5 reasons The Secret World is a fail: Reason 3

3. The game is a buggy mess.

The Secret World isn’t kinda buggy. It’s not a little buggy. It doesn’t have just a few tolerable bugs. It’s a mess.

Bugs are so prevalent in this game it’s staggering. Combat is bugged. There’s a persistent bug where you can be standing right next to a target and you’ll be told, “No line of sight to target”. Questing is bugged. Some people are finding themselves having to reset quests to get them to work. Even chat is bugged: Sometimes all the channels disappear. The client is bugged: Sometimes things are just so messed up you realize you have to rebuild your client. It’s a good thing there’s a repair option.

And those are just a few of the bugs. People talk in general and in the forums about the bugs.

Here’s what likely happened. Remember when Age of Conan released? It was buggy, too, so buggy it hurt the game. The Secret World was built on the same game engine as AoC. So what Funcom did was build their game on what they knew was already shoddy crap. When you build an MMO on an already buggy framework, your bugs multiply ten fold, resulting in a horrendously buggy game.

But, hey, it probably saved them the expensive of having to develop a new game engine.

Reason 4, tomorrow.