The Secret World : 3 hours of Beta gameplay

Animations don’t really matter to me. The game seems awesome, even watched the whole 3 hours of that gameplay, more excited than ever 8)

The fun part is when he does the investigation mission and ends up asking someone to walk him through it after not finding the correct answer within 10 minutes.

Hmmm were we playing the same game? I played for about 8 hours today I never had an animation or cutscene die, I played on high graphics and everything was really smooth. I’ve never played any fucom games o I’m not sure about that but I rather enjoyed combat I spent alot of my time playing around with different abilities which was super fun and you had super amounts of customization. I like only having 7 abilities, it was a refreshing change from the wow like game s where you have like 40ish to use at once…
I’m thinking I might rate based on the same things you rated.

Story/setting: Loved it, setting was refreshing and amazingly done I found the story/cutscenes/voice overs, the best I’ve ever seen. You thought swtor had amazing story/voiceover, this was alot better in my opinion. This was really the strongest aspect of this game. 9/10

Combat: Loved playing round with different abilities making your perfect setup, combat was fun and worked well although I do say it can get slightly repetitive at times. 7/10

Art: Background setting was amazingly nice to look at, zombies and other enemies loked extremely good, the one let down here is your character, including customisation and the like there are literally no options and the ones that exist look awful. Lack of music I believe is made up for with the realistic surrounding sounds (groaning from zombies, car sirens and the like were really well done). 6/10 (would be bought up to 8 if character models are improved which the client says it will be for launch)

UI: The other let down was very confusing with literally no customisation. 4/10

Quest Design: I rather liked the setup of quests, they were both the same and very different to usual mmo quests. There were 3 different types of quests each of which had several tiers. You had your main story quest which had about 20 tiers per planet and once you completed all 20 tiers you would get a massive amount of exp and reward. Then you had The equivalent of world arcs, you could only have 1 active at a time, these had about 5-10 tiers and gave significantly less reward then your main story per quest. Then there were what I refer to as bonus quests. You may have 3 active at a time and they have 1-3 tiers and as you’d expect have significantly less reward than the other 2 types of quest. I found the quests extremely interesting as even though you get go collect 3 of these quests you are made to think about them. For instance i got a quest to pick up some security cameras except 1 was on top of a building so i had to wander around the building to find something to jump on to get on top of the building to get the security camera. Then there were the puzzle quests which were really awesome and required lots of thinking to solve (I sat trying to find a way through some booby traps for about half an hour). O thought they had a very refreshing take on quests, made better by the brilliant voice acting/cut-scenes. 8/10

Performance: I played on max graphics and it ran perfectly fine, absolutely no problems.

Personally I’d love to play at launch this game really grabbed my attention, there are still a couple of issues (character customisation and ui mainly) but if they are sorted out, in my opinion this has potential to be the best mmo on the market.

The only things I agree with you is about how animations feels wrong and combat is repetitive. But beside that, I don’t see how you can say that the story is hard to follow, i mean, it’s by far the most interesting story I’ve ever seen in a mmo (and I tried LOTS of them). Very immersif and interesting. Graphics are very good without being extraordinary. I maxed out gfx setting and it’s above average mmo (way better than SWTOR). Quest design is very well done. Yes you got the typical kills and grocery list quests but also some fresh air such as investigation missions and sabotage mission where you actually have to think and do some research on Google and such to complete them. Combat skills limitation is a obvious thing since you have access to all skills in the game. Cutscenes are much more interesting to watch than the ones in SWTOR. I never wanted to skip any of them so far. UI is fine, I would actually rework some boxes such as the health bar but well, not a big deal. Music is top notch, very good job done there.

Will I pay to play this game ? Probably not in it’s current state. Combat and poor animations are the biggest let down for me, but overall the game feels very solid and polish. Maybe a bit too many loading screens that I didn’t understand the reason why they were needed (like the one when you enter the room to try the weapons type in the Templar Temple at the very beginning.). The ressource system for all type of weapons is wayyyy too easy for my taste (wouldn,t think we could see easier ressources system than the ones in SWTOR). Even a 5 years old child could manage this system.

This game has huge positive aspects (story, atmosphere, cutscenes, investigation quests, mature setting), but also some huge flaw (combat, animations, ressource system) from my own perspective.