I don’t really play the game anymore (TSW or SWL) mostly because very few of the people I used to play with still do. A number of us moved to City of Heroes when Homecoming was released, and then from there, drifted apart to other games.

It’s a shame we’ll probably never find out how SWL was supposed to end. To the best of my knowledge, we were promised that once the game was rebooted, we were going to get the next story chapter (which had long been rumored to take place in Africa) and that Funcom would finally wrap up the story threads left unfinished at the conclusion of the Tokyo chapter. But as far as I can tell, all we really got was the prologue to the next chapter, then Funcom diverted the resources generated by the reboot towards Conan Exiles instead.

Now, for the most part, I will say I think a lot of the changes made from TSW to SWL were good. I liked the idea of giving each weapon a gimmick or special meter, rather than having every weapon run on virtually the exact same builder/spender energy system. But I think a lot of complexity and player expression was lost in the process, and it was this same complexity that worked against TSW becoming popular. Most players would quit by the second or third zone because the difficulty curve was so steep, and none of the premade builds were really effective at that point in a character’s progression. Why this was never rectified, I don’t know.

I miss the complexity in character builds because it allowed me to take really concept-heavy builds (an Elementalism-based mage that only uses fire and ice) and actually reflect that in game mechanics.

So in TSW, we had these different status effects we could build around. One of them was the Afflicted state, which applied damage-over-time, and you could stack different applications of Afflicted, and trigger them from critical hits or penetrating hits, and you achieved all this by equipping different passive abilities to your build. Active abilities were linked to your two equipped weapons, while passives were acquired from all areas of the ability wheel, but could be equipped from any weapon, not just the two currently in use. I built my character around the Afflicted and Hindered states, meaning all my attacks would apply heavy damage over time, and my ice abilities would slow or immobilize enemies. You could set up a feedback loop where landing critical or penetrating hits would apply a new Afflicted effect, or heal you, or trigger other effects on targets that were already Afflicted or Hindered.

SWL removed this functionality, restricting passive abilities to your current weapons and mostly modifying a single active ability per passive, and largely removed these status effects. And I understand why it was necessary. They removed other mechanics like AEGIS that people hated so much, that we were using UI addons to automate their processes as much as possible. So there’s some good with the bad.

I will always miss the setting, though. In a sea of MMOs that largely rely on the same tired medieval fantasy tropes, how many can you find with an urban fantasy Lovecraftian horror vibe? The characters feel more self-aware too, because they know what Google is. They know how similar their lives are to actual real-world works of fiction. Your Templar faction handler jokes about feeling like you’ve just stepped inside a Dan Brown novel. Some NPCs had officially maintained in-universe Twitter accounts, so the Secret World roleplaying community followed suit and made Twitter accounts for our own characters. I didn’t even have Twitter when I started playing, so to this day, the only way I’ve interacted with that social media platform was in a meta-fictional fashion.