"Death of a game: The Secret World" by nerdSlayer

Secret World Legends General Discussion
142

We can certainly do that as a community, the Untold Stories mod is great (find it here) :smiley:

Having said that, it’s unlikely to ever be pushed by FC rather than the community. Player created content is often a mixed bag when it comes to quality, and sadly the great stuff is all too often the minority. The official missions are all about quality, and being FC approved effectively puts a stamp on stuff saying “this is good”.
If they can’t be sure that the same quality is being delivered, then it’s a risky move from the developer position to do anything which could be seen as them endorsing low quality content.

Even if 99% of the stuff is great, they probably wouldn’t go much further than saying “this is some really nice player-created content”, because of the potential for it to come back to bite them.

There may be other reasons too - say someone created a mission where Deputy Andy has been using cats around KM to help draw Cassie’s eye to him. Not necessarily anything too bad, but it long term wouldn’t mesh well with the Meowling and Andy’s current existing romantic interests. If there’s another mission about Andy getting set up for his first date with Moose, then it starts getting more complicated and confused about how all the missions interact to create a coherent whole.
Looking at how many different angles and perspectives stuff like fanfiction generates, it presents a fair bit of difficulty for that to then be officially endorsed.

143

Given that other company that was famous for its player created content system sunset that earlier this month, I rather doubt Funcom will officially tackle the issue of (semi-)approved player-created content. They certainly shouldn’t, because they clearly don’t have the resources they could possibly do it right.

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144

Well, if real content is too hard to make for fc, if lower quality content (missions without cuts cenes or voices) would make people unhappy and and even making a custom content contest is also out of the question because a post about it and choosing a winner is too much for fc to do or they don’t want to make it canon(which isn’t an obligation either) then I don’t nt know what to say. Everything seems to be too hard for fc to do.

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I don’t think anyone has said “real content” is too hard to make, it’s just expensive and time consuming. Obviously this fact is anathema to the impatient but that doesn’t make it less of a fact. :v:

146

Since the relaunch in June 2017 we’ve got one small new zone and the story continuation. We’re almost 2 years after that.
I think that speaks for itself. <\3

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Nirvelle has been dark for a while, but does appear to be logging into the forums regularly, if only discreetly.

In a recent stream on the brawl he mentioned that ever since TSW-Beta, Mr Rosenbaum has been envisaged as powerful magus and only now has a part to play inline with the canonical behaviour and capabilities of the Tabula Rasa. Also, the idea for the Rosenbrawl itself came around the time of ‘The Last Train to Cairo’ testing, so a long time in the pipeline.

148

It took ten months after the relaunch to get Dawn of the Morninglight and it’s pretty safe to assume there was already some work done on that. It’s only been 12 months since then and it’s probably also safe to assume there’s less resources available than there were before.

That’s not to say new story content is just around the corner - maybe it’ll never come. Maybe the game is making enough money for other updates but not enough to justify voice actors. That’d be a shame but I’m sure we’d all find a way to go on living. :v:

149

I think it says a lot when ppl make it out as if that was all they did in two years.

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150

I never said it’s all they did. I specifically said new zones and story coninuation. They have done other things but not in those 2 departments.

151

I think it feels that way to a lot of people because most of the new content updates have been things that they haven’t really been asking for. The biggest selling point to the relaunch was the fact that it would allow for the continuation of the story. So, while Agents and the new OD scenario have been nice, they don’t feel like an acceptable tradeoff for the content missing from TSW or for the character progress wipe.

152

This part depend on the player. When ND and in part Faction Missions came out, many were crying for more group endgame content. Now ppl are crying for story. Same problem with reimplementing old (for TSW players) and brand new content. A lot of ppl have an opinion on when it counts as new ‘content’ and while that is fine to an extent, the fact remains that anything patched into the game, took time. Ignoring that is getting really old. Its nearly impossible to win, when ppl are All ‘me me’ about what they put in game, and unfortunately unhappy is always louder than happy.

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153

The problem isn’t really what counts, but how things feel. Specifically, casual players can take however long they want to progress through the main story at their own pace (ignoring the question whether the MoF system actually supports that for the moment).

The new content in the agent system, as such, is a mad grind compared to the main game. A casual player actually seeing the full Dante and Jeronimo storylines would certainly qualify as lightning striking twice. That rather limits the extent to which these side stories can even feel like content to a broader audience. (And that’s on top of the question whether or not a system like that even has much of a chance of being accepted as content in the first place, given it’s definitely not very action for the “shared-world ARPG”.)

Patching old content back in isn’t new content, so, err… no wiggling room there.

As such, SWL didn’t get that much new content that will actually feel like the promised new content to average players in nearly two years. Ultimately, one could argue it’s SA only, because the Tokio Temple is endgame group content (squarely aimed at MMO players, whom SWL wasn’t market to with that "“shared-world ARPG” marketing), and OD is endgame grind content (so also MMO content). (EDIT: Oh, wait, there was this new mission in a time-limited event, which,err… time-limited is not a 365-day draw, regardless.)

So presumably, “SA was the only new content in two years” is a fairly broad perception Funcom will have to overcome in this “shared-world ARPG”. I don’t think they have much of a chance; they probably should’ve picked their battles more wisely than fighting a disconnect between marketing BS and actual game from day one. If only this were officially a MMO, where it’d be a lot easier to argue there really was so much more truly new new stuff.

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154

Sure, it takes time to add anything to the game, especially since it has to be balanced to fit the unbalanced combat system of SWL. Which is exactly why they need to focus their limited resources on things more players want.

My point is that there hasn’t been as much content as people were expecting. Fair or not, a lot of people had higher expectations for things moving forward when the relaunch was announced. Those who are more concerned with just the story updates aren’t too pleased that the only new content on that front in 2 years is the SA zone. Those who want to see more end-game group content have only seen Occult Defense broadened to allow groups of 5 and the new lair in Tokyo. Those wanting more PvP have seen Shambala reduced from teams of 10 to teams of 5, and, I guess, the Rosenbrawl.

So, yes, it’s impossible to please everyone, but who exactly have they been trying to please? I’m not asking that rhetorically; I honestly want to know. Are they approaching content updates, with the limited resources they have, from the viewpoint of “What do the players actually want to see added to the game”, or is it more of “What do I want to put in the game”? As the content creators, the devs have every right to the latter viewpoint, but if it doesn’t match with the former, the players might get upset.

Take Dark Agartha, for example. Implementing that must have taken a lot of time, especially since it’s scaled to 10 different IP levels. What did that add to the player’s experience? A long, repetitive solo grind that adds a miniscule amount to end-game glyph stats. So, who was asking for an extra layer of grind for the sake of grind? How was that a better investment of limited resources than working on story content, fixing the combat balance, or porting over missing group content from TSW?

Edit: I wrote my response before noticing BombShelley had already replied to you. I don’t want this to feel like I’m just piling on.

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It is not even about ‘not very action’. For me at least. Agent stories are not stories of my character. Some random people go somewhere, do something and then post twit with results. It is not R_pg but card game. Where are exciting actions of my ‘hero’ character? So I just use agent system as augments in tsw.

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156

Because the content’s not coming in slow, big patches or expansions, it means that they’re unlikely to satisfy all the different types of player.

I agree that there’s been less group content than I’d have liked to see, but there have at least been fairly regular releases.

Taking your example of DA, I’m not sure just how hard the scaling was to implement. They already had dungeon, scenario and faction missions with scaling, and there wasn’t any need for major changes during the player beta testing.
In terms of what it added, there’s a story component, (it’s not a big one, but it does tell us about the eventual destruction of the world by the sleepers,); it introduces a new item quality which people have to play long term or trade for; it creates a tradeable resource which lower geared players are also able to farm (albeit slowly); it gives solo players a boss fight with partially randomised conditions so that they don’t feel totally samey; and it increased the glyph budget to the point where they had to change the stat caps (which is arguably a thing they should have implemented alongside it, instead of shortly after).

I think the aim is that each bit of content should appeal to some players, but also have repeat value to keep people logging in. All of the events will have appealed to cosmetic collectors and achievement hunters, and offered up new (to swl, tiny) bits of story.

The agents act almost like lore, with the way you can slowly piece together storylines which help to flesh out the world - after all, we’re not the center of the universe, just another bee in the machine.
Don’t get me wrong, I really dislike the implementation of the agent system. The fact that it’s meant to be about the stories doesn’t really work with your inability to go back and read the missions that you’ve been on, so it’s all to easy to actually lose track of the story that’s meant to be bringing you back to investigate the next step. And that’s just one of my problems with it.

But that’s the thing, not everything will appeal to everyone. We all want the next content drop to be tailored to our own specifications, but the chances of that are pretty minimal - I know that my own preferences would probably take about a year of work.

We have had new group content, and we even got a new type of scenario - that has been on the wish list for many years. I’m hoping that we get a group DA too, I think there could be some really interesting potential there!

Yup, I agree. The question though is whether that’s about our expectations or Funcom’s abilities. I think when SWL launched, there was a lot of mixed feelings in the player community. There were people who were understandably upset about the relaunch, but I think that there were also a lot of people who felt it was a real opportunity for the game to grow and give us all the stuff we’d been hoping for during TSW’s time in the doldrums. I think that perhaps we were overly optimistic in our hopes of how new content would be delivered.

157

I could understand being upset if they’d called the relaunch a dating sim and you were a dating sim enthusiast lured by false promises but the difference between “MMO” and “shared world ARPG” is almost completely meaningless. :v:

Yes, pretty much. More story content, a new scenario type, the return of faction missions, scaling solo content and group scenarios are all things that have been asked for by the players. You could argue that producing anything other than story content is a waste of their limited resources but if story content alone brought in enough money to pay for itself they’d probably aready do that.

Well yeah, it’s their game.

158

It was Ragnar Tørnquist’s game really, before he left to form his own company. He designed most of the original story and game content with help from Joel Bylos and Joshua Doetsch, none of whom are involved with it anymore, sadly. I would actually love to read what Ragnar thinks of the “changes” that were made afterwards…

159

I’m not sure if Scriv was quite as involved during the early development tbh, I know he took over as lead writer in 2013, but no idea about the original story design.
The video was quite up front about Ragnar’s original involvement, and that he moved on. It’s not his game any more - but that’s pretty common in games really. You have people who generate ideas and people who implement them. Once a title’s gone live, most developer teams will then change the creative lead, because they get moved onto new projects so that they can carry on churning out new ideas.

I’d guess that Ragnar’s position would be “not the way I’d have done it, but I can understand why they did it” - that’s the attitude almost every game designer I know takes.

160

The idea that Ragnar was the sole creative force behind a game of this scale is pretty childish and severely undervalues the work put in by a huge amount of people. It also ignores the fact that had he remained creative director to this day, he’d probably have made a lot of the same decisions that subsequent directors made and most of the people holding him up as The One True Dev, Without Who The Game Stood No Chance would be complaining that he’s not fit for the job. :v:

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161

Dav Scheve is the unsung hero as original lead writer, who has also been working at RedThreadGames along with other heroes like Simon Poole. Here’s their Draug trailer.

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