The Secret World Preview

“In an MMO you are not the chosen one. I find that almost offensive,” says The Secret World director Ragnar Tørnquist, a man who’s clearly looking to give the MMORPG genre a much needed overhaul.

Though development studio Funcom has a lot of experience in the genre after 2008’s Age Of Conan, Tørnquist is a relative outsider, having cut his teeth on point and click adventure games like The Longest Journey. His approach to the MMO is understandably story driven. 

“When I do a quest in an MMO and go into a village and someone says ‘hail the chosen one, you’ve saved us’, I’m thinking that ten metres behind me there’s another guy and you’re going to say the same thing to him.

"It feels like they’re lying to me and it’s all just bullshit” argues Tørnquist. “The Secret World addresses this and says you’re not the chosen one, you’re part of an army of chosen ones.”

That army is one of three secret societies – the Templars, the Illuminati and the Dragon – who form to uncover and explore the eponymous secret world, an alternate dimension hidden between the cracks of our own universe and inspired by such fictional touchstones as the works of H.P. Lovecraft and Vertigo comics like Hellblazer or Sandman.

Such fantastical worlds can only seem fantastical in comparison to something extremely ordinary, of course. Which is why The Secret World features several realistic real-world locations, such as New York, Seoul and Tokyo. For the purposes of our demo, we are introduced to the London tutorial area and are staggered by the level of authentic detail on display.

Every element of the streets looks exactly as you’d expect from the real city, right down to the design of bollards or road signs, while the buildings, such as a proper chip shop, show a cultural understanding of the location that goes beyond mere mimicry of iconography.

In addition to the main locations The Secret World also features a number of minor areas also based on real countries. 

Only a billboard advertising ‘English Football’ breaks our suspension of disbelief, and only momentarily. Funcom’s London is one of the most believable locations we’ve seen in a game and is immediately refreshing next to the generic fantasy and sci-fi worlds more typical of the MMO genre.

“I think that cities in games are just portrayed horribly wrong,” says Tørnquist. “It’s too easy to do the prettified version of Times Square, for example, but you don’t want that. You want to find the soul of the city. That’s really important to me.

"All that detail is part of giving this game a soul and I think good games have souls. Good games can be flawed and those that do have a soul have some value to them, and that’s what we’re trying to create here – a world with a soul, characters with soul… gameplay with a soul. Something that is fresh and different and maybe not super-polished but with substance.”

Much of The Secret World plays exactly as you’d expect from an MMO, its combat mechanics, for example, falling squarely into well-worn moulds, but that freshness Tørnquist is striving for is definitely there.

There’s no levelling, for example. In fact, there are no classes or experience points at all. Instead, you’re totally free to build your character any way you see fit, by equipping a series of powers and abilities that interconnect and complement each other.

There are over 500 such powers to be gradually unlocked throughout the game and, though we initially struggled with the reality of enduring combat without grinding our way to a position of strength, it quickly became second nature to drop into the character customisation menu and fiddle around with the powers until we had a formidable array of abilities with which to overcome a given situation.

Such an alteration to the traditional MMO template is merely a tweak compared to some of the other ideas in The Secret World, not least the addition of investigation missions.

Optional side-quests can sometimes be more absorbing than the main ones. 

Rooted in Tørnquist’s point-and-click adventure works, the investigation missions offer a lengthy and taxing alternative to the MMO’s usual type of ‘click to win’ combat missions.

Rather than the sort of inventory-based puzzles you’d find in a LucasArts game, for example, these missions are more like treasure hunts, wherein players follow cryptic clues that lead them from one location to another and eventually to a an ultimate goal.

The mission we try in the demo, known as the Kingsmouth Code, sees us travelling all over an island village filled with zombies, trying to avoid danger while following a breadcrumb trail of clues.

It’s far from easy too. One riddle eventually leads us to realise we should be looking for a clock in a ‘seat of power’ and, assuming that we’re dealing with typical videogame logic, we run around town looking for the biggest clocktower we can find. There isn’t one.

Instead, we’re supposed to have noticed a regular sized office clock on the wall of the town hall. Once we find it, its hands point to a time that, once cross-reference with a previous riddle, direct us toward a specific line in the Bible’s book of Kings, our search taking us into the real world and drawing on a stock of knowledge beyond the established rules of the game’s fiction.

“Kingsmouth Code is actually the easiest of the investigation missions,” says Tørnquist, much to our surprise. Getting to the end of the quest within the time allotted to us was no easy task but those who got there quickest were the players who took advantage of the massively multiplayer nature of the game and worked together, sharing breakthroughs or following independent trains of thought (or wild goose chases) in order to save time.

This, says Tørnquist, is the key that will stop The Secret World players from getting frustrated with the bottleneck nature of puzzles. “Some of these things are really, really hard but the point is for the community to come together and help each other crack these things,” he explains.

Lovecraft isn’t the only influence on monster design. There are loads, cherry picked from the best of myth and legend. 

“Investigations are not the bulk of the gameplay so if you don’t like them or get stuck then you can always go and kill zombies or do something else you prefer.

“I think you’ll see that players are very active in the chat channels, very active in the community boards. What we’ve seen so far is that people are really good at helping each other with these things, not spelling things out but dropping hints, like ‘maybe you should look at the Bible’ or ‘go look at the clock’.

"I think it will be really interesting and that people will be much nicer than they usually are online. People are really interested in sharing that information, but also ensuring that they enjoy solving a puzzle themselves.

"I really hope that you’ll see a very communal effort. Some of the tougher investigation quests are designed to take weeks to solve for the entire community.

"I think everyone will get stuck on something at the same time and the problem will simmer away in the background for a long time, until one person has a breakthrough and then everyone will flock back to the mission as word spreads.”

The investigation quests certainly proved popular among the media invited to try out The Secret World before release, with talk about the riddles and their solutions dominating post-game conversation, and Tørnquist is certain this popularity will extend to a wide audience.

“We revealed the first investigation mission at GDC and the response was immediately fantastic and, after that, any time anyone hears about it they think it’s great. So we’ve actually been doing a lot more of them than we intended even a year ago.”

Such difficult puzzles are sure to consume a lot of time – an essential quality for any MMO – but dedicated players are bound to exhaust even that content within a matter of months.

Some enemies are clearly better tackled while in a group.

Thankfully, Tørnquist and the two internal Funcom studios developing The Secret World are already preparing new content and expansions. “There’s stuff we’ve already started working on that we hope will come out reasonably soon after the game launches”, says Tørnquist.

“We are going to continue the story. The story informs everything in the game as it is and it will continue to inform everything. You guys played the Tokyo Flashback sequence today and that sequence won’t necessarily mean a lot even if you play through all the launch content but it will mean a hell of a lot a year from then.

"The story mission in the launch content has a satisfying conclusion but of course there’s more stuff coming and there will be lots of questions left unanswered. We’re also not making it up as we go along. The story is mapped out, so we’re not going to do something like the final season of Lost and screw it all up.” 

After the agonising wait for the concluding chapter in Tørnquist’s Longest Journey series, we have to ask if The Secret World will end on a cliffhanger. Thankfully, the director has clearly learned from his mistakes. “I’ve been warned away from cliffhanger endings.”