Did you ever think about what a virtual reality would be today, at your home, in a form realizable and available on any day? Hereby I mean no virtual reality in general but in a specialized form of virtual world that is not separable easily from the real one. I mean it is a virtual environment that can be considered as another world, but it mixes with our current environment.
Well, I was thinking about this a lot years ago, and I believe that good (and sometimes bad) ideas can emerge in more than one head worldwide, and in the same time, of course. (For skeptics: Having no scientific explanation for something doesn’t mean that the given thing cannot exist, does it?) This real virtuality idea could be such a thing because Funcom made it and released it summertime, this year – however, the idea had the come up for this years ago, maybe in that time when I was thinking about it too.
I can’t remember when had an MMO such an impressive effect on me. Anno the ad of The Secret World was considered special; besides the usual e-mail newsletters they started a Facebook application titled Secret War, in which you had to use your social network to get points and win ingame items, and a closed beta keycode if you reached the maximum.
After this I was waiting for the game with the usual mix of disinterest + mild curiosity. I was watching only a few of the trailers, and I paid attention to the big words of advertising only with one eye. Then I got a beta key and started it.
Perhaps the first hours will show you no novelty. Seasoned MMO-players can go forward by watching only the quality, which is good enough, 4/5 in the MMO category. So, you start in a city environment with a tutorial, then you make a jump into the Agartha, which is something like a fugue dimension with much shorter distances between locations. The first such location is the town of Kingsmouth, full of zombies.
Zombies again, yes? If you can live with this gnawed bone, you may dive into the details that make this game unique and really awesome. Because Secret War was only the beginning, and the so-called social networking is alive in the game, attached to a nicely wrought-balanced alternate reality. Anyway, I don’t like it if a game bulls my social life, so I was not interested in this part, but I can tell you one or two things about the other effects.
It starts – apart from the zombies – with the name of the town, which summons the name of Lovecraft into the mind (it is a mix of two lovecraftian towns, Kingsport and Innsmouth). By the way, the renowned author and his fellows got street names in Kingsmouth, with some other literal references (Lovecraft Lane,Arkham Avenue, Elm Street, Poe Cove, for example). So, the dark fantasy/supernatural horror mood is based on and supported by the scene, and finally the game doesn’t falsify these namings.
Because, getting deeper into the game it turns out that the gameplay is about more than – again, apart from the zombies – tactics with AOE and DPS. Of course, as in every action game, it has its place in The Secret World too. However, the atmosphere excellently puts the dryness of continuous fighting into the background. The missions are diverse, the story and the main missions are separated, and even in the side missions you can find some that is available only for on given faction.
If you already heard about the game, these factions will be familiar, because they are treated in many books and films and games. The Templars are kinds of fanatic zealots, inquisition with machine guns, making holocaust for the good cause. On the other hand, the Illuminati is searching for and following the covert ways, while the Dragons are standing somewhere between them, waiting for their time.
Than these three get involved in some kind of battle between good and evil, kill monsters threatening the modern world where they can. But we are just at the point where I described an above average MMO with well-wrought atmosphere based on Lovecraft, Indiana Jones and Stephen King.
Let’s mix the character development system into it. It brings another good point for Funcom. The developers decided to make a rarely used development system based on skills instead of levels. It means that there are suggested character development paths (Tank, DPS, etc.), but practically you can fine tune your character as you wish. Moreover, because some passive skills are affecting not only the other skills belonging to their strict category, there is an opportunity to pick up things from out of your main area of interest.
And, of course, put the abovementioned quasi-alternate reality into the mix. It is strengthened not only by the (real or fictitious) earthly locations, but by certain missions too. There are so-called investigation missions that can be anything from simple searching to puzzles and collecting information.
And here is the double twist. In The Secret World you find an inbuilt web browser that is excessively used for some of the investigation missions. A Latin quotation here and it would be good to know its meaning; a reference to a location there, and you can search it on the website of Kingsmouth (yes, it is a fictional town, and yes, there it has a real homepage on the web: http://www.kingsmouth.com/), etc. Because of this real connection with the World Wide Web, Funcom asked its players not to reveal direct information about the missions on the forums, let’s give only hints for the players who solve such tasks harder.
Maybe the point didn’t come through entirely: During playing the game you need to search for information on the real World Wide Web. Somewhere in The Secret World the game world merges into the real world, though it remains in the ground of virtuality. This is the thing that unbelievably empowers the game, mainly on the areas of atmosphere and immersion. Let’s say, I can imagine some TSW geocaching to touch it all up, but it would be cruel.
—Garcius—
Title: The Secret World
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Developer: Funcom
Homepage: http://www.thesecretworld.com/
Style: modern day MMO, supernatural horror
What I liked:
world setting
alternate reality
development system
investigation missions
What I didn’t like:
some clichés
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