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GDC 2011: Funcom talks The Secret World's PvE, PvP, and ARG
Many of you are no doubt as anxious as we are to get your hands on Funcom's new The Secret World MMORPG (with a new website!). The skill-based end-of-the-world riff has been shrouded in a good bit of mystery for a good long while, but we've finally managed to snag a few minutes of face time with the title. This year's GDC marked the first opportunity for anyone outside of Funcom's alpha team to lay eyes on the game, and we've got some pretty juicy details to pass on. Join us after the cut for the new trailer as well as a recap of Funcom's presentation, which was spearheaded by Ragnar Tornquist and featured designers Martin Bruusgaard and Joel Bylos. Discussion topics include PvP, PvE missions, and character progression.%Gallery-118804%
The state of twinking pre-3.1
Our friend Drayner has posted an open letter to Blizzard over at Twinkinfo.com in which he basically laments the breaking of WoW's twinking game. We've covered twinking quite a few times before here -- it's the game-within-a-game of beefing up lower-level characters to their maximum power using enchants, low-level items, or whatever else they can find. Officially, Blizzard hasn't endorsed or condoned twinking -- if you want to do it, you're free to, but you've got to live with the rules they set on items and enchants, and so forth.And that seems to be Drayner's main issue with Blizzard: they aren't consistent on twinking. They'll make changes that level the twink field, and then they'll ignore bugs that almost completely break it. They kept the latest enchants off of players below level 60, but then they grandfathered in players with the 450 profession buffs. He's got a whole list of changes they've made for and against twinking, and basically asks Blizzard to either support twinking, or (and obviously he's less happy with this decision) end it for good.Unfortunately for him, he probably won't get an answer. There are plenty of players twinking, but not nearly enough for Blizzard to consider making changes based on twinks alone (and while twinks are howling at some of the changes, the rest of the player population either dislikes the whole idea of twinking, or couldn't care either way). And considering that twinking does draw some players into the game, it's not likely Blizzard will ditch it anytime either. Twinks, they would likely say, are playing a meta game already based on made-up rules, so why should it matter that they've also got to abide by other inconsistent rules? Based on what we've heard from them in the past, it seems twinking is a player creation, not a Blizzard creation, so it's up to players to deal with the issues, not Blizzard.
