SA had I believe a pretty strong uptick in people that calmed down once people layed through it. Some even accelerated their progression through the game to see SA if I remember right.
Than again in all MMOs a Expansion of sort brings new players that quitely fade over time. True for SWL as it is for giants like GW2 or WoW.
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Sadly, I think you’re right, and Funcom knows this. A new zone won’t significantly increase the amount of playres, especially not on a long-term basis. Looking at the steam charts (the only reference we have) The player numbers dropped significantly soon after launch and there was only a small, brief uptick after SA was released. That’s why we’re unlikely to see another major content update for a while. We just get little bits here and there to slow down the decay of the player base. And the new stuff we get is designed more for adding play time to the game than for enjoyable experience.
I think that’s why there’s been a bigger push of late to get the other dungeons and raids ported over to SWL. I can’t speak for everyone, but I’m only barely hanging on to the game, and then only because of the group content. There’s still a lot of good people playing the game, and it’s fun to do stuff together. However, the end-game content is severely lacking.
I do think fixing the combat system would be more productive in bringing people back to the game, but it would be near impossible at this point. I started playing SWL about a year ago and even back then I kept hearing rumors that they were about to nerf sustain tanking so that healing would be a thing again. Here we are a year later, and nothing. So I don’t know if those rumors were lies, or if the project was abandoned because it was too hard/cost-prohibitive.
New players won’t know new content is an incessant grind away. That’s a contributing factor why I really don’t think SWL would manage to retain well.
The words “in any significant fashion” are doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. 
Well, yes. So?
SWL combat system is unfixable imho, it is even far more flawed than TSW one. And even if there would be any “fix”, it would bring almost zero new players if there would not be any new content.
I really don’t want to sound negative only, but I have not much faith in future game. I don’t believe we will ever see Congo. Instead of it we can hope in some small updates of stuff they left unfinished in TSW past etc.
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It actually reads like “top 10 reasons IT projects fail”. Generic in its failings. The reason I quote it is because it is similar to TSW/SWL where the original designers were story-oriented, and struggled with making the gameplay work within a multi-player environment. If a AAA team with 7 years and a 10’s of millions of $$$ couldn’t make it work, then imagine the difficulty for Funcom.
When I read the comments on the video, it became clear not everyone thought the same when they said they “hated the combat system”. Where it looked like everyone had a common complaint was really about 3 separate items: #1 lack of physical “pop” or “floaty” and non-responsive combat and animations, #2 rpg / gear complexity / gear leveling system; and finally #3 bad gameplay of actual fights, where players feel that combat is too slow or unfairly difficult.
After much thought, I think Funcom should have left #1 alone and lived with the crappy engine they have, at least for re-launch. It took too much effort to “fix” #1 and now SWL is worse. They should have made some area mobs easier to kill or more survivable; particularly in Blue Mountain and Egypt. Kaidan mobs should have had Aegis removed and Aegis limited to Kaidan dungeons. The focus of “hard” and good combat systems gameplay should have been limited to dungeons and PVP. They could have added training-oriented missions as part of progression to address #2, and given every player elemental force as part of the basic dps deck. They could have tried to address #3 by tweaking fights or looking to see why lag monster is the hardest boss in the game. This would have left more budget for figuring out how to more easily add content into the game. Finally, they should have engaged and respected the community far more than they did. They made many decisions in fear of the community response that weren’t productive.
What would have happened if SWL launched with 3 new elite dungeons, related story content, and South Africa? And kept the skills wheel and tab targeting?
If they’d had the money for that there wouldn’t have been a relaunch.
well, if FC doesn’t want to keep the game updated with new content, that includes new dungeons, new zones, new story new quests, and others; ultimately there isn’t much we, as players, can do.
but we all know where this path leads to.
Then we would have called foul for basically gutting any element of difficulty that TSW had, and complained even more if we’d had to reset our characters. You’ve basically said that you’d keep the ability system, (which turned off many people), so combat would have been the same, so not attracting any players who disliked the combat. Saying you’d train people isn’t enough to make it less complicated, it’s just acknowledging that it’s complicated. Addressing the lag monster, again, not going to have a big selling point - “Now with less lag in fights” isn’t going to be a marketable slogan.
Content development is not cheap. The only real way to make it cheap is to massively reduce complexity and quality. TSW’s greatest strenght was the quality of the missions, and the fact that they weren’t all just “go kill boars in the forest”.
The community was/is hostile to changes, specially if we don’t know what the full scope of the changes are or will be. Putting out information that said they were going to make TSW easier to play would have been met with cries for blood. Most MMOs placate their communities with large amounts of content (expansions) when they overhaul big systems. There wasn’t enough money to create masses of new content, so involving the community immediately turned into a plan to basically get people complaining and protesting throughout the entire development cycle. Imagine if we’d had 6 months of people moaning on the TSW forums before SWL was even in beta. The community wouldn’t be any less angry that stuff was being changed, and the negative reviews would have just started sooner.
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That particular part was fixed in epeen patch about 3-4 years after launch. Maybe because of that (and other tweaks in patch) TSW lived a little longer.
And yes there were cries after epeen and videos of characters in starting gear killing mobs in CF.
Actually after they made crosshair targeting gameplay became smoother and easier (except part where there is lag between mouse move and actual selection). There is no single fight in game where tab targeting is needed. Sometime it is convenient but no more then that. What FC should have done is implement ‘follow previous target’ from EffectsUI directly in their code.
Unfortunately, that would have been worse. They had to change the system enough to justify a re-launch as opposed to just adding stuff to TSW. Unless they made significant changes to the engine, just re-releasing TSW would only serve to piss off everyone affected by a character reset. So the other option would be to just add the new stuff to TSW, but that wouldn’t have drawn in as much as announcing a whole new game.
The problem isn’t that there were changes, the problem is that a lot of the changes were bad or unnecessary. Gearing is less complicated, but a lot more grindy. The combat is more fluid now but at the expense of balance. End-game content is less varied and less rewarding, so that’s a complete negative. Event bosses are less laggy, but also less engaging. The agent system is kind of interesting, but I don’t know if it’s really a whole lot better than the augment system. Same with gadgets versus aux weapons.
To be fair, there were some positive changes as well. Less kills required for the museum. The cosmetic system is a lot more organized. The lair boss system is vastly improved and makes lairs much easier to run. But come to think of it, all of those changes could have, and probably should have, been made in TSW.
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Ok, so what would you suggest? Or even better, what would you suggest to be done now?
Regarding the ability wheel. My posted theory is that it wasn’t the actual ability wheel itself that was a turn-off, but the perceived complexity of it; as well as the area gameplay which made fighting mobs tedious and deadly and generally a turn-off at beginner levels.
Which is why I broke down “disliking combat” into separate components. Trying to address “disliking combat” as one lump problem resulted in SWL missing the mark.
I agree that content development, as how people assume it to be, isn’t cheap. But why not be curious about how to make content cheaper, yet still enjoyable by those who pay for it? Which is where community engagement comes in. Not just for play testing, but for actual content creation. Why stop at play testing? It’s obvious from other MMO’s and industries that community engagement or collaboration can be successful much earlier in the creation process.
I agree a lot of (if not all) existing players would have gotten pissed off with a re-launch and a free character reset to boot. But that’s pretty much what happened with SWL except we got a game that is not marginally better or might be worse. The user numbers settled lower than what TSW had prior to launch. Which is why in 20/20 hindsight I’d gamble on getting the community behind you (“we have no money so we need to relaunch”) and spending the launch money on new dungeons+story and new monetization, rather than the combat system.
Toic came u recently on discord and I’m quoting a dev but basically it was to complex for a lot of people to a level they managed to only build trashbuilds. Given how some people struggle with the way easier SWL combat I don’t dpubt it was an issue. Same with the trainingsrooms were peole would start testing out people without ever reaching a decicion and than quitting. I think the term for it is Analysis Paralysis, when you have so many options to think about that you can’t decide which to ppick because you are stuck weighting them against each other for way to long.
The biggest problems with the old skill wheel were mostly related to its overabundance of options
A large percentage of new players would open the skill wheel for the first time, and then instead of
doing anything there, they would get scared by all the options, panic and quit playing the game forever.A second large percentage of players would make an absolutely awful build. Have no idea that their build was bad, and quit playing the game because the game was ‘too hard’
2 was not really related to their being better or worse abilities in the wheel, but people would make a build with say, four builders and no consumers on it
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Exactly!
But these two problems didn’t mean Funcom had to trash the wheel completely and spend $$$$ re-doing all the damn animations and combat. Why not create a progression filter (similar to what we have now)? Maybe even lock changing abilities until you pass certain levels, and modify the mobs and story to support that. That would have been far cheaper to implement, imo. Let story-mode users have a good combat experience, and contain the complexity (and fun!) of the skill wheel to end-gamers which are basically dungeons and pvp.
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The main “problem” of ability wheel in TSW was total lack of any helpful tutorial/basic explanation for less hardcore players how combat system and synergies work. We can debate about not the best combat animations, but imho the main problem was inability to understand how the system works.
exactly, they could have added a ability wheel guide or something locking the first skills until a certain level and then get a few suggestions on what skills to unlock based on certain preset builds.
also we all know that content isn’t easy or cheap to make, but if a company is making MMO, we all assume they have the means to create it. content being not cheap or not easy to make is not an excuse for lack of new content.
And what if Funcom lacked the necessary capability/resources for SW from the start?
Like lets just follow the train of thought that TSW/SWL was too big a project for them if they wanted a quality that is substainable long term. They pulled something off that does have some amazing parts but other parts just are and were always lacking. Be it stability, various systems, animations, balancing…pick whatever you like, compared to the industries big titles Secret World was always underfunded and underdeveloped and it is amazing that these barriers didn’T stop funcom. Else we would never be able to play the game we all love (or at least are in a love hate relationship with).
Did some of the changes from TSW to SWL make no sense or were illfounded? Yes.
The same is true for some of the patchchanges being either utter weird or downright contraproductive. They made the change away from the wheel to alleviate the issues they saw at hand and probably went waaaaay overboard on making it simple, creating a shallower experience but as they say “No use crying over spilled milk”. I think our attention should be on how one could polish the few abilities we have to increase past nitty gritty build variant compared to dream over contemplating over what TSW had and how that could have been fitted into SWL.
At least that is how I see things.
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