Never been one for rushing through. If you squint in parts, you can play as an RPG. Sorta. Now wheres my Fus Do Rah perk. Oh yeah. Shotguns.
Never been one for rushing through. If you squint in parts, you can play as an RPG. Sorta. Now wheres my Fus Do Rah perk. Oh yeah. Shotguns.
There isn't much rushing required.
The main story is around 12 hours total if you do it and ignore the side missions. Even if you "casually" play that (3 hours a day) you'll be done with that in 4 days. From there, there's another 4 Episode missions and that's another hour tops. At this point you got two main decisions:
1. Do the side missions which give 1-2k XP and 100-200 scrip
2. Do pursuits which give 100's of Ego ratings while earning vastly more XP and scrip
Most people chose 2. Now understanding Ego rating is critical. At 1408 Ego rating 650 of that is skill points, another 250 is skill points (4 ego/lvl) and the rest is all pursuits (around 500). In general this means if you see anyone who's Ego above 1000 they've either been grinding a lot of Pursuits or they've been grinding a lot of XP at Major Arkfalls (which when fully done yield around 17k XP). Anyone who's 1250+ most likely has done most of the Pursuits and grinded quite a few Ego levels at that point. Anyone 1500+ has started to really grind XP levels and has done most of the pursuits.
The reason why side missions are mostly a waste of time is that their rewards are trash by comparison to just about anything in the game. For the same time and effort I could go do a Major Arkfall and make literally 10 times the rewards and much more loot. Why bother other than the few needed for zone completion?
Pursuits are easy to gain as well once you have the guides, which there's already plenty of guides for Data Recorder locations (which are honestly the hardest part). Even then there's quite a few bugged, such as PvP ones resetting and Dam Defense being taken out so there's another 100 Ego or so that's currently impossible to even do.
Even if it takes you a month to reach that stage, the chances of there being some mythical content update in that time frame is likely slim. At this point in the game (again around 1300+) your game play devolves into:
1. Contracts. Once per day. They go fast. They let you buy terrible gear.
2. Major Arkfalls. The only reliable way to gain large chunks of XP to continue to advance. Also the best source of loot with multiple white/greens from the minors in the Major and sometimes Blue/Purples from the Major.
3. Driving around tagging events with your car but not finishing them but then getting full credit when some other shmuck finishes them giving you free XP/Runes/Scrip.
4. Chain running instances to grind out weapon skill gains.
5. Checking the vendor shops every hour on the half hour to see if anything decent is in the special of the day.
6. PvP if you like one shotting and getting one shot by Shotguns while cloaked.
I mean that's your game and what there is to do in it. Like I tell people, the game is the polar opposite of EVE. It has amazing game play (EVE has boring game play) but is shallow as a kiddie pool (EVE has amazingly deep consequences to everything). As they stated, most of their first few major patches will likely be directed at focusing on fixing the glaring issues like the broken just about everything (matchmaking is broken, pvp is broken, chat/voice is broken, many missions are broken, etc) so expecting a content patch to beef up the end there likely won't happen till month two and by then I think a lot of people will have moved on (because grinding the same 4 major arkfalls over and over gets boring pretttttttttty quick).
I laughed when I read another thread that people were going on about "I didn't rush the game, I'm ego 1100+ and I just San Francisco!" and they don't realize all they did was reverse the order others did the game. They started their Major Arkfall and Pursuit grind BEFORE they finished the story, which honestly doesn't matter. The only thing the main story matters is in unlocking San Francisco and side missions for zone completion.
Founder of Clan <Lazy Console Port>
Blur Game Play
I found the vast majority of side quests take a mere fraction of the time of a minor arkfall, let alone a major. It's just drive somewhere, kill a couple guys and pick up something. The arkfalls I've done take a significantly longer chunk of time.Originally Posted by KodiakX
*edit: some do have you do an event/public quest but then the event has it's own reward on top of what the side quest offers anyway
I've found around 50% of them in the later zones are all go to X place, and then do the event for the area which is the major source of the XP not the 1000 reward you get at the end. Also considering minor arkfalls you just need to kill any mob and then walk away you can spend that time tagging a mob, then running off and doing other events in the game for double or triple the XP of the people who sit there and actually do the Arkfall itself.
It's pretty poorly designed system for credit and really lets you optimize your XP time if you want. Consider yesterday where I drove around for a half hour tagging side events throughout all the zones and then went off and took a shower. Came back 20 minutes later and had half my XP bar filled (35k at the time) and 20 key fragments.
I will say the Major Arkfalls are actually well designed for credit, however and in general you want to do them start to finish to get the full reward they can yield.
Founder of Clan <Lazy Console Port>
Blur Game Play
MMO players are strange beasts.
They either take off the entire week from work or (usually) they have no job or are still in school so they end up playing like 8-10 hours a day and grind. Then, once they complete everything at an abnormal rate, they flock to the forums and complain there's nothing to do.
It's even funnier in this game because the TV show didn't even start yet so of course content and things to do for the first week pre-show is gonna be slow.
People are complaining that theres nothing to do in comparison to pretty much every other MMO release ever. Even global agenda had more to do and it only had 3 PvE missions. The TV show will make absolutely no difference to the state of the game bar 1 or two episode missions so stop clinging on to that excuse.
I just play a few hours some nights. Not rushing it. I play The Secret World on Friday nights when I am drunk in TS3 doing dungeons and I play MechWarrior Online as well with some people. And every Sunday I do Guild Missions in GW2 and usually stay on and do my daily.
Mixing it up a bit.
I think you summed it up pretty nicely. I do the side quests to get rid of them off my map. It also forces me to explore.
How is TSW these days? I regret not having many friends playing it in the end because it was a really awesome game
Exactly. I don't think people understand that no one is complaining that there's nothing to do, it's that the stuff to do is so limited and shallow most of us can't possibly see how this game will hold anyone's attention for very long once they do reach the same point. It doesn't matter if you spend a week hitting that point or a month but everyone seems to keep clinging to thise same tired rhetoric.
Other than yesterday and today I haven't taken any time off of work and haven't lost any sleep and easily got through the game's content. If I had done all that I would have been Ego 2000+ already from grinding XP. The only conclusion I can come up with is either spend more time posting on forums than playing in game or they're so bad at the game they can't figure out how to play the game properly.
Founder of Clan <Lazy Console Port>
Blur Game Play
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