I just got there and completed a few quest but like… its not that fun? i dont like fighting with oni demons or whatever the hell they are. if it was up to me i wouldnt feel the need to prove anything to anyone (i mean i wouldnt participate in duels for those stupid flags on my back and i also dont care if some demons brothers or sth betrayed them) i’d just let them eat each other. i know i sound… cruelly ignorant? but really back when i was at trans i wasnt expecting much after my fav zone Egypt but end up loving trans so now im in Tokyo with high expectations but it doesnt deliver. is it like this only in the beginning? can someone please convince me that this zone is awesome? i mean you dont have to but im just asking. you can line up the things you like about it or anything you want really. i just need the will to continue the story.
The creepy, scary, spooky horror elements of the main storyline through Tokyo are pretty great. The zone isn’t all about the oni demons in the North West. More happens throughout the zone.
The missions in Tokyo are mostly about exploring what’s happened there. You run missions for the key players there so that they’ll reveal more information about what’s going on. Fighting the Oni isn’t simply to prove something to someone, it’s that you need information, and if you don’t go fight them, you’re just going to wander around with no other leads to pursue. There’s a lot of cool stuff going on in Tokyo, but it’s one of the first times that you’re essentially having to pay for information from the NPCs.
Tokyo is the best non-dungeon/raid content this game has or has ever had. In fact, the Tokyo dungeons were the best end-game this game has ever had. Too bad they’re missing from SWL.
Be glad you’re playing the AEGIS free version.
I know it’ll probably sound dismissive and rude, but I really don’t see the point of this thread. You got there, explore around and decide for yourself if you like it or not. No one here is you, and therefore any opinion will be nothing but that - opinion. It’s like saying ‘sell Star Wars to me, because I hate starships and if I were Luke I would have stayed in the desert growing corn’. Just give it a chance on your own and form your own opinion.
Those onis apparently can’t eat each other, especially being hell residents and so not really dying, only banished for a bit, but also if you leave them alone Inbeda won’t give you info you need. 
He’s chatty but not stupid to give away something important for free. Sure can’t make you like it. Also it’s tiny part of the map.
Agree’d. However, I never really did play that many dungeons in TSW, my PC at the time was very low-end, and the dungeon difficulty high-end, and I didn’t want to mess up groups’ dungeon runs with my lag. About the time I got a new PC assembled that could handle the dungeons, I had to move, and couldn’t take my PC with me. Then, couple months later, SWL came along…
AEGIS was my biggest complaint about Tokyo, but, having played the AEGIS-free version, it does kind of feel like something’s missing. That isn’t so much AEGIS as it is the difficulty: I logged back into TSW shortly after getting to Tokyo in the SWL version, and almost had my rear handed to me a few times in TSW, despite having pretty decent gear. In SWL, I just walked around and pretty much pwn’ed the place.
But, the same can be said for Scenario difficulty and the difficulty of the game overall: I miss the difficulty, and the challenge. But nowhere more so than in Tokyo.
AEGIS missing is one of the worst things they did to this game. It should never have been cut.
But it was trendy to hate AEGIS and there’s nothing that people love more than a popular trend, so they jumped on the bandwagon and everyone cried that a color matching system was too hard.
I think that the biggest problem with AEGIS wasn’t the mechanics, but the lack of content to level it. If it’d been introduced earlier on in the game it might have done better, but if you wanted to level it then you were pretty much just grinding one dungeon, (or one boss in one dungeon early on). Then when you’d got to the next cap, you just went to the next dungeon to grind. It was a shock for a lot of TSW players to meet a far bigger grind than had been seen in the rest of the game prior.
I thought AEGIS mechanics had some really interesting applications, and the manufactories were some really fun dungeons to run. If we’d been introduced to AEGIS much earlier in a more stepped fashion then I think it would have been better.
This. It was rather integral to the story, too, and Tokyo in SWL being somewhat underwhelming is to some considerable extent due to that story not being there/not making sense anymore.
That said, the implementation in un-modded TSW certainly wasn’t fun (particularly not for casual players), but cutting it completely feels like Funcom leaning the wrong lesson. Par for the course with SWL, unfortunately.
I’m not sure that AEGIS was integral to the story, other than it being a key part of the dungeon mechanics.
I would also question whether a new player’s experience is different to a veteran’s. Those of us who were around in TSW will always feel like something is missing because we remember the original. A new player without any of the same nostalgia and expectations may not even notice. Kaidan still has great story, loads of atmosphere and some pretty twisted stuff which all helps create an interesting zone. Hopefully the majority of players have enjoyed it 
Perhaps not. But Kaidan is supposed to be Ground Zero. A place where reality itself is coming apart. When we first got to Kaidan in TSW, it was a wake-up call for many of us. Situational awareness became important again and many of the things we took for granted didn’t work anymore (looking at you, leech healing). You couldn’t just sleepwalk through the zone. In SWL, Kaidan is barely a step up from Transylvania, if that.
Not to mention that some mobs (Oni and their AoEs in particular come to mind) were neutered even beyond the removal of AEGIS.
AEGIS was a great mechanic executed poorly. Most people didn’t hate AEGIS they hated how it felt. You know that feeling when you overheat with elemental in SWL and cant do anything for a few seconds? You know why elemental is therefore not very popular in SWL? That was one of the prime flaws with AEGIS. The second flaw was that it was a system that only impacted a small % of the overall content. If you had sweet AEGIS gear it did absolutely nothing for you anywhere but Tokyo and MFA/B + NM raids. To make matters worse the grind for it was bottle-necked by the same small amount of content you needed it for.
TLDR
AEGIS itself was not bad, it refreshed the difficulty of new story content for veteran players. How it was obtained and how easy it was to use without a MOD was where it was flawed. And also how relevant it was to the rest of the game in terms of content.
This is a forum, people express their opinions. That’s the point of the thread.
That might be an overreach, but it was an interesting addition to the story. A “What happens when the filth assimilates tech” question answered. Very compelling stuff.
This 1000%. It was not so bad that it couldn’t be fixed. The community offered up a lot of suggestions back during TSW to make it a better system. FC never implemented any changes, though.
PS. for anyone who thinks that AEGIS did nothing but add extra hp to enemies, go back and read some of the strategies for the Nightmare raids, especially the Nightmare Flappy raid. SUPER awesome mechanics requiring AEGIS. Extremely clever boss design and FC just threw it all away because people with no vision or foresight just cried about AEGIS instead of thinking about how it could be improved.
One big thing it takes out of Tokyo is the progression curve… stuff’s just roughly the same both sides of the wall anywhere you go (which is, because the new gear system is grindier than aegis… tedious everywhere). In the final version of aegis in TSW, by the time you finished north of the wall’s main story sequence you were >5 times stronger than when you started.
In SWL you never get to that breakthrough moment where your basic attack clears shields, it’s just grind grind grind and the green items fused into your gear make you maybe 10% stronger over the entire zone (since you’re going from maxed blue into purples around then)
As someone who refused on principle to use autoswap addons my one complaint in the aegis dungeon/raids was 3-shield minions. Even at-level the shields were breaking every 3 seconds, it’s just too much downtime and rng (since one good crit eruption dusts off the shield). NYR was like that all over, and then MFA5 is the first fight that comes to mind.
I’d say something about MFB6 being tuned as too long a fight for all its rng-instawipes but they did that to every dungeon’s 6th boss in swl so obviously they don’t think that’s an issue.
I love how topic from completely new player once again was converted into topic for old players whining about their losses and calling names for other just as old players but who apparently didn’t like it back then too, that’s just cute. Also could you stop part with names, pretty please?
I was in tSW just few months before news about relaunch and Tokyo with AEGIS was that thing that I stumbled upon hard and was struggling through for story purpose only because I had very little pleasure in this. Now two years later I barely remember what biggest problem was, I guess it’s what Drenneth said. Now I love re-run Kaidan because I don’t need to crawl through the place.
Also, trick question, how come similar thread about not liking CotSG wasn’t converted the same way, maybe, wait, maybe not everything about AEGIS here, wow, no way.
And regarding TS question once again. There are a lot of matters of taste, simple as it it. Lot of people have favorite zones and ones that they never repeat after finishing them.
Yeah it’s like they didn’t cut a big chunk out of CotSG’s content and then say it’s not a priority to bring it back or something (although lack of HF in elite mode is still bad)
okay so update.
i continued the story. finished my business with demons thanks to some other secret worlder’s help. hopefully never again. i like that Inbeda guy tho. or do i like his mask more? i dunno.
some of you mentioned horror elements and when you said that i thought oh okay im familiar with that it might be fun its secret world anyway. but oh boy that carpark… i dont even wanna talk about it.
so long story short i generally loved egypt but cotsg was like a huge wall for me im sorry for all the enjoyable content that i just couldnt manage to find joy in. i guess i had very high expectations for tokyo comparing to cotsg and all the process leading to tokyo was awesome but those samurais and demons werent the welcome i’d like so it just broke my will a little. im glad i got through it now cause the journey from now on seems VERY interesting. i also took your advice on giving serious attention to the story especially in this zone (i already play story focused but still) so now hopefully i got it all figured out.
PS: oh i should’ve seen it coming guys. every topic about tokyo turns into was-aegis-really-necessary-discussion lol i knew it.
so about aegis from a new players pov:
i dont think theres something missing. like if-this-is-absent-i-cant-play-because-the-game-doesnt-make-sense kind of missing. but like idk i still havent finished the zone so dont know if my opinion changes but right now its all good.
however when you guys put it like that, it sure would make more sense storywise because i fcking trained specifically for this zone but its not different from any of the others.
but also if we think about technically i wouldnt prefer if it was implemented poorly and made gameplay annoying.