The Secret World: The Belated Halloween Event

The Secret World Halloween update that was supposed to have gone live on October 20 didn’t happen. It didn’t happen the week after either. It finally dropped, the day before Halloween or thereabouts, and I didn’t get the chance to check it out until last night’s session of TSW Monday, along with Tententacles, Syp and Winin, who has recently come back to the game and is checking out the Meowling cat quest from previous years.

The new quest for this year is The Broadcast, given to us by NPC Dave Screed the conspiracy theorist and weird magazine editor in NYC. Needless to say I won’t be revealing any specific/spoilerific details here, but there will be images galore to tease the content. It’s a pretty fun one, and if you like “haunted house” themes in games, you should definitely play the mission for yourself to see what the folks at Funcom have come up with. It’s pretty spooky!

The good old “ghostly figure in an old sepia photograph” effect.

Eek! The eyes, they’re everywhere!

Who is that figure standing there just around the corner?

The mission boss fight.

Post-quest celebration: getting our Thriller on!

Though, Chucho’s (center) outfit might possibly be the scariest thing I saw last night.

Screenshot Of The Day: TSW

Parking garages are horrible places to be in The Secret World…

The Secret Wednesday: Postcards From Tokyo

For The Secret World players, the day has finally arrived – we are Tokyo bound!

Issue 9: The Black Signal is now live, adding content beyond the current quest line. It became available today to purchase with points for subscribers, though free players will have to wait a few days longer to hit up Japan. So rest assured, I won’t be posting a detailed summary of my impromptu night in TSW, in case of spoilers for those who haven’t done it yet.

But I will say this, it’s already pretty tough. I probably wouldn’t want to traverse the city alone, at least in the beginning. First though, we had to get through some pre-quests…

Grab a friend (or two!) since it can be completed as a group. The more the merrier, and a lot easier too! And you might need someone to steady you when you recognize someone familiar from your past…dun dun DUN!

Ah, here we go, sakura and skyscrapers. This must be it! Wish me luck now…

D’oh! Not another pre-quest! But we gotta learn how to use the new Aegis System. Or rather, they just sort of vaguely show you how it works and you’re supposed to stumble around and figure it out for yourself. In other words, business as usual in TSW.

The Secret World sure loves its subways…

Finally! This is for real now. Tokyo, I am in you! And yes, signs of Orochi are everywhere…

Er, look, I’m making a great first impression on the locals already. Please don’t kill me!

The new headquarters…nice looking digs.

Hmm, I kinda feel like a dragon roll. But I don’t think this is that kinda bar.

Chucho, Thermic and Laeyn, surveying the new place!

TSW Screenshots: New York, New York

You’ll have to pardon the wall of pictures, but after fighting Flappy last night our Monday Secret World group decided to jump into the New York raid just for the hell of it. Of course, we were only seven people and knew we had no chance of success, but none of us are against simply poking around and exploring the place.

And I did my exploring, all right…I explored the inner workings of the Inutterable Monster’s gullet. But this may have just become my absolute favorite screenshots of all time:

Anyway, the whole “fight” with him really just involved us running up to him and snapping as many pictures as possible before he roflstomped us.

But still. Funcom has seriously outdone themselves. Gotta love a raid that takes place in an urban setting. The atmosphere down in the subway station was also positively chilling with the survivors trapped on the platforms. Check out the details in this place. And they totally nailed Times Square. Just take the giant tentacled monster out of the equation and you are practically right there.

I missed my stop…

A “real” tank:

Some group shots featuring Ochoclivis, Dortmunder, Dex-y, Solaris, Thermic, Chucho:

Hey, we’re on the news!

Holy crap, an explosion of tentacles! I’m blaming Maric for this:

On the ground level with the big baddie. Um, yeah, we can totally do this! But Imma letting you go first.

Fun times!

The Secret World: Krampusnacht And End Of Days

Lighting Hel up for the holidays.

Happy new year, from your friendly neighborhood MMOGC! Hope everyone’s holiday season was filled with much love and joy and gaming.

The last few weeks have been conspicuously devoid of posts about The Secret World Mondays, though I have indeed kept playing even through the craziness of the holidays. In fact, out of all the MMOs that had their Christmas events, I probably spent the most time doing TSW’s, even though I did dabble some in Guild Wars 2 and their Tixx’s Infinirarium dungeon.

Heh, now that’s some insane juxtaposition right there: creepy Krampusnacht of the former versus the whimical Wintersday of the latter. True to form, Funcom puts a horror twist on everything, even for Christmas.

And nothing says “horror” quite like an ugly holiday sweater from your great aunt Agnes.

As a bonus, the End of Days came back as well, which made me very happy because I was out of town when they had that event last year and I thought it was a one-time thing that I’d missed forever.

Sigh…this would have been such a cool screenshot if I hadn’t ruined it by wearing my granny panties.

And this screenshot says so much about us as a guild.

Anyway, it all wrapped up today and my friend TenTentacles’ round-up post inspired me to do one of my own. And like TenTen, I thought it was great, but also that it’s high time Funcom comes up with something other than, in his words, the whole “Big Bad Monster Tromping Around the World thing”. It’s a lot of fun, but he’s right in that it’s also getting a little old. Or heck, maybe I’m just feeling bitter because I must have participated in more than two dozen fights of Super Hel and never got my horns. Seriously, everything else dropped for me BUT the damn crown.

“That two-faced mother…er, she’s standing right behind me, isn’t she?”

On the bright side, I still maintain that these types of events bring out the best of the TSW community. I wouldn’t even have gotten to battle the big two-faced Norse goddess if not for the efforts of the different cabals and the numerous other volunteers pooling up their resources to chain summon her for the rest of us who need the achievement or need her drops. Everyone is always so eager to help others in this game, and I hope that aspect never goes away!

People all over The Secret World, join hands! Start a Hel train, Hel train!

TSW Monday: The Night In Pictures

Last night’s session of The Secret World Monday was another mixed-bag for the Knights of Mercy. For the second week in a row, we had a large showing and was able to put together two groups for some scenario running and Aureus/Oreo farming. One twist, though — we thought we might be able to slip into a harder version of a solo scenario for some extra rewards. Unfortunately, our attempts to entire a Nightmare solo scenario with a group of 5 were ultimately cockblocked, to say nothing of our plans of entering a scenario with a raid…which didn’t work either, obviously! But hey, nothing ventured nothing gained, right?

If nothing else, it was an interesting experiment. That, my friends, is a picture of the simulation leaving half our raid behind. The suckers in our group were thus transported to a Elite Group scenario, of which we promptly got the hell out.

Please disregard the dead vampire. And awkward horse is awkward.

We are ever so eager to be in a raid group, aren’t we? And with the numbers that are consistently showing up for Secret Mondays, we definitely have enough to fill a full group. But even if we wanted to enter a raid dungeon for shits and giggles we wouldn’t be able to, not until we have everyone past the Gatekeeper. And as such, we will continue to run Elites until we do.

Which explains how we found ourselves in The Facility last night. Honestly, I remembered this dungeon as being a lot more fun. And it really wasn’t so bad, until like the dozenth time we were handed our butts by the computer core boss. Quite possibly the worst boss in the entire game, because so much is dependent on luck and being quick enough on your feet to not get balled or lasered. I still hate The Facility less than The Slaughterhouse though, by a wide margin.

But as ever, persistence pays off. The Facility was conquered in the late hours, and a couple more guildies are closer to completing their achievement. Now time to goof off…

I think we earned it.

And the other highlight of the night: I completed another deck, the Templar Magus. Two more decks to go and I can start working on the Panoptic Core. It’s always been slow going for me, playing TSW only once or twice a week, and it’s going to be even slower now with the new augmentation system added to eat up my AP. But on the bright side, there will always be something for me to do.

Showing off my new Magus outfit, as Sctrz looks on in awed admiration!

TSW: Venice Is Going Down…And So Are We

Venice is sinking…but we’ll all party like it’s 1999.

The Secret World Issue #8: The Venetian Agenda is live! Last night, a few of us logged in to help JayeDub get his rocket launcher in the Venetian Missile Crisis quest (it was a night for all sorts of Venetian-related shenanigans, it seems) so we also decided to check out the new content while we were at it. Hey, when in Venice…

The first thing we tried were the new scenarios. I’m sure much of this is due to growing pains, this being just-released content and all, but we were certainly presented a challenge.

Beaming up…

For our maiden voyage, we chose to do the hotel, and after getting our asses handed to us in group mode, we decided to aim lower and clear it on an easier setting first. It proved much more doable, and now at least I’m aware of what to expect. I also know what I’ll be doing if ever I’m in need of AP. Doing this one scenario with my time accelerator active, I finished off the night much closer to completing my next deck.

Protecting the useless cowering survivors.

To wrap things up, we did a few more runs of Nightmare Mode Cat God…because with the Halloween events coming to a close this weekend, there aren’t too many more chances left if you still need a weapon drop!