The Secret World’s holiday event this year was a tad underwhelming. No new content beyond some tacky decorations in Agartha and a very dull snowball fight minigame.
Some of the new cosmetics were nice, though. The moose and reindeer mounts are cool, though sadly out of my reach, and the new frost sprint is really pretty. Plus some nice general use winter clothes… and Elf ears.
Elf ears.
An item that gives your character Elf ears in The Secret World.
Elf.
Ears.
In.
TSW.
Aaaahhhh myyyy gaaawwdsss.
So, um, I had kind of a brain meltdown and a brief existential crisis and stuff happened, and…
Well, long story short, I bought yet another character slot and created a character I could RP as an Elf from the start.
So yeah.
This is my fifth character, and once again this is a game with very little use for alts to begin with and no reason at all to have more than three characters.
The worst part? She’s another Dragon — my third Dragon. It seemed to make the most sense from a lore perspective, and I wanted her to have as many green outfits as possible.
I don’t know if I’ll even play her to any serious degree. I still haven’t even finished Kingsmouth on Kamala…
I am at least trying to make her fit within the TSW universe. “Everything is true,” after all, and there’s already lots of Norse mythological stuff in the game, so I’m basing her character on the Elves the ancient Norse believed in — gave her a Norse inspired name and so forth. My thinking is the Elves in TSW would be a bit like the Jinn — embittered ancients struggling to cope with the modern world.
I’m waffling on her build at the moment, as I am wont to do. I started with elemental/chaos, but now I’m thinking elemental/blood makes the most sense, given Elves were viewed as the bringers and curers of disease. Shame — one day I’ll have a character that actually uses chaos seriously, maybe.
She did turn out to look pretty cool, at least — really surprised how good she looks in the geisha top from the issue ten CE — and if nothing else she’s been good screenshot fodder.
And honestly? Just knowing I have an Elf in TSW makes me feel better. More at peace with the universe.
Because Elves, that’s why.
Tutorial changes:
This was also my first time creating a new character since the global rebalance whose proper name escapes me but is usually referred to by fans as the NGE or the EPEEN.
It’s not a huge difference, but it is noticeable. The main change is the section in your faction’s training area. It now includes more instructions as to the proper use of the builder/consumer system (tailored to the unique mechanics of each weapon type, which is a nice touch), and it makes sure you grab two weapons before leaving.
It’s still a long way from explaining all the complexity TSW offers — I especially think more attention should be put toward explaining the importance of using passives from multiple weapons — but it’s unquestionably an improvement.
One strange thing is that you no longer get a full set of white gear upon leaving the tutorial and now enter Kingsmouth with most of your gear slots empty, but that gear never made much difference anyway, and it was always replaced quickly, so I guess it’s not too big a deal.
Interestingly, not all the changes are mechanical. The cinematics for new characters have also received at least one change: The dark-clothed fellow who appears to speak for the Dreamers has had a makeover and now sports some gnarly face tattoos.
Exactly what this means is somewhat open to interpretation, as are most things in TSW, but if you read through the discussion I started about it on the official forums, it seems it may actually have some intriguing lore implications.
Superior Realities 
First of all, on the event: yes, it seems to have been bland. After all, as far as we know, the last puzzle of it was solved already this week, so like three days before the event ended. Of course, many people only looked at what they saw at the start, concluded that they saw it all and decided that it was underwhelming.
Actually i don’t know if we found it all, i rather doubt it. There was the snowball fight, which with an achievement locked into the Hel fight, which again unnoticed by many (me included) actually was not the goal but just a pointer that there was a change. Sometimes the achievement triggered something (Hel flinched) for a guaranteed extra reward. But while the message was there, in the middle of the screen, most people never bothered much about it. (Or were too busy surviving and fighting the fight the old fashioned way to notice that text. )
So this event might not have been the most obvious new-content-in-your-face event the game ever had, and TSW generally is more stylish and less noisy in its presentation than most other MMOs. But things were there, hidden and ready to be discovered, and i believe that there might’ve been more, which we just have not even figured out before the event ended.
On your character: a norse elf is a dragon? Just because of green? Might just be me, but i would’ve made it a Templar for geological reasons. 😀
On the tutorial changes: in theory you are right, new players could be taught much more, but i also think they already went to the limit there. I mean, i have met players who started playing after the change, and watched let’s play videos for TSW where people created characters in the new tutorial and still afterwards ran around, using only one weapon and not understanding builders and consumers.
So apparently the new tutorial, the way it is now, already overstressed their information processing capabilities and any more would’ve not helped at all. But hey, a system which is even more complex than the Assassin in Diablo 2, the Rogue in WoW, anything in Rift and basically any other MMO class with a ressource building system is just so new and alien, you can’t expect people to understand that.
And yes, my sarcasm is getting the better of me, whenever i think about this and have to accept that people really can have problems understanding the simply builder/consumer system. Just consider what it would do to them, if they’d be forced to actually understand the more complex part of passives and synergies…
And on the tatoos: damn! I wasn’t even aware that the cutscene in the tutorial was changed, i haven’t created a new character since years. Very big thanks to pointing this out, for the implications indeed are interesting. 🙂
The mini-puzzle was rather clever, and I was glad to be able to get my claws before the event ended, but on the whole I still think it was something of an underwhelming event (plus I wrote this post before that particular mystery was cracked).
I don’t think there’s anything else we missed. Of course, with Funcom you can never be quite sure, but if there was anything truly in-depth new to the event, I think they would have at least dropped some hint to put us on the scent.
An Elf isn’t an obvious fit with any of the factions, really, and I did give some serious thought to Templar, but then I remembered that the Templar are very strongly against non-humans. They’d probably try to use her for target practice as soon as welcome her into their ranks.
Meanwhile, the Dragon are about breaking down the flawed aspects of our society, and I don’t think any hypothetical TSW Elves would be very well-served by the world created by modern humans.
They’re also the faction with the most canonical support for non-humans. There’s that tattooed half-demon fellow from the tutorial, and we’re pretty sure the lady in the red dress who gives the player their “oral exam” isn’t human either, plus they’re supposedly planning to rescue Traian and help him join the other elder Werewolves…
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