It took me a while to get used to the way Secret World Legends hands out missions. The limits on the number of missions you can have active at one time – 1 story arc, 1 main, 1 investigation, 1 action and 3 side – felt unnecessarily restrictive and inefficient.
This isn't a game where you enter a new hub and fill your mission log up before heading out, to return only when you've completed most or all of what that hub has to offer. It's clear that a lot of work went into the main missions in SWL, and they're paced out accordingly. It adds to the reality of the setting, as you go back and forth across the town, making notes of other mission givers that you'll come back to later when you're less busy.
Main missions come from people (directly or, rather brilliantly, indirectly as you're just listening in on their conversations) but side missions are prompted by objects – ammunition boxes, lost parcels, dead bodies, bits of dead bodies... They're not as involved as the main missions, but still well written.
There are missions that do feel like filler – 'Kill 10 Whatevers' that pop up in certain areas – but they're entirely optional.
Then there are investigation missions, which put you in a time machine and send you back to the 1990s. At least that's what it feels like as you're asked to find your way to a location that's only hinted at and there's no objective marker to tell you exactly where to go.
It's a strange experience, initially – like playing a 90s FPS and not realising there's no auto-save until you die and find yourself staring at the New Game screen again – and that surely says something about the degree of hand holding that's become the norm in gaming in the last two decades.*
It's unexpected, and it's very satisfying when you follow the clues and make the correct deductions and get it right without any help.
*Secret World Legends doesn't entirely get a pass on hand holding. The investigation missions may leave you to work out things for yourself but in other ways the game is, at times, extremely on-rails. No more so than in the maintenance tunnels, when I got a 'return to the mission area' message when I took two steps into an alcove off the main corridor.
Above all there's the story missions, which remind me somewhat of the Epic Story in The Lord of the Rings Online, in that they run parallel with the zone missions, and are the best indicator of where you should be going and when. The flow of the story is good... except when it's unsubtly interrupted by the game telling you that you need to reach a particular level to access the next mission.
(I can kind of see why it does this – the game isn't hard enough that I'd be slowed down by difficult combat encounters. Still, the level limits do seem a little arbitrary.)
The Savage Coast is where I should be going now. I could stay in this zone a little longer and finish up some of the missions I haven't done yet, but I'd rather move on. I've never been beyond Kingsmouth.
I guess I never will find out what happened to old Tom...
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