Imagery - The Secret World

I started with a bag of popcorn to keep me company.  I then had to add a demanding kitty that wanted to be in my lap.  It is hard to kill zombies when a kitty is nuzzling your eye but I made it happen.

I notice that a certain type of Zombie called a Servant of One Death tends to hang around inside of the compound a lot.  They seem tough and I've helped kill a lot of them. I don't know what they do or why they are all over the compound.  Since they are sometimes chasing people I guess it is part of some mission string I have not yet reached.

I also just learned that I can make the chat window a bit smaller by dragging it down.  Yay.  Since no one is talking to me I'm not very interested in the channel and what people are saying.

I've picked up the hard type missions to see how they go.  I randomly found this mission chain and picked it up.  I haven't started it other than looking at the first bit to see what I am supposed to do.

So far I've been successful with the other "hard" type missions I've tried.  I don't think they are hard, hard maybe?  The side missions are easier in general then the main storyline mission.  I'm not in a sewer being eaten by something terrible while confused.

Plus, I now have a sword.  This makes me innately awesome.  I'm thankful for that because I am terrible at almost everything else.  Understanding the magic trees and the various spells and such things.  However, a lot of the technical stuff is secondary.  You can still just play the game and see what happens and that is the ride that I am on for the most part.

Wow.  This game has some pretty brutal imagery for those that are used to pretty, fluffy bunnies.  I don't think that is a bad thing. I also had my first really good battle. I died the first time.  But the second time I positioned myself and used my distance skills to wear her down.  It was great.  She also got stuck on an object and that allowed me to work on her while she tried to get to me.  She got around it but I love that the landscape hinders the NPCs.  I got so worked up that I MISSED the goal and had to fight the stupid thing again because the goal object had a timer.  Who knew?

But I finished it.  I have another mission that I can't find the next step to.  I seemed to have not looked at an object I should have and now I don't know how I got the mission or how to get rid of it.  I'll have to look it up.  For now, it's not a big deal.  I'm sharing popcorn with the cat and listening to Deputy Andy tell me some even more soul killing terrible things about his father   But, I got a mission out of it and while my soul may be a bit less innocent then it was a few minutes ago I have stuff to run off and do.

My next quest starts out with "see what you can do" and it sounds like a sabotage gig. I'm excited.  I'm getting good at moving around the zombies outsides.  Sometimes I totally fail and get chased still but now thanks to my sword I can mow them all down most of the time.  However, I reach my goal and my next order is to kill the things in the way.  That's not stealthy.  :(  And they respawned when I took too long!

I died a lot.  Over and over again trying to fight this thing that vomited green nastiness on me that wasn't one of the things I had to kill but kept spawning beside one.  Ugh.  I finally killed them but it was terrible and I stopped counting after the 10th time I died.  I've also discovered that there is some type of award system for finding the glowing yellow honey combs in square   If anyone is into that kind of thing it's kind of an exploration award mixed with a collection award.

I did a few more side quests and decided to wrap it up for the evening.  I dumped some skill points into my combat abilities and improved my damage some I think.  I'm still getting stomped rather easily.

I did take a picture of this stunning young lady.  When Nosy Gamer did a review he commented on the choice of clothing. Clothing does not seem to carry stats so how you dress is personal choice. It is not the normal the more powerful you are the less clothing and more breast your female character has to show.

For this shot the difference between our two female characters amused me.  I was like blue shirt! (blue is my favorite color) and cargo pants in urban camo! So great.  This is something I'd wear IRL.

The Quest for a Sword - The Secret World

My body, thankfully, wasn't trapped inside of the instance.  It was laying on top of the sewer when I ran back for it.  A discussion on Twitter with Nosy Gamer had me going to look for a bladed weapon to use since my magic wasn't cutting it.  I then found out that I needed skill points I didn't have so I ran back off to find some side missions to work on for skill points.

I need something to do!  I decided that because you are sent to the sheriff's office first that will be the best place to go to find some basic missions.  So far, they seem to be ranked normal, easy, hard and such things.  I assume that I will die to everything so I wandered around until I found one ranked normal.  The story is about defending the sheriff's office from the zombie attacks.  It seems that ritual sacrifice was pretty common in this town before the zombies.  What?  Okay.

I'm not sure that I understand the group instances. It seems that these events are shared but each person has a task.  So you can help people kill things but you also need to kill a certain amount in the help.  The game spawns tons so there is plenty for all.  The impression I get is that these are social but singular quests.  I'm not sure but it was helpful when someone ran up to assist me killing this big rainbow monster thing.

Thankfully someone random ran up and shot at it a lot with me.  It died and I finished that little mission string.  Phew.  I felt pretty good and now I had a skill point.  I needed two or three to go and buy a sword so I looked around and found a story chain to find missing people.

The first person was easy, he was hanging out in a church that seemed to be pretty anti-zombie.  The next ones were not hard but they were dead or zombies.  The one that really kicked my ass was the one at the firehouse.  Let me tell you, when firefighters become zombies they become ass kicking zombies with hatchets.  I died half a dozen times over the course of the quest to the firefighters.

After they finished kicking my ass I finally discovered the last guy, died yet again and accepted another story line to find food.  This time I wound back up with the firefighters and died another two times before I collected everything from their fire station.  I am very good at running around dead now back to my poor body.  I did stumble across a woman's body with a message on a cellphone.  I was trying to figure out where I needed to find a keypad but got distracted with dinner and such things and work tomorrow.

I'll play some more this weekend.  Hopefully with a sword to supplement my inadequate magical abilities.

Zombies and Dying and Puzzles - The Secret World

There was a patch today for the Secret World.  It took quite a while to download which is a them problem not a me problem.   Then once it downloaded the launcher errored   A relaunch fixed it and I was able to spend a little bit of time playing.

Eve, as always, just sucks up my time so I planned to start playing earlier in the day but I had so many things to do that I didn't get around to it till later.  Once I started, since I have gotten a hang of the quest log menus, I bounced right into the next stage of my mission which was finding some guy.  This had to do with the medical records that you read.  The map is very important at this point because the houses do not always have routes between them.

Looking at the map I also realized that the area I had to explore was much larger then I realized.  It wanders off in several different directions.  This is one zone and there is a lot to do here. I like that.  I hate when a world is not complete.  While it may not be Skyrim and I may not be hoarding all the woven baskets I pass, the world is very richly detailed and tactile.  I'm starting to recognize the streets I run around on.

I learned today that direction matters.  I almost died tot he zombies at one point because I wasn't facing them and I was trying to cast and I wasn't casting and I'm like WHY!

I need to find a healing spell or item or something.  I wound up assisting some people in a random mission that spawned in front of me.  The instances seem to be shared when it comes to doing things like damaging the NPCs.  Its kind of distracting when three people in the row spawn the same big bad ass looking creature if you were looking for the originality of it.

That may be my biggest worry fort his game.  Its very interesting but the replayability seems to be very low.  I am someone that rereads books over and over again so it concerns me when I think that the replayability of the story may be an issue.

I was also smart enough to use my environment against a zombie today!  I shot him across the fence and blapped him as he tried to run around to get me.  The NPC is smart and he didn't just let me blap him to death from the safety of the fence.  Still, it was fun to actually use the fence.  Then it turned out I had killed the wrong NPC and the one I wanted was in the sewer.  And here I had thought I was a bad ass.  Now I had to follow what looked like spots of green vomit.

I guess this is horror genera stuff?  The interesting thing is that when I selected "yes, please let me go into the sewer cuz I'm not smart," it asked me if I wanted to enter a solo instance.  Okay, so I've been right about things being multiple instances.

So far my method of fighting is button jamming while backing away to try to make range. I thought I could maybe creep around the sewer and be sneaky instead of just balls to the walls about everything.  It didn't work as well as I hoped.  I wound up dying, somewhere down in the sewers and it was getting late so I had to head out for the night.  I might be over my head with the main storyline.  I think I'll side track for now and do some of the other stuff for a while.  I work this weekend so side quests should be a good way to work through content without a lot of dedication.

Its about Puzzles - The Secret World

The Nosy Gamer explained that The Secret World is about puzzles.

Things make a bit more sense now and I am a lot happier.  I still haven't read the actual description of the game.  I find that they are often too full of the developers and advertisers dreams and not full enough of what the actual game consists of.

But I love puzzles.  A lot.  One of my things I do when I travel is buy a puzzle in the country that I traveled to.  I then put them together and use them as wall art.  Because, puzzles are amazing.

The Raven quest was a puzzle. I didn't get it at first.  Now, the entire thing makes a lot more sense to me.  The mission told me, "Find how to call the bad raven boss dude," and I was sitting there like "eh?"  It had been leading me by the hand and then it dropped my hand and I was sad.  I did figure it out on my own however.

So, what is next?

First, calming down.  As an Eve player one of the biggest adjustments to playing almost everything else is remembering that everyone isn't trying to kill me at any given time.  Except the zombies.

Running from zombies.  I'm getting better at it.

Anyway, I started a quest where I am trying to find pieces of paper.  Its helping me to learn how to orient myself with the location dials.  Basically, they drop you off in a circle that is green on your map and inside that circle, somewhere is the objective.  Only the objective looks like trash and there are zombies eating people everywhere.  That wasn't so bad but then I lost my HUD(or whatever it is called in non-eve games) and I couldn't actually do anything anymore or figure out how to get it back.  So I closed the game and reopened it and prayed that lost HUDs were not persistent.


It's my fault for being a button masher. I really am.  No grace or delicacy. I'm spamming my attacks while backing up and hoping for the best.

I also admit, I used Google to find out what the password to the computer was.  I kinda figured it out from the basics given but I'm terrible   My guesses were random.  Word guessing games like that are *not* my strong point.

I can shoot zombies thou!  Anyway, I picked up all of my pieces of paper and then went to crackle the riddle I couldn't crack.   I accomplished that ask which puts me on 5 of the 18 levels of the mission tier.  This is going to take me a while.

So far the multiplayer aspect has mostly been me shooting other peoples zombies when they are being chased by a hoard and other people shooting mine.  It feels like a busy solo game still.  I don't pay attention to the chats.  I'll probably wind up closing that window.

Oh, I also read the blurb on Amazon (Price is back up to 29.99) about the game.  I figured it was about time.

"Dark days are coming. All the myths, legends and conspiracies of the world are true. Three secret societies - the Illumunati, the Templar and the Dragon - are recruiting thousands of civilians from all over the world, civilians with extraordinary powers embedded in their DNA, to aid them in the war against darkness...and each other. "

That helps not at all. :P

Puzzles.  Okay.

I'm on Fire - The Secret World

For some reason my character caught on fire and has stayed that way.  I'm guessing I did something to make it happen.  It doesn't appear to hurt her any.

So I've managed to do a quest or two and get killed by zombies.  The quests or missions or whatever they are have been a bit vague.  One of them tells me to, "Follow the Ravens" and I have to run around until I find them and then kinda head in the direction they flew off in.  Meanwhile I'm trying to kill the zombies chasing me and not lose my path through the woods at the same time.  Then I fight some random dude that was kicking my ass until other players showed up and shot at him.  Well worth it to me.  There was a riddle I had to kind of figure out.

I then learned that some NPCs have cool down timers for their missions.  In the midst of that I learned something about assembly.  That took a lot of Google searches and clicking on menus to figure out what the various screens were.  I then made a glymph, attached it to my 'focus' or weapon or whatever it was and then made a phone call for experience points. Once I figured that out (thank you Google)  I ran off to try to find someone else along the main mission path.  That's when I found out that sprinting through town with a massive crowd of zombies chasing you is not the right thing to do.

This is me dying to zombies.

I go back to my body cuz it seems you have to (I don't know what I lose when I die) and do a better job of Zombie management   Only this time someone else brings a wave of zombies in from behind me and I die again.

Third times a charm.  Zombies are all cleared out.  I crawl back into my corpse, things go from black and white to full color and I go find the chick that I saw on the map to talk to her and experience some cut scenes.  You don't even have to click on them.  As soon as you come up, cut scene starts.

This is how I look, every cut scene.

I'm not on fire anymore as well, which is nice.  Maybe it was bad?  At some point I gained more of the points for the skill system.  Not knowing what I am doing I randomly allot them to what interests me the most.  This is my classic build in a game.  "I like this, select."

So far this feels like a single player game with other people running around.  I guess Eve is like that at the start as well.  I wonder if I have money. People were trading things for 50million.  I assume they don't mean ISK as in Eve.  I'm used to the incredably high prices from Eve Online so I'm not sure if 50mil is a lot here or not.

So off I went on my next adventure where I promptly fell off the bridge that led to my goal and had to run through mutant and zombie infested waters to escape.

Back at my goal I attacked the Pirate Captain when he popped up.  Two other people ran over and proceeded to beat on him as well.  He died and the next part of the mission sent me back to the main sheriff's office.  I was also on fire again for a while. It seems to be a skill I cast sometimes(Maybe?).

Anyway, the grocery store interrupted me for a bit.

The Secret World

The Nosy Gamer got me to try The Secret World.  It was on sale for $15 from Amazon after it went Free to Play.  Nosy is an enthusiastic Eve player but also tries a lot of other MMOs.  I'm not prone to trying that many MMOs due to my Eve Obsession.  I haven't logged onto Aion in months.

For $15 I'll give a game a try.  Its a month of Eve's subscription or a cheap meal or however one converts their money into time into entertainment.  I don't drink coffee or go to Starbucks so I can't use that as an evaluation.  He likes it and it seemed interesting so, sure, why not?

I probably should have read the "about".  I haven't even done it as I start to write this.  Because, why not?  I'm prone to just trying things to try them.  I know the game is not Eve and its not space and its not spaceships.  But I like Video games.

Anyone ever played Limbo?  Its a fantastic, fantastic spooky puzzle that is so simple and elegant that it has a surrealism that I can't even begin to explain.

Anyway, I got the game and waited until today to settle down and play it. The download servers were okay. I have a ridiculous connection recently upgraded to 300/70 FiOS by my husband.  It cheerfully tests out what download servers can do.  It still took a bit to download this game.  Not a big deal, but if your connection is slower, set it for over night or while out.

I started the game up.  The graphics are kind of hand drawn and kind of well rendered. I have directx 11 installed and the resolution cranked all the way up.  I can't say I am super impressed with the facial movements and such.  But its far from terrible.

There are different domains to choose.  I asked Nosy where he was and picked the same so that I can stalk him easier in the future.  You then pick one of the three factions.  I chose the Asian (Japanese(?)) one.  The character creator is simple but allows for enough customization to let you feel like a Special Snowflake in a Blizzard.

Once I entered the game it became the land of Endless Cut scenes.

I don't like visual movie/video media much.  I like games because I am controlling them.  Watching things doesn't do it for me.  The Secret World put me through many cut scenes.  Then my character had a lesbian encounter.  When the other chick crawled into her lap I was like, "Unexpected."

After the girl on girl action it gives a mild intro tutorial mode that is a memory.  Okay.  Once done with that the chick kicks you out without even a kiss and off you go to train your power.  This wasn't overly clear as well.  It turns out there are guns, hand(sword/punching/something) and magic powers.  I didn't notice the other two because the guns are right behind the contact.  Thankfully, I run around and quickly discovered magic.  I then learned that the doors leading you out tell you that there are other things to try.  Nice of them to realize that their layout is terrible.

I spent a minute fiddling with my powers.  It looks like you can remap your selections with ease.  I think.  I'm not really sure.  I decided on elemental magic.  I was leaning towards blood magic but the slurping pools of blood you throw got creepy pretty quickly.

So you run off, wind up finding some kind of secret magical portal area, have more cut scenes, and get sent off on your first... mission?  I really have no idea what is going on.  They've told me I'm special and stuff happens and I have to go deal with it cuz they told me to and they are more special.  That's what I understand so far.  I'm ready to gank them all and go explore.  None of them are overly interesting. I keep finding golden honey combs that tell me to press U to access and give some quote that I don't get that then vanish.  Collectibles or achievements or something?

Sliding down the tree was fun.  I ran off to my mission and got, yet another cut scene.  Sigh.  Then I decided to write this and was disconnected for being idle.  I'll keep chewing away at it for a while and see how it goes.

Edit to Add:

1. I have two Eve windows open on my other screen.  Hahahah, I'm way to addicted to not play and chat at all.
2. If you play a guy character do you get a homosexual cut scene instead of a lesbian one?