Cabala Illuminati dell' Alleanza Segreta

http://www.thesecretworld.com/news/game_director_letter_february_2015

Hi guys!
For the past few weeks we’ve been splitting our time between the player experience revamp and Issue #11.

The revamped experience has expanded slightly in scope by improving the tutorials in the beginning and smoothing out the difficulty curve. When we go back and change things, we also find other ways of improving the early game experience.

There is a fairly long laundry list of changes, but I will attempt to summarize most of the important ones here.

Time to Kill/Population changes/Boss Loot
The first and most obvious change is the switch in time to kill monsters pre-Tokyo. We are reducing the amount of time it takes to defeat regular monsters in adventure zones. We looked at the numbers and concluded that at least a part of the trouble some players have with combat early in the game stems from the time needed to kill the general monster population. It also stepped up in difficulty quite quickly, where it increased from 7 seconds to 25 seconds to kill a monster between Kingsmouth and Blue Mountain. (7 seconds is about the time it takes to use a single Builder/Consumer rotation to kill an enemy.)

We’ve also taken a second look at some of the irritating populations in the game (*ahem* Ak’ab) and adjusted them. We’ve streamlined the nightmare population around the mission design so that people aren’t charging from something they can handle into absolute and sudden death (*ahem* Blue Mountain Quarry). In some cases this has meant downgrading the monster populations from Nightmare to the correct difficulty of their zone.

While I am aware that some people will be standing on their porch shaking their fist at me right now and shouting “Damn you for making it easier for the filthy casuals” I would like to point out that we have not touched the difficulty of content outside of the critical game path – dungeons, lairs and Tokyo are all unaffected.

Think of it as turning progression from a staircase into a ramp – they still reach the same height but one of them is less abrupt along the way.

In addition, all of the rare bosses have had a loot revamp and are now guaranteed to drop a rare (blue) piece of gear.

Quests/Rewards/New Tutorials
We’ve taken the opportunity to revamp the quest rewards throughout the game. This means that rewards will be more immediately meaningful to your progression. We’ve replaced some of the early choices in the game with a better mix of items (to avoid people gimping themselves very early by equipping full heal talismans, for example).

The Story mission will now reward players with an appropriate choice of rare weapons, with the full story mission (through Transylvania) culminating in the acquisition of your first epic weapon as well.
The opening tutorial sequences in the training areas of the factions have been upgraded to teach new players to use two weapons. We’ve revamped our tutorial pages with improved explanations as well as added additional tutorials for things that we realized are very important but not clearly explained (wait, I can buy sprint upgrades???)

And we took the time to convert faction missions to use the notification system (so you no longer miss phone calls) and updated the starter decks with more reliable builds.

UI Changes/Achievements
We’ve revamped the Playfield Map interface to improve the communication of connections between locations, dungeon entrances, vendors (and vendors of particular types), Agartha entrances and the ability to filter between them all.

Before launch we wrote a design for a series of achievements call “Unseen Achievements”. These are tied to Sabotage missions and are specifically designed to reward those of you who can complete these missions as intended, by being never seen at all.

Fast Travel System
We’ve now introduced a fast travel system to the game. Players will be able to open their map at any time and teleport to any anima well in a playfield for a fee in PAX cost.

In alignment with this, we’ve removed the ability to choose an Anima Well on using /reset, instead opting to send you to the nearest anima well.

So yeah, we’ve been busy. There’s dozens more changes that I haven’t mentioned here so I recommend that everybody take a good look at the patch notes when we patch this, soon ™.

Issue #11
Of course, we aren’t *just* working on revamping the experience for players throughout the storyline, we are also working on the next part of the storyline.

I’m talking about Issue #11, and it’s pretty exciting. As I mentioned last month we had to look at the scale of the issue and considered how we were going to put it all together.

So Issue #11 will be the finale of the story in Tokyo, wherein you will finally have a chance to learn more about the Orochi Group and the final pieces of the puzzle behind the events that have rocked The Secret World will fall into place.

But in addition, we wanted to convey the sheer size of the Orochi tower. A building like this deserves some attention and the eight different companies that makes up the Orochi tower each deserve their fair share of screen time. But how to do it? We can’t simply force you to visit every floor of the tower on your way to the top.

Instead we chose to draw upon some of our favorite rogue-like mechanics and your progress through the building will be randomized. This means that there are 512 unique ways in which you will experience your journey from the bottom to the top of Orochi tower.

Not to mention the secret floors that lucky people might stumble across.

We are creating group versions of the major boss fights for Issue #11, with additional abilities and loot for those of you who prefer to tackle the content as a team. The earlier planned dungeon will be pushed into a later update.

More details on Issue #11 as it draws closer.

Events
Once the release of the revamp is finalized, we’ll be throwing wide the gates to welcome new players into The Secret World. To that end there are several ongoing initiatives and events that I’d like to mention.

First and foremost, around Valentine's Day, you’ll find a new vendor in London selling all sorts of interesting odds and ends. We can’t promise you love, but you’ll probably be able to approximate the feeling by spending money buying yourself a cute outfit (trust me, your brain won’t know the difference).

We’ll also be hosting a series of initiatives run by our community team. I don’t want to spoil their surprises, so let me just suggest that you keep an eye on the forums in the coming weeks.

Finally there is a community run Cabal Pride event (see thread here). I suggest that anybody who is looking for a cabal or wants to see what sort of madness they get up to should show up and take a look.

Remember, people who play together, stay together!

Alright, I’ve said more than enough this month.

Cheers,
Joel