The Sad Punk said:
The Secret World also looks good - the modern and non high-fantasy setting is certainly a nice change of pace, and I'm curious to see how it deals with no classes/levelling.
The classless, level-less system is nice. People tend to need numbers, and you do get a loose sort of category system going. While you don't have a numerical level, people tend to go off gear--ql 1-10 where ql means quality level. In order to wear the higher QL stuff you have to gain skill points, which means run the quests and instances that are for your gear level. For instance, going to Egypt in ql2 and 3 gear won't work, but doing those quests in 5/6 combo til you build up sets of ql8ish to go off to Transylvania. I guess no one who spends nearly as much time a week playing games as I do at work can be called a casual gamer, but I'm not all ql10ed out yet, and have mostly just done the easier quests in the beginning three area a bunch of times, run the first couple instances a few times, and am just starting to hit up the quests in Egypt. For someone like me, who gets bored very easily with a single type of combat, it's great. I've got a pretty nice pistols/elemental pure dps build, hammers/swords for tanking (chaos/swords seems to work better, and from what I've read the glance/evasion tank can be godly in pvp--I have yet to do much pvp though), was running an assault rifle/sword dps build for questing which combined ranged and melee combat with a good amount of survivability that was fun the other day. I'm too ADHD and don't have a lot of the abilities that cost a lot of ability points (which your xp gives you as you're doing stuff) because I keep messing around with different weapons, but i can do it all on one character. Not like in swtor or wow where I had to have eight or ten characters just to try out everything.
And having come from games like wow and swtor where questing is the most dreadful, boring way to level (at least swtor had the storyline stuff, but after having done the non-class stuff more than once that just turned into "blahblahblah just give me my credits stupid npc" ), some of them are difficult. The investigation missions, which are one time things that usually involve googling stuff--even of you're not cheating with a walk through, there's a built in web browser so you don't have to window out if you need to look up something. For instance, one leg of a chain quest requires you to access instructions on how to disable this piece of equipment sitting on the beach (read: the order in which you have to click a number of panels on the box), so you go to a computer, it asks you for the password, and gives you this vague "my wife" as a hint. Well who the fuck's wife? Search some bodies lying on the ground, go to their company's website (real website, fake in-game company), read the about so and so page, and it's hiding there. Lots of puzzle shit, some of which is pretty easy, but others are absolute pain in the asses that are quite the far cry from everything being clearly marked out on your map, not even requiring you to read them. Most of the repeatable quests (beginning ones have 18 hour cool downs, the Egypt ones I've done are apparently 2-day) are "deliver this to the guy over there," "kill 10 of these guys," typical mmo quests. But killing zombie firefighters=win.
