Secret World Legends wasn't my first choice of what to play after I'd finished my latest run of City of Heroes. It was on the list, as one of the five MMOs I've spent some time in before but not revisited since I started this blog, but it wasn't at the top of that list.* The two games that were, however, are both running double XP events at the moment, which really plays hell with the pace of early levelling, so I decided on SWL instead.
*There's also the list of MMOs I've spent no more than an hour or two in and would like to try again, and the list of MMOs I haven't played... yet. I'm not going to run out of new experiences any time soon.
For all that it's brilliantly written and superbly atmospheric Secret World Legends has never quite clicked with me before – not enough to come back to it long enough to go beyond Kingsmouth. Part of the reason for that was the combat – there's only a couple of MMOs I've played that have really great combat, but I felt that even by the standards of the genre TSW/SWL was lacking. It certainly didn't help draw me back in.
Having played for 24 hours now, across the first two zones and having reached level 22, I am getting more of a feel for the action – I've even found myself enjoying it at times. It's got to be said though that if in every other way Kingsmouth is a terrific zone those early levels are not a good showcase for the action side of the game. You don't have many abilities and the enemies you encounter aren't all that interesting to fight. Things do improve in Savage Coast.
Somewhat.
The facets of the game that do start strong have stayed that way. There are other MMOs in which I like the writing but Secret World Legends is on another level – it's intelligent, funny, full of allusions but not impenetrable, and superbly atmospheric, and it's all these things consistently.
It also does something I've only ever seen done well in Fallen Earth, in that it not only gives an in-game rationale for why player characters don't stay dead, but has NPCs who take that into account when dealing with you. That's brilliant.
(City of Heroes does it as well, with the medical teleporters, but doesn't run with it quite so much.)
There's also a lot more content than I'd really expected from such a story-driven game. I was surprised at the number of missions I didn't have to complete to stay on level for the main story, and if I go back to this game on a second character one day I know I'll be able to explore side stories I've passed on this time. For me that's important. t's good to know that there are alternate levelling options, even if it's only different side stories.
I could easily keep going with Secret World Legends for longer than the 24 hours I allocate to each run, but I won't, for reasons I've laid out before. I do know though that when I start the next round of my rotation this game has an absolute lock on one of the slots.
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