Stepping into The Secret World

Early impressions and video commentary of Funcom’s horror-themed MMO.

The Secret World seems kind of like the anti-Tera. The moment-to-moment combat is not the highlight, and should feel very familiar to any MMO veteran. Instead, it’s the questing structures, the setting and the mood of the world that really help it stand out, blending aspects of the point and click adventure genre into an MMO environment. But alongside every interesting progression system and non-traditional quest is another that asks you to kill five of this, then run over there and kill five more, then run over there and kill ten, so after sampling some of the early content of The Secret World, it’s difficult to say if it manages to differentiate itself quite enough.

It certainly has strengths. When starting out, you don’t select a class. Instead, you pick up different weapon types – shotguns, assault rifles, pistols, swords and more – and are free to custom-build your play style. Killing enemies and completing quests earns experience, but doesn’t level your character. In conversation with others about The Secret World, you’ll never say “I’m a level 60 Blood Magic user.” Filling the experience bar unlocks skill points and ability points, which can be allocated however you like to power up attack types and unlock new ways to heal, deal damage and tank effectively.

Looking at the shifting mass of the slickly presented ability wheel the first time can be intimidating. You pull back its layers like peeling an orange, revealing clusters of complexity nestled under each scrap of rind. It’s not clear at the outset if your decisions about where to spend ability points will result in peerless power or an inefficient mix. Funcom does provide some direction by offering “decks”, which highlight specific abilities on the wheel for you to work towards and, presumably, arrive at an optimal build. Only seven active abilities and seven passives can be equipped at any time, so you need to carefully consider how every ability interrelates, especially with regards to the various debuff states that can be placed on enemies. It's a system with quite a bit of depth, and though it’s still too early to judge it, the amount of freedom Funcom provides is certainly promising and provides a lot of opportunity for experimentation.

While fighting the shambling horrors inhabiting the opening questing zone of Kingsmouth you’ll take part in genre-standard Tab-targeting combat. Without auto-attacks (at least with my ability build) and with the ability to actively dodge out of the way of incoming attacks, fights can be a little more interesting compared to the World of Warcraft style, though they still feel similar. Perhaps that sense of familiarity will fade during some of the complex dungeon encounters that require a group, but for now, there’s nothing terribly exciting about peppering Kingsmouth’s zombified residents with bullets.

The questing system is really the intriguing part, as is the mood. Playing The Secret World encourages observation and exploration instead of a near-scientific pursuit of efficient experience gain. Quest goals are sometimes obvious and highlighted on your mini-map, but sometimes only vaguely hinted at. One quest description asks you to follow crows. The first crow is pointed out on the map, and when you approach it flies off and, after a short duration, disappears. Confusing? Sure is. I scanned the skies to see where it might have gone and saw the occasional crow soar by. I followed their paths while nervously eyeing the quest timer countdown, never sure if I was heading in the right direction. The quest failed and I restarted, wondering if the disappearing crow was a bug or intentional. I had no idea what to do.

Seeking help in moments of confusion seems to be one of the ways Funcom encourages social interaction. So I asked for an answer in general chat, and the results were surprising. Multiple players did not provide a direct answer, but only more hints. They didn’t want to ruin what they viewed as a core part of The Secret World, that sense of satisfaction derived from successfully solving a puzzle. In some cases, like when I had to resort to Google searches using the in-game browser to look up puzzle solutions, I agreed with their sentiment. Discovering secret door codes and hidden locations sometimes required a little bit of critical thinking that’s usually never a part of the MMO experience. Yet at other times, like in the case of the crow quest, it was just poorly designed.

As it turned out, the crows I was supposed to follow weren’t in the air, as the first flying crow seemed to so obviously hint at, but sitting on the ground. The next group of crows I had to trigger to advance the quest was pecking the pavement somewhere in the direction of the first crow’s flight. In cases like this, the lack of clarity is more of an obstacle than a clever tease, and there was no revelatory satisfaction associated with figuring things out. That’s not the case with every quest, but there seem to be just as many that are challenging for the wrong reasons, like when a quest goal requires an extensive amount of pixel hunting for a security camera at Kingsmouth’s gas station. So, in other words, it feels much like a point and click adventure game.

Funcom makes an effort to provide context for each of the major quests by introducing them with lengthy, fully voiced cut-scenes with NPCs presented with dynamic camera angles. The approach helps establish mood and convey the importance of each task, and makes it feel like the quest is being handed out by a person instead of a robotic dispenser. It’s odd, then, when a quest finishes to have no ending scene with the NPC. Instead, a completed quest is unceremoniously texted in, which gives each task an unbalanced quality, like a novel with its last page scribbled on a bar napkin. It’s at least convenient, letting you turn in a quest everywhere for experience and items, but the omission of true endings in a game seemingly so obsessed with exploration, tone and storytelling remains a nagging issue for me. The actual main story mission does seem to more consistently employ voiced cut-scenes, so perhaps it’ll provide more of a detailed conclusion.

What is consistent throughout is the mood. Circumstances in Kingsmouth and each of the three factions’ starting cities are desperate, but there’s still an element of tongue-in-cheek horror humor, such as street names like Lovecraft Lane and Elm Street in Kingsmouth. The quality of the visuals is impressive, with ominous tendrils of black wavering in the distance and light filters through Kingsmouth’s foggy forests, solemn houses and blighted seafront that meshes well with the game’s horror themes.

The attention to detail in the presentation extends to the menus, which, aside from the ability wheel, are compact and tastefully simple. The item upgrade mechanics seem pretty interesting as well, as they feature a Minecraft-style grid crafting system. If you find something you don’t want, you can quickly disassemble it into component parts, then fuse components into higher quality versions. When you’ve collected enough, these components can then be combined with higher quality crafting kits to generate new weapons and stat-boosting talismans, letting you deal more damage and increase things like crit power and heal rating.

In case you’d rather just beat up other players instead of questing, you can hop into PvP arenas to earn experience and unlock more skill and ability points. You can participate in standard territory control contest between small teams from the three factions, or check out a much larger persistent warzone where you’ll fight large teams of other players as well as AI-controlled bosses that guard capture points. It’s great fun, but feels very conventional in a game that seems to want to distance itself from convention wherever it can.

While The Secret World does quite a bit different, does it do enough? These are questions that’ll be answered in a review, which will appear on IGN within a few weeks as we continue explore Funcom’s new world.