The Secret World Comments by Oli Welsh

im first! im fucking first!

your a twat! your a fucking twat!

/sighs

'I'm' and 'You're'

The premise looks interesting but as ever I'm perturbed by the fact that it's an MMO. The whole idea would work perfectly as an open world action-adventure without the need for online.

I've been looking forward to this. Spot on preview, the game is shaping into what I was hoping.

It's Funcom, 'nuff said really. If it ever sees the light of day, wait 6 months after release before purchasing and do not give them the benefit of the doubt.

I really like the premise, and the concept art in the gallery looks awesome, but I have to echo _Price_ and say that I'd rather it wasn't an MMO.

If its as good or better then how Age of Conan is today we have a awsome game coming.... Cant wait!

well, it's not really an MMO in the traditional sense.. there's no leveling or grinding at all..

the premise sounds fantastic, ive always wanted an MMO with exactly the sort of inspirations he mentioned - Gaiman, Buffy, heck even Harry Potter. The real world with unreal stuff in it.

Also really happy that he is straight up saying there will be lots of solo, story-line focused content. "Solo-content" too often ends up being "bring me 10 boar tusks".

Shame there is no mention of a beta/release date.

Ideally, this sounds like the MMO that will get me into MMOs. Selecting your own pace instead of progressing down a predetermined line, choosing your own look rather than being stuck with a certain armour everyone of your level/class is wearing, and uncovering a mystery (with others) is what I want to see in MMOs. If Funcom pulls it off, and has an RP server up and running, I'll definitely try this out.

With Ragnar, Funcom created The Longest Journey and Dreamfall, and I've enjoyed those games, even if the latter was a bit trash. Anarchy Online is also a solid MMO, although still not my thing. I'm willing to ignore Funcom's failure (Age of Conan), and watch how this game develops.

Sounds great, but it's an MMO, and I'm done with MMOs.

Still, I'll be intrigued to see what it's like. If there really isn't any grinding or committing huge amounts of time every week, then it could be alright.

you sweaty fat pile of shit

If this has elements of Dreamfall and TLJ mixed into i will be in seventh heaven. Sounds like it will be years before we see this though :(

"Ideally, this sounds like the MMO that will get me into MMOs."

+1

" ZuluHero
07-Apr-09 14:39:41

If this has elements of Dreamfall and TLJ mixed into i will be in seventh heaven. Sounds like it will be years before we see this though :( "

It's far from that. I just hope that any teenagers with tourettes stay away from this game.

age of conan mark 2 ?

Sounds intriguing. Hopefully it delivers a more polished experience than games like Tabula rasa, which also showed promise, but in the end underdelivered.

It would be nice with a great MMO without elves and orcs.

GAP: The MMO

Or, from the cgi trailer - UNIQLO: The MMO

@Pike
Sounds intriguing. Hopefully it delivers a more polished experience than games like Tabula rasa, which also showed promise, but in the end underdelivered.

It would be nice with a great MMO without elves and orcs.

What makes you think there won't be? Elves and Orcs/goblins would fall neatly into this "Secret world". As foes or neutrals most likely though, not as PCs.

It's interesting, but I'm a bit wary of Funcom. Also keeping people interested without the levelling might be more difficult than they think.

Well, ok, orcs and elves in a medival setting then.

I love everything he referenced, so I'm very likely to give it a go.

"The Secret World will have no classes or levels."

Okay, consider me interested.

"The meat of The Secret World will be combat; missions to fight monsters."

Consider me uninterested. Convince me that there's no "Kill 50 shoggoths" missions, and we'll talk.

Ermmm. i read the article but...wtf is the game actually about? Shooting demons whilst wearing clothes of your choice?

Sigh.

Think I'll just stick with this:

http://www.theonion.com/content/video/ho...

Finally, an MMO for the rest of us! ;)

Sounds wonderful if they can pull it off. I loathe all the leveling up RPG-stuff of most MMOs but feel I'm missing out on the sense of place and adventure. Hopefully this can bridge that gap.

Would you like to see the Egress?

I'm too lazy to read a preview on an MMO (I'm pretty cynical about MMOs) and all three screenshots are of cutscenes if I'm not mistaken? Has the dev not shown anything in the way of actual gameplay? That'd be worth a thousand words.

I can't see the reason that has to be a MMO if groups are not mandatory for most things.
I know that this applies to WoW as well up to a point but Blizzard has the Warcraft lore behind them + the polish.
If WoW was available as a single player RPG I would buy it and stop playing online in a heartbeat.

Funcom has no Warcraft lore behind them so I guess this game is a "skip" for me unless their story is the 2nd coming.

Consider me uninterested. Convince me that there's no "Kill 50 shoggoths" missions, and we'll talk.

"Combat will be conjoined with exploration, puzzle-solving, and what sounds like a much more languid, adventure-game style of play. "You can choose: today I don't want to fight things, today I want to explore this mystery, I want to find out about this story, I want go and meet these characters, I want to know what's behind that door, I want to know what's behind the legend of this place," Tornquist says."

I'm pretty sure there will be 'Kill x monsters', though, as that is a necessary evil in MMOs. I'm just hopeful that there's enough to distract me from this flaw (puzzle-solving and exploration).

Ermmm. i read the article but...wtf is the game actually about? Shooting demons whilst wearing clothes of your choice?

What would you have, battling ghouls whilst wearing armour everyone else does? Or are you being sarcastic?

Looks intriguing, I'm still waiting for TOR though ;)

@Pike
Well, ok, orcs and elves in a medival setting then.

Yeah, not medieval, but I bet you there are a lot of long, black, leather coats involved. ;)

@ChthonicEcho: Yeah, I know that's what the rest of the article says, but if that were true, it'd mean I could play the game while simply ignoring the combat, and that directly contradicts the "The meat of The Secret World will be combat" statement he made earlier. It's either one of the two, and cynicism and past experience with MMO's that are "totally different than anything you've ever seen!" makes me think it's the latter. I'm open for surprise though.

"I'm pretty sure there will be 'Kill x monsters', though, as that is a necessary evil in MMOs."

Why? Why on earth is that a necessary evil? There's absolutely no reason any MMO has to add a Kill X Monsters mission. The only reasons to do so are either some warped sense of tradition because they've always been there since DikuMUD/Everquest, or because it's an easy way to add another quest. "Yeah, I could think of an interesting storyline and some cool surprises for players, but I could also just have them kill 20 wolves. That doesn't take as long, and we can put "Over 200 quests!" on the game box."

I can tell you: no.

"it's the stories on the news about the missing person who people think has been murdered but the story's been covered up"

This man obviously doesn't live in England. Do you think sinister murderers are behind this? Press red!

Is that Zoe with a new hairstyle?!

The irony is, I'd be interested in this if AoC hadn't put me off MMOs.

Fapula: I'm not guessing, but seeing how there are hardly any MMO's with single player offline modes, I think we're reasonably safe in assuming that it's not going to happen here either.

I'm actually looking forward to this, which is unusual for me when it comes to MMOs. Modern fantasy is where it's at.

C'mon Ragnar, do an MMO right, I know you can :D

Why? Why on earth is that a necessary evil?

It's a time sink, and ultimately you wouldn't have enough (diversified) quests for all levels. All sandbox and open-ended games have archetypical missions - go there, fetch x, kill x, kill n amount of x, etc. The best they could do is include as many diverse and unique quests as possible, and insert them between dull quests (GTA IV).

I don't believe that. Take Oblivion, for instance. There were "Kill X Monsters" quests in Oblivion, but I've played it for over 300 hours and didn't do a single one of those quests. Were they necessary? Apparently not. Do we need boring stuff between interesting missions? No. The boring missions in GTA4 were just that: boring. The game would've been much better if the story was more condensed.

And yes, the quests in Oblivion were either Kill X, Get Y of Z, or Bring A to B, but they were integrated so well in the world that you didn't notice or didn't care. You wanted to know what the quest's story was, or what was going to happen when you bought package A to guy B. Conversely, in every MMO I've played, all you really needed was a summary of where you needed to go or who you needed to kill, and the story was optional, in case you were interested.

I don't believe that. Take Oblivion, for instance. There were "Kill X Monsters" quests in Oblivion, but I've played it for over 300 hours and didn't do a single one of those quests.

Like I've said: "the best they could do is include as many diverse and unique quests as possible, and insert them between dull quests". You don't have to do every single quest in MMOs. In fact, you can level up without doing a single quest, save for possible class advancement ones.

Do we need boring stuff between interesting missions?

So you'd rather chop half the content and let people kill n amount of monsters for nothing but XP instead of killing n amount of monsters for XP -and- a quest reward? Different strokes for different folks, I guess.

The GTA IV was a somewhat bad example, considering you disliked it. Oblivion did the same - mingled good quests with bad ones so that they could write 'over 200 quests!' on the game box.

And yes, the quests in Oblivion were either Kill X, Get Y of Z, or Bring A to B, but they were integrated so well in the world that you didn't notice or didn't care. You wanted to know what the quest's story was, or what was going to happen when you bought package A to guy B.

And Ragnar implicitly states it at least twice in this article that is what he's trying to achieve in The Secret World.

Sod Oblivion - one of the emptiest and generically boring RPGs on the planet.

Give Bloodlines a go - that's chock-full of some truly interesting and brilliantly written RPG quests with absolutely no "go here and kill x things" and anything that looks as simple on the surface as "get A, take it to B" has twists and turns that make a plate of spaghetti look like a steel ruler. It's that sort of standard that I'll be expecting from The Secret World.

It sounds like a great idea, it's definitely strange but in this case I think it works.

I'm hoping for demon/monster hunting organizations in place of guilds, or maybe you could still have guilds that were formed in ancient times.

It sounds interesting and I am usually not that much into MMOs. It also reminded me that I've been waiting to hear something new on Huxley...

We're never going to get a proper conclusion to tlj are we. funcom are going to spend years developing mmo's nobody wants to play and then go bankrupt.

godammit I have to know what happens to april and zoe.

Sounds like they are trying to do something totally different, and all credit for them, but I just dont know if it will work from what I read in the preview.

Also as someone else said, I would really love an offline play type game, where i dont need to log online and play with others (sometimes its better like that) :D.

Sounds like an MMO version of Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines. Aren't CCP, the makers of Eve Online, doing a similar MMO based on the World of Darkness (which the Vampire: The Masquerade stuff was part of)? I'm not generally interested in MMOs but these might make me reconsider.

That makes me quite sad. I don't want to play an MMO and I enjoyed the first two games and even if I enjoyed the storytelling more than the gameplay in the first two games the gameplay in MMOs just makes me sad.

This is an entirely new IP... it's unrelated to either TLJ series or VtM series.

I would genuinely pay for this, if, and only if, it has real-time combat. You know, combat that, when you click the mouse button to fire, or punch or whatever, causes your character to immediately attack the target, and then when, and only when, your fist, bullet, sword, or kitchen implement hits something, does a reaction occur.

None of this icon-queuing nonsense you get in every other MMO ever made, bar Planetside...