Sounds like South Africa update.
2 Likes
One nit-pick with the video, at the end, listing the reasons for failure, he seems to be judging SWL’s PvP instead of TSW’s. Or did anyone actually into PvP really find TSW’s options lacking?
I personally didn’t. TSW covered the main PvP arena styles that are popular. And provided a vast variety of build and strategy styles for each mode. Being that PvP was never this games focus TSW did it exceptionally well.
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TSW’s PVP was good, in fact no - it was great, since it was the only reason i logged in to TSW anyway.
The failure on it’s part was when someone thought it a great idea to add rolling PVE missions into a PVP zone (Fusang) which then (for me) spelled the end of PVP in Fusang.
Something which even now (In TSW) has had a lasting consequence.
PVP over there is now practically illegal as @Sawo can confirm.
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The way in which the queue system favoured groups over anyone else queued solo meant you sometimes had to wait a long time to get in to the other zones - if at all.
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Then using Shambala as the measuring factor of how popular this type of “PVP” was, is the reason it is present in SWL - when the main reason anyone went in there was because it was the only way to get the new signets on offer, which meant it was a flawed measure and inaccurate.
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PVP in TSW felt like a demonstration of the limitations of the combat system to me. It covered the popular arenas but didn’t try to do anything terribly interesting with them. I couldn’t get any of my PVP friends from other games to stick with TSW after they tried it, they all went off to titles that were more PVP centric and had better combat. 
The problem with PvP focused titles is that I have always found them very skill dependant. While I’ll agree that TSWs combat has never been great PvP in TSW offered a great balance between player skill and build creativity/ strategy. I’ve played a few PvP games and it’s always been more about how quick your reflexes are or your aim. That was not how you won in TSW.
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Well… there were aggressive campaign agains PvP few months a go, against some players especially (some unfairly). If you have seen screenshots about those scripted announces in chat you know what I mean. There were some action too, but it died because of same reason it didnt last long after SWL announce. Too much drama and nit-picking rather than having fun in Fusang. This is the reason I dont see much of hope anymore… players are making it awfull. Last weekend there were nice little 2 Temps vs 1 Dragon Custodian fight and man… I was so happy about it 
Somehow I wish that TSW have same treatment as Anarchy Online, Rubi-ka 2019. Fresh start with progressive server. Good old Black/White Mark Fusang etc. I mean, Anarchy Online is 18 years old game, with 17€ subscription, and there are pretty good population there any given time.
Please please please… Can we make this happen? PLEEEEEEEASE
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Anarchy Online isn’t competing with Anarchy Online Legends though. Feels like that’s an important thing to consider here. 
You are right. But is SWL really competing with TSW considering TSW has no support what so ever, even gamekeys are not officially sold via Funcom. If FC considers SWL competing with TSW, then something must have went horribly wrong with relaunch, no?
Jokes aside. I personally see it having more pros than cons. Would allow people new to SWL see the ”origins”, would (hopefully) bring bit money to the table (Rubi-ka requires active sub to play for example, would it make people sub to SWL?), maybe some ingame rewards (clothing, pets for SWL). I dunno, I would love to see something like this but its understandable that not everyone wants it ^-^
It is if they launch a new server for TSW. 
Seriously, I think there’s absolutely no chance of them running TSW alongside SWL until and unless SWL stops bringing in enough money to cover costs.
PVP in TSW was great, the three PVP platforms offered great variety. Stonehenge was about team balance, a damage sponge (which was usually me) a resilient healer and some good damage snipers. El Dorado was played best with a good strategy with a guard team and a steal team and fusang (before it got petty and abusive) was just bloody good fun.
Shambala was for grinding or to fill time when waiting for the others to pop
It was a good fun few years with some great PVPers. Miss you guys 
7 Likes
In regards to the main post, I agree with @Aeryl in that the whole video comes off as an outsider’s perspective, and I think he misses a few points.
For one I got sick of hearing about how great Ragnar is and how he left doomed the game…which went on to have some stellar issue releases without him. Even if you feel the Call of the Nameless missions or all of South Africa is lacking the fine touches of earlier zones, good Secret World story content is still a grade above the very best story put into another MMO.
For two I think the guy rolled up and smoked too many one-sentence, all caps Steam reviews of SWL. It was received badly by old players, who obviously had a lot to lose with TSW being moved to the coma ward and some of its troublesome bits like PvP getting surgically removed. I think the video tells the wrong narrative about the SWL relaunch, as things were still quite hopeful even a year ago. SWL relaunch certainly pissed off a lot of TSW fan base, and with good reason, but it was clearly a calculated risk to bring in new people and get a reappraisal of the game. I would argue that it worked. The rerelease got the languishing player numbers back up for relaunch, at their highest even higher than the first Steam launch. Reviewers who didn’t like TSW played SWL and said, “hey this is an improvement.” Funcom kept to their timeline for the most part, had pretty regular and good communication, and did good QoL changes base on feedback from the community. For a time, at least, it felt like stuff was happening, and the relaunch had done its work. It culminated in the biggest surprise of them all: Funcom actually fulfilled their promise and released the first zone of Season 2! Unheard of. There was even a bump in player numbers for people coming back for that, at least on the Steam charts. Emotion-wise, if not player-count wise, South Africa release in April and the anniversary celebrations in June last year were the high-water mark for recent Secret World history.
What about since then? Well, compared to that first year…it is as if we are back in January 2017. Little communication from the devs, not even a tweet or a tease on Twitter for stuff like content drops, inexplicably. They have kept up a good pace of releasing things once every 2 months, which is laudable. I recognize that I am in the minority when I say I enjoy OD, DA, and even the recent Rosenbrawl and tank commander fight, because I love seeing more stuff to do in the game other than just story content. But without any hint about new story stuff, which is the real lifeblood of the game and the thing people clearly want, there is no real future for SWL. For people paying attention to such things, there are lots of troubling signs for the future of the game: many of the members of the dev team that were visible on Discord or the forums have left the company, there is the ominous lack of mention of any Secret World related plans in each investor report, there have been unpopular changes to the service level of customer support, and the player population on Steam has fallen back to its lowest levels.
I wouldn’t argue the thesis that the main failure of TSW/SWL is that lack of content -> dwindling playerbase -> lack of content is an unending negative feedback loop. I don’t doubt that much like AoC or AO, SWL will be around for some time in one form or another…but I can’t help but feel like this situation wasn’t inevitable, unlike how the video paints it. I think there was a future where SWL kept a larger playerbase at steady numbers for years down the road, or at least had a stronger seasonal playerbase as new content was properly marketed and deployed and people dropped back in to the game.
I dunno. Maybe we see Congo drop next month and it blows everyone away and we see more than 1000 concurrent players on Steam again. Maybe the producers think of an ingenious way to monetize the game such that supports both player enjoyment and long-term sustainability for SWL. Maybe Funcom’s CEO and board of directors has a change of heart about leaving all their previous releases to wither on the vine and orders a company-wide investment in older properties, instead of throwing everything into new titles, hoping to find another one that sticks. Stranger things have happened! For instance, for the last two months thousands of people have been paying $20 a month or whatever to play a new server on Anarchy Online, a game that is old enough to smoke, drive and vote in most US states.
Or maybe we watch SWL go into a soft maintenance mode a year from now, and wonder what the point of relaunching TSW really was.
I am confident that Nirvelle and his team are doing the best they can with the resources they have. I just wish they had more, and we knew more. But it is an old lament; they say if you press your ear to your computer monitor, you can hear people complaining about the future of the game back in 2012.
9 Likes
I think he misses the point. I’ll regurgitate my comments from reddit:
His argument is that TSW/SWL failed because it had a lousy combat system and long delays between major story content releases. That’s just scratching the surface. Warframe is successful with barely a story but attractive combat mechanics. ESO is successful with horrible combat mechanics and regular content. What is common with both is that Digital Extremes/Zenimax/Bethesda figured out a way to deliver enough toys and hooks to their target audience; including a very tempting monetization model.
Why TSW/SWL has such few players is because Funcom wanted it to be everything to everyone. They couldn’t agree on who their audience was and what that audience wanted. They chased everyone and ended up pleasing no one. They built a lousy monetization model for a f2p game. They alienated their community along the way.
I’m glad the current Funcom team seems much more community engaged. Instead of chasing marketing analytics, I hope they build and innovate on what can be delivered by working with people who love the game and play with vastly different play styles. Build success based on fundamentals, singles and walks, instead of trying to hit a home run.
I’d also add that after reading Kotaku’s “How Bioware’s Anthem Went Wrong”, I think developing story content for a mmo is far more resource-intensive. So this is where Funcom will need to innovate in delivering story content given the small audience and limited opportunity for profit.
Isn’t this just agreeing with his point though? You need regular content or attractive combat mechanics - SWL has neither, but Warframe & ESO showed that one or the other would do.
SWL has officially focused on story, but hasn’t been producing the content regularly. They could have made the greatest monetization model ever, but if people aren’t logging in to play and have fun, it wouldn’t have helped.
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Actually, a good monetization model that fits the game’s strengths would probably help quite a bit.
A story-focused game that does have content that would make running at least three characters interesting should be encouraging people to run those alts and make it fun to try new stuff (and buy more cosmetics on those alts!).
As such, a monetization model centered around a sorry excuse for a gear system that makes trying new gear the antithesis of fun, and actually charging for even just the second character? Not what this game needed.
3 Likes
You are correct that I am of the mind that either a good combat system or timely content would have made for success.
Without mentioning ESO or Warframe as examples in his vid, however, one could be left with the impression that the solution, therefore, was for Funcom to produce more timely content and have a good combat system.
Which is much more difficult to pull off that focusing on one or the other. And how trying to be both was how we ended up with the SWL reboot.
Which brings us back to where SWL is today. Great story built on a game engine that takes a ton of resources to create what is expected as “content”.
Main and story missions are where TSW/SWL really falls victim to its own success. The missions themselves as well as the cutscenes and voice acting that accompany them are quite unique, and any dip in quality is immediately noticed by players even when it’s still miles above what any other, even triple A, game is doing.
6 Likes
What could have been.
While The Secret World isn’t quite dead yet, it is dying. I don’t think the failure was inevitable in the sense that it would have failed no matter what they did. But I do think it was doomed from the beginning, due to their approach. As was pointed out by the video creator and many other people, TSW’s main selling point was story content. Once that dried up, there wasn’t much hope for large-scale success. If Funcom put more resources into regular story updates, maybe TSW could have succeeded, but that’s just conjecture at this point.
I also think the relaunch didn’t have to be a failure. If they kept everything from TSW and merely updated the engine, it would have been much better. Completely changing the ability/gear system was a really bad idea. Not only was it an unnecessary waste of time and resources, it made the game worse. Weapon balance and sustain tanking have been complaints since beta. Keeping abilities and gear the same or similar would have expedited the scaling of the dungeons and raids as well. Most importantly, If SWL launched with all the content from TSW, it would have stopped, or at least lessened, the constant comparisons between the two.
I’m not a MMO player. TSW’s story was good enough to get me to give it a try. The community and end-game content was good enough to get me to stick around. SWL is lacking in every respect. It’s sad that a game with such promise has fallen to this.
2 Likes