Comments on: What exactly is the problem with Blue Mountain?

By: flosch

flosch — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 08:53:05 +0000

Yeah, that… has a history that goes back to early university days, and decisions to design personal “badges” that took and merged things we were interested in or liked. Somehow, mine has stayed with me ever since, because I liked the design. And I’m typically really bad at design, so this one stands out. 🙂

By: Carson

Carson — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 03:56:35 +0000

By the way, the reason I came to be reading your blog is that I saw you comment elsewhere, and your gravatar of the BÖC symbol with the extra arm caught my attention. 🙂

By: flosch

flosch — Thu, 23 Aug 2012 06:46:12 +0000

Haven’t really seen a lot of other BÖC references so far, but the game is replete with pop and non-pop culture references.

Can’t say I’ve been a fan since the mid 80’s… I was barely in school at that time! I caught up though, even got a good bunch of their original vinyls by now.

By: Carson

Carson — Thu, 23 Aug 2012 00:23:20 +0000

What the hell? I haven’t been following TSW closely, but you’ve done more to get me interested with that one screenshot than anyone else has!

( <– Blue Oyster Cult fan since the mid 80's)

By: flosch

flosch — Sun, 12 Aug 2012 20:44:47 +0000

Maybe I should add that the Franklin mansion indeed is an example of all that is great about The Secret World. Alternate realities, time travel, surreal dream worlds… I haven’t seen anything this good in an MMO ever before, only in single-player adventure games. The only gripe I have is that there can simply not be enough of that.

By: flosch

flosch — Sun, 12 Aug 2012 18:13:45 +0000

I had a lot less (or is that fewer? it should be fewer, but it sounds weird) problems with the Ak’ab in Blue Mountain. They never swarm me there, whereas the ones around the tree house in Savage Coast are at the very top of my “most social and hated mobs of all times” list, up there with the Murlocs in vanilla WoW. *shudder*

I did have a lot of problems with the bog area in Blue Mountain, though. There is a mission involving a mechanical golem that culminates in an escort mission. And, just like escort missions in every other game, Funcom also made this one only slightly more enjoyable than scraping your eyes out with a rusty ice cream scoop. After failing it four times in a row, some of them to obvious bugs (standing right next to the golem, but presumably “outside of the quest area”), I gave up in disgust.

When it comes to dullness, my main gripe are the Wakanabi missions. I just find these natives very verbose, talking for ages without saying anything. All this pseudo-shaman mumbo-jumbo is getting boring. I think I’ll just try and do every mission once just for the sake of it, then jet to Egypt. I heard so many good things about that place, I’m looking forward to it. Even if the good things for the most part just were “it’s better than Blue Mountain, and on par with what you’ve seen in Kingsmouth and Savage Coast”.

By: bhagpuss

bhagpuss — Sun, 12 Aug 2012 17:01:11 +0000

The Franklin Mansion is the best thing in Blue Mountain by a country mile. Pretty much everything else there is hard work at best. Everything is harder to kill than its Egyptian equivalent and worst of all in my opinion for a full 50% of the time it’s literally too dark to see. I actually got in the habit of using my miner’s lamp outdoors and I still couldn’t reliably tell where I was. I also found the Missions there (other than at the mansion) very dull, which didn’t help.

The Ak’Ab are vile wherever they are but I found the Blue Mountain ones were tougher and more inclined to swarm than the Savage Coast versions. I’m happy to hear you’re making the best of it though. If you like Blue Mountain you’re going to love Egypt!