a spectator.
(All ATs were rad, respect for everyone)
Hell yeah, brutes were great. My first level 50 (also the only one I played in the endgame) was a SS/Will brute named Falcone Paunch.
Champions - The kinda sorta almost-but-not-really CoH imitator that had superhero stuff but none of the charm.
Yup. It's a step ahead of CoH in terms of mechanics, but the atmosphere isn't there.
It sort of mashes up serious plots with saturday-morning-cartoon goofiness, and it doesn't work too well. Not to mention the cartoonish graphical style makes even the serious-business plots seem silly. It's like trying to take the plots of Batman:TAS and somehow fit them into the writing/acting/visual style of the 1960s series.
Anyone who likes superhero stuff should still give it a shot, though. Preferably with a 1-month sub to try out all the power sets (and freeform characters). In CoH you had to design your character around the power sets that were available; in CO (at least with freeform characters) you can mix/match powers and visual effects pretty much however you like. Of special note, the Power Armor and Strength-style melee sets really nail it. The game also gets bonus points for having a kick attack that's explicitly designed to let you be Leonidas.
I actually feel bad for WildStar,I felt like they tried so hard and pushed a really characterful product out that just died on the vine.
The lower level people, yeah, but a lot of the top asshats were actively making shitty decisions and went crawling back to Blizzard the second the game starting losing subs.
Yeah, reading about behind-the-curtain stuff at Turbine, there's a lot of "people actually making the game put their heart and soul into it, but it was managed by assholes".
I think my highest ever character was level 32. When I stopped playing it seemed like there was a major lack of content for that level range and that combined with the naturally slower levelling as you rank up meant that I'd end up getting bored and rolling a new toon to do the much more fun 1-30 grind all over again.
If you weren't rolling a Brute, then you were just on the team to pad my spawns. Until they let me just set it to x8/+4, at which point you were invited to the team purely as a spectator.
(All ATs were rad, respect for everyone)
Hell yeah, brutes were great. My first level 50 (also the only one I played in the endgame) was a SS/Will brute named Falcone Paunch.
Brutes were the only CoV archetype I really ever got on with. I had fun with my stalker and corrupter for a while, but ultimately never got past level 12 or so with either of them. Brutes though, they satisfy my A.D.D nicely with their whole "punch punch punch, punch all the things immediately, never stop punching" playstyle.
My favorite Brute was "Professor Smash", who was basically just the Hulk with a beard, glasses and a labcoat, which everyone seemed to get a kick out of. His concept was the classic "scientist caught in one of his own experiments", with the gimmick that his personality was split between that of his genius former self and the "RAWR SMASH" monster he'd become, so he'd mostly use "hulk speak" scattered with unnecessarily long words. I believe his battle cry was "Hulk SMASH perfidious adversaries!" for example.
Champions - The kinda sorta almost-but-not-really CoH imitator that had superhero stuff but none of the charm.
Yup. It's a step ahead of CoH in terms of mechanics, but the atmosphere isn't there.
It sort of mashes up serious plots with saturday-morning-cartoon goofiness, and it doesn't work too well. Not to mention the cartoonish graphical style makes even the serious-business plots seem silly. It's like trying to take the plots of Batman:TAS and somehow fit them into the writing/acting/visual style of the 1960s series.
Anyone who likes superhero stuff should still give it a shot, though. Preferably with a 1-month sub to try out all the power sets (and freeform characters). In CoH you had to design your character around the power sets that were available; in CO (at least with freeform characters) you can mix/match powers and visual effects pretty much however you like. Of special note, the Power Armor and Strength-style melee sets really nail it. The game also gets bonus points for having a kick attack that's explicitly designed to let you be Leonidas.
Champions just never really grabbed me. The mechanics are fine, there's just no soul. Everything is all "Hurr hurr, comic books are goofy hyuck hyuck" compared to CoH which would play it straightish with the occasional nudge and a wink. Also, when I last played it at least, it did a really bad job of hiding that spawns were fixed and just reset when you were done with them. For example, you get a mission to shut down some turrets. You blow them up, get told "good job" and get your rewards, then the turrets immediately activate again so that the next person can deactivate them. Felt more like I was wandering through a superhero theme park than anything else.
I think my highest ever character was level 32. When I stopped playing it seemed like there was a major lack of content for that level range and that combined with the naturally slower levelling as you rank up meant that I'd end up getting bored and rolling a new toon to do the much more fun 1-30 grind all over again.
I only capped a single character, but that's primarily because the leveling curve turned into a wall post-35 and making alts was too much fun. I never felt like there wasn't content, though... if anything, there was always far more content than I could do without leveling past it, I always had contacts below my level I never maxed.
Now, if we're talking unique content then yeah, mechanically you only ever did variants on the same 10 things.
If you weren't rolling a Brute, then you were just on the team to pad my spawns. Until they let me just set it to x8/+4, at which point you were invited to the team purely as a spectator.
(All ATs were rad, respect for everyone)
Hell yeah, brutes were great. My first level 50 (also the only one I played in the endgame) was a SS/Will brute named Falcone Paunch.
Champions - The kinda sorta almost-but-not-really CoH imitator that had superhero stuff but none of the charm.
Yup. It's a step ahead of CoH in terms of mechanics, but the atmosphere isn't there.
It sort of mashes up serious plots with saturday-morning-cartoon goofiness, and it doesn't work too well. Not to mention the cartoonish graphical style makes even the serious-business plots seem silly. It's like trying to take the plots of Batman:TAS and somehow fit them into the writing/acting/visual style of the 1960s series.
Anyone who likes superhero stuff should still give it a shot, though. Preferably with a 1-month sub to try out all the power sets (and freeform characters). In CoH you had to design your character around the power sets that were available; in CO (at least with freeform characters) you can mix/match powers and visual effects pretty much however you like. Of special note, the Power Armor and Strength-style melee sets really nail it. The game also gets bonus points for having a kick attack that's explicitly designed to let you be Leonidas.
Felt more like I was wandering through a superhero theme park than anything else.
And that's before you even get to the actual theme park filled with evil robot cowboys.
That was literally where I quit.
I hated that fucking zone with every fiber of my being.
Yeah, the circus with psychic mime ladies and strongmen hitting you with hammers was much more entertaining.
1. "Mystical Carnival" is a much easier theme to leverage than "Cowboy Robot Themepark gone wrong". Sure, Westworld did it...but Snake Gulch so fucking ain't Westworld.
2. CoH just had the right touch. Carnival of Shadows were an insidious, city-wide threat that was worthy of hero intervention. Snake Gulch is more "Why am I even doing this?".
3. If you're going for the absurd type of threat the feeling you want to evoke is "terrifying", not "Corny". "Evil robot cowboys" has a hard time being anything but corny (sure, westworld does it...against the odds), while "the soul of an ancient evil tied into a carnival mask" and "insidious cult using mindcontrol" has a lot more going for it.
"The western world sips from a poisonous cocktail: Polarisation, populism, protectionism and post-truth"
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
+10
FairchildRabbit used short words that were easy to understand, like "Hello Pooh, how about Lunch ?"Registered Userregular
THE SECRET WORLD has an Amusement-Park-As-Focus-Of-Evil chapter in one of its starter zones, if that type of thing appeals to you.
I fondly remember CoH. That grind to level up. The rush to be the first to kill Hamidon and pulling it off (and some of the disappointment at the type of fight it was, but whatever, we were first). The insanity of 8 man missions and a huge CRUSH of mobs bumrushing you.
The fact that the 5th Column was an awesome enemy group and I was bummed when they basically got retconned.
The crush of realizing they'd never really try and balance PvP, despite dreaming of how cool it could be.
And the brilliance of running into buddies from Q-Link (Quantum Link) who I played a Champions RPG with almost a decade after Q-Link shutdown. It was good stuff.
I still think the Dev team was in over their heads, at least at first, when it came to balance and raids though.
Bizazedo on
XBL: Bizazedo
PSN: Bizazedo
CFN: Bizazedo (I don't think I suck, add me).
I fondly recall the Rikti Mothership. That was a funky one. I had no idea what the hell I was doing as far as the greater good went, but I sure killed loads of dudes in my assigned locations. Those last drop in and swarm the objectives raids they kept releasing were lots of fun for me, too. Minimal need for getting super-organized, lots of wildly different power sets interacting at wildly different levels of contribution and one big visual mess every time.
It was all very casual, and I've grown increasingly fond of that sort of thing in my multiplayer murder-mans. Players too strong? Send more mooks! Players sometimes too weak? Let them decide how many mooks they get! It was lovely.
Rikti Mothership raids were always a matter of hitting tab and mashing on my ranged attacks until something was in range to shoot it, but never actually having enemy models load before they were dead.
My perms-hastened electric brute adored that raid, though. Electric Armor was the shit vs. Rikti, even without heavy IO support, and with a million overlapping buffs flying around the zone, sometimes the recharge on Build Up + Lightning Rod would get below 20 seconds. So she'd just pick a spot where enemies were likely to be a couple times a minute and turn it into a glowing crater, and watch the kill rewards scroll by too fast to read.
Mothership and Hamidon were inelegant and weird, but Virtue Server had an amazing community for them. Which really showed when the Incarnate Trials started up, and there were enough people around who knew how to work well with groups that we could find competent PUG badge runs on any given day.
Realizing lately that I don't really trust or respect basically any of the moderators here. So, good luck with life, friends! Hit me up on Twitter @DesertLeviathan
This includes their The Atlantic Park, an amusement park built by a business tycoon, Nathaniel Winters, to harness magical energy through mechanical means...irrevocably tainting it in the process. Nathaniel Winters sought immortality and got half his wish. Living on as the wraith Bogeyman he steals slivers of unlife from the terror of children.
"The western world sips from a poisonous cocktail: Polarisation, populism, protectionism and post-truth"
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
+9
AxenMy avatar is Excalibur.Yes, the sword.Registered Userregular
The Secret World was and I suppose is amazing.
Oh and it turns out they made an adventure game set in the Atlantic Park of the TSW universe. Of middiling quality I guess, but still!
Hell, I'd throw big money at Funcom for more games set in the TSW universe.
A Capellan's favorite sheath for any blade is your back.
The presentation of quests and story bits, from the chatter to the puzzles and scenery is fabulous throughout. Very modern urban fantasy, with a few large zones that largely avoid the feel of traveling through a theme-park by going all in on just a couple themes at a time.
It starts with Cthulhu and later runs along into American Indian folklore, Vikings, Egypt-Is-Weird, Catholicism-is-too, and some others. In one mission you might be examining paintings to hash out a clue to pursue something neat, while in another, you might just mulch some zombies on a pier because you want a thing over there which leads to something where you do some magic and so on and so forth. There's a variety of things to do and many of them are even interesting. I commend the devs for their creativity.
I submit only one warning about the game. The ur-plot? The player character driven storyline you might expect will lead somewhere or solidify into something because things get hinted at relentlessly? Abandon all hope. The pay-off is consistently awful, insulting in its banality, and should be ignored in favor of the neat zone stories and fun characters doing things that you will actually remember years later!
I suspect that whichever team did the cool stuff was not involved in the awful stuff.
Basil on
+6
AxenMy avatar is Excalibur.Yes, the sword.Registered Userregular
Is that clip reflective of The Secret World as a whole?
Because I feel like I may have done it a disservice by never trying it.
Holy crap yes!
The writing and voice acting is straight up aces.
edit- So many memorable characters and lines. One lovable character started a cult in his younger years just to see if he could. "You'd think they'd have been happy to find out they didn't have to die."
Axen on
A Capellan's favorite sheath for any blade is your back.
+4
RingoHe/Hima distinct lack of substanceRegistered Userregular
Yeah it is
The Secret World is amazing
The world is fun, the ability wheel is fun, the dungeons are fun
It completely runs out of fun once you get past the original story arc and you get into grinding for better gear to go grind for the powers to access the new upper level story (I have no idea if the story content introduced with the grind is worth it)
But for a one time purchase of twenty bucks or whatever it is these days, TSW has three huge zones to play through and I would recommend it to anyone who enjoyed CoX and are interested in a supernatural horror themed game
AxenMy avatar is Excalibur.Yes, the sword.Registered Userregular
It also has what I would consider the single best clothing/outfit system in an MMO.
As in there was no armor (not in the traditional sense) just clothes for you to wear. Clothes that did nothing, but be clothes.
You had little unseen doodads fill the traditional armor mechanic
Ugh, dammit all, I might have to replay it... oh yeah it may be an MMO but it is a game I still replay from time to time like you would a beloved single player game.
A Capellan's favorite sheath for any blade is your back.
"Having my costume not dictate my gameplay" is one of the Core Decisions in if I think a game is good or not (GEE I WONDER WHERE I GOT THAT FROM) but my main beef with TSW is that...I didn't want to play as just some dude in a hoodie. So are TSW costume options really just "Shit I Could Buy At The Mall"?
"Having my costume not dictate my gameplay" is one of the Core Decisions in if I think a game is good or not (GEE I WONDER WHERE I GOT THAT FROM) but my main beef with TSW is that...I didn't want to play as just some dude in a hoodie. So are TSW costume options really just "Shit I Could Buy At The Mall"?
Not JUST stuff you can buy at the mall. But yeah, mostly. TSW is very much a mix between urban-fantasy and 20-minutes-into-the-future, and the selection of clothing reflects that.
..but like 90% of the katanawielders you can still go The Bride.
"The western world sips from a poisonous cocktail: Polarisation, populism, protectionism and post-truth"
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
I think my highest ever character was level 32. When I stopped playing it seemed like there was a major lack of content for that level range and that combined with the naturally slower levelling as you rank up meant that I'd end up getting bored and rolling a new toon to do the much more fun 1-30 grind all over again.
If you weren't rolling a Brute, then you were just on the team to pad my spawns. Until they let me just set it to x8/+4, at which point you were invited to the team purely as a spectator.
(All ATs were rad, respect for everyone)
Hell yeah, brutes were great. My first level 50 (also the only one I played in the endgame) was a SS/Will brute named Falcone Paunch.
Brutes were the only CoV archetype I really ever got on with. I had fun with my stalker and corrupter for a while, but ultimately never got past level 12 or so with either of them. Brutes though, they satisfy my A.D.D nicely with their whole "punch punch punch, punch all the things immediately, never stop punching" playstyle.
My favorite Brute was "Professor Smash", who was basically just the Hulk with a beard, glasses and a labcoat, which everyone seemed to get a kick out of. His concept was the classic "scientist caught in one of his own experiments", with the gimmick that his personality was split between that of his genius former self and the "RAWR SMASH" monster he'd become, so he'd mostly use "hulk speak" scattered with unnecessarily long words. I believe his battle cry was "Hulk SMASH perfidious adversaries!" for example.
Champions - The kinda sorta almost-but-not-really CoH imitator that had superhero stuff but none of the charm.
Yup. It's a step ahead of CoH in terms of mechanics, but the atmosphere isn't there.
It sort of mashes up serious plots with saturday-morning-cartoon goofiness, and it doesn't work too well. Not to mention the cartoonish graphical style makes even the serious-business plots seem silly. It's like trying to take the plots of Batman:TAS and somehow fit them into the writing/acting/visual style of the 1960s series.
Anyone who likes superhero stuff should still give it a shot, though. Preferably with a 1-month sub to try out all the power sets (and freeform characters). In CoH you had to design your character around the power sets that were available; in CO (at least with freeform characters) you can mix/match powers and visual effects pretty much however you like. Of special note, the Power Armor and Strength-style melee sets really nail it. The game also gets bonus points for having a kick attack that's explicitly designed to let you be Leonidas.
Champions just never really grabbed me. The mechanics are fine, there's just no soul. Everything is all "Hurr hurr, comic books are goofy hyuck hyuck" compared to CoH which would play it straightish with the occasional nudge and a wink. Also, when I last played it at least, it did a really bad job of hiding that spawns were fixed and just reset when you were done with them. For example, you get a mission to shut down some turrets. You blow them up, get told "good job" and get your rewards, then the turrets immediately activate again so that the next person can deactivate them. Felt more like I was wandering through a superhero theme park than anything else.
the comic book missions in champions aren't bad
the last one i played was kinda cool, you go blow up some base in canada and end up in the void and have to find your way out
override367 on
+1
KayWhat we need...Is a little bit of PANIC.Registered Userregular
"Having my costume not dictate my gameplay" is one of the Core Decisions in if I think a game is good or not (GEE I WONDER WHERE I GOT THAT FROM) but my main beef with TSW is that...I didn't want to play as just some dude in a hoodie. So are TSW costume options really just "Shit I Could Buy At The Mall"?
Not JUST stuff you can buy at the mall. But yeah, mostly. TSW is very much a mix between urban-fantasy and 20-minutes-into-the-future, and the selection of clothing reflects that.
..but like 90% of the katanawielders you can still go The Bride.
TSW has a mix of fairly general urban stuff you can start off with, a wider range of stuff you can buy early on from a big clothing store in London, and niche/weird stuff you can get from in-game achievements (through completing 'class' skill lists) or with in-game money or real world money, including full theme outfits (hacker, steampunk, all sorts of stuff.) You can get some pretty neat outfits, though most will tend to trendy urbanite or no-nonsense organised criminal in a good suit sorta themes.
| Zinnar on most things | Avatar by Blameless Cleric
+6
AxenMy avatar is Excalibur.Yes, the sword.Registered Userregular
edited February 2017
The fact that a fair amount of the clothing options in TSW were basically just normal clothing was a pretty big highlight to me.
Now if you still wanted to run around looking like a Techno-Wizard, Cyber-Ninja, Hell Knight or a Road Warrior reject then the game still had you covered.
edit- In fact if you're curious about the options, but don't want to spend the time downloading the game then https://sephorassecretcloset.wordpress.com/ is a solid place to check out. Mind you it hasn't been updated in forever, but at the least it should give you an idea of the variety to be found.
Axen on
A Capellan's favorite sheath for any blade is your back.
+ Interesting sociopaths to work for.
-Your choice of outfits is 16 variants of Corporate Goon.
Note that IMHO Templars have the most stylish uniforms, but they're kind of dull to work for.
P.S: The Dragon on the other hand pretty much epitomize the "I mugged a second hand store" look.
Fiendishrabbit on
"The western world sips from a poisonous cocktail: Polarisation, populism, protectionism and post-truth"
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
+3
H3KnucklesBut we decide which is rightand which is an illusion.Registered Userregular
Yeah, reading about behind-the-curtain stuff at Turbine, there's a lot of "people actually making the game put their heart and soul into it, but it was managed by assholes".
Carbine, Turbine is a different MMO company entirely (the guys behind Asheron's Call, LoTRO, and D&D Online).
Posts
I'm pretty sure the Monster Factory videos that Polygon did for it the past 2 weeks have been the highest amount of players in like 5 years.
PSN: ShogunGunshow
Origin: ShogunGunshow
Nope, that's Wildstar. Champions has been in maintenance mode for years and probably will be for years more.
The game oozed style and character and I'd absolutely love to experience more of that world. Whether it be an extremely, extremely unlikely WildStar 2 (that avoids the pitfalls of the first) or a single player game.
It's an IP I want more of in some capacity and will hate to see it fade away.
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
Hell yeah, brutes were great. My first level 50 (also the only one I played in the endgame) was a SS/Will brute named Falcone Paunch.
Yup. It's a step ahead of CoH in terms of mechanics, but the atmosphere isn't there.
It sort of mashes up serious plots with saturday-morning-cartoon goofiness, and it doesn't work too well. Not to mention the cartoonish graphical style makes even the serious-business plots seem silly. It's like trying to take the plots of Batman:TAS and somehow fit them into the writing/acting/visual style of the 1960s series.
Anyone who likes superhero stuff should still give it a shot, though. Preferably with a 1-month sub to try out all the power sets (and freeform characters). In CoH you had to design your character around the power sets that were available; in CO (at least with freeform characters) you can mix/match powers and visual effects pretty much however you like. Of special note, the Power Armor and Strength-style melee sets really nail it. The game also gets bonus points for having a kick attack that's explicitly designed to let you be Leonidas.
Brutes were the only CoV archetype I really ever got on with. I had fun with my stalker and corrupter for a while, but ultimately never got past level 12 or so with either of them. Brutes though, they satisfy my A.D.D nicely with their whole "punch punch punch, punch all the things immediately, never stop punching" playstyle.
My favorite Brute was "Professor Smash", who was basically just the Hulk with a beard, glasses and a labcoat, which everyone seemed to get a kick out of. His concept was the classic "scientist caught in one of his own experiments", with the gimmick that his personality was split between that of his genius former self and the "RAWR SMASH" monster he'd become, so he'd mostly use "hulk speak" scattered with unnecessarily long words. I believe his battle cry was "Hulk SMASH perfidious adversaries!" for example.
Champions just never really grabbed me. The mechanics are fine, there's just no soul. Everything is all "Hurr hurr, comic books are goofy hyuck hyuck" compared to CoH which would play it straightish with the occasional nudge and a wink. Also, when I last played it at least, it did a really bad job of hiding that spawns were fixed and just reset when you were done with them. For example, you get a mission to shut down some turrets. You blow them up, get told "good job" and get your rewards, then the turrets immediately activate again so that the next person can deactivate them. Felt more like I was wandering through a superhero theme park than anything else.
And that's before you even get to the actual theme park filled with evil robot cowboys.
Now, if we're talking unique content then yeah, mechanically you only ever did variants on the same 10 things.
The game itself was whatever (loved the character creation but I hate mmo gameplay), but I loved that in Champions there was a random donut shop in the city with goatse as it's logo.
That was literally where I quit.
I hated that fucking zone with every fiber of my being.
PSN: ShogunGunshow
Origin: ShogunGunshow
Yeah, the circus with psychic mime ladies and strongmen hitting you with hammers was much more entertaining.
Funny enough, I quit there too. I think I killed three robot cowboys and never fired the game up again.
The whole thing is cartoonish in a way that reminds me of GI-Joe parody skits, only less clever.
1. "Mystical Carnival" is a much easier theme to leverage than "Cowboy Robot Themepark gone wrong". Sure, Westworld did it...but Snake Gulch so fucking ain't Westworld.
2. CoH just had the right touch. Carnival of Shadows were an insidious, city-wide threat that was worthy of hero intervention. Snake Gulch is more "Why am I even doing this?".
3. If you're going for the absurd type of threat the feeling you want to evoke is "terrifying", not "Corny". "Evil robot cowboys" has a hard time being anything but corny (sure, westworld does it...against the odds), while "the soul of an ancient evil tied into a carnival mask" and "insidious cult using mindcontrol" has a lot more going for it.
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
The fact that the 5th Column was an awesome enemy group and I was bummed when they basically got retconned.
The crush of realizing they'd never really try and balance PvP, despite dreaming of how cool it could be.
And the brilliance of running into buddies from Q-Link (Quantum Link) who I played a Champions RPG with almost a decade after Q-Link shutdown. It was good stuff.
I still think the Dev team was in over their heads, at least at first, when it came to balance and raids though.
PSN: Bizazedo
CFN: Bizazedo (I don't think I suck, add me).
It was all very casual, and I've grown increasingly fond of that sort of thing in my multiplayer murder-mans. Players too strong? Send more mooks! Players sometimes too weak? Let them decide how many mooks they get! It was lovely.
My perms-hastened electric brute adored that raid, though. Electric Armor was the shit vs. Rikti, even without heavy IO support, and with a million overlapping buffs flying around the zone, sometimes the recharge on Build Up + Lightning Rod would get below 20 seconds. So she'd just pick a spot where enemies were likely to be a couple times a minute and turn it into a glowing crater, and watch the kill rewards scroll by too fast to read.
Mothership and Hamidon were inelegant and weird, but Virtue Server had an amazing community for them. Which really showed when the Incarnate Trials started up, and there were enough people around who knew how to work well with groups that we could find competent PUG badge runs on any given day.
The Secret World is definitely a case of having the right touch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tx-mla7a8jU
This includes their The Atlantic Park, an amusement park built by a business tycoon, Nathaniel Winters, to harness magical energy through mechanical means...irrevocably tainting it in the process. Nathaniel Winters sought immortality and got half his wish. Living on as the wraith Bogeyman he steals slivers of unlife from the terror of children.
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
Oh and it turns out they made an adventure game set in the Atlantic Park of the TSW universe. Of middiling quality I guess, but still!
Hell, I'd throw big money at Funcom for more games set in the TSW universe.
Because I feel like I may have done it a disservice by never trying it.
PSN: ShogunGunshow
Origin: ShogunGunshow
It starts with Cthulhu and later runs along into American Indian folklore, Vikings, Egypt-Is-Weird, Catholicism-is-too, and some others. In one mission you might be examining paintings to hash out a clue to pursue something neat, while in another, you might just mulch some zombies on a pier because you want a thing over there which leads to something where you do some magic and so on and so forth. There's a variety of things to do and many of them are even interesting. I commend the devs for their creativity.
I submit only one warning about the game. The ur-plot? The player character driven storyline you might expect will lead somewhere or solidify into something because things get hinted at relentlessly? Abandon all hope. The pay-off is consistently awful, insulting in its banality, and should be ignored in favor of the neat zone stories and fun characters doing things that you will actually remember years later!
I suspect that whichever team did the cool stuff was not involved in the awful stuff.
Holy crap yes!
The writing and voice acting is straight up aces.
edit- So many memorable characters and lines. One lovable character started a cult in his younger years just to see if he could. "You'd think they'd have been happy to find out they didn't have to die."
The Secret World is amazing
The world is fun, the ability wheel is fun, the dungeons are fun
It completely runs out of fun once you get past the original story arc and you get into grinding for better gear to go grind for the powers to access the new upper level story (I have no idea if the story content introduced with the grind is worth it)
But for a one time purchase of twenty bucks or whatever it is these days, TSW has three huge zones to play through and I would recommend it to anyone who enjoyed CoX and are interested in a supernatural horror themed game
As in there was no armor (not in the traditional sense) just clothes for you to wear. Clothes that did nothing, but be clothes.
You had little unseen doodads fill the traditional armor mechanic
Ugh, dammit all, I might have to replay it... oh yeah it may be an MMO but it is a game I still replay from time to time like you would a beloved single player game.
Not JUST stuff you can buy at the mall. But yeah, mostly. TSW is very much a mix between urban-fantasy and 20-minutes-into-the-future, and the selection of clothing reflects that.
..but like 90% of the katanawielders you can still go The Bride.
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
the comic book missions in champions aren't bad
the last one i played was kinda cool, you go blow up some base in canada and end up in the void and have to find your way out
So a bit like Pokémon Sun and Moon, then.
TSW has a mix of fairly general urban stuff you can start off with, a wider range of stuff you can buy early on from a big clothing store in London, and niche/weird stuff you can get from in-game achievements (through completing 'class' skill lists) or with in-game money or real world money, including full theme outfits (hacker, steampunk, all sorts of stuff.) You can get some pretty neat outfits, though most will tend to trendy urbanite or no-nonsense organised criminal in a good suit sorta themes.
3DS FCode: 1993-7512-8991
Thank you, The Secret World.
The combat is fun as hell, even if the animations are a little wooden, and there are a TON of intricate interactions between skills.
Now if you still wanted to run around looking like a Techno-Wizard, Cyber-Ninja, Hell Knight or a Road Warrior reject then the game still had you covered.
edit- In fact if you're curious about the options, but don't want to spend the time downloading the game then https://sephorassecretcloset.wordpress.com/ is a solid place to check out. Mind you it hasn't been updated in forever, but at the least it should give you an idea of the variety to be found.
+ Interesting sociopaths to work for.
-Your choice of outfits is 16 variants of Corporate Goon.
Note that IMHO Templars have the most stylish uniforms, but they're kind of dull to work for.
P.S: The Dragon on the other hand pretty much epitomize the "I mugged a second hand store" look.
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
Carbine, Turbine is a different MMO company entirely (the guys behind Asheron's Call, LoTRO, and D&D Online).