This game cannot be recommended in good conscious for a variety of reasons, which I will cover below. Starting with a look at the relaunch and a look original, then a look at the company in terms of questionable business and moral decisions, and finally a look at the community and what to expect out of it. Both the good and the bad without exaggeration; based largely on facts with some opinions interjected. The review will also have to reference other games to give context about the above in terms of gauging, and will cover other Funcom releases as well as non-Funcom releases.

(This review also mentions dating periods for verification; it was also written and revised/rewritten from the headstart of SWL to the imminient Steam release. All information is double checked and verified before posting of this review. Some segments may be left to showcase how things were, and there should be a reference of changes mentioned.)

Also don't judge my Steam play time. I've been playing the non-Steam versions of this game and will continue doing so. The play time for this game is for Steam Cards and to actually post a review.

As a game itself, if The Secret World (TSW) never existed, it's an alright game. The story is good and the combat has interesting, albeit annoying, gimmicks that while "different" and "innovative" actually adds clunk to some of the weapons. The animations are generally decent and runs a large range of quality; from cool to sh!t based on your weapon of choice and if enemies instantly die or live (I will address this in more detail later). The game has an interesting story and is a rare niche for an "shared world RPG” lovecraftian horror in the modern day. The game also has many instances of cheap deaths, though they're scattered and spaced out enough that it's not that horrible. Any more would actually require a look at both TSW and Secret World Legends (SWL) and see how they measure up to each other side by side; which leads me to the following:

A look at the revamped combat in detail, with a comparative look of the systems and changes, and finishing up by looking at changes and inconsistencies in the game's other systems and content. I was originally trying to list them but it was too numerous to do and then explain them in more detail; I trust that if you're going to read through this review then you'd get to those parts anyway.

First the target reticle is not new. The whole action combat the game is boasting was something that existed for a long time now in TSW (it is called Target Mode). If you actually spent time looking over the options for the game or even accidently hit T on your keyboard while not chatting; then you've encountered the action combat in SWL. I was going to mention this later in the community section, but I decided it was worth noting that very often when people originally complained about the tab target combat the community would try to help the person and mention that they could try the Target Mode; this mode was often met with even more disdain. It is literally the same thing; with AoEs around the player being around the player, target based AoEs around the target that you are looking at, single target attacking what you are looking at. The only difference is that the TSW reticle is plain with no other options, and 11 reticle visual options in SWL with the option of turning off the reticle as well. As of July 21st 2017 I logged back into TSW and purposefully tested the reticle combat; so both memory and a recent verification both confirm this.

Second are the weapon mechanics themselves and how "incredibly complicated and deeply strategic" they are. To showcase this I will have to explain all 9 of the weapons.

Blade: Attacks with Blades have an innate 50% chance to generate 1 Chi. When you have 5 Chi your Spirit Blade is full of energy (but not forged) and you have a few seconds to either forge a Spirit Blade, which grants a damage bonus on hits and the blade lasts a few seconds. Extra generated Chi can be used to slightly extend the duration. Or you can can left the Spirit Blade shatter by doing nothing, which grants a self heal. This mechanic is a simple no thought RNG based system. To forge the Spirit Blade you must slot a specific Active Ability.

Hammer: Attacks with Hammers and taking damage while having one equipped generates Rage, which fills the gauge up to two times, each filling representing 50 Rage at which point you are enraged and some of your abilities alter for a different effect. There's some thought to it, but mainly you will just hit harder or hit harder and get a temporary max HP boost from this mechanic; which is one where you are probably just mashing abilities.

Fist Weapons: Attacks with (certain) Fist abilities generate Fury and when your Fury bar is full enough you may activate certain abilities (Wrath abilities) to temporarily change your current abilities into a different set. This is rather straight forward and can potentially lead to versatility in builds though I wouldn't consider it so since having damage gear weakens Fist healing and slotting a damage ability change with healing gear would similarly worthless. To activate Fury you must slot specific abilities.

Blood Magic: Is one of the few mechanics that actually have something to them, though I'm unsure if anyone actually uses the mechanic. Blood attacks grant Corruption, while Blood heals grant Martyrdom, and the blood bar has two ends a Corruption and a Martyrdom. Corruption effects shift the bar away from Martyrdom and and vice versa creating a tug of war mechanic. The more Corruption or Martyrdom you accumulated the more damage/healing you do, while also causing self-inflicted damage from using abilities and reducing the amount of incoming healing you can recieve. There is a passive ability that can be slotted to cap the amount of Corruption or Martyrdom you can accumulate (and cause self healing for going over that cap).

Chaos Magic: Attacks with Chaos generates Paradox if the damage dealt is divisble by 8. When your Paradox bar fills it will be consumed and generate 1 of 3 potential effects at random. You can drop a slow casting damaging AoE (you have no control of placing it, seems to be placed right in front of you), summoning 2 temporary clones of you that attack and deal damage, or a damage buff to your party for a few seconds. Another simple mechanic that is based in RNG where you just mash abilities.

Elementalism: This is the most complicated weapon mechanic in the game, and it's very similar to Blood and actually not very complicated at all. Your Fire and Lightning based attacks generate Heat and using Ice attacks reduces your heat. As you build up heat your attacks deal more damage, however if you overheat (hit max heat) then your Fire and Lightning attacks are locked up until you cool down enough. (I may be wrong on that part and all of your attacks are locked up.) A number of Elemental passive abilities affect heat build up; making this the most thought out weapon, but not much more beyond any other weapon or game (in that you think about your loadout and rotation).

(Side note: Originally when the issue was brought up, Funcom officially stated that the guns shoot Anima and not bullets. It is also under good cause to believe that all weapons are Anima Infused, which is why all of the Auxillary weapons had to be anima infused to be used, and why weapons like swords and guns are able to harm spirits. With SWL this apparently has been ignored or thrown into the garbage as they now seemingly shoot bullets.)

Shotgun: Attacks now consume shotgun shells, which you have 6 of, and upon exhaustion changes the icon of all your Shotgun abilities into one of four shotgun shells. Each shell has a different effect, 3 of which basically add more damage, and you actually have to reload them after selection. In reality most people aren't going to spend the time going over their choices and will just randomly mash a shell type, compounded with an actual reload time burning half to a full second, and only recently they fixed a graphical bug where you could possibly be seen reloading other weapons. My friend found it amusing as he reloaded shotgun shells into his Hammer.

Dual Pistols: Pistol attacks causes the revolver chambers to rotate every so often. If the colors match you get a damage bonus for a few seconds. This is a very simple RNG based mechanic that only buffs and is based entirely around mashing your abilities. There may be a graphical bug where you may have 2 holstered pistols while wielding 2 pistols in your hands.

Assault Rifle: Attacks with certain rifle abilities have a chance to load a grenade; which has a timer, can be "cooked" for an increased effect, and will damage you if you fail to use it within the time limit. This mechanic may be circumvented by never learning a grenade launching ability. Once learned you will be flagged as grenade capable and the mechanic will activate as per normal intended function. There may be a graphical bug where your rifle may have another rifle at a 45 degree angle intersecting your current one.

Half of the new mechanics don't really mean anything and just mash abilities, some of them are just mash abilities and have some thought, and the only ones that could have any real depth to them simply require that you think about your loadout and rotation.

The above graphical bugs have long existed in TSW and have carried over into SWL. As of the recent I have not noticed that the visual bugs of Dual Pistols and Rifle in for a some time now, and while they were probably removed and could possibly still exist, I am leaving that reference above because those were issues in TSW for the life of the game. If I had to guess I would say sometime within the first 20 days of July of 2017 they were fixed. Just in time for Steam release about a month from non-Steam Release. The Reddit credit flowing into Funcom's Coffers must have motivated them well, since they didn't seem to give a f@ck about those visual bugs at initial release of SWL and for years prior in TSW, but managed to fix them in about half a month to almost a month of the non-steam release of SWL.

Not every weapon got an actual overhaul in the graphics and sound department; two weapons or rather a couple abilities are poorly done. Sorry if I don't have every single ability unlocked at this time as the grind is stiff, game not as enjoyable, and I don't feel like buying Aurum to unlock more abilities. Speaking on that if you thought AP Injections weren't that much of an issue in TSW you can now buy both AP and SP with Aurum (the real life money currency).

While animations for most melee weapons are passable enough certain others were neglected. In my brief time with magical weapons I'm under the impression that those got the most care during this relaunch, while ranged weapons were a more copy paste from TSW. Assault Rifle's Full Auto ability looks like they took a third of the damage spray animation and effects and upscaled them and slowed down the audio. Dual Shot from Dual Pistols like most abilities has the damage calculated instantly but the animations are much slower. This matters because you can visually have enemies keel over and die for no reason and you will shoot the air with your pistols.

Another gripe on the weapons is that they don't feel anywhere near as syngergistic as they were previously generally making me question what would be worth much as a secondary weapon and why can't I just use one weapon with more energy available, but I guess this means it's time to cover the changes in abilities and the number of loadout slots.

First we'll start with the number of ability slots a loadout has for SWL, which is 6 Active Ability Slots (slots for abilities that must be activated for use) and 5 Passive Ability Slots (slots for augmentation of abilities). In contrast to TSW's 7 active and 7 passive slots (I will not be counting Auxillary weapons to compare a default loadout). In SWL most of the passive's augment a specific active ability, and some will augment a weapon in one aspect or another; which differs from TSW's passives which apply a general boost to a mechanic or aspect regardless of weapon unless it is stated otherwise, with very few passives actually being tied to a specific ability. (In case you were wondering Auxillary weapons add an additional active and passive slot to add a little something extra to your build that your current loadout might be lacking, maybe they'll add it in the future and slap it onto the 3-5 or R on the keyboard by default)

As there is no current "talent calculator" for SWL, I can only share the following for TSW.
This will be a good calculator to showcase the Ability Wheel as it looks like in game. There are also filters by bringing up the slider on the right hand side. This one is relatively accurate in terms of look (the side panels will look different in game). http://www.drakkashi.com/secretworld/

Here are some examples of a builds you could have made in the previous game, and those are something I slapped together in 5 minutes. These should help give you an idea of how weapons can be used to complement each other. By all means try SWL or wait for a build calculator to come out and try to find something that synergizes like this. I also miss how tanking with any weapon was viable, though the tanking weapons did have a significant advantage. Also with the changes I’m going to miss that heal tanking was an option.

http://www.tsw-builder.com/#27v711252742235733713246p253223623653210612836

http://www.tsw-builder.com/#38v311352354865813870356p312955364862814871366

http://www.tsw-builder.com/#15v111154554533513113506p112421721530251g21216

http://www.tsw-builder.com/#00vp (fresh, or you could hit the Reset button at the top)

Under a basic solo general build assumption you would run 1 builder, 2 consumers, 1 elite, and have 3 left over slots in TSW. In SWL one slot must be a basic attack, you cannot have 0 basic attacks and try to run without it, and you'll probably slot at least 2 consumers and your 1 elit;. leaving you with 2 left over slots. Add onto this that Blade, Fist Weapons, and Assault Rifle require another slot to utilize their mechanic; unless you want a Blade heal or if you want to count Elementalism cooling and heating. And in terms of passives I doubt you wouldn’t run Absolution so that’s technically 4 free passive slots for Blood Magic users. There are almost no available slots to add utility abilities like heals (group heals or self ones from Blade or Shotgun, not specifically healing weapons themselves) or buffs and even less passives to supplement your build; and added to that most of the passives augment a specific move and you have more moves than you do slots to augment (not that it matters much since most passives don't add anything great). A personal gripe with this new ability slot limit and ability choices is that there are basically no impairs (stuns) outside of elites.

If you spent like half an hour or so with the calculator above you might see that it's not that hard to navigate and make a build. Many people have spent well over half an hour looking at abilities thinking about builds in SWL and that's not nearly as extensive of a list.

Combat also had another change, and this is probably the biggest and truest change. Originally TSW's combat was focused around using Builders to accumulate weapon resources and then spend those for bigger effects with Consumers, which consumed the stored resources from a scale of 1 to 5 resources. Now in SWL weapons have an amount of energy for them and move abilities that consume that energy will use 3 energy per use (this isn't always the case). Weapons hold 15 energy and it regenerates quickly out of combat and at a rate of 1 per second for your primary and half that for your secondary while in combat. Critical hits will generate 1 energy for that weapon. (Ignore the belief that it regenerates faster if it's above 5 energy. It is factually wrong as I have timed it and because both the tooltip and loading screen tip says those beliefs are false too)

So the "new dynamic action combat" is nothing more than the old Target Mode with Weapon Resources removed in exchange for Weapon Energy and a generally stupid Weapon Mechanic. Oh and generally flashier attacks. I've read and watched a lot of reviews that don't seem to realize this and perhaps I will delve into this more in the community section.

They removed the ability to save loadouts, which was an actual function in TSW. Even if they didn't want to be bothered with the saving of equipment it would have been nice enough to save the build. I suppose they thought it wasn't necessary with the reduced number of active and passive abilities available and reduced build slots to utilize. Adding to that; casuals probably won't carry multiple weapons or swap around their builds. I heard (as a rumor in game chat, and it’s probably true) that they have plans to implement a loadout system. Not sure if this was another thing removed and reinstated to make themselves look like they listen or if they realized they can't butcher basic functions from their game and expect people to like it.

I haven't come across a different looking weapon my entire time playing and I've only seen weapons with different looking icons on the Auction House posted from other people. From what I can guess those are Argatian Cache drops and dungeon drops on the off chance someone got them as a drop. I saw patch notes saying they (eventually) adjusted the drops (this was a large complaint by many for a while) but I haven't been able to see the differences as my friends quit playing SWL calling it worse than TSW and that I haven't jumped on the Elite dungeon grind. This is made even worse if you can from TSW where the various weapons had multiple looks each tier and you could reskin your good gear to look like other gear. Just check the TSWDB or Sephora's Closet II. I heard that they will be added weapon moulds (weapon skins) back into the game, but still it is most likely a very weak comparrison to TSW's. In TSW you could get different skins from dungeons and raids and obtain moulds to destroy that weapon and reskin another. Additionally you had the option to buy those skins from the cash shop if case you didn't want to grind or were excessively unlucky. Added to that were some seasonal and the various general drop skins (which were not obtainable from the cash shop). It's severely lacking in comparrison and no doubt they will heavily monetize moulds in SWL.

Cabals (guilds) have gotten only one noticeable improvement and that is they are cross faction now, and despite the game's age you cannot sort the Cabal bank normally; if you want to move an item around the Cabal bank to stack a stackable item or to visually organize it you must manuall drag the item(s) to your inventory (stack them if applicable) and then move them back into the Cabal bank.

Despite all these years they still do not have a sort button (auto sort) for your bank (nor the Cabal bank), which is something that you (currently have and) had for your inventory for years.

There are now more modes for dungeons and an alternate method of progression. Additionally you are given a daily allotment of dungeon keys which allow you to open boxes that spawn after you kill a boss. Patron players (not Legacy ["veterans"]) get more keys per day than non-subbed players, however both groups get keys that never really match a full dungeon run and are only good for 2 and a half or 3 and a half runs. You cannot accumulate keys and I heard you can buy more keys back in Argatha for 500 Marks of Favor each.

The regular 5 player dungeons, that scaled to the zone and did not have a level cap, are replaced with 3 player story mode versions that have a minimum and maximum level to queue, but that isn't so horrible since you can continually ask people to help you and queue in a private group to enter the dungeon; and if no one wants to help you, you can use the private instance to walk in alone. There are still 5 player dungeons, but those are for Elite difficulty dungeons at max level. Elite dungeon queues enter a random dungeon, Nightmare mode no longer exists, and Elites have a level. Access to each higher level requires a higher level of gear. There are currently 10 levels of Elite dungeons.

TSW technically had levels and despite their color coding and icon use it seemed that people had a difficult time understanding things; like figuring out where to go to do things or how hard are enemies. I guess they didn't play Marrowind or Skyrim or something. Regardless, they now added a level system where you can vastly outlevel mobs and they no longer aggro you if you're high enough. It took a while to get used to not having things be a threat anymore, after jumping back into TSW it was refreshing and odd to go back to a place where everything was a threat and I couldn't herp derp run through the wilderness. My leveling experience in SWL was one where I was overleveled and pretty much wandered through zones where mobs ignored me (almost the entire time); though I have yet to reach Transylvania.

There was an annoying limit to trying to sell items on the Auction. You can only sell 10 items at a time and you used to be able to only list 10 items per day. If you sold all 10 you couldn't list any more items and if you failed to sell items it would count against how many you could list unless you sold items. They have removed the limit on how many can be listed per day.

Something that I have noticed, but no solid proof one way or the other, is the suspicion that mob respawns are not tied to a timer per mob on individual mob death. Normally a mob dies and they will respawn X minutes after death. I've run through areas killing mobs and have mobs respawn right before my eyes in large areas. Literally running in killing enemies in a line for about 10 seconds and the entire coast or road is reinfested. I honestly doubt they had a 10 second respawn timer, which is also not consistant as I've killed running back and they didn't respawn nearly as fast. Almost as though they respawn large sets of mobs if enough die in an area or every so many minutes. Instead of mobs respawning after X minutes per mob, they respawn an area every 10 minutes. I've also encountered areas that other people have cleared out and had to wait excessively large respawn timers for an area; around 5 minutes for places people have already blazed through. Perhaps I'm imagining things, but they don't seem to spawn in normally. If this is true, it probably has to do with how they reprogrammed the zones to hold less people and thus have a slower spawn rate so that people will have to encounter less enemies. The (possible) spawning changes might be a result in how they changed the world from being a shard that held 50 or so players to one that is now 10 or 20? This is a purposefully done reduction and is another reason why they are no longer an MMORPG and now a shared world RPG, but more on that later.

I thought things have changed and that paragraph was originally written about 2 weeks ago, but last night while grinding my dailies so after killing a nice stretch of Draug infest coastline I noticed the mobs didn't respawn quickly and decided to take a time to see how long it took. I waited over 4 minutes mobs didn't respawn, and in my boredom decided to move and kill 1 mob in the water and then the entire coast respawned at that moment. It might be because of the mob I killed or it might not, but it was sure as f@ck odd that the whole coast respawned at the same time since I can't kill the whole coast at the same time. Since writing that paragraph I've had mobs either take a long time to respawn of have mobs respawn almost instantly after I killed a mob.

There are also a few less face options in the character creation, because I was unable to create one of my previous characters.

The crafting system for making gear, which accounts for non-end game gear almost exclusively, has been removed. As a system it ended up resulting a massive surplus of vendored PAX ("in game gold") or crafting materials for long time players, which might be why they scrapped it; the other reason would be that making shapes in a box is too difficult for people of lower intelligence. (Honestly you rarely needed to craft and when you did you could just Google the answer, anything that you crafted often was either simple or would be memorized in a short period of time. The only things I crafted often were Glyphs and that’s a tiny circle.) One of the nice things about the crafting system was that there were no crafting requirements other than materials, and that all materials could be upgraded or downgraded to fit the crafter's needs; however you needed to have the correct skill rank to use said gear.

The new system for gear is a matter of having a piece of gear and has a random quality to it in addition to the rarity and possible suffix of the item; and having the ability to upgrade gear by sacrificing other pieces of gear and paying an in game fee. Talismans (armors) and Glyphs will come in 3 grades, and they have their own names like Faded, Luminous, Radiant, Crude, Standard??, Intricate; but that doesn’t mean anything. What you need to know is that it’s jank, decent, and the only sh!t worth upgrading. I haven’t gotten to Signets, but I heard they are unaffected by this (or I was lied to); Weapons on the other hand eat double RNG as they have a random suffix (additional effect) and that effect comes in mk (Mark) values of 1 through 3. And of course the same general rule applies, minimum effect, decent effect, and the only one worth a sh!t. Now your initial gear is titled Standard rarity (which is green in this case, there are no whites) and has a maximum level of 20, at which point in time you will need another max level green (of the same kind if it’s a weapon, otherwise of the same type if talisman ) and Fuse the two max level greens to make a level 0 Superior (blue) gear. (Your first level 20 green weapon and talisman will recieve a free upgrade fodder, like any good crack dealer they know to give the first hit for free.) Now blue items go to level 25, glyphs and signets cap at level 20, at which point you will need two of those to make an Epic (purple) item, and two level 30 Epics make a Mythic (orange) and two level 35 Mythics make a Legendary (red) and those cap at level 70. As far as the “pips” or number of dots an item has; I heard those are upgradable for free, but I haven’t been able to figure out how that happens. What I do know is that Funcom will offer an item for 25 USD that will upgrade any item to 3 dots. Also it takes more XP for each item level as the rarity/quality increases.

Needless to say that holding onto all those extra components takes up an excessive amount of inventory space, even more so if you're working on extra weapons or talismans, as you may be sitting on an Epic trying to make a Mythic and building up another Epic holding onto a Superior and trying to build up another two Standards. It starts to spill over really quickly. This was compounded in the initial launch as you had 25 instead of 35 inventory slots, but I'll dig into that later.

I also heard rumors that you can use older upgraded gear as XP fodder without losing any of the invested XP for better gear. As of July 25th 2017 you cannot. The only thing that you can do with a less than 3 dot item that has been leveled, is to use it for Fusion fodder. The same thing as before. If you bought into the lies and have a 1 dot Legendary, well you’re screwed and are gonna have to throw 25 USD worth of Aurum at your item or level another Legendary from scratch. If you think I misunderstood what they meant, I would say it's kind of hard to misunderstand when someone in General chat literally said that you can use max level standard gear to help level your Legendary weapon without wasting anything. Literally misinformation spread.

This new level of grind on getting "good" gear is ridiculous. Now you’ll hear that you don’t need great gear to do the story and that’s true; and that was true in TSW. I went through Transylvania with the Screaming Demon Ring and various greens that were quality level 3-6. Every mission said it was Devestating to me and I didn’t really have any problems, unless I over pulled (which could happen when mobs walk near to you, you have to dodge and move into them, or the enemies knock you down or back into other enemies; all of which were rather uncommon resulting in about 5 or 6 deaths across the 3 trans zones).

I played back when zones have zone specific tokens called sequins and the best tokens in the game [Black Bullion (BB)] was only from PvP and Nightmare Dungeons, but some quality of life changes were eventually made everything gave BB and they added a new token [Mark of the Pantheon (MoP or Panty Marks)] and upped the original prices of BB for gear. End game gear was "custom" and could be upgraded. This gear was listed as 10.0 and could be upgraded to 10.9 (I believe this is correct and that they didn't have 11 gear or that it wasn't an upgrade but a new drop/craft) and could have a signet and a glyph and a custom glyph was 10.0 and could be upgraded to 10.5 (I heard there were Quality 11 Glyphs, but those were toolkit dropped only).

This is where it gets a little bit more personal and in depth on dungeon drops. I never had any Quality 11 gear and I played almost exclusively solo and casually. Elite dungeons were made to be tackled with Uncommon (green) and Superior (blue) rarity Quality 9 and 10 gear, and they would drop Superior Quality 10 gear. This would eventually gear you for Nightmare dungeons which would drop Epic (purple) Quality 10 gear. You could spend BB to buy custom gear and upgrade them to 10.4.4 (which is how it was referred to with as an upgraded weapon or talisman with an upgraded Glyph) solely with BB, and this gear was better than the drops and above the rewards of what the content gave. Now the content itself was still difficult, and this is because learning passives didn’t give you a stat boost and mobs always aggroed and hurt regardless of gearing and where you went. You could have 10.9.5 dps gear then waltz back into Kingsmouth and pull a group of 4 zombies, AFK for a minute and you’d find yourself dead. Sure you could have killed those zombies in 2 or 3 attacks, and would normally be considered not a threat; but you couldn’t just stand there and pretend to be invincible. Upgrading above 10.4.4 required both BB and MoP, and a subscription would give you a 50% increase to BB gained.

With a sub, playing casually doing mainly Daily/Weekly Challenges only while solo for about 2 hours a day you could get a full set of 10.0.0 gear in about a week or so, and another week to upgrade to 10.4.4 (the full set mind you) and probably about a month to get that to 10.9.5; and I’m going to assume you aren’t subscribing, so let’s just call it 3 months. Let’s go out and call that 90 days of 2 hours for 180 hours. That sounds like a lot, but this is endgame gear grind, and I’d ask you to be level 50 in SWL and play for 180 hours. Do you think you’d have a full set of Mythic gear? Not counting what you leveled with you while playing before. Try having a full damage set and weapons and then spending those 180 hours making a brand new healing set with healing weapons. Honestly I doubt you could unless you spend 15 USD for fodder skipping items for the purple fusions (at least). Now it might be considered unfair to compare Mythics to Epics, but remember that 10.9.5 was pretty much best in slot gear, and in the best gear to best gear comparison I think Mythic level is pretty generous. I'd say overall grind would be equal in SWL if I knew for sure that it would bundle up Augments and Aegis systems; but then I'd be comparing overall total grind to overall total grind and not gear to gear as well. In my case I'm pretty sure I got my gear faster then even I mentioned, but I padded the time against my favor to be sure that it was reasonably doable by most people.

This is probably the most questionable part of my review as I haven't delved the various levels of Elite dungeons for gear and distillates, however my comparisons are made for casual solo play from TSW to SWL and so I would still stand by the time estimations. I would guess if you had a group that routinely delves Elites the time would be much shorter.

There have been some other changes like mission locations, including acquisition/ completion of the missions themselves as well as the tasks in the various tiers. Other changes include guards placement, facing, and type for the Orochi base at the airport, as well as brighter lasters and camera location changes for "Horror Show". Mobs being put into the world such as the Djinns near the gate to the City of the Sun God. They even changed at least one mission from one type to another, as was the case of "Live Free, Die Hard" where it was a sabatoge mission and became an action mission.

Some the the changes made missions easier, especially in Kingsmouth, however they didn't always make logical sense; such as the mission "I Phone Home" where you leave Danny's cellphone in his mailbox instead of deliviering it to him. Rarely a change actually increased the tedium for a mission, such was the case in "Rolls Downhill", where you had to travel farther and had more tedious interaction chasing a mob who would he health capped and run off after so much damage until the final resting spot. Sometimes things were just bugged or poorly thought out, and some of those issues were new with SWL and others some that were issues from TSW that carried over.

In the mission "For a Fistful of Zombies" the fire from the gas can doesn't alway properly ignite the zombies. This doesn't happen all the time, but can be replicated by using the first gas can you encounter (the one near the blue car) and then using the car's alarm to spawn zombies to you. This can happen even if you wait for the can to explode and then summon the zombies or if you immediately jump on the car right after using the can.

In the mission "Elm Street Blues" if you kill the Draug at the very end too fast (basically instantly kill it) you will not get kill credit and not complete the mission. This was something that plagued even the original game. In TSW I usually just spammed an AoE Builder, which was weak enough and was part of my general build to bypass the issue (not to mention having saved loadouts was an easy enough swap). In SWL I've had to run off and change my primary weapon and my basic attack because the new weapon I'm leveling proficieny in kills the Draug too quickly, even with my basic AoE attack (and yes my other weapon is a leveled Superior compared to a leveing Standard weapon; my weaker weapon hits harder either due to weapon imbalance or weapon mechanics.

As of all of New England and Scorched Desert I've noticed that sabatoge missions are erratic in their scaling and design. So far the design has been to have their levels be relevant (making the mobs max level) to be a threat or by having instant K.O./reset mechanics (which is the same thing they had before if that was the case). I've encountered at least one such sabatoge where they failed to account for the levels and this reduced a sabatoge mission to running by enemies and only watching out for environmental hazards. I will refrain from mentioning the one specifically as to make it easier for some to get their Unseen achievements.

A few other Sabatoge missions have issues as well, such as "The Prisoner" where you sneak downstairs and without going too far down you can look and see the mobs near the stairs and see that you have not aggroed them, but walk all the way down and you can sometimes aggro them through the floor because they have x-ray vision. Another mission would be "Mean Streets" where in the last tier you have to kill a Cultist Leader mob and I had killed multiple of them with the C4 given to you, but kill credit was not given. I had to attack the mob to "tag" it to my character and then kill it with the C4. No one else was around and I the patrols had walked into my C4; it was simply the game failing to register my kill through game mechanics. Which resulted in a death as the area is a cluster f@ck of mobs all hard hitting and max level and I guess it's time for another minor gripe, but here goes: Cheap Deaths.

Some missions require you to be a spirit, and if you can't get the hint from this or from the game; hopefully you might recall vanilla World of Warcraft attunement. Sometimes there were bullsh!t hard to see lasers in TSW, and while they are brighter now in SWL, the premise of really cheesy deaths or forced deaths can cause some frustration. Depending on player awareness they may die a few times or may die frequently.

The Faction missions, not the faction specific missions that tie into the new story arcs, but the Faction missions themselves are removed from the game (they will be returned at a later date supposedly) and a lot of the flavor of each faction has been removed with the new Class system they implemented (as hollow as that system is because it's obviously a get your feet wet 2 free weapons deal). In TSW completing a certain set of skills (known as a Deck, the preset ones weren't good though) would unlock a title and a costume. Each faction had their own set and you can see that here.
http://www.badomens.net/calculator#01.09.09.09.09.09.09.09.09.09.09.09.09.090

While everyone has some definition of what Pay2Win (P2W) is and it varies and shifts depending on how much they love a game to how entitled they are; I am going to address the paywalls and the ability to buy good gear.

In SWL there are 4 currencies currently. Anima Shards, which you get from quests and are used for upgrading items and paying off your death penalty. Marks of Favor (MoF), which you get from other players and doing Daily Challenges; and are spent for fusing items, buying 2 inventory upgrades, 2 or 3 Sprint upgrades, gear from other players, buff food and buff potions, Caches (and supposedly Dungeon Keys), titles, and some stuff from the Achievement store. Aurum, which you get on the exhange (a means to trade MoF for premium currency or vice versa) or you can get it by giving Funcom money; it is spent on bypassing almost anything in the game, upgrades to Sprint, increased inventory and bank space, and on cosmetics. Third Age Fragments, which are obtained from opening Caches (which are the only mob drops in the game, except for the item bag for killing a world "boss" for the first time); and these are spent on pets, cosmetics, mounts, and 2 dot epic gear.

You start the game with 24 bank slots, 35 (used to be 25) inventory slots, and a barely noticable Sprint (which is like mounting in other games). You may spend MoF to get two upgrades of 5 inventory spaces and I think 3 Sprint improvements (or you can spend Aurum directly). After that point you have to spend Aurum to increase these. Bank slot increasements immediately cost Aurum. You may spend 10k MoF or 400 Aurum to unlock one of two trees for each weapon. When you unlock a weapon you only unlock the passives or the actives, essentially requiring you to buy a weapon twice to get full (and real) access to it.

You may spend Aurum to buy Ability Points and Skill Points, this will not increase your character's level; and you will continue earning them even after maximum level anyway.

You may spend Aurum to bypass having to have another max level item for Fusion purposes, and may spend it to increase the number of dots on your gear to 3.

You can exchange Aurum for MoF and buy good gear off the Auction House. If you cannot buy good gear or need fodder for upgrades you could exchange Aurum and buy fodder pieces. The only limitation with buying fodder is having to spend Anima Shards for the upgrade costs, which you can get by playing the game some or spending your MoF on Caches from a vendor in Argatha and then sell the Caches for 50 Anima Shards. Is the potential to spend real life money to get "the best" gear in a round-a-bout way P2W? I'll let you decide.

And if you didn't figure it out, Caches require Cache keys, which you get by spending Aurum or by subscribing (you are given one free Cache Key per day with the Daily Login Reward; be sure to grab the reward or you'll miss out).

Lots of people will defend the game saying it's not P2W because you can buy Aurum with MoF.

At launch, exchanges were 1 Aurum for 40 MoF and that quickly rose to 80, and then they had to remove the Exhange and Auction due to exploits. Once that sorted out it rose to 140 and then 200 and stayed there for a week or so. Then it slowly died down and started to hover around 140 for a couple of weeks. As of the 27th it went up to 143 and has stabalized there.

Now why does that matter? Well completing Daily Challenges gives MoF. (It used to be 1k per task completed and a bonus 1k for competing a set of 4 tasks.) Currently you can earn up to 10k MoF per day unless you sell items on the Auction for additional amounts (Patrons [subscribers] earn an additional 20%, this occured when they made the split changes below. Also this is not a complaint; just mentioning this). This is done by completing a task and you get a bonus for completing the set of 4 tasks. If you did one set it opens an additional bonus set of the same tasks, only you have to do even more. (This used to be a 5k and 5k split, but now it's a 6k and 4k split) The tasks are to get Monster Kills (50/100), complete Main Missions (3/5), complete Side Missions (3/5) and perform Item Empowerments (4/6). You can only get credit for the 2nd set by completing the entire first set. If you were 50/50 Monster Kills, 2/3 Main Mission, 3/4 Empowerments, and did 8 Side Missions; it would still be 3/3 Side Missions and 0/8 once you finish that last Empowerment. This is a total of 150 Monster Kills, 8 main and 8 side missions, and 10 Empowerments.

This process takes about half an hour to 40 minutes repeating Kingsmouth for fast and easy dailies, you could also get this by a long playing session progressing through the game or any other routine you wish. Time will vary depending on how overpowering you are to the content and if you have to wait on respawns or encounter bugs; because of this and that people are also grinding runs through Transylvania I'm going to put the time to completing both sets of Daily Challenges at 1 hour.

Now a lot of people are saying SWL isn't P2W because you "can" get everything for free and you "can" get premium currency by "playing the game" and this is true. Now let's say Steam launch is generous or just make up the assumption that people keep throwing money into the economy (not for personal spending) and the price for Aurum is 100 MoF. Knowing that 100 Aurum is 1 USD and assuming you do both sets in 30 minutes. You make 10k MoF in a day for half an hour (at best) and cash it in on the exchange for 100 Aurum, which is 1 USD. At that rate and time it isn't so bad. Now think about it if you aren't running Kingsmouth (because the talisman reward bags only give necks and belts) and running something else. That's not "too bad" since you were running other things for other gains. Lets consider people stop throwing Aurum for sale because they don't need to buy gear anymore or people really need Aurum badly and buy it up; whatever is the cause doesn't matter, and it rises back to the 200 MoF for 1 Aurum. Do you think it's still good that you are grinding for 25 to 50 cents an hour? Maybe you're enjoying yourself and don't care, or perhaps you're fine spending money on the game yourself. I have no personal comment into this; I'm simply telling you to consider the time investment to premium currency gains ratio.

The story in this game is good, it isn't as amazing as it's puffed up to be though. This could change with the continuation and conclusion of the 2nd season or whatever it's called. Part of what makes this story and game as amazing as it was is how you had to dig for the truth. The Lore (or Legends as they are now called) basically tells jack sh!t, and the narration on the missions only goes so far. Most people don't talk with the NPCs and listen to everything they have to say, which is the red icon with the chat bubble in TSW and blue icon with chat bubble in SWL. What the NPCs tell you when they recount their experiences or what they believe actually happened may conflict with other NPCs or documents that you come across in the game. This ends up showing you that despite getting some information it's still filtered by their bias, perception, and memory; which means it's not the actual or whole truth, but another blurry piece of the puzzle. What really helped me with enjoying the game so incredibly was piecing together the bits, not just the cutscences, but all the NPC dialogue and the various entries on computers and notes found in the game. Every bit adds 1 clue or even just a fraction of a clue and it was immensely fun putting the whole story together. Most players actually will skip a lot of the information and story in the game, and only watch the cutscenes (which is only a fraction of the story) and then of course there are people who skip everything. They'll all tell you how amazing the story in this game is, but the real story is deeper. Which leads me to the next part; I believe they butchered the story in SWL.

In the new streamlined story they force players to finish up a zone before continuing onto the next, but this causes some issues because certain issues were released much later and were meant to be a return. In the case of Last Train to Cairo the mission "The Prisoner" you end up in a cell and get a cutscene and the leader of the cultists tells you that he will be given immortality because he is the next in line now that the Black Pharoah is gone, but that doesn't make sense as in the storyline leading up to that part the song that seals the Black Pharoah is fading and heralds the awakening of the Black Pharoah. In TSW this actually leads up to the City of the Sun God (CotSG) and you end up killing the Black Pharoah (don't cry spoiler, because you should have been able to guess that one). In SWL you are resent back to the town and then to the Marya camp and the story continues with the Last Train to Cairo, which was originally meant to be a return to finishing up the events in Egypt. The only reason the Black Pharoah is "gone" is because you killed him, which you didn't do in SWL (at that point in time, which you will do later). Now I haven't completed the CotSG zone, but I'm pretty sure I restore the song of the guardians and kill the pharoah. And if I'm wrong on this, how does he know the Black Pharoah is gone when part of what he's trying to do is awaken him and his god Aten? How does he even know about the Black Pharoah and then know if he's gone or not? As you're travelling through the CotSG the NPCs that help you know about the pharoah so why doesn't the cultist leader know?

Funcom is one of those companies that has a telling history about what kind of company they are, and most people don't have a clue about the company's history. When someone tries to talk about Funcom they're always off about something. They're a company that likes to promise big, but has always failed to deliver on their promises. Don't get me wrong though; they do work until it's passable, but they fail to fulfill everything that was promised. If you've kept up with the initial press about Age of Conan (AoC) or TSW then you know what I'm talking about, you've also probably heard the term "WoW-killer" as well. You might also know what I'm talking about if you are waiting to see if the promises for Conan Exiles come true too. This portion of the review will not have as many details and have more conjecture.

So why a relaunch of an older game? Probably to emphasize the new combat and to say it's Free 2 Play (F2P); but from what I showed you the new combat isn't that new and could have been a game changing patch. They have shifted from other payment models to F2P with AoC. And has their decision making process on what is fair good?

When AoC first went F2P you could only pick from 4 of the 12 classes and you had 7 inventory slots, at least I recall not even having 2 rows and each row is 5 slots, and of course 2 character slots. They eventually upped it to about 32 or 35 inventory spaces and all the classes, and that seems great (though the space is barely passable and you need to vendor often). Then in 2016 they decided to change up their subsciption benefits and the F2P model again for their anniversary. Now all new accounts made only have 1 character slot (if you made your account prior to the changes you get to keep your 2 slots). And they ask 10 USD per character slot in every game they have. This makes more sense in a game like TSW or SWL where your character can learn all the skills and play as any role, as opposed to a class based game (with 12 f@cking classes).

And on the subject of the revamp for AoC it was nice of them to remove the regular and collector's editions of the expansions and then have the price of the expansion be higher than the collector's edition was. Truly great decisions. Oh and the new cash shop looks even more retarded than the old one. I have no screenshots but maybe you could Google a comparison.

When SWL launched the subscriber benefits literally included the ability to trade with other players, and from what I heard you couldn't trade with non-subscribers. Funcom has made some changes to their system, but I wonder it they're all token gestures. That it wasn't a make something horrid and then see if you accept it or complain and then they offer something less horrid or passable. This may or may not be the case, but you have to wonder if Funcom was legitimately this stupid to begin with or perhaps doing an age old business/political tactic. (The "serve you sh!t and then give you sludge when you complain, and tell you they listened and will continue to try and make it so you will get something better in the future" tactic.)

The steam store page is the same page that TSW used, but renamed it to keep the old positive reviews intact while rebranding. Which may also explain why SWL overwrites TSW installation. This isn't the first time a company has abused the Steam Store pages to circumvent the review system. How can I be so sure? I can't, but what I can do is be suspicious of them renaming the existing page for a different game when they promised that they would keep the TSW servers running. Kind of odd that they would remove the game they promised to keep running from the Steam Store. Why not just make a new page for their new game. But surely, it's just a coincidence.

The game was originally slated for a June 26th Steam release, but they pushed back the date because of other popular games such as the new expansions for Elder Scrolls Online and Final Fantasy 14. This is a possible truth or perhaps they wanted to get some field testing in before they shipped onto Steam. I mean they did make a lot of nice changes to the game and fix a lot of those graphical bugs right up in that month time limit. Something they didn't bother fixing for years in TSW, and no this isn't a new game engine.

Maybe you heard or believe that TSW was dead and not making money and that's why Funcom keeps going into financial crisis after financial crisis. Well I guess you know all about Lego Minifigures Online (LMO) and how it was a cross platform game that you could get for 5 USD on your phone or 30 USD on your PC. I also heard, but cannot confirm, that it was a subscription based game as well. And Funcom ran into financial problems because the PC sales were insufficient, I heard they were projecting a sale of 1 million PC copies. Not like that would cause any financial problems. Or that their old and neglected MMOs of AoC and Anarchy Online were carrying the big financial burden of TSW's tanking failure. On the contrary, TSW was their flagship title keeping the company afloat.

But it's not like they're trying to kill TSW; they promised they would keep the servers running as well as the SWL servers. They also mentioned they would stop updating TSW and only continue updating SWL, because any MMO that no longer recieves any updates for new content would never suffer a population drop (doubly so if the main selling point was supposedly the game's story). Or none of the old unused TSW game keys are valid, except for the Steam keys and those are not eligible for Account Transfers. (I used to pick up keys on sale and give them to people that liked the game after the free trial or had genuine interest in the game, thanks to the invalidation of my keys I'm down about 50 USD.) There is no way to get TSW unless you buy a key from one of the more unheard of 3rd party websites; Funcom and Steam no longer officially sell access (via keys) to TSW, officially making it a game that no longer accepts new players. All the installations of TSW used to self overwrite into SWL, this problem persisted for at least a couple of weeks and probably still exists if you use the older installation file (named setup.exe as opposed to TheSecretWorldInstaller.exe). Not like forcing players to play your new game makes any sense since the SWL beta testers didn't have overwrite issues (at least I haven't heard anything about it) and SWL had it's own page with it's own installer (SecretWorldLegends.exe) so why even have an overwrite process to begin with? And they didn't even replace the old installer for at least a week, I tried repeatedly so that I could make use of the TSW Legacy Transfer System.

The legacy transfer links your TSW account to your SWL account and transfers access to all weapons, cosmetics, and subscriber time; and each premium day grants you a Cache key and some other benefits, while subscriber time in TSW gave nothing of transferable value. The questionable part is how poorly implemented it was executed; in that if you had Funcom Points/Bonus Points you could have spent them for extra costumes, but you couldn't actually get into TSW to spend those points to buy some costumes to transfer over and this problem lasted at least a week, but probably 2. It also leads me back to why did they make it so that TSW converts to SWL. So you're stuck either gimping yourself in SWL or having to cash in for less and jumping in. And to clarify you can only do a legacy transfer once. https://secretworldlegends.com/news/legacy-transfers/

It is true that they did make some actual changes to the game, but they're seemingly doing everything they can to funnel people to the new version; the version that constantly asks for more money at every turn and for more than just cosmetics and content. Sure they promised free content but at what cost and for how long? Funcom has always really focused on their next project and has shunted previous projects to maintenance mode, officially stated or not, and unless SWL prints money for them in vast amounts continuously they will shove SWL into the same hole they shoved every other game they made. Just look into the complaints about the company and their online games like Anarchy Online (AO), AoC, and TSW, and perhaps their expectations on LMO.

Here's a video for AO from yesterday and it covers Funcom's attitude quite nicely. Sure SWL doesn't have bugs nearly as bad as this and they do support SWL better than their other games, but that's because it's their new shiny money making machine converted from their flagship title and turned into a drugged up prostitute of what it was (not that it was anything amazing before either though). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLXot5AS6CY&feature=youtu.be

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DiEKJ0_K9nY This is another review and it's a little outdated as they have made some other minor changes, but it largely stands as my review still holds some of this person's complaints as well. (Meaning lots of the stuff didn't change and still sucks.) I actually liked the Chaos Magic swirling kick though.

People will tell you that the community is great and friendly and wise and other grandiose descriptors, but they're not really any different than any other community. And their level of helpfulness depends largely on what people ask of them.

Some of the helpful things I witnessed in chat are answers to perplexing questions like:
How do I zoom my camera in? When did they change it where you can't pick your starting weapons? (Which should have been obvious when the relaunch since you pick a starting class with specific starting weapons, or you could have read any one of the many hype inducing articles on the next that came out in the prior months.) How do I do/solve X? How do I make the color purple? Can I mail items to others? (Apparently you can't. I haven't confirmed this because I had no need to mail items. Perhaps I did learn something... bad... about this game.)

The community is helpful in that it tries to answer questions, but they're full of f@ck for the most part. And if you want to say they don't talk about stupid or random ♥♥♥♥, well they did/do. You've never been there to see their political talk or the triggered speech about how you're so retarded if you have any dissenting views about SWL. Mainly for the first few days of release though. I saw someone comment that 25 inventory slots was too small and then 3 or 4 people had CAPS LOCK mode activated to tell them if they're not happy go and play TSW and all this other crap for I don't know how long. Not that anyone could because of what I explained earlier about TSW converting to SWL. They get confused about lots of things like Patron isn't Legacy, which is minor except confusing when someone is asking a very specific question. The new person doesn't get it and the "older" person got mixed up; which leads me to how the community can't read. A few examples on that include a person wondering if they could buy costumes in TSW and get them in SWL when you Legacy Transfer, which was stated and it was also stated that you could only do the transfer once. Totally went over the person's head, though you know they did "read" it because they even asked the question to begin with. The "community" had a backlash that they only had 1 character slot, a loss from 3 in TSW, which while understandable was mentioned prior to release. This lack of attention also affects chat, where someone asked when do the Daily Login Rewards reset and they did get a correct answer and a wrong answer. Someone got confused and thought they meant Daily Challenges reset; I don't understand how you can f@ck this up but they did. Luckily the person was able to figure out who was misinformed and who wasn't, but the person in the wrong was starting to become condescending to the asker because he/she thought that person was retarded (in a "why can't they figure this out after I explained it" way). In case you're curious the Daily Login Rewards and Daily Challenges reset at different times.

My personal experience with the community is largely based in the TSW days and if you ask questions that require extensive field testing or data mining, you're going to get absolutely zero help because they're all lazy and just regurgitate the same general and slightly conflicting information they all do. Questions along the line of how much of what stat do I stack? And if I have X of this stat what should I expect as a Y.Z% chance of "something" happening. Doesn't sound that difficult and would simply require having certain gear and running content. This is an impossible task for the community. You'll never get that information as they don't have it; what you will get is "just stack X hit, Y pen, etc." That might seem fine until you get someone who says 800 pen and someone else who says 1k pen, and then add onto that you need Iron Maiden 800 and even 1k pen and then be told it's not necessary to have Iron Maiden. It would be helpful to have better information to either back up a claim or to at least let a player decided if sacrificing X% of one thing is worth it for Y% of another.

I do both sets of Daily Challenges everyday and on days that I feel motivated enough I try to push onward, mostly because I want to see what happens after you're labeled a terrorist and the chats are generally quiet or filled with the simple questions I talked about earlier. This is a general community look from June 23th to July 30th 2017 for SWL and from sometime in 2014 or 2013 for TSW.

The current setup of the game is bad even for a "shared world RPG" as I absolutely hate encountering other players; and this is not because I don't want to see other people, but rather because encountering other players is largely a griefing session. When you encounter another player because you're doing missions in the same area it becomes a race to get mobs or objects so the other person is left waiting for the respawn. (Named mobs and quest specific mobs have a very fast respawn timer, but regular trash generally has a really long respawn timer. The paragraphs written earlier cover this.) Other times you get people who kill mobs they don't need for the purposes of making other players miserable. One specific time was when I was doing "Sacred Ground" and a player was running out of the church while I was running a group of zombies into the church for the mission and they killed them. You might be able to say they were trying to get their monster kill challenge done, but you can do that anywhere without making other players miserable in the process. And once you get used to it you'll know what mobs are for what missions and you'll see people skip large number of mobs and just kill select ones that are required in quests; but what if they're on that quest you might ask, then I'd have to ask you why they skipped the other mobs needed for the earlier tiers in the quest. There are possibilities like pausing and returning to the quest later, but more likely it's trolling.

But what is the community of SWL? Well, the SWL community is actually made up of a large number of people from the TSW sub-Reddit that just hated the game for a number of reasons.

Some of the gripes from Reddit were about TSW being boring in the beginning zone because the first monsters you fight are zombies. It's Lovecraftian Horror; reanimation of the dead is a thing. Alot of complaints were about the combat, but they never really understood why, Most people claimed it to be clunky tab target, despite liking an action combat system literally from the game they hated. Some people complained about the "WoW rogue" style of combat and favored getting a sh!tter dual energy bar combat from the Rogue. The main issues in actuality were the combat animations and sound effects, which also included that TSW was a horrible game because the guns (for their types) all sounded the same and had the same animations (literally because the M14 skins rifle sounded and shot the same as the SCAR). Well there were complaints on all the weapons but the gun ones took the brunt of it, which is nice because in SWL those are the weapons that got the least amount of rework.

In fact a lot of what you see in SWL are from the many Reddit threads about TSW. If you're ever curious browse the /r/TheSecretWorld or /r/MMORPG. The 25 inventory slots, the price point of 1 slot being one dollar (which got haggled down to "almost a dollar" or around 80 cents), the each weapon having their own weapon mechanic gimmick. Pretty much every single paywall in the game was sanctioned by Reddit.

Now the above 2 YouTube videos weren't the only ones I watched, and I read a lot of Steam Reviews for SWL. I didn't share certain ones because of how full of bullsh!t and retarded they were. Things like "I'm squishy because I chose the mage class" and that "all abilities are useful now" and that "unlocking weapon trees is similar to classes in ff14" to how it has a short tutorial compared to TSW (that they claimed to have played, but it is actually longer because the tutorial used to only be the Tokyo part and didn't include the Cthulu like monster fight nor the dream sequence). I could go on, but that would simply be a waste of time for you reading and for me gathering the information.

I could go on but I'm running out of time if I want to get this out before the SWL Steam Release and if I did continue it'd only degrade into a stream of f@ckery. So I will be ending it here. Thank you for reading this, assuming you actually went through all of this, and hopefully this will help you understand what Funcom and Secret World Legends is. SWL is still a "good" game but it's something that pales in comparison to what came before it. Like a crappy copy paste with poop smeared all over it and someone trying to charge you 1 dollar for every few hours of examining it.

In the event you stumbled across the guide and haven't found the review you can now vote on how helpful or useless this review has been for you.
http://gtm.steamproxy.vip/id/doctorgar/recommended/215280