Tag: Funcom

The Story Continues: Funcom Announces Secret World Legends Expansion


The secret world of The Secret World just got bigger as Funcom today announced the first story expansion since the game went free to play last year. Continuing the main story, Dawn of the Morninglight leads players to investigate the faction of the same name.

The Morninglight began in The Secret World’s story as seemingly insignificant threats with the player finding bodies of their agents present seemingly wherever a disaster occurred. As the story went on, the Morninglight’s insidious nature began to show itself, and in Dawn of the Morninglight players will finally get the opportunity to infiltrate the secretive organization and see how it ticks.

“This is it, this is the next chapter every Secret World player have been waiting for,” says Josh Mills, Producer for Secret World Legends. “Ever since we left off in Tokyo before going free-to-play, players have been wanting to know what happens next. The whole team is really excited to finally be able to provide some answers to that and taking the story into a location such as South Africa has been an absolute blast. This is Secret World Legends unlike you’ve ever seen it before.”

(Source: Funcom)

 

Funcom Announces Acquisition Of Conan Property


Funcom has announced that it has approved plans to acquire 50% of the Conan the Barbarian portfolio. The acquisition, approved by the board and pending approval at a general investor meeting in January, would see Funcom benefiting from a 50% royalty reduction on Age of Conan and Conan Exiles while also acquiring 50% royalties for any game developed using Conan and various other properties acquired as part of this venture.

The joint venture company will hold interactive/video gaming Intellectual Property (IP) rights based on the works of Robert E. Howard and classic Swedish pen & paper and board game properties, including attractive IPs such as “Conan the Barbarian”, “Solomon Kane”, “Mutant Chronicles”, “Mutant: Year Zero”.

The acquisition will allow Funcom to secure more frequent launches of games both produced internally as well as co-developed and published from third party partners. Rather than paying cash, Funcom will be paying with shares, reducing risk and increasing revenues. More information on the acquisition can be found at the link below:

(Source: Funcom)

Review: Secret World Legends


Secret World Legends is a reboot in the sense that the second verse to a song is a reboot to the first. Functionally it follows the same ebb and flow, but it feels like somewhere along the way the lead singer/manager died, only to be replaced by the studio label’s brand manager who doesn’t so much care about playing sick tunes at the next small gig as he does monetizing the band to death. The end result reminds me a lot of City of Steam, a fun game that didn’t do so well in revenue and as such was resurrected as a shambling money zombie to the detriment of the community and ultimately the game’s viability as people left for greener pastures.

After heavily considering whether I want to review a game that is now several months old and rebooted from a five year old title, I guess you can already tell my answer.

1. Let’s Talk Praise, Before I Tear It Apart

I’ll be the first to admit that my memories of The Secret World are as biased as they can get, owing to the 2012 launch and accompanying alternate reality games that were ridiculously cool. I can still remember sitting at my computer with a few thousand people watching CCTV camera footage of a park in Montreal where one of the chat members met up with secret agents (actors) and was given the next piece of the puzzle as we all tried to crowdsource this intricate puzzle.

Since the meat of Secret World Legends is pretty much on par with The Secret World, I think it’s safe to start with its two big draws; questing and the world. The secret world of the Secret World is one of myths, legends, and conspiracies. Imagine that everything you read on the internet is true, from living mummies in Egypt to vampires in Transylvania, swamp zombies in New England and filth in Tokyo. The Illuminati, the Dragon, and the Templars are very powerful entities unlike in the real world where contractual obligations require me to state that the Illuminati is certainly not controlling your everyday life via radio waves. You once again don the uniform of and join one of the three factions in their bid to stop the end of the world, mostly to forward their own purposes.

Missions vary greatly in length and complexity, from the simple “kill x creatures” jobs to 29 tier journeys that can take more than an hour to complete. Because a lot of the puzzles involve knowledge of Morse code, bible scripture, and 18th century musicians, the game has helpfully built in a web browser to assist you in looking up the answers. As well as aiding in learning about the world in which you inhabit, missions also go far into establishing the plot and actors that you’ll be encountering along the way. I’m not lying about that knowledge of bible scripture by the by, a fair amount of puzzles early on will require you to source from the Good Book.

One of my favorite parts of the story is in the scorched desert which features a series of quests that are basically stripped right out of an Indiana Jones movie. You even get to have a prolonged series of fights on a moving train. Many of the quests start and end with fully voiced cutscenes, and while the voice acting and animations aren’t always so great, it’s a nice change from the walls of quest text that still permeate most games in the medium.

Combat is, and I know this is something of an unpopular opinion, better than the average traditional MMO, and I can give me sound reasoning. While combat does devolve into the usual MMO repetition of the same five buttons in specific orders, each fight tends to last just long enough that you don’t feel like you’re grinding out, and short enough that each trash mob doesn’t feel like busywork. The game encourages you to keep moving by giving most enemies some form of powerful area-effecting attack, so Secret World Legends basically drip feeds you enough adrenaline to keep it from getting World of Warcraft quest-grind level boring.

But now that I’ve talked about my two favorite parts of Secret World Legends, let’s get the rest of this over with.

2. The Sheer Incompetence Of It

If you want to understand the criminal incompetence of handling in regards to The Secret World, all you have to do is look at the fact that people from Funcom went to actual, physical prison over fraud and corruption related to this game. Criminal incompetence is a term that I’ve used for a long time in regards to The Secret World, and it is still applicable to Secret World Legends, but worse. If The Secret World was held together with duct tape and chewing gum, Secret World Legends feels like the dry gum was hastily covered in a sign that says “nothing broken here.”

To further explain my point, I hit a spot while leveling where the story mode had become completely impossible to progress. I leveled up my character and managed to reach the Scorched Desert, the first desert area. At one point, the main story tells you to complete a quest called “A Time to Every Purpose” for your contact Said before he will let you continue. Funny story, though: This mission is bugged and has been so since long before the relaunch in July. At one point in the mission, you have to craft two items in succession in order to progress, and sometimes the second just won’t craft. At all, for no reason. It also doesn’t help that this quest highlights some of the user interface chunks that are no longer functioning but remain in the game anyway.

After reading through numerous conflicting theories on how to fix said glitch via Reddit and the official forums, I eventually found a method that worked for me. You craft the first item and then leave the area, log out, and come back which resets the quest but doesn’t remove the first item from your inventory. Get to the point where you craft the items and just craft the second item. Voila! Using a glitch to fix another glitch.

Like the pyramids that dot the Egyptian landscape, many of these bugs are old and decrepit. The fact that many of these bugs have been in the game for months and still haven’t been fixed is depressing, the idea that some have been around on and off since the original launch is downright pathetic. It’s indicative of a company that is either grossly incompetent or pitifully understaffed, but considering that Funcom’s history of MMOs seems to be one unmitigated disaster of a launch after another (Anarchy Online and Age of Conan, followed by The Secret World and Lego Minifigures), I’m inclined to believe that the answer lies in both theories.

The game just finished its Halloween event which is effectively just a reboot of an event from several years ago. The event had major, progression blocking bugs including one where a portal you had to step through to continue the quest just wouldn’t appear, for no reason.

3. R-E-C-Y-C-L-E Recycle! Make Gear Grinding Boring Again.

Let’s talk about loot and gear progression in Secret World Legends, more specifically how underwhelming both aspects of the game are. It’s important that we talk about both in the same section as they specifically go hand in hand.

Secret World Legends doesn’t much care about its loot, it knows that 9.9 times out of 10 you’re going to stick with what you have equipped and as such has no problem feeding you tons of junk with every completed mission. At the beginning of the game, you’ll pick your first primary and secondary weapons, a task that the game forces you to do before you even know what each weapon really does, and then locks the rest away behind some pretty aggressive currency grind. Rather than feed you a steady drip of increasingly fancy looking gear, Secret World Legends has you to level up your equipment by feeding it similar equipment, which are obtained via random bags given as rewards for completing missions. A mission might give you a weapon bag, a glyph bag, and a talisman bag, or some combination of the three.

While I like the idea of being able to upgrade your gear, the manner in which Secret World Legends seems to rely almost entirely on feeding garbage into your weapons in order to slowly level them seems to cut entire swaths of content out of the game. It isn’t like, well every single other MMO where part of the reason to play is the hopes that you’ll get some cool piece of gear. It makes completing quests feel less rewarding, not to mention raids/dungeons, as your best bet at sweet loot is some junk that you’ll recycle to incrementally boost your existing gear. Get used to staring at the same weapon for most of your time playing, because especially after the first few levels there isn’t much of a reason to start leveling up a new weapon.

So here you have an MMO with unsatisfying loot and virtually nonexistent gear progression. The more you level up and upgrade your gear to higher ranks, the longer it takes to get the pieces necessary to perform those upgrades. But hey, the cash shop is always there to speed that progression up, a sad reminder that certain elements of the game were functionally crippled in order for Funcom to try and make some extra moolah off of the free to play transition, at the expense of fun and, if it mimics The Secret World, long term financial stability and player loyalty.

4. Funcom’s Generosity With Loot boxes

One thing you may have noticed is that I’ve been talking about loot gained through mission rewards, and I haven’t said much about loot gained through monster drops. This is simple, monsters don’t drop loot. There are named boss creatures that roam around the map that will drop loot, usually just a random item bag, but monsters in Secret World Legends only drop one thing: Loot boxes. They drop a ton of loot boxes, and nothing else. According to the game, my character has 50 hours invested into it right now. In that time, I have managed to accumulate around 150 loot boxes.

Now that translates to one box on average every 20 minutes, which doesn’t sound so bad and also doesn’t take into account the amount of time spent not killing anything. In reality when you’re killing mobs, these things drop every few minutes. This still wouldn’t be a problem, after all I play Neverwinter and that game drops loot boxes like candy, but that’s coupled with the fact that mobs drop nothing else. Literally the only loot that drops from standard level mobs needs to be unlocked with real money.

It also doesn’t help that the loot box drops are nearly completely worthless. Barring the very rare cosmetic item, of which I have yet to obtain a single one from my daily patron keys, the loot boxes drop distillates and pretty much nothing else. Distillates are items that are used to further increase the experience on your gear, so one of the perks of a patron subscription is you get to boost your gear up every day by a certain amount.

This generosity also expands to the game’s varied dungeons, where your limited daily keys can be used in dungeon lootboxes to obtain even more distillates and junk gear to feed your inventory.

5. Yet I Keep Coming Back

I have very little reason to believe that my time in Secret World Legends will extend beyond completing the story, frankly I have neither the intent nor the willpower to continue the endless grind via repeating missions to continue leveling various weapons and equipment pieces. My character just hit level 50, and is about the venture into the relatively unknown lands of Transylvania. Even then, I’m feeling my interest waning in continuing on with the story after making the arduous journey essentially back to where I left off from the abandoned The Secret World.

Verdict: 2.5/5 – Secret World Legends feels bad all around, from the enhanced combat system that doesn’t actually change much to forcing the existing community to either forgo their characters and in some instances purchases to start over or be left behind on the abandoned-yet-still-operating-until-Funcom-arbitrarily-kills-it-for-lack-of-players The Secret World, while ignoring issues that have been present in the game for years. It strips content from the original game, some for the better, while crippling other parts for the sake of the cash shop and loot boxes. While the missions are still engaging, gear progression is a mind-numbing snore and another function crippled for the sake of selling you lootboxes.

Secret World Legends Adds Orochi Tower


Funcom today released the latest update to Secret World Legends, introducing the Orochi Tower and bringing the Tokyo story to a close. Players have been keeping an eye on the so far inaccessible tower since Tokyo became available earlier this year.

Now that the area is accessible, players will finally be able to bring the story arc to an end.

“This final chapter of the Tokyo saga features hours of new story and gameplay content,” says Executive Producer Scott Junior. “Players get to explore over 20 sections of the massive tower, fighting their way to the top to uncover dark secrets behind the Orochi Corporation’s experiments. This concludes the Tokyo storyline and brings Secret World Legends up to date with the content of The Secret World. From here on out it will be unexplored territory for everyone and we are very excited about the future.”

More details on the update can be found on the official website.

Funcom Boasts Best Half Ever As Conan Exiles Propels Profits


Funcom’s second quarterly revenue report is out, and the results are as expected, positive. The combined success of Conan Exiles and Secret World Legends has propelled the Oslo developer to its best half in the history of the company, nearly halving their debt and increasing equity by 40%. Sales of Secret World Legends have exceeded company expectations, although the sales had little effect on this quarter’s revenue due to its late release and will not be seen until the next release. Overall revenue increased 79% over last year.

To complement its success, Funcom has rebranded as Funcom 2.0, with a brand new logo of a screaming face on a burning flag, to convey the developer’s passion, ambition, and history.

Two new games are currently in production at Funcom, with the Oslo studio working on a new Conan game and the Durham studio in the concept stage on a game that will be dependent on the success of Secret World Legends. In addition, Funcom has announced that it is partnering with Bearded Dragons to produce a new game for 2018. Funcom had previously revealed that Johnny Depp will be involved in a TV series based off of The Secret World.

(Source: Funcom)

Secret World Legends Returns to Tokyo


Secret World Legends is going to Tokyo, again! Players familiar with the original The Secret World storyline will be well acquainted with Tokyo and its quirks, but the zone has just become available on reboot title Secret World Legends.

Tokyo marks the first of three major content additions that will add new areas, content, and story. True to its name, the Tokyo update brings players to (you guessed it) Tokyo to continue the fight against the filth and the evil that it brings.

“The Tokyo updates represent the final part of the storyline that was The Secret World,” says Executive Producer Scott Junior. “Secret World Legends has opened up the game to an entirely new audience who will experience the Tokyo storyline for the very first time. But there is much more to come, and we especially want our veteran players to know that as the storyline of The Secret World ends, the storyline of Secret World Legends is about to start. This winter, a brand new story will be revealed.  Players will get to go to new locations, meet new characters, and experience adventures they never have before.”

Secret World Legends is free to play on Steam.

Nontroversial: Secret World Legends and the Unsurprising Subscription


Subscribing to Secret World Legends is a subscription that automatically renews like a subscription. This statement may be obvious to anyone who has subscribed to a game, a newspaper, or television service, but for some reason it needs to be reiterated when talking about Secret World Legends. The community has been in a bit of a tizzy this week, which may have origins in trolling, over some misconceptions regarding the game’s subscription.

First, let’s discuss the claim that Secret World Legends signs you up for a recurring payment without explaining this. It isn’t true. The button to subscribe says “subscribe,” and when signing up with your payment details it explicitly states that you are signing up for a recurring payment. This is standard for virtually every video game with a subscription on the market and is made clear when checking out.

Second, there are statements floating around that the game sets you up for a one year subscription through Paypal when signing up. This is another falsehood. When you sign up with Paypal, you authorize Funcom to charge you the subscription fee every month as long as you’re still subscribed. The authorization lasts for a year, a limitation imposed by Paypal, but does not constitute a year-long subscription. It basically means that you won’t have to log into paypal and authorize Funcom every month. In a way, this subscription system is more restrictive as other games won’t stop after a year and will keep billing as long as the card is good.

In short, a subscriptions constitute subscribing to a service, and setting up a recurring payment means a payment that occurs more than once. It does not, incidentally, allow Funcom to take money whenever they feel like, for whatever sum they feel like.

 

Funcom Celebrates Traffic Surge, Plans Roadmap


This may come as little surprise to gamers, but Funcom today is celebrating the initial success for Secret World Legends, boasting that the game is at the highest player activity in years.

“We are very encouraged by the initial success of Secret World Legends; it has been years since we last saw a surge in player activity like this in the Secret World universe and it is a very good start leading up to Steam launch on July 31st,” says Funcom CEO Rui Casais

For players more interested in seeing what content Funcom has in store, you’re in luck. Along with the news of the population surge, Funcom released its roadmap for the months to come. This week marks the launch of elite dungeons with scaling difficulty.

Later this month will see the release of the Transylvania story missions with the special event to unlock Tokyo either in July or August and related world content. You can check out the roadmap at the link below, which goes through to next year.

(Source: Roadmap)

MMOments: Secret World Legends and the Power Of Second Impressions


The Secret World will go down in history as one of the few games to put some of its executives in actual, physical prison, a strong connection considering that the game itself didn’t exactly leave much of a splash on the genre when it launched in 2012. It’s disappointing but true, while critics were praising the title for its intelligent missions and players were getting through the launch ARG, the game initially tanked Funcom’s stock value and never really garnered the kind of following it deserved or really needed. It was no failure by any means, don’t get me wrong, but five years later, the game is in some dire need of a reboot.

For those who haven’t given The Secret World a look, Secret World Legends is a not-exactly-horror game set on modern day Earth with a lore steeped in conspiracy. To picture the world you will inhabit, imagine that every conspiracy theory you’ve ever heard is true. The Illuminati exist but they don’t really control everything, there is a town in Solomon Island, Maine that has been besieged by zombies, the Egyptian gods were real, and Transylvania actually does have vampires living in it. Who knows, Bigfoot probably also exists. You start the game by choosing one of three factions to join: The Illuminati, the Dragon, and the Templars. Who you join basically determines your faction quest line and your choice of faction specific outfits, otherwise you’re pretty much going through the same zones and missions.

The absolute strongest aspect of Secret World Legends carries over from The Secret World: Its story telling. While the animations are about as stiff and lifeless as you’d expect from a Funcom game, the missions themselves are quite a bit of fun to go on. Best of all are the investigation missions, bits that have you solving rather difficult puzzles that require outside reading and research. Normally this is where I’d joke and say “grab your bible, because you’re going to need it,” but you’re actually going to need access to a bible if you don’t want to cheat and look up the answers. A number of the puzzles in Secret World Legends involved cracking open a bible and reading passages to find clues. Crazy, right?

You won’t be doing any long division or physics problems for the puzzles, they’re more understanding references and taking a look at the scenery. Some are obscure, require you to really soak in the scenery, while others are simple “the answer is the length of this song.” Almost every mission starts and ends with a cutscene, and usually some sort of message from your faction offering some more information on the case.

Combat is the next big thing in Secret World Legends, because the one that existed in The Secret World wasn’t exactly what you’d call…well received. This time around, combat is more action oriented, with a reduced number of slots for actions along with each weapon having its own special ability. Combat isn’t great, but it is a step up from the floatiness of The Secret World.

I can appreciate that the game points out harder enemies on the map, not only because they are more engaging to fight than the random mobs roaming around but because this game is seriously stingy when it comes to drops. I imagine that Trond Aas must be getting more from his commissary than Funcom is willing to dole out in goods. The plus side is that you don’t have to spend much time comparing stats since your weapon/talisman drops will just be recycled to gear up your current weapon, so the lack of loot is sort of complimented by the fact that it is mostly useless for purposes other than feeding your current equipment regardless.

As someone who abandoned The Secret World early over its lack of players (understandably contributing to just that problem), I’m glad to see Funcom give the game another chance rather than letting it slide into a slow death. While you would be within your rights to be angry about having to start over,

More impressions to come.

Exploit Knocks Secret World Legends Into Extended Downtime


What originally began as a simple maintenance downtime has resulted in the Secret World Legends servers being offline for much of the day, with services now expected to resume at 5pm eastern. The downtime originates from an exploit discovered in the game that allowed players to generate mass quantities of currency. As a result, Funcom has taken the servers down for an extended period of time to figure out what to do about the exploit and to deal with the spread of bad currency being injected into the economy.

We’re terribly sorry for any inconvenience caused by today’s extended maintenance. As some of you may know by now, there was an issue discovered with the Exchange and it’ll take time to come up with a proper solution to both the underlying issue and the effects it may have caused. Today’s maintenance period has been extended until at least 17:00 EDT / 21:00 UTC (please correct me if the conversion is wrong somehow) and we’ll try to keep you in the loop on any other developments. Patch notes will be posted on the official website at www.secretworldlegends.com once the servers are back up.

While the exploit itself wasn’t dealt with until this downtime, Funcom reacted quickly after learning of its existence and was able to disable to auction house to avoid further complications. For now, the servers aren’t expected to come back up until 5pm at the earliest.

(Source: Reddit)