Video Games

Harada seems to be down with the idea of free DLC, so I'm of the persuasion that a lot of the characters you mentioned will probably come out later. Shout outs to Namco though for the Tekken Tag 2 free DLC, I mean, I know of no other game developer that would release that many extra characters for free (even if a fair few were clones of other characters). The "clone" characters already have hope considering that Panda is set to be released alongside Kuma, so it wouldn't be too difficult to get Anna and Armor King in there, I'd imagine. Really, nearly all of those characters you brought up have high hopes, except for maybe Bruce, as cool of a character he is. 

The number of mongs in Maximilian's latest Injustice video is pretty astounding.

Oh dear, I do hope these new ones are not silly choices.

OMG GUYS MASS EFFFECT ANDROMEDA IS FINALLY HERE AND IT SO GODDAMNED ... okay, I guess.

Persona 5 is awesome. I've already sunk around 60 hours into it. It's the only game I've truly enjoyed in a while and drawn me away from League. Horizon Zero Dawn and Nioh are very well done games and they're fun for sure, but I haven't really fell in love with them.

I'm reposting this from elsewhere, because it concerns one of my favorite games of all time, The Secret World.



So, in case anyone missed it, Funcom had a quick Twitch stream yesterday that showed off a very quick look at Secret World Legends. Some quick points (obviously some are a matter of subjective opinion):
Everything they showed is still in beta and is subject to change. They confirmed that the UI will be changed entirely, they were only using a current TSW UI as a placeholder.

The graphics look either equivalent to TSW or slightly better. I think they did mention that they are going to use more particle effects but considering it's still on the Dreamfall engine I don't think there will be a huge graphical improvement.

Character creation did feature a revamped UI though. Preset faces (no sliders, because it was mentioned that slider options interfere with building face clothing that wouldn't end up clipping through some characters), but also more initial options. TSW's character creator had something like 3 coats you could choose from at start, Legends has several more (with more on the way according to Tilty). There is also now a tattoo option in the character creation.

Character creation also starts you with your initial "class", which TSW players will remember as the initial starter decks. Like the initial decks, these are just starting configurations, you are not locked in to them for life.

There is now a tutorial before the Tokyo tutorial. TSW players will remember the opening intro in which your character swallows a bee and gains their powers; a new dream sequence immediately after this functions as a tutorial for combat. None of the NPCs in this tutorial have voices yet, and their "quests" are all placeholders.

Alot of the character animations look similar - I don't know if this is also a placeholder or if there will be no major change to the character animations. This is a little disappointing to me, since one of the major problems I had with TSW was the lack of weight to the look of combat. Some of this might be my own fault, since I was expecting a major change to combat, bringing it more in line with stuff like Tera Online. A foolish dream.

On the other hand, some of the attacks do have nicer animations. The electrical bolts he was throwing around look much nicer than I remember them in TSW.

There doesn't seem to be a builder system anymore. Abilities seem to run off of cooldowns or, in the case of elementalism attacks, run up your overheat meter much faster than the mouse button attacks.

Auxillary weapons run off of "energy" now. This was only mentioned in passing, so no clue how it works. Perhaps you can use your flamethrower three times in a row now?

Different weapons will have different quirks to them. Tilty was using the elemental weapons which have an "overheat" and "cooldown" function; throwing out lightning and fireballs build up heat on your character which makes your attacks stronger. But if you overheat completely you suffer a movement speed penalty and can't attack for a few seconds. Using ice abilities cools off the overheat meter. He mentioned that shotguns have their own quirk system (he didn't mention what it was, but I think he mentioned its' more involved than elementalism's overheat system - this may have something to do with the leak a while back suggesting that the shotguns use different ammo) and also mentioned that Chaos weapons seem to randomly assign debuffs or buffs on attacks.

Almost everything you unlocked in TSW will transfer over (event clothes, lootbag clothes, etc). Some achievement clothing will transfer over on a "case by case" basis. In some cases repeating the achievement will unlock different reward clothing.

You can go out of reticule mode. On stream Tilty mentions that they currently have a placeholder "black overlay" which doesn't look so great. But you will be able to move the camera around to get a look at your character, you aren't always stuck looking at their back.

There is a dressing room where you can try all of the clothing in the game, even ones you haven't unlocked yet.

Cross-faction cabals might be a possibility. Tilty wasn't entirely sure about this one since he mentioned that cabals and factions are closely linked, but it is something they are looking into.

Investigation missions are unchanged. The streamers mention that there seems to have been some confusion when it was revealed that Investigation missions have a tutorial, causing some of the fandom to assume Investigation missions have been dumbed down. It was clarified that the "tutorial" was only in regards to making it clear to new players that different missions play differently; the game makes it easier for new players to know that an Action mission plays differently than an Investigation mission, which are both different than the Sabotage missions.

A look at the inventory system features an Upgrade button; so now it seems possible to take a white QL1 weapon and boost it all the way to... I don't know, purple QL 1. Funcom did mention an upgrade system allowing you to take your favorite weapons from starter to endgame, but it's unclear what limitations that upgrade system has.

On one hand, I am a little disappointed. I dreamed, perhaps foolishly, that the Secret World Legends would feature Tera Online combat or that it would be launched on a new engine (The Park was released on Unreal). Looking back on it, since Funcom is using the same engine I really couldn't expect something so drastic. Considering that, is it possible that Funcom could have simply launched a Legends patch and dropped a 30+ GB update to TSW, updating the combat mechanics, the weapon pages, the skill abilities (Funcom has mentioned elsewhere that they removed some of the superfluous skill abilities), the item/upgrade system,the character creation system and bosses (at least, I assume that changing the combat mechanics means the dungeon bosses have to be tweaked a bit) and whatever else they plan to change? I don't know, I'm not a programmer. But it seems to me that people asking that question view Legends as a superficial update to TSW which could have simply been handled by a giant patch. I think a related issue is people looking at their 1k hours invested in a character and realizing that that character cannot port over to SWL.

All that being said, I am still quite excited. The combat system looks interesting. While it is true that each weapon in TSW has different properties (Blood Magic is heavy on DoT while Fist is heavy in single target abilities), most of them play similarly; if I'm using Rifle, Pistols, Blade, Chaos or Blood, I am using builders to save up to the inevitable consumer ability. If, however, now each weapon has some unique game mechanic that differentiates them from each other then that sounds real interesting. And frankly, while I love TSW (hell, I'm writing a fucking fanfic chapter right now), I admit that I would only log in when a new Issue was released because the story drew me to the game, not the combat. If Legends does nothing else except make the combat more interesting and fun (no matter how slightly), that's a win in my book. Of course I'm hoping it'll do more than just that and it looks like it will do more than just that.

So I'm still pretty hyped and I'm eagerly waiting for the next live stream in two weeks time.