Spurred by the recent release of The Secret World for 5e, I came back to Secret World Legends. Now, this is uncharacteristic of me because I obsessively play the old version, albeit the servers are only full of the few people like us who enjoy the old version.

I'm gonna divvy up everything neatly.

The Story

The story is just about the same so I won't bore you with the details of it: it's unchanged, which means Joshua didn't retcon anything Ragnar Tornquist has made - plus the new Issue - New Dawn.

It's essentially a play on cults and their compounds with a twirling-moustache 'in your face' kind of societal gap. Every time I'd point out that most members would have rebelled after 90% of what I have seen in the DLC, I got told "they're brainwashed, so they can't" - which could be a fair point if it didn't feel like it's just a cheap way to explain away how weakly written some parts of this are.

And then there's the weird Filth monsters that just don't apply to anything we've seen so far.

It's missing Trail of shadows - perhaps the most interesting Issue out there - which cut off Manufactory and Manufactory Breached as dungeons, taking away a piece of lore with it.

The Monetization

I genuinely can't see how someone can justify the aggressive monetization of this game.

The Secret World was once "pay to own, sub if you'd like, pay for DLCs" but Secret World Legends takes a free-to-play approach with extremely annoying demands.

For starters:

• You are locked with three potions for Health Regen that refill if you pay a sum of Marks of Fortune (a currency gainable in game). Now, MoFs aren't hard to come by but demanding 1,000 to refill potions is... disingenuous? It's at the price of one Challenge completed in your daily log.
• You are locked at Sprint Tier IV, meaning you can cap for free at 200% of your running speed - if you want more, pay up 1,000 Aurum (€10.00) for the next tier.
• You're locked at 45 Inventory Slots. If you want more, pay 400 Aurum per 5 slots (€6.00 with 100 Aurum to spare). And you're gonna fill them up fast because everything drops something, may it be a Cache or some pipped item.
• Your bank is capped at 24 Item Slots. If you want more, pay 800 Aurum for 12 slots (€10.00). And you're gonna fill them extremely fast too because you will have countless museum items at some point, or saving up for those damn pipped weapons/talismans.

Every now and then - very often I might add - you will find yourself looting a [x] Cache item that varies with the current season: it contains a lot of goodies, pets, sprints, mounts, all in a random roulette. Even weapons and curious. You can't open them unless you're a patron (€12.99/month) or you have purchased the Cache Keys on their own (goes from 5 Cache Keys for 750 Aurum - €10.00 - to 25 Cache Keys for 3,750 Aurum - €50 - that is if you don't want the Epic Cache Keys from 2,000 Aurum - €20.00 - to 10,000 Aurum - €100 - which give you immediate access to a top tier reward, which also includes weapons). Being a Patron gives you one Cache Key per day, a standard one, so you can play the lootbox game.

But wait, there's more! They once had limited dungeon loot, accessed only by spending a Dungeon/Scenario/Raid Key - which were Patron only and for the common free-to-play player, it was 3 a a day, after those, you couldn't open any more loot from any boss encounter. Now they changed it where Patrons get an additional end-of-activity box that they get to spend their key on.

You can buy AP (Ability Points) and SP (Specialty Points) because the rate at which you get them as a free member is show-stopping slow. In order to unlock further use of these AP and SPs other than filling the 'pages' of abilities given to you, you must buy further Weapon Pages. I luckily am a user from the old game, so I was given them for free.

The Gameplay

You don't have to rely on tab-targeting anymore, now you aim at an enemy and it will prioritize them which - sometimes - makes for interesting mishaps (such as aggro-ing multiple things because you can't focus on just one. It's an okay change but for group of mobs it feels like you're losing yourself a little bit.

You don't have unlimited freedom in your build, now restricted to some archetypes that work and some that still work but a bit less.

Dungeons now work in tiers:

Before

1. Do the dungeon in Normal or Elite mode (new mechanics).
2. Reach the point where you have to fight the Gatekeeper.
3. Unlock Nightmare mode dungeons (new mechanics, better loot).

Now

1. Do the Story Mode dungeon if you want, you can solo most of them, doesn't teach you the importance of group comp at all.
2. Do the Normal dungeon if you want, you can almost solo them and doesn't teach you the importance of group comp at all.
3. Do Elite tiers 1 through 10 - this is now the equivalent of Elite dungeons. Only the Hells and Polaris retain this difficulty.
4. Do Elite tiers 11 through 16 - this is now the equivalent of Nightmare dungeons. Only the Hells and Polaris retain this difficulty.
5. Do Elite tier 17 - this is the new tier with new mechanics. Only the Hells and Polaris retain this difficulty.

Raids? From 3 that were in the original game (Eidolon, New York City Raid and Agartha Defiled) it was downscaled to two (NYCR and Agartha Defiled/Dark Agartha) and both of them have the same asinine tier system.

Penthouse, from being an Elite dungeon and having a Nightmare mode has been added to the list of Elite tiers they have going on.

The Community

The community in The Secret World has always been pretty good, less toxic than your normal MMORPG though it wasn't without hitches and hiccups. However it always felt like you had to have an active group (or Cabal, as they're called here) in order to scale up, grind and make sure you have a good time and can do the higher end content.

The feeling, in this case, is amplified by the lack of people queueing in the Activity Finder - the system is a bit archaic and less 'precise' than the Party Finder present in FFXIV, but the gist is the same: you select your favored role, you queue up for one of the tiers or activities... and wait. And by golly if the wait is exhausting.

There's a whole lot of to do while you wait but it only makes you painfully aware that the queue you are in is not popping, which means at lower Elite tiers, you're stuck waiting forever for something that isn't coming and that means you're simply left to find a Cabal with members willing enough to help you (mine is 90% dead, some people haven't logged ever since 2017).

There simply isn't a good player base, or a fresh one at that, so most people are already geared and ready for the highest tiers available. If you missed your train, it's kind of hard to get back on your feet.

Conclusion

Play it for the story. Better yet, if you owned a copy of The Secret World Classic, experience that one. You miss nothing if you don't play New Dawn and I almost feel like, even in this reboot, there simply aren't enough good writers to bring the story anywhere meaningful like Ragnar did.

Which is a shame, because the story is, by far, one of the best in all MMORPGs I've ever played.

Cheers, The Secret World. You've outlived your ugly cousin.