Missions and Worms

Today we finally get introduced to one of the worms of Arrakis, and while the planetologist is working for the Emperor, he shows admiration for Duke Leto. And as we keep moving closer to confrontation in Dune, I move closer to New York and the Illuminati HQ, where Chicken Noodle hopes to get some answers and find out how to get moving to regular missions now that she has finished the tutorial.

Cruising Through To Brooklyn

As I mentioned in the previous session of Secret World Legends, I flew through the tutorial, but it bears noting that there is essential information in the process.

This is the first experience Chicken Noodle has with the various types of missions – Action/Sabotage, Investigation, Story – and how they combine to make SWL such a fun game. The idea is that you should always have a Main Story Quest that you are working on but then can have multiple side quests. You can only have a small number of each type of side quest, though, which pushes you to finish off one before moving on to another. Fortunately, the missions in SWL are pretty involved and exciting, and while there are a few ‘kill ten rats’ type of quests, they tend to be outside the mission log and are usually triggered based on location. The game is not gonna make you go very far to find the rats (or, in this case, zombies) you need to kill.

Beyond the types of missions, the tutorial does an excellent job of helping a new player understand the scope of what they are getting into with the various mission types. For instance, in one of the tutorial missions, you have to step on certain tiles, but if you step on others, you fail – step on the correct symbols, and you are good. In another part of a mission, you are asked to press buttons based on image matching – but you’re not really told that in the mission description. And that’s the enjoyment of SWL – missions have a goal, but they don’t always explain how to achieve that goal – typically, you need to think about how you want to do something, and that’s what keeps drawing me back.

In SWL, your missions are more than just run here, do this, find that, turn in this. They actually make you think about things – some require morse code, others require you to remember a code from another location, others require you to spot certain things in an image, and others actually require you to die so you can run around in the afterlife.

The atmosphere and complexity of the missions really drive me back to this game every year, and I still have not seen most of it.

In any case, the tutorial makes you fight a bit, makes you jump through some logic hoops, and eventually, you head to Brooklyn to try to track down the Illuminati. It’s all fun, and I should be getting into the game more fully in my next game session.

Meet a Worm

This chapter of Dune is pretty packed with information and activity, and it was a lot of fun to read. We finally, in chapter 15, get to see what a worm experience is like, and it sounds pretty scary; We learn that Paul knows inherently how to put on and wear a stillsuit, even though he’s never touched one before; and we learn that the planetologist, Kynes, is clearly an agent of the Emperor. That doesn’t mean that Kynes would fail to see how the Duke treats all his people with respect and values the workers’ lives above spice.

Even so, the main event is a worm attacking and consuming a factory crawler. Duke Leto performs aerial acrobatics to ensure all the workers are saved, but the crawler is lost. As the chapter comes to a close, we see Kynes admiring the Duke for his concern for life over profits and wonders if he’s on the wrong side in this political battle between the Emperor, the Harkonnen, and the Atreides.

I rate chapter 15 a Must Read…

Ramble 20 Badger 30| Missions and Worms