The Gaming Den

Anybody else playing this?

What it is: MMO set in an urban fantasy setting. It's a buy-once, buy-"expansion patches" (currently $20-$30 base game, $15 or so patches worth) game, with some really neat things. There are no classes - instead you build a "deck" out of abilities from a giant list with 9 different weapons ( http://www.badomens.net/calculator ) , choosing two weapons to use, and mix and match whatever you want. You can swap these around any time, although you have to buy the abilities first. Ignore the advertisements with "No leveling" though as that's total bullshit, there's leveling, just weirdly.

I'm pretty into it and enjoying it - the missions are much better than usual questing despite mostly being usual questing, except for crazy puzzles that might require bible verses, riddles, musical notation, or morse code to solve. Dungeons are short (no trash, 6 bosses each) and challenging both on a "What build do I get, how do I customize myself for this fight" level and an execution level unlike most other MMOs I've seen, even right from the get-go.

If anyone is interested, I can toss out a 3-day trial.

Your description makes it sound like the mechanics of Guild Wars but with better execution. Is this an accurate assessment?

What I've heard is that it's an interesting setting and story locked behind terrible WoW knock-off mechanics.

Having not played GW2... yeah, it is pretty similiar to GW1 in how you build decks. Pick 7 active, 7 passive abilities from between any two of the nine weapons. It doesn't have GW's annoying skill sliders, though, and PVP is pretty shitty from what I've seen.

The mechanics are very WoW, yes. If you never liked WoW, you likely won't like TSW. However, as someone who's big into doing different instances, TSW's are some of the best I've seen in MMOs as a whole.

This game is on sale for $15 today on steam. No subscription fee, excellent MMO!