What do you get when you divide 30 missions by 3 days and then square it by the sum of thousands of newbies in the general chat channel asking the same questions over and over again? The answer is 1200 Funcom points and a t-shirt that proves you were at The Secret World’s one-month insanaganza.
Don’t get me wrong — I think this special free weekend/celebration weekend was a smart move on Funcom’s part. It was gussed up in a way that didn’t just blare “FREE TRIAL”, but made a genuine party out of it. Funcom’s got a great little game here and certainly needs to be aggressive in promoting it, especially in light of its subscription-only nature and the upcoming fall line-up.
1200 free Funcom points was a hard bait to resist, especially for someone like me who loves putting together fun outfits for my character. That’s a few articles of clothing from the store for nothing, so I was determined to knock out those 30 missions come hell or high water. Originally I was concerned, because getting just one mission done in Blue Mountain can take me upwards of 30 minutes to an hour. What I wasn’t anticipating is how easy they’d be going back to Kingsmouth. Not only did I know how to do them all, but the difficulty was far reduced now that I’ve geared up and have a good build under my belt.
I didn’t have any great plan to do the 30, but instead just started wandering around and snagging the ones that I found. Side quests were by far the easiest to accomplish, and fortunately Kingsmouth is littered with them. It went so easily, in fact, that my 30 missions were accomplished by Saturday morning.
I spent the rest of the weekend in TSW going back to do all of the new missions from the first update. The investigation missions were sufficiently tricksy, especially the Hell and Bach one (I was NOT a fan of the seance circles), but great fun to do. My only complaint is that many of these investigation missions have such lackluster endings. Like, “that’s it?” The game seems to get to a point where it’s okay having you be finished, so there’s usually no grand revelation or finale. Just, boom, you’re done.
I’m quite impressed by how much the game asks you to use the internet. There are blogs, YouTube videos, websites, even stuff tucked away on Amazon — all related to TSW. I’m really wondering how Funcom is going to track all of these to make sure they stay up and running, but that’s not my problem, now is it?
My favorite of the new batch was the new mission with Carter, Innsmouth Academy’s sole pupil and wielder of “thaumonuclear” magic or somesuch. Despite lacking missions before the update, Carter’s become something of a popular figure in the game, and it was great fun leading her around a spooky basement looking for the source of the haywire puppets. I kept getting killed by her, though, and it wasn’t until the end that I realized the device I put together keeps me safe from her blasts. D’oh!
In other news, I spotted Harry Potter. Photographic evidence to the right.
Bio Break 
It took me less than two hours to complete 30 missions. I split it across two days and did some of them twice. Some of the Kingsmouth missions take less than a minute and refresh overnight.
The problem came when I got the 1200 points. I spent as long browsing the shop as I did doing the missions and I still couldn’t find anything worth spending them on. I went to Pangea and bought some stuff there instead. That selection’s also lacklustre but still better than the store. What are they thinking?
In the end I spent 600 points on a crow and I’m hanging onto the rest in the hope they might add some hats. Currently the store has none at all.
@bhagpuss Make sure you spend those points before the end of September. By the way, you can get hats at the tube station in London. Not the world’s greatest selection, but still.
Yeah, I ended up getting the New West outfit just for the hat for one character. I would have preferred an a la carte cowboy hat, and spent the rest on a pet. I was also able to get the 30 done in KM very quickly, not quite 3 hours(?).
He. Bumped into Mr Potter up there tonight. He was wielding an assault rifle.
That’s not potter, have a look at the courier in the quest “rolls downhill”, perfect body double.
I got a new dog, then realized that you can only have one pet out at a time 😦
He’s pretty awesome-looking, but really whiny!!