Even two decades after its release, The Longest Journey hasn’t lost its hold on players’ imaginations. Except now, satisfying that nostalgia fix doesn’t have to mean stomaching those 1999 graphics thanks to a high-res makeover mod released last week.

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Nine months after its free-to-play reboot as Secret World Legends, Funcom’s globe-trotting MMO of modern myth and magic finally has a second new location to explore. For those who have finished the main story and are hungry for more, you’ve got a new assignment out in South Africa, and giant glowing hyenas are probably the lesser evil out there compared to the Morninglight cult.

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Secret World Legends is off to South Africa in its next big update, the first new land added to the supernatural MMORPG in yeeaars. While Funcom’s recent free-to-play revamp-o-relaunch of The Secret World initially focused on rolling out old areas, now they’re ready for new adventures with new mythologies. Old mythologies? New old mythologies. I still haven’t gotten around to revisiting this pleasant spookworld after its relaunch, though our John quite enjoyed it still, so maybe I’ll poke my head in for new ghost stories. Apparently we get to join a cult, which I’m certainly up for. Have a peek: (more…)

Funcom have been slowly building up Secret World Legends [official site] the revamped version of their conspiracy-laden 2012 MMO The Secret World by taking bits of the old game, polishing them up and plonking them down in the free-to-play title, which launched in June. Now it’s the turn of the Manhattan Exclusion Zone, a 10-person raid that happens directly under Times Square.

Any level 50 character can plunge under New York’s tarmac in search of the 100-foot long Unutterable Lurker, the raid’s big bad. There’s multiple difficulty levels and lots of rewards for success, including new weapons.

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The Secret World was always a game struggling to crawl out from under the weight of its own genre. Many have attempted to build a story-led MMO – and it’s a noble pursuit – but no one has ever quite figured out how to do it, not least because an MMO is a terrible setting in which to tell a story. The Secret World got the closest so far. The intricately woven tale of conspiracy upon conspiracy was a huge hook when the game first released five years ago, and some could forgive the janky grindy weirdness of its online necessities to enjoy a setting and quest style not seen before in the genre. Will more people learn to see past the structural faults now, with its free-to-play reboot as Secret World Legends [official site]? … [visit site to read more]

Last night, a hipster necromancer (or maybe she was a thaumaturge?) stopped me from becoming the main course at a zombie diner. Just a regular evening in Secret World Legends [official site], I guess. I ve been dabbling in the relaunched MMO s head start phase for a wee while, but it launches properly today. … [visit site to read more]

Real-ish-world supernatural MMORPG The Secret World will relaunch reworked and free-to-play as Secret World Legends [official site] this spring, developers Funcom announced today. It’ll look prettier, fight better, and rework quest flow, all of which sounds great. The Secret World is a wonderful game at heart, with a weird and well-written world I hugely enjoyed getting to know and some cracking puzzles, but it has suffered from its MMORPG baggage. Funcom aren’t even calling Legends an MMO – it’s “a shared-world action RPG”. TSW dropped subscription fees years back but Legends will be properly free-to-play, with all content free to everyone too. … [visit site to read more]

One of the main reasons I got into RPGs back in the day was that if you bought one, you were getting a lot of game for your money. That was important when there was only one birthday and one Christmas a year, and not much chance that some relative might pop their clogs in sync with Ultima VI coming out. Years later I no longer need the Grim Reaper’s help to fill my collection, and other genres have done their best to replace scouring maps for objectives with, y’know, game>, but there’s still few that can match it in terms of raw Stuff. It takes a lot of content to fill an RPG.

This week then, I’m turning the spotlight on a few small bits and pieces from various games that I think back on fondly. Not entire games. Just a few ideas and moments from them that stuck with me, whether I liked the actual game they were in at all. Add yours in the comments, yadda yadda, you know the drill. Also, I thought I’d try and pick a few things that aren’t brought up that often, hence the lack of, say, Heather Poe from Vampire: Bloodlines or any of The Witcher III’s awesome stuff. Got that? Cool.

Note: you can browse through the list using the arrows alongside the image at the top of the page, or using the left and right arrows on your very own keyboard.

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A rash of hacks in the past two months has left the usernames, emails and passwords from at least twelve gaming forums compromised, including those of Unreal creator Epic Games and Secret World developer Funcom. Other breaches include a GTA fansite and, as previously reported, the official forums of Dota 2. All the attacks involved an exploit in the forum’s software, which the hackers used to hoover up details of members. And while the passwords are encrypted, they can often be easily cracked. In total, over 9 million user accounts have had their details stolen.

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This is the end, my only cyberfriend, the end. Episode 5 of adventure game Dreamfall Chapters [official site] launched last night and, unless something strange and wonderful happens, that will likely be the end of the whole thing. It’s the end of Dreamfall and it’s the end of its overarching series The Longest Journey.

… [visit site to read more]