[ChicletPrime]

two seconds out of my day to say SECRET WORLD ROCKS! fuck, that was (and maybe still is) A Game Of The Ages. I loved that thing to pieces, I had bad dreams about The Black House and the Blue Ridge mine when I first encountered them. The storyline for the carnival grounds in the second zone was *chef's kiss*.

Back inna bit for the rest of this, I'm wandering in and out from work. Which keeps happening to me.

[Coldsaturn]

two seconds out of my day to say SECRET WORLD ROCKS! fuck, that was (and maybe still is) A Game Of The Ages. I loved that thing to pieces, I had bad dreams about The Black House and the Blue Ridge mine when I first encountered them. The storyline for the carnival grounds in the second zone was *chef's kiss*.

Back inna bit for the rest of this, I'm wandering in and out from work. Which keeps happening to me.

I will actually cry you know tsw/swl ;____;
What a masterful example of world building and lore. So many places where I went "oh this is creepy <3" So many good NPCs.
Forever in love with the city of the sun god. So many players hate it, and I understand why, but the vibes in that map with the background noise filled with human screams was gnarly in the best way possible.

At least once I year I log in to walk around a bit and remember the good ol' times with the cabal I was in and all the daily dungeons and raids ;_; good times.

Take your time, it's so good to be in a forum where I can expect a new post to be sitting there when I check on it  :heart:

[ChicletPrime]

hang on, no wait, i know i have this here somewhere...

hah! found it! original game photo album! my very first couple of baby characters:

[attachment=9][attachment=12]

aww, lookit me, being all fresh recruit!

[Coldsaturn]

ashdfsjdldasdk ;__;

I had an entire tumblr blog dedicated to my old TSW playthrough before they switched to SWL.

[ChicletPrime]

I have to be honest, I didn't get super far in it.

In the standalone game, I got to the third area (Black Canyon? Blue Mountain?) before everything just started to get too hard for me as a lone player, too nervous to find friends or a group to keep continuing. I really, really enjoyed the game but it wasn't easy and I'm a sucker for giving up when it gets rough.

When Legends came out, I gave it another college try and REALLY had a good time as they had in fact made it a bunch easier to progress so I got to the fourth zone (name really escapes me, the mummy/Egypt one) and was happily toodling along. Then I kind of realized that my weapon picks just weren't really doing it for me emotionally and then I ran smack dab into the wall of free-to-play game mechanics, wherein I would have to spent a rather stupid amount of time and resources to go back and try something different since it wasn't like the first game of just pick up new weapon and begin swinging. And what if I didn't like the new weapons any better?

So I stopped playing again. But the game itself has both thumbs up from me, I enjoyed it immensely each time and I'd recommend it to anybody that wanted to give it a go.

[Coldsaturn]

I first got into it because it was advertised as a MMO that you could solo entirely, and it was technically right. It was way harder and took much much longer, but one could solo the entire storyline and all the maps. So I started to do that, and I was lucky enough to have a few online friends who also played it, so we occasionally met and burned through difficult missions in teams. Then I continued alone for quite a while, and then I was recruited for a huge cabal in game and I decided to join them. That gave me access to their discord server where they organized daily dungeons and raids and farming sessions, and while I'm not too keen on the social part of MMOs (can't spare the energy to deal with assholes or people in general most of the time), that community was largely very friendly, and it got me through end game content farming repeatedly.
When funcom decided to drop tsw for swl, I was peaking at tsw lol I had just completed my entire skill wheel (it was something like 536 skills), and was now pretty good at switching between builds to play different roles in dungeons. I kinda loved how complicated making up builds was, and how you had near endless options to synergize with passives and actives.

Then came swl, and so many people from that cabal straight up said fuck it and left. swl largely penalized old-time players (even paying players) by clearing the slate and making everyone start again from 0 and eliminating pvp, rendering hundreds of hours of playing time and hundreds of -insert money currency- spent now useless. I still jumped to swl because I loved the game too much, but it was a different feeling altogether.

I was a paying player in tsw, and I stayed a patron player for a long time in swl (mostly because they made it impossible to grind up levels without paying; the timeout between missions is ridiculously long f2p), and I still hop in when there are big annual events just to breathe a bit of the magic again where you see 50 players waiting with you to kill a superboss. But it's a dying game and only a handful of die-hard fans are still there. It kills me a bit, because in terms of vibes that game is one of the best I played.

[ChicletPrime]

Polaris Fight! --- i only wrote a few starter pieces for Secret World, so if you're interested at all, let me know and I'll plunk 'em down here for funsies over your morning margarita.

---

“C'mon big boy, show me what you really got!”

The problem is, it’s got more than me. Way, way more than me. It fills the horizon like a malevolent wall, rising up in a shuddering wave and I'm so close we're nearly waltzing. Broken scales and sloughing skin, writhing gray flesh full of things crawling in the folds; things that I’m trying very hard not to recognize. There's too many eyes, too many slithering tentacles with slime dripping madness into the waters and over everything the rank, fetid stench of long rotted death.

Does it understand english? Because this time I barely have time to see it coming at all. Frantically throw myself to the side as it snakes up like a mountain, faster than something that big should be able to think, let alone move and three tons of alien imperative comes down way too damned close, swamping the water around us in a foul tsunami.

I’m spun away in a tumble, spitting swamp and muck and things I definitely don’t want to think about. Grope around desperately in the dark waters. Fuck. Fuck. An aeon later my cramped fingers close again around the grip.

I am not going to be anyone’s.. any thing’s afternoon brunch, no matter how big it is. Just. Not. Happening. Flip the sodden mass of hair out of my eyes for the umpteenth time, staggering to my feet even as I drag the weapon back up to the surface with me.

If I get out of this in one piece, I’m getting a haircut. A pixie bob. Something cute and terribly, utterly short.

“That it?!”

“Cuidado, niña!”  He flashes in from the side, brushing past me like he’s not even winded, the steel machete a black streaked extension of his arm. "Go faster," he growls, “or we're all dead.”

There’s no time to spit anything back. He connects with something, a spinning move, two handed and faster than I can track and there’s yet more blood in the water then, another ounce of flesh carved away. Out of nowhere it occurs to me that if we’re going to paper cut this thing to death, somebody should probably dial out for pizza.

It screams but I’m not even sure what it felt, I’m not even sure it can feel. It doesn’t seem to care, of course. It still wants me, swinging its massive head around, it doesn’t care about the other mewling things in the water. I’m the one it wants, the one that it needs, I’ve made damned sure of it.  At least how to piss something off is one lesson well learned.

A heart blink and twenty feet away now, his hand rises towards me, palm out. He’s right under it, almost completely obscured by the heavy shadow. I can’t see his face and I have no time to decide if I’m grateful for that or not.

Copper and offal, the sudden heat grabs me by the throat and I gag. The arcing magic squirms over my skin like an unwelcome lover, washing my vision to red; greasy and slick and sly. It crawls under my uniform like a thousand angry centipedes.

Blood magic, blood mage, rough and impatient as they almost always are. It's what they do, it's who they are, masters of stealing life to bind to other purposes, everything bleeding out with the pain and ichor. This time it's vectored transfusion to heal my wounds, ease the blossoming flower bruises, drain away the lactic acid in muscles straining to keep dodging and out of the way in this one-sided chase. He’s no doubt siphoning some off for himself, the sanctimonious bastard.

I hate blood mages the most. It's like paying for sex - you get what you need, all right, but it feels like you have to scrub everything with a wire brush afterwards. But energy rises even as the taste of scorched metal recedes, things knitting back together inside me fast and sweet. I need it; just as he needs me if we’re all going to get through this nightmare.

Standing hock deep in void and mire, I have a sudden overwhelming wish to be back in the nice, safe classroom with Steven's cultured tones; his gray on gray suit and cool hazel eyes, the trim goatee and fine kid leather gloves.  The image is so strong I can almost smell the lilacs under the window, almost see the warm wood of the study walls rising around me. Back when everything was so nice and clean and blessedly theoretical.

He'd definitely never have gotten himself trapped like this, slogging it out in some screwed up, phased out reality, partnered up at head office with some inner city punk who probably cribbed his first spell book from his cracked out grandma. The others aren’t much better; some chick with identity issues and a pair of guns to her limp credit and her wisecracking boyfriend or brother or familiar or whatever the hell he is.

Take it, darling. Use it, save the bitchy mood for later. Work with what you've got, not what you wish you had. Every tool has a use.

Right on cue it screams as it finds me again and it lumbers forward, one baleful eye out of dozens spearing me where I stand. Six tons of elder godlet if it weighs a pound and we apparently weren’t invited to the tea party.

Bring up the hammer and set myself, borrowed strength making it seem easy. Paper cuts it is.

“C’mon, big boy!” I shout, just in case it does understand. “Bring it!”

[Coldsaturn]

As a Blood Magic/Assault Rifles user, I am delighted with your description of blood healing. I can almost smell the scene you wrote. Excellent.
Truly, SWL wordlbuilding is so charming in writing, it just has that perfect amount of black humor, death, cynicism, and plain ol' ancestral magic fighting against edge-cutting technology. Dump here anything you're willing to share, I will gobble it up and ask for seconds!

[ChicletPrime]

I had a lot of fun in Polaris, notwithstanding our failure to clinch the deal. The whole (*waves hands*) everything about Secret World is just so, SO ripe for extrapolation if you're at all bent that way. The skill level of the writing, at least in the zones I made it to, was so head and shoulders above everything else that it was standing on a deluxe soapbox. I've never been in another game like it - even FFXIV (which I feel has the better *story*) didn't have the consistency of text excellence that SW did.

do you hear the buzzing, sweetling?

man. now i want to load it up and poke at it where nobody can see me.

[Coldsaturn]

Oh it gets even better going forward, they really had stellar writing and I haven't found anything similar since. Not to that point of loving dedication to every single character, no matter how minor.

Well, you ever want to be carried through a few maps, you know where to find me!