Bare Minimums

When you make a product, there are certain standards that should apply. For newspapers, for example, you expect clean editing, the right pictures with the right articles, etc. For games, you expect a clean, understandable rule book, all the pieces to fit and be there. For food, you expect it to taste right and not kill you. For MMOs, we seem to have... no real expectations except a "smooth launch," which really just means not too crappy of a launch. Games that have smooth launches tend to be smaller, niche games, basically because they are not stressed as heavily during the initial week.

For an MMO, one of the key things that needs to work is chat. Currently, The Secret World is having issues with its chat. Big issues. Issues like: I can't talk to my guild issues. This is bad. I won't sugar coat that; it's a critical failure that they are working on fixing (and may have already patched by the time you read this). It's something you can stumble through, but I can understand if it makes you wait to buy it.

But, the good things outweigh the bad here. Here's one really good thing. You have so much freedom in character creation and choice that, well, you'll make lots of wrong choices along the way. Also, if you find the right group of people, you can even role play in a modern setting. In other words, the game has a lot of good things, just some of the bare necessities are lacking. I still think you should try it, but I'm enjoying it. Even if I'm going terribly, terribly slow. Maybe I'll finish the starter zone today.

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P.S.,

Apparently, SoHo has a problem that not enough people are artists, or something. Obviously, though, these people simply don't realize that all those non-artists are really just performance artists. After all, if this is art, why isn't not being an artist also art?