”So, um, who wants to hit the giant barbed wire demon first?”
In The Secret World, you can be whoever you want to be. You don’t have to lock yourself down into one class and one role, but instead you can experiment and create hybrid decks that make your player character radically different from any other character in the game. Without levels, you’re also free to explore the world in a nonlinear fashion–hopping from New England to Egypt, for example, when you’ve had enough of the fog and the dead rising from the ocean, and you want some sun…and evil sun-worshiping cultists.
In addition, you get to explore modern cities such as London, New York, and Seoul; use weapons such as shotguns, assault rifles, and baseball bats; fight vampires, zombies, and parasite-infected humans; and set off plastic explosives, dodge security cameras, hack into computer systems, decipher locks, and, together with other players, solve intriguing and complex puzzles in our unique investigation missions. These story-driven missions take online cooperative play to a whole new level, and players are required to work together–both in-game and outside the game–to research conspiracies and ancient history, solve mind-bending puzzles, and use lateral thinking to crack these mysteries wide open.
Players will encounter and do battle with a huge variety of monsters, pulled directly from mythology, urban legend, and popular culture: from the walking dead of Kingsmouth, the ancient mummies of Egypt, to pure-blood vampires and experimental human-vampire hybrids in Transylvania; from demons in hellish dimensions and bloodthirsty Mayan sun-cultists, giant tentacled god-creatures in Times Square, and growling werewolves in the Carpathian mountains, to parasite-infected humans in the Tokyo Metro and dark shades inside the dreaming mind of an eldritch god-thing. The variety is massive, and our monsters are some of the most unique and horrifying monsters ever seen in an MMORPG. We’ve got some amazing monster designers and artists making these creatures, and I’m really proud of what the team has come up with. I think players will agree!
We haven’t announced any cross functionality yet, but the opportunities are too good to miss out on–so yes, there will definitely be hooks into both social media services and other out-of-game media such as websites and community forums.
It’s pretty simple: it needs to be a good game. It needs to be fun to play, approachable yet deep, and it needs to support hundreds–even thousands–of hours of gameplay. We need to keep players engaged and entertained as they progress through the scripted content, PVP, and other gameplay mechanics.
To that effect, we’ve made sure that the content in The Secret World has meaning and value. Our missions aren’t about killing 25 vampires and collecting their fangs. They’re about digging deeper into the mysteries of the world, interacting with characters and the environment, exploration, puzzle-solving, sabotage, and story-telling. There’s plenty of combat, of course, but rather than being the sole reason for the missions, they’re an integral part of accomplishing the goals in the mission–and sometimes you even have a choice. Jump in and attack everything that moves, or find a way to distract or mislead your opponents.
The same goes for all the other game mechanics as well. In The Secret World, you’re rewarded for playing the game, and you’re given a reason to do what you’re doing–be it PVE, PVP, crafting, achievements, socializing with other players…everything. Making MMORPGs is probably one of the most difficult things in this industry, and it takes a lot of people and a lot of time to get it right–not just from a production point of view, but also through focus testing and bug fixing, ensuring that the client-server technology is stable, flexible, and bug free.
But most importantly: an MMORPG needs to be fun, plain and simple. And since I play The Secret World every single day, and still enjoy myself immensely every time I log in, I can at least promise that our game will be tons and tons of fun!
loading...
