The Open and Shut Secret World: "Multi"player

Part of a series on the death of a bad game with excellent atmosphere. Presume spoilers.

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"Screaming stars, impale me with beauty!"

Dance, monkeys, dance.

 

The Machine Tyrant was the last boss of The Secret World's second group instance, Hell Raised, and on hard difficulty served as a litmus test of players' expertise. Many a group spent many an hour wiping repeatedly only to finally give up. Even more groups were sabotaged by spineless little millennial twerps who died once or twice and immediately ran away instead of trying to figure out the fight. To be sure, it could look like a stroll through Castle Heterodyne at first glance.

 

First off, he hit like a motherfucking truck full of trucks (I say that as a habitual healer who had to struggle to level off tanks' constantly rubberbanding HP bar) and could PBAoE one-shot anything in a medium radius, requiring the tank to "active dodge" out without error - while maintaining aggro... and many a group wiped five seconds into the fight because DPS didn't slow their roll while the tank dodged. MT also periodically gained a nigh-invulnerable shield and ran to the middle of the arena, after which the tank had to aggro him into the yellow light pillar up above.

That red AoE circle? It locked on to one player and chased him. They increased in frequency as the fight went on.

Those orange AoE circles? They almost filled the arena and MT cast them when running to the center, which increased in frequency as the fight went on.

That yellow AoE pillar? The one the tank needed to drag MT into? It did enough damage to kill anyone but the tank in a couple of seconds and could spawn right on top of you without warning.

If he stepped on you, you died.

If you DPSed while his (damage-reflecting) shield was up, you died.

If you stood next to the tank for even one (cleaving) basic attack, you died.

Oh, and he continually stacked a DoT at infinite range, requiring constant group-wide cleansing and healing... while you were often scattered out of range by the constant one-shot-kill AoEs.

Oh, and did I mention it's a DPS race? If he activated his enrage timer, everyone died.

Fun!

No, really. MT was a blast. Technically it was several kinds of blasts all at once, but you catch my drift.

TSW was a single-player, linear adventure game. Almost all content was solo, its skill system was an unbalanced mess largely due to the shoehorned, gratuitous, pointless PvP and PvE advancement consisted of mindlessly grinding the easiest, quickest five-man instance (usually Polaris or Darkness War depending on the patch) for hundreds upon hundreds of times. That being said, it also included some truly excellent fights, albeit overusing ground AoE. Multiple phases, twin bosses, triplet bosses, adds, exploding adds, blocking terrain, chase scenes, enrage timers, body-blocked buff beams, splitting and stacking the team, shrinking fields of play, persistent AoEs requiring careful positioning, invulnerability, what TSW lacked in terms of player abilities' interaction it made up for in its imaginative use of enemy abilities. Very few fights felt like the standard tank'n'spank of MMO infamy... despite being exactly that. Some bosses introduced in the Tokyo patches (The Manufactory) made MT look trivially simple by comparison.

 

Machine Tyrant's worst and best feature was that it could not be taught. You had to know the limitations of your skillset and time cooldowns appropriately on a shifting battlefield. Nobody could tell you "stand here and click this button" to give you a false sense of accomplishment for obeying orders like a mindless grunt. Sadly, in most fights, three of the team's five players could do exactly that. Instructions compiled by various player groups for each dungeon were usually written separately for the tank, the healer and the three DPS.

- Tank instructions read like some twisted pages-long time travel short story where interweaving sequences of events had to either be performed with the grace of a minuet or disrupted precisely when the bomb timer flashes zero.

- Healer instructions reduced to a couple of paragraphs mostly detailing when a special ability (e.g. Cold Blood) had to be used and foreseeing aggro spikes.

- DPS instructions just read "don't stand in the flaming puddle of death, dumbass" and a second line about hiding/stacking during phase transitions.

 

Funcom obviously anticipated most of their customers would be idiots and set up a system allowing oligoi to carry polloi. However, requiring only one and a half of five participants truly understood what was happening had the predictable effect of further splitting a customer base already divided between puzzle-solving, PvP, number-crunching and immersive adventuring. Many never bothered playing any role but damage and claimed expertise based on gear levels for pressing three buttons by rote as per some wiki's cookie-cutter build. Their underlying incompetence grew painfully obvious whenever they hit a fight like MT requiring them to direct their own movements.

 

For as long as the right customers stayed and continued to carry the idiots, things looked superficially good. But whenever the lynchpins went AWOL, the various times TSW's multiplayer interest crashed, it crashed hard and fast.