Dark Days Are Coming - New Funcom Project

[tmp]

Eh, the shadows never look right to me because they are too harsh all the time.  They look like they are created by a very strong, harsh light instead of just normal shadows.  I can try and see how they look though.

On advanced tab for video settings, if you drag the slider for Lighting Detail to the max it blurs the shadows to some extent if i remember right. They wind up looking not too bad.

[HaemishM]

Lots of stuff to like so far, but the combat is fucking terrible. TERRIBLE. Boring, unresponsive, repetitive, and just bad.

Yeah. Though I will say, it improved when I made a character with blade/elemental magic instead of shotgun/assault rifle. I don't know if it was because it was a later patch or blade is just more responsive, but yes, the combat is pretty blearg.

[Riggswolfe]

Hmmm...oddly enough the character creator seems to have lost tons of options in the latest patch. I wonder why that is. Alot, I mean, alot of clothes have just disappeared.

[Kageru]

Standard practice, fodder for the cash-shop.

[Tyrnan]

Hmmm...oddly enough the character creator seems to have lost tons of options in the latest patch. I wonder why that is. Alot, I mean, alot of clothes have just disappeared.

I assume they were just available in the character creator for a while so they would get more testing for clipping issues, as they're all still available in the clothing stores in the hub cities. I hope they add some more stuff to the CC though as it's a bit too limited as it stands.

Standard practice, fodder for the cash-shop.

A dev posted yesterday that those items definitely weren't moved to the cash shop but I'm only on my first coffee and can't find the post right now.

[WayAbvPar]

There weren't a ton of choices, but I did like what was there. Enough to make some decent looking characters. I am a sucker for that stuff- I would definitely drop some vanity dough in micros if they stocked the right stuff.

[Falconeer]

More Protips: Go to the Interface Settings and put a checkmark on "Show detailed abilities information". Without it all you get in abilities tooltips is along the lines of "It does moderate damage", "It heals for a lot of HP" and so on.

I have NO IDEA why they decided to leave this deactivated by default. Who does not want to know detailed information about their abilities and powers?

[tmp]

More Protips: Go to the Interface Settings and put a checkmark on "Show detailed abilities information". Without it all you get in abilities tooltips is along the lines of "It does moderate damage", "It heals for a lot of HP" and so on.

By default it shows detailed information for the skills on which you click triangle icon to "unfold" the description, and brief summary for others. I like this approach better tbh -- the exact numbers for various skills often vary by just 1-2 points if that so "minor", "medium" or "large" along with attack type and possible effects/synnergy are handy and good enough indicators of what i should expect (and which skills are worth a closer look) Similarly, i don't need stuff like exact dimensions of affected area and how many ticks a channeled attack does for the shit i don't even consider slotting and whatnot.

edit: looks they fucked it up in current patch. Some of the abilities show only the basic info even with the "detailed info" toggle on. With the toggle off unfolding the description doesn't provide any details. Charming.

[Sky]

I was ambivalent but interested in the setting. Today's patch news: no SLI.

Not going to bother wasting time patching the rest.

[Minvaren]

Unique character names game-wide, and no name generator? 

So far, it's definitely an interesting setting, but the game feels incomplete somehow...

[tmp]

Only the nickname part has to be unique if i understand it right. First name and surname aren't checked for that.

[Falconeer]

And that's because basically the game has only one server. Actually it has more than one, but they are all "crossable", so not having unique names would be a problem.

[TripleDES]

Eh, signed up with the key for the beta weekend, and I can't authenticate. Already good start.

[Threash]

This would be so awesome if the combat was not so horrible.  I love everything about it except the one thing i'll be doing the most of, meh.

[Dark_MadMax]

This would be so awesome if the combat was not so horrible.  I love everything about it except the one thing i'll be doing the most of, meh.

 I dunno  why you guys complain so much  about combat.  I find it actually pretty dynamic and better than Rift/SWTOR by a noticeable amount ( I think mostly because of active dodge and the fact that you need to use it if you dont want to suck completely). Many boss fights (not all) are very entertaining imho, requires skill and coordination to not wipe over and over. I done 6 out of 8 elite dungeons and PvE wise its imho up to par with whatever you think is best pve out there. Soloing becomes challenging past first 2 zones as well.  

I mean really what MMO you think has "better" combat? I d say probably only GW2 .

[Threash]

Every single one.

[Raguel]

This would be so awesome if the combat was not so horrible.  I love everything about it except the one thing i'll be doing the most of, meh.

I sort of feel the same way (although I don't feel the combat is horrible, I just find mmo combat to be bland in general). I suppose I could tolerate that if there really were conspiracies to unravel as opposed to the usual mmo questing, if that makes sense.

[Sky]

I think mostly because of active dodge and the fact that you need to use it if you dont want to suck completely

The other patch message I read before uninstalling said that active dodge was disabled.

[Minvaren]

Was working fine today.  Much better than CO's block thingie, IMO.

[Furiously]

Combat and characters both seemed a lot better than in beta. I'm almost tempted to grab it to pass a few weeks.

[Falconeer]

Active dodge is back, combat in general kept improving over the weeks and now sits in a decent spot in my opinion, but it still plays and flows very differently from all the other MMORPGs so it takes a while to adjust to the "offness" of the faster than usual GCD coupled with lots of counter-intuitively channeled skills that give you the feel of an actually slower GCD. Similarly the weird turning speed and turning animation of your character do not help in making the whole experience feel "responsive".

That said, it's a combat that grows on you when you start populating your skill bar and when you find a weapon you like and get comfortable with it. To me the more recent version of shotguns is quite satisfying, and even pistols are noticeably better than they were only 2 weeks ago. Conversely, blades don't do much for me but people seem to like them.

I won't try to convince anyone that the combat is "good", or that you should like it. But I think after all the improvements it's way more about how different it plays from the games we are used to than how bad it objectively is.

One more random combat related comment, and personal useless experience: I hated, really, hated SWTOR combat in PvE from beta to a good month after launch. I bashed it any chance I had for weeks. It's only when I got around level 30, and playing heavily in PvP, that I realized it was actually kind of cool once you were playing it aggressively, dinamically, and most importantly against other players. Against mobs, it was and still is boring as hell to me. Same for WoW combat. And Rift's (which at least had bells and whistles I liked a bit more). Not saying that TSW's combat is going to become fun once you get into PvP. Only pointing out that sometimes these silly games that are not really action based require some "breaking in" in order to become comfortable.

[TripleDES]

My account suddenly started to work.

Anyway, the combat is fucking weird. Maybe I'm just not used yet, but my camera's swiveling into all directions while trying to target and fight anything. I've only done the training missions, but it sure looks like it's going to rely on mob spam, which is not really cool.

[Raguel]

I've completed a few quests but when I try to get the next one from the same questgiver it says I didn't complete the first one. Did I screw up or are some quests broken?

[Tyrnan]

I've completed a few quests but when I try to get the next one from the same questgiver it says I didn't complete the first one. Did I screw up or are some quests broken?

Did you get the "Send Report" button after completing the quest? I had a problem with it not showing up on a new character yesterday (even after I rerolled her) so couldn't progress . Using the /reloadui command fixed it.

[tmp]

Conversely, blades don't do much for me but people seem to like them.

Think lot of people use them because it's one of few options for self-healing. Other being blood magic, i see these two all over the place.

In PvP it seems mostly rifles for the huge range AoE spam. PvP feels like nothing to write home about, though. Zerg rush/whack-a-mole for the most part and can be very laggy with nametags turned on (and they are on by default) -- literally difference between ~20 fps and 1 frame per 5 seconds.

[Raguel]

I've completed a few quests but when I try to get the next one from the same questgiver it says I didn't complete the first one. Did I screw up or are some quests broken?

Did you get the "Send Report" button after completing the quest? I had a problem with it not showing up on a new character yesterday (even after I rerolled her) so couldn't progress . Using the /reloadui command fixed it.

Pretty sure I did, and getting the rewards after. Even when I go to the questgiver,there's a checkmark now (the checkmarks didn't appear on the day I completed the quest, but did the day after) saying I completed it. It sounds like a bug so I'll report it.

[Falconeer]

Interesting... Hell dungeon rare drop. The Dandy Hellraiser Outfit.  

[TripleDES]

I'm still undecided about this game. The little I've tried it, I had no crashes, which is a surprise for Funcom. If I knew there'd be a lot more investigative quests (of which I have done none yet), that'd speak for it. Something else than spamming the A-key on hordes of mobs is always a good thing.

[Draegan]

I played a bit more of closed beta last night, a few comments:

• The character creator is still ass.  I did manage to make a female character that wasn't mexican, asian or black but her upper lip was swollen :/
• I still love the UI, Skill System, Setting, Music/Sound
• The combat feels a bit more responsive.
• The combat is still annoying.  With no autoattack, 1s GCD, I feel like i'm just spamming buttons at high speeds.  It's pretty awful.
• Character models look ok from a distance, but in cutscenes they look about 6 years old.  The animations are still kind of awful, but not as bad as they used to be.

I would play this a bit if it was free or cheaper, but I can't see myself spending full box price on it.  It's Funcom, so I can wait.

[WayAbvPar]

I really want to see what they do with a couple of patches. Definitely some entertainment potential here, but I am not too excited about paying full freight hoping they fix things.

[Minvaren]

According to the patcher, if you were in open (possibly closed) beta, you can patch directly to release.

The investigation part of the game really started grabbing my attention towards the end of the weekend, but I'm a bit hesitant to spend $50 on the game.

[Falconeer]

I would still suggest a clean install, since they mentioned old RDB potentially messing with newer ones, and I don't want to give the game any excuse to crash or perform poorly. That said, investigation quests are definitely in. In fact, people keep complaining on the forums about how hard they are, or impossible, or stupidly impossible. I did only the Kingsmouth ones and I loved them not without lots of frustration.

[tmp]

Character models look ok from a distance, but in cutscenes they look about 6 years old.

Could it be graphics settings being set too low by default? I'm not sure if you mean 6 year old technology-wise or literally like 6 year old kids, and in my experience they were neither:

[Draegan]

I've got everything on High, and they still look awful.  They might have more pixals and textures, but they way they are constructed suck.  Lots of sharp angles.  Look at the dude on the left; that doesn't even remotely look good.

[Miasma]

The only sharp angles I see are the argyle pattern on his argyle sweater... but this is an eye of beholder type thing so meh.