I finally reached Blue Mountain yesterday. I’ve taken my sweet time in The Secret World, using a pattern in the first two zones of “run every mission once, then do the dungeon, then run a bunch of missions again, and a couple even a third time, plus a second dungeon run”. Now I’m in the worst zone of them all, according to many people, among them Bhagpuss and Syp.
It’s just that I can’t agree.
To me, starting out in Savage Coast was painful. I died so often on the first missions, I was getting genuinely annoyed. The missions around the Overlook Motel were bad, and the League of Monster Slayers one was downright painful, with the horrible, horrible Ak’abs and their pathologically social behavior of coming to help their mate from across half the map, just to kill me. In comparison, Blue Mountain is cake so far. Granted, I’ve only done the Sasquatches, the Grunt camp, and the mansion. Maybe the difficulty and annoyance magically ramps up afterwards. Maybe my build just happens to be weak in Savage Coast, and strong in Blue Mountain. Maybe it’s just that I spent what felt like a lot of time in the previous two zones. I actually did my Jambala Special Assignment mission before I moved out of Savage Coast.
But even the Ak’abs feel much more considerate in Blue Mountain, graciously letting me kill them without calling every relative for help down to their third cousins twice removed.
Also, Funcom got some massive bonus points for this:
OMG, it’s my favorite band’s logo! Though very… colorful. Also, a bit ahead of its time. That flashback scene takes place in 1966, and Blue Öyster Cult published their first album in 1972. But maybe Sandy Pearlman was a survivor of that artist’s colony?
My main problem with the game right now is actually that I can’t figure out what to spend AP and SP on. I’ve focused on blood magic so far, with a small amount of pistols, just because I like the combination style-wise. I branched out into fists when I came close to the maximum allowed backlog of 175 AP, simply for Bloodsport, only to realize that I didn’t like it. When I reached 170 again, I bought all of the inner wheel blade skills, with the idea that I might go back and try tanking in the first two dungeons. I’m still completely clueless on how to design a good deck though. I know in theory you should try and figure out how to exploit certain one of the four major debuffs (afflicted, impaired, weakened, and hindered) , or of the attack type, but I still feel pretty lost and mostly just choose stuff based on what sounds nice. On the other hand, I always try to save up points until I’m close to the allowed cap, just in case I suddenly get a clue.
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!
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”.
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.
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)
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 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. 🙂
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. 🙂