Gaming by the Hour – week ending 7/1/2012

This was another slow week for gaming, but marked the beginning of two big events in my gaming life.

The first event was the early access for The Secret World. While I was excited to get to into the game for real, I unfortunately did not have much opportunity to do so. I did manage to play two sessions for about 1 hour each. During the first session, I created my character. I decided on Dragon for my first since I had not read much about them, but liked the controlled chaos theme. This story was expanded upon during my second hour when talking to Jin Jae-Hoon in Seoul. I went through all of his conversations learning about The Secret World, the Illuminati, the Templars, and many other things. While the Dragon, Templars, and Illuminati comprise the main factions, there are other groups in the 'governing body' of the Secret World. This organization, called The Council of Venice, also includes smaller societies such as the Phoenicians, who I don't believe players can become a member of (at least yet). The Council was created to prevent the societies from destroying the world during one of the earlier conflicts and I am sure we will learn much more about them as the game goes on.

Once I had extracted all the information I could from Jin, I proceeded upstairs to the actual initiation into the Dragons which included a mental projection to the events that happened in Tokyo just prior to my awakening into the Secret World. At this point, I have just begun my experience – I don't even have a weapon yet though I got to use a shotgun during the Tokyo vision. In the next week, I look forward to getting my basic gear and heading to Kingsmouth for the zombie assault and to find the 'Order in Chaos'

The second event this week was the escalation of the war in Delve in Eve Online. This is going to be 'THE' event in null sec for the summer as there are a over a dozen alliances involved in the fight. Win or lose, I am looking forward to some good combat. With things heating up, I put in 3 hours trying to find some bad guys to shoot, or at least some guys to shoot at my friends so I could heal them, but I only saw friendlies moving in for future fights. I am certainly hoping that things will pick up now that the European Soccer tournament is over, but I know the Olympics are starting soon, so we'll see.