This Machine Kills Fascists (Okay, Maybe It Just Knocks Them Out...) - Dustborn Demo Microreview

In the comments to Tuesday's post, Tyler Edwards mentioned that Dustborn is "the brainchild of Ragnar Tornquist, the creator of The Secret World." I'm not sure you could exactly tell that from the demo but certainly, once you know, it makes a lot of sense. It also explains the quality of the writing, which is top-notch as is the voice acting.

Whether it would also be true to say "If you liked the Secret World, you'll love Dustborn" is a lot harder to predict from the demo and not just because it's an imponderable in the first place. The problem isn't so much trying to assess the similarities - or lack of them - between the two games. It's more the unusual format of the demo itself.

The demo, which may have been built specifically for Next Fest, is made up of four disparate segments lifted from the storyline. They do appear to be in chronological order but they aren't contiguous and there's no specific narrative continuity. Each appears to have been chosen more in the hope of demonstrating the game's mechanics than hooking you into the world or the story, although by and large the demo manages to do that too. 

The first scene is primarily about puzzle-solving. It takes place in a bus garage, where someone has managed to get themselves trapped under a bus while fixing it. You have to work out how to bring the automated lifting apparatus back online and get the mechanic out from under the bus.

I found this a difficult opening for a demo. There's not much in the way of instruction or hand-holding and it involves a lot of learning by trial and error. The scenario also seemed quite unconvincing to me, mostly because it involves a good deal of that typical adventure-game logic, where people stand around in a crisis situation not doing anything much while the player character runs around trying to do everything and the supposed crisis just stretches on and on with no objective urgency. 

Never a truer word...

I'm not saying I'd have preferred it with a timer - timers always make things worse - but it's hard to take someone seriously when they say they can't hold something up much longer when it's clear they could hold it until a week next Sunday or until you figure out the right buttons to press, whichever came sooner. I definitely would not have started the demo with this.

Things didn't improve much after that, either. The second scene demonstrates the practical musical aspect of Dustborn, namely the rhythm gameplay. I don't like rhythm games. I can do them but I find them flat-out annoying for the most part. I wasn't best pleased to be faced with a scenario where I had to hit the notes at the right time to make sure the band's ad hoc performance for some border guards at a check point didn't get them turned back or even locked up.

The actual mechanics of the rhythm game are fairly simple but for a first example, with no preparation or prior experience or chance to practice, it seemed like an unnecessarily anxiety-inducing choice for a demo intended to draw people in, not put them off. There is some suggestion from the conversation that takes place immediately after and also in the subsequent segment of the demo that the band isn't intended to perform well in this difficult situation, so it may be that how successfully the player keeps the rhythm doesn't actually make much difference. 

You really don't want to know...

I could go back and replay it a few times to see if the dialog changes depending on how well or poorly the band appears to play but ,while I'd like to know if they really did record different voice-overs to reflect varying levels of skill, I'm not going to put myself through the dumb mini-game twice to test the hypothesis. I might take a look on YouTube to see if someone else has, though.

The third sequence I enjoyed a lot more than the first two. This one's set on the tour bus and mostly involves talking to the rest of the band and the robot driver. The dialog is excellent, very naturalistic. The voice acting, as I said earlier, is really good too. 

The characters all come across clearly even in this relatively short sequence and without much in the way of backstory, since we've arrived somewhere in the middle of the narrative. I especially enjoyed the blonde-haired, English-accented Noam, who reminded me very strongly indeed of Suki Waterhouse's character in Daisy Jones and the Six. 

That's Noam, lounging back, reading a book about Marilyn Monroe, who's 104 now and still walks five miles every day.

The segment features a curious mechanic, where Pax, the character you play in the game, either sits down at the front of the bus, next to the robot driver, staring out at the road ahead through the windscreen, or goes to the back of the bus and sits there, looking out at the road behind. As she sits, she goes over everything that's happened in a series of reminiscences and self-reviews. 

I wasn't entirely clear if this was a necessary process or an optional extra. It felt something like the kind of internal monologue novels have relied on since the nineteenth century to give insight into the protagonist's psyche. I'm not sure I've seen that tried in a video game before and certainly not in this precise manner but I liked it.

The bus journey also features another of the rhythm mini-games as Pax tries to write a new song. This I found much easier than the live performance and a lot more enjoyable. The pace is much slower and each time you succeed, you're rewarded with a new verse. 

A bad song deserves a bad title.

The song is terrible, though. I suspect all the music will be bad. I'm not sure whoever was responsible for it can ever have heard a punk band. Or possibly any band... ¹

It was at the end of this segment of the demo that I ran into a problem, one of those typical adventure game moments where you know what you need to do but can't figure out how the writer wants you to do it. That necessitated a visit to YouTube to watch how someone else figuring it out. 

It was obvious I needed to do something with the map to make the little bus icon move to the next stop on the itinerary so the sequence would end but nothing I could find would make it budge. In the end I got it to move, after seeing a video that confirmed it was possible, but even now I couldn't tell you how I did it.

That moved the needle on to the fourth and final section, which is also the longest, the most action-packed, the most dramatic and the most informative in terms of the overall narrative. Save the best 'til last, I guess. 

Plenty of time for that yet, Pax.

It comes in two parts; first a big fight and then a lengthy conversation. The fight managed to be both enjoyable and intensely irritating, which is a clever trick if you can pull it off. 

It was enjoyable mostly for a very personal reason. It was an almost-literal manifestation of my twenty-something fantasy life. 

Back when I was playing table-top games every Sunday, for half a year the campaign character I played in a long-forgotten super-hero RPG called Golden Heroes was a leather-jacketed punk-rock singer called Chainsaw. In addition to her eponymous, hi-tech chainsaw, she liked to bring along a baseball bat for the close-up work. 

Damn! I want that bat! And not just in a video game.

The final sequence in the Dustborn demo starts with Pax's estranged sister, Ziggy, giving her a super-fancy baseball bat that has all kinds of extra tricks, not least returning to the hand when thrown, like Thor's hammer. Pax falls in love with the bat and so did I. If there's a better way to fight fascists than by beating on them with a baseball bat, I don't want to hear about it.

Unfortunately, it's not quite as simple as that because games designers can never leave well enough alone. I loved the basics of combat, the way the Justice goons ragdoll around when you thrash them with the bat, the way the dronebots crash to earth when the bat hits them in mid-air...

What I didn't like were the endless, unnecessary combos and tricks the game insists you learn. The fight is also a combat tutorial and it did a pretty good job of convincing me combat in Dustborn won't be nearly as much fun as it could be, if they'd just give me the damn bat and let me get on with it.

Pax, getting all existential on that AI ass.

After the battle's won, which actually wasn't as hard as I feel it should have been, given I never really had much of a clue what I was doing, there's a long debrief with Ziggy and one of the sisters' two moms. Since we're not just in media res but floundering somewhere in mid-story with no real clue what's happened up to then, much of the nuance of the conversation most likely passed me by. Even so, it drew me in emotionally and fired up my curiosity to find out what I'd missed.

It's a solid end to a pretty good demo. I do think the episodic, dislocated nature of the segments takes quite a risk with the patience of the uncommitted Next Fest dabbler and the obvious focus on mechanics seems a little at odds with the what I take to be the narrative-led focus of the game. On balance, though, I think it does a reasonable job of selling both the concept and the execution.

I haven't mentioned much about the world-building, which is clearly going to be one of the game's strengths. You can see a lot more of that on the website, along with some indication of how good it looks, which is very. The art direction and the visuals in general are excellent, although I'm not sure I'd say exactly the same about the character animations, which look like they might need a bit of a scrub-up before launch, although since that's scheduled for 20 August, I suspect they won't be getting one.

Yeah, I guess I am too, although I might just wait for a sale...

My takeaway from just under an hour with the demo is that Dustborn is going to offer a fantastic narrative experience, whose fluidity and charm might be hobbled a little by some awkward video game mechanics and a quite likely unnecessary focus on combat and mini-games. I'm hoping much of that is a function of the way the demo has been put together and that, in context, the parts I'm dubious about will feel more organic and less artificial.

Either way, it's going on the wishlist. Whether I'll then be able to play it all the way through is another matter. I'll need to work on my fingering, that's for sure...

---

1 According to Copilot, the composer is Joris de Man, "two time Ivor Novello winner and Bafta-nominatee". His background and previous credits seem to be entirely in orchestral music, though, so why he would have been tapped for a punk-rock score beats me. A google search carried out by commenter Andrew Farrell indicates the person really responsible for the music in the game is Red Thread's in-house sound person, Simon Poole, although Wikipedia also mentions the game as something Leigh Phillips may have worked on. There's a lengthy discussion in the comment thread if further details are needed.^↩

Another Secret They Tried To Sweep Under The Rug

This is going to be one of the shorter and stranger posts I've written. It's about carpets. Specifically, it's about carpets in The Secret World and in the house where I lived when I was growing up.

I've taken a lot of screenshots in The Secret World and its mirror-world twin, Secret World Legends. I think it offers some of the very best photographic possibilities of any game I've played. I've had a folder containing nearly a thousand TSW image files set as my desktop background for several months, pulling random images that change at ten minute intervals, so I see a lot of TSW even though I haven't played for a while.

Yesterday, I tabbed out to desktop to find myself looking at the carpet that used to be on the floor of my bedroom back in the 1960s and '70s. I hadn't seen it for a long, long time but I recognised it immediately. I'd completely forgotten that there's a house somewhere in the game with my old carpet on the floor.

I think it's in Kingsmouth. It's definitely in New England. That's it in the picture at the top of the post.

It started me wondering. Why that carpet? Is it a classic weave? Was it mass-produced? Is it really the exact same design or just something similar? And given that TSW supposedly takes place in the same timeframe as the real world and the game came out just over a decade ago, are we meant to believe interior design hasn't moved on in the best part of half a century?

This afternoon, when I thought about knocking out a quick post about it, I toyed with the idea of logging into the game and getting some better shots. I wasn't wholly certain where the house in the picture was, though, and I had a feeling it might only have been acessible through a quest, so to save a bit of time I started flipping through my screenshot folder to see if there was anything I could use.

To my astonishment, I found another shot of what looks very much like the same carpet, only in a different location entirely. I know roughly where that second image comes from (It's even on the mini-map in the top, right corner of the shot.) and it's definitely a different house to the first.

Now look at this next picture. I think that's the interior of the headquarters of the ultra-creepy Morninglight sect. They have the same rug under their coffee table as the one at the top left of the previous shot. Maybe there's only one carpet warehouse in Kingsmouth and it keeps limited stock.

Or maybe it goes deeper than that. Take a look at this somewhat blurry image from the haunted mansion in Savage Coast. The one with all the ghosts.

Isn't that my childhood bedroom carpet, again, in the room at the back? I'm pretty sure it is. Plus there's another very similar rug in the room my character's exploring. Does everyone in the area have one?

And what's this? The motherlode! Carpets on carpets and all of them in those same designs!

Where exactly was that shot taken? I can't remember. It was a long time ago. 

It doesn't look like New England. The ceiling seems to be made of rattan or bamboo and there's one of those overhead fans you see in old movies set North Africa or the far east in the 1930s. There are cushions on the floor and a hookah on the table. It has to be Egypt, doesn't it?

So what's the carpet connection between Egypt and New England? There has to be one. This is The Secret World. There are  no co-incidences, only conspiracies. Don't start talking about copyright-free images and re-used art assets. That's just what they want you to think.

And most worryingly of all - how did they know that was what my carpet looked like? Eh? Go on, explain that, if you can!

Secrets We Keep

Today I finally got around to removing Microsoft's idea of a pretty picture (Clue: not mine.) from the lockscreen, which had reverted to type following The Incident. I set it to Slideshow and chose an old favorite: The Secret World.

In yesterday's post I mentioned how I thought Vanguard was one of those mmorpgs that looks better when you're playing than you'd guess from screenshots. Funcom's neglected gem looks great however you view it.

I was so happy to see some of my old favorites again, I thought I'd slap a few up on the blog just for the hell of it. No particular context or reason, just a good old screenshot post like the old days. It's possible I may have used some of them before, but there are more than twelve hundred in the folder so the odds are good.

Sunset. I love everything about it. The sunlight filtering through the haze, the reflections in the water...

I never tire of the way the light burns through the fog, the mist, the dust. Miasmas, everywhere.

They make everything glow. You could read a newspaper by that moon.  

Though you could always just turn on the lights.

Or maybe light a fire.

Then again, not everyone needs light. Or color.

We all shine, in our own way.

Some of us by day.

Some of us by night. Anyone for tennis?

Yeah, I'm on the night team but don't let that put you off. We're really not that good.

There can be a lot of distractions, y'know?

Some of them big.

Some of them small.

In the end, though, it's nothing we can't handle...

A girl..

Her gun...

And the night.

Can You Keep A Secret? Doesn't Look Like Funcom Can.

You know that feeling, when when someone tells you there's something you can't do and even though you didn't want to do it, weren't even thinking of doing it, now you know you can't do it, you really want to? Yeah, I bet you do. Well, I had it today, when I read this news item at MassivelyOP.

It's a long time since I last thought about logging into Secret World Legends. No, actually, that's not entirely true. I thought about it yesterday, funnily enough, although not because I wanted to play. 

It was while I was running through Great Cleave in New World, looking at the dirty snow and wondering if it was the most convincing winterscape I'd seen in an mmorpg. I've always been something of an afficionado of imaginary snow. One of the first articles I ever wrote for a comics fanzine was called "Good Snow Art". 

There generally isn't all that much "good snow art" in mmorpgs. Rift wasn't too bad, particularly when it came to blizzard conditions and whiteouts, but even there everything was absolutely pristine, as it is in most games. 

Snow zones tend to share a certain unreality with lava zones. Make everything the same color and then add some glare so it hurts to look at, that seems to be the general principle. Even the Guild Wars 2 art department, otherwise exemplary, seems to throw up its hands at the thought of grading fifty shades of white. 

New World has some very odd ideas about representing weather but the art team has done a pretty good job with snow. The covering in Great Cleave is scrappy, trodden down with the dirt showing through along the tracks and not too much lying on the exposed rocks. It feels cold and bleak and wintry without the slightest hint of wonderland.

It's good but it's not as good as the snow zones in Secret World, Carpathian Fangs especially. At least, I don't think it is. It's been a while since I was there. Maybe I'm remembering it as better (or more realistic) than it was.

So, yes, I was thinking about logging into SWL just to go check. Probably wouldn't have done anything about it. Even if I'd wanted to do a post comparing the two, I could just have flicked through the hundreds of screenshots I've already taken there. No need to go to the trouble of patching up, logging in, finding the right portal in The Agartha and running halfway across the map to get a photo.

And I doubt I'd have done the post, anyway. I've posted about my feelings for snow before. I don't have anything new to say (Although when has that ever stopped me?)

It's likely nothing would have come of it, if it hadn't been for that news item, telling me I couldn't log in so I shouldn't bother trying. I tried to ignore it all day but by teatime I couldn't resist checking to see if the issue had been fixed. 

According to the update at MOP, Funcom was "looking into it". At least that suggested it wasn't intentional. They hadn't just shut the game down and hoped no-one would notice. 

I found my login details and clicked on the icon on my desktop. The patcher went through its usual four-stage routine, downloaded a few files, then handed me on to the authentication server and thence to the login server... and that was as far as I got. 

I could have left it at that. I'm sure Funcom will get things sorted eventually. They'll give us some notice before they sunset the game. They're that professional, at least.

In a way, it might be for the best if they did close the servers and call it a day. I would lay good odds that The Secret World and/or Secret World Legends would be back in emulated form in short order and I'd also bet that whoever set that up would do a better job of curating the IP than Funcom have.

For now, though, Secret World Legends is still there, even if no-one can log in. And so is the original game. I'd forgotten about that but the MOP article confirms "the original Secret World server is still up and operating", unaffected by whatever's troubling the newer version of the game.

I'm sure everyone can guess what's coming next...

 

It really wasn't that difficult. I found this post on the forums which explains the process in five very straightforward steps. I added a sixth, almost certainly unecessary, step of my own by copying the entire SWL directory and making my changes there. It was 50GB so I wouldn't recommend it. I'll be deleting mine when I'm done.

Once I'd gotten the config file sorted all there was to do was run the patcher again. There was a gig and a half of data to download, which went very slowly. I wrote most of this post while I was waiting. Other than that, the whole process was perfectly smooth.

It's been many years since I last saw my TSW character. I tried to remake her as closely as possible in SWL but I can see now that I didn't come all that close. My SWL character's something of a show-off. The original's more introverted, less flashy, a little bleak.

The other character on the account, who I remember making but not playing, seems to have suffered some kind of identitiy crisis in the long lay-off. Whoever they were, all that remains is a string of numbers and a blank space.

Once in game I spent an inordinate amount of time fiddling with the settings, trying to get the controls to work. Unfortunately, the Nvidia GeForce Experience overlay, which I didn't ask for and can't seem to switch off, overwrites TSW's native controls. That's why the screenshots in this post aren't very good. 

It also took me the best part of half an hour to find the right portal in the Agartha to get to Carpathian Fangs so I could get a few pictures of snow. When I got there, winter seemed nowhere near as well-rendered as I remembered but there were a lot of werewolves wandering around so I was a little on edge. I may not have been appreciating the finer details.

All in all it was an interesting little expedition. It was very nice to reacquaint myself with my original character but somewhat to my surprise what that did was demonstrate that, emotionally, I've moved on. She didn't feel like my "real" character. I could sense an absence. She didn't seem to be quite there in the way my SWL character is.

That might all change if I were to play her regularly but there's precious little chance of that. It's good to know that I can drop in for a visit if I feel the urge, all the same. 

And who knows? One day it may be the only Secret World game left. I wonder which has the more players these days? There were several people in the Agartha as I was bumbling around and there was some activity in general chat. I'd log into SWL to compare but, oh, wait, that's right! I can't.

Let's hope Funcom get that fixed and soon.

Extreme Makeover : Secret World Legends

Syp's short Massively OP news report on the upcoming update to Secret World Legends came across as admirably even-handed and professional, I thought, given his history with the title. Like many, I'm sure, he's on record as being, shall we say, less than impressed by Funcom's handling of the revamp no-one asked for.

Described as "one of the biggest updates ever", the patch notes supposedly run to "nearly 9,000 words". I thought that sounded a little unlikely so I copy-pasted them into a word counter and yes, I guess you'd have to say 8,792 is "nearly 9,000".

I did not read them all. Instead, I read Community Manager AndyB's overview and summary, much more manageable at a sprightly 644 words. Then I had a quick scan through the epic specifics of the notes. 

I came away puzzled. Not by the brain-crushing detail. I ignored most of that. In part it was the nature of the changes that seemed curious but mostly it was the mere fact that change on this scale exists at all in a game many of us, in this part of the blogosphere at least, had most likely written off long ago.

Maybe that's premature. I was quite surprised, checking the dates for this post, to see Secret World Legends only launched three years ago. It feels like a lot longer. Of course, the original game, The Secret World, debuted all the way back in 2012. The two do tend to blur in the memory. Hardly surprising, given that they're arguably the same game. 

The narrative, such as it is, seems to have been that Funcom, under great commercial stress, attempted to re-tool and re-market what was then their newest, highest-profile property to attract a broader audience and failed. Then their financial fortunes took a turn for the better and they scored an unexpected hit with the little-fancied Conan Exiles, after which the company appeared to lose interest in MMORPGs altogether. 

New content dried up. The older MMORPGs remained in service but to all intents and purposes appeared to have moved into de facto maintenance mode. No-one in this part of the blogosphere talked about the game any more and such news items as appeared on MMO sites seemed both desultory and scarce.

And yet it appears someone must have been playing. Possibly rather a lot of someones. With no new content in years and no prospect of any in the foreseeable future, what could those people be doing?

Judging by this update they've been running dungeons and raiding. Obsessively. I suppose that shouldn't come as a surprise. If TSW/SWL ever had a solid reputation for anything other than story it was probably dungeon play. 

Not that I'd know. I've never done a dungeon in SWL, only a couple in The Secret World, and those in pick-up groups. I didn't form much of an impression. I have read plenty of praise from players who have, though.

SWL doesn't even have a lot of dungeons. Just eight, according to the wiki. As of this update "You may now queue up to Dungeon Elite difficulty 17". I have no idea how many you used to be able to queue for but I'm guessing there's a progression system similar to Guild Wars 2's fractals. 

There does seem to be a demographic within MMORPG players that's happy to run the same dungeons over and over again, always provided there's a number against their character's name that keeps going up. I'm guessing that's Secret World's Legend's core audience these days.

How else to explain Funcom's perception that not only does the dungeon and raid offer need to grow but that the fundemental combat systems which support it deserve a major re-visit? The sweeping changes detailed in the notes suggest an enormous amount of work. Why bother with any of it other than to consolidate and expand a potentially profitable segment? And time-consuming though I'm sure it must be, it's almost bound to be cheaper than creating new narrative content.

It's not going to affect me. Probably. I still log into SWL occasionally but only to ride my motorcycle and look at the scenery. Okay, I might do a mission now and again but it's exceedingly unlikely I'll ever make another serious attempt to progress my character. Even less so that I'll ever set foot in a dungeon.

Even so, I admit to a frisson of concern at the news that healing potions seem to have been nerfed and that "solo survival passives now cap healing at 15,000 max HP". Also "...all nine weapons have received significant changes. Some weapons may even be completely different from what you’re used to".

Doesn't exactly spark joy in the hear of the casual player, does it? It wouldn't be the first time that changes intended for dungeon and raid play spilled over to make life harder for solo players. 

If there are any left, that is.

Defiant Pose : TSW

I kind of tired myself out, writing the last two lengthy EverQuest posts, which is why I skipped a day yesterday. I have several ideas for posts in mind but they all involve a lot of writing, possibly some research. Not sure I have the energy for that right now.

God put the sun there just for me.

Still, I don't want to get in the habit of skipping days. I was casting about for something short and succinct, when I thought of a post Mailvaltar put up about clothes and stats in The Secret World. By co-incidence, I recently swapped my desktop background to pull images from my folder of Secret World Legends screenshots, which reminded me just how great that game looks and how much I love my character there, as well as her fore-runner in its still-extant but almost forgotten predecessor.

Ripped jeans and mirror shades. My Sunday-go-to-church look.

Unusually, I really I only have the one character in each version of the game. I have tried to make others, not least so I could experience the world from the viewpoint of al three factions but it just didn't work. When SWL replaced TSW I remade my character as closely as the new options allowed.

What have I got in my hand? You'll never know.

As I've mentioned many times, I'm not in the habit of making characters in games that represent my self-image, at least not physically. Not in the way that, for example, Belghast would. I do create characters to stand in for certain personality traits I perceive myself as having or which I would like to believe I have, but I no more look like one of my Asuras or Ratongas than I ressemble a random toy plucked from the playbox.

Although playing TSW was Mrs. Bhagpus's idea in the first place, she never took to either the mechanics or the setting. I felt her character always looked a little uncomfortable.

The Secret World is very different. It's one of the very few MMORPGs I've played where I found a character that looked like me staring out of the screen at creation. If I was a few decades younger and female, that is.

I've got an itch.

We all probably carry some core identity inside us that remains broadly unchanged as we age. It would be precocious, precious even, to claim this was mine, what with me being a cisgender male, but where some of my other characters feel like me, my Secret World character looks like me, too. The me I might have been, anyway.

This is exactly how I would sit in real life. Cross-legged and on a roof.

It's not something that would have found expression in the kinds of video games I normally play. The heroic archetypes of traditional fantasy settings don't really lend themselves to any look I'd choose. Even futuristic worlds don't seem to provide the right templates. It requires something more contemporary. If I wasn't concerned about showing my age I'd say something more rock'n'roll.

"Inappropriate footwear"? Come here and say that!

As I said in a comment to Mailvaltar, "Clothing in TSW is just better-looking than any other game I’ve played and, extremely importantly and unusually, individual pieces fit better with other individual pieces than pretty much any other game." This is really significant. In most games I've played, if you want to put a look together that works you need to source most of the pieces from some kind of pre-designed set. It's restrictive and formulaic. (Ironically, TSW has those, too, and they're almost universally bad).

What did you say? Sorry, I had a crick in my neck.

Very skilled players can always circumvent those restrictions, go around them to find combinations that work. Mrs. Bhagpuss is brilliant at it. I'm not.

Are you following me, cat?

In The Secret World and its successor, the designers have done the prep for you. Very little you can wear clips or clashes or conflicts. Not everything you throw on is going to look good with everything else you're wearing but it will almost always look like that's because you don't know how to dress yourself, not because the clothes you've chosen conform to the physics of some alien dimension.

Excuse me, have any of you Jawas seen my droid?

The choice is amazing, too. As far as it goes. As Mailvaltar says, it's a great shame Funcom didn't choose to double down on what has to be one of the great strengths of their game and fill the cash shop with a torrent of new season designs every couple of months. Guild Wars 2, whose clothing options aren't even a pale shadow of TSW's, has been making bank on that for close to a decade now.

Well, if he didn't want to be stared at...

The clothes aren't the only reason I find my character so personally connectable and convincing in The Secret World. There's something about the way the characters inhabit their environment. It's naturalistic in a way that's subtle and unforced. They have body language that connects to some level of my understanding in a more nuanced manner than most games.

Yes, officer. I can walk in a straight line. I'll prove it to you now.

When I look at my character and at those of the players around me, it's not that they look normal or familiar or weird and outré. It's rather that they exude a heightened sense of reality. Everyone seems to be cooly conscious both of how they look and of how others see them. Every character seems to be the star of their own, private show.

It was this big. And it had wings...

 The game's camera colludes with the characters' self-awareness. I'm not sure I can think of another game where posing for screenshots seems so effortless, so inevitable. I have hundreds of shots with my character stage center, perfectly poised, holding the eye. These are the kind of poses I strive and struggle to strike in every game, often with sparse success, but in TSW everything seems to fall instantly into place.

The character animations, particularly the idling gestures and movements, are exceptionally rewarding in still photographs. Many of the shots look as though I'd triggered a specific emote to get the mood just right but no, it's not that. My character just knows the right moves. Also, I swear the at rest action stance is modelled on that iconic photograph of Patty Hearst.

One of the first songs I ever wrote was about Patty Hearst.

Anyway, I said I wanted to keep this short and I've already run on longer than I intended. The pictures tell the story.

I really ought to revisit The Secret World, too. The real one. I miss my true self.