Radio On : TSW

I'd like to thank our collective corner of the blogosphere for nudging me to do something I've been meaning to do for months - log back into The Secret World. Several times of late I've patched up and sat looking at the password screen for a minute or two before deciding it was too much trouble to go find my old log-in details. That'd be a whole thirty seconds of my life, right? Who has that kind of time?

Both Syp at Bio Break, whose Secret Adventures series  has been pressing my nostalgia button for weeks, and Rowan at I Have Touched The Sky are consistent advocates so TSW never drops off my radar. Ysharros at Stylish Corpse recently gave in to the same prompts and jumped back in, thereby adding to the welcome, gentle pressure on me to return but it was Aywren at Clean Casuals whose pithy rundown of the current Halloween events finally tipped me over the edge.

To be precise, it was Aywren's account of a new event, The Broadcast, a recreation of 1940s radio drama, that caught my full and undivided attention. I've long been fascinated by the Golden Age of Radio. Obviously I never had the chance to listen to it first time around (I'm old but I'm not that old!) but I grew up in its hinterland, getting glimpses of that lost world from movies like Radio Days, Garrison Keilor's ironic re-creations and the countless revisitings and retellings of the panic inspired by Orson Welles' Mercury Theater production of War of the Worlds.

When they called it The Black House
they really weren't kidding

The all-pervading influence of the Internet and the World Wide Web has changed just about every aspect of our lives over the last couple of decades and one of the greatest changes has been a previously undreamt of access to the past. When I was writing articles for comics fanzines in the 1980s, if I wanted to send an editor a thousand words on 1940s cinema adaptations of comic book characters it would take me a week of research in the Central Library of a large city and even then I'd be lucky to find what I needed.

Now I can get up, make a coffee, sit down in front of this screen and have more information in a few mouse-clicks than I could possibly use, on just about any subject I could dream up. What's more, as evidenced above, writers of journalistic nostalgia don't need to describe things in detail any more; instead they can simply link to the originals and let their audiences experience those things for themselves, unmediated.

I always found Radio and MMOs a good fit, both for me and for each other. I may have missed the Golden Age but I grew up listening to the radio. From Radio Luxemburg on my mother's battered transistor and my grandfather's shortwave stations on his 1930s Bakelite valve set throughout my childhood, through the Radio One soundtrack of my adolescence to the thoughtful, eclectic, intelligent rumble of Radio Four that marks the background to my adult life, radio has been a constant presence.

When I began playing MMOs I settled into two audio habits right from the start: I always left the in-game music playing and I often supplemented it with radio in the room. For more than a decade I'd slay monsters, craft armor and explore imaginary lands to a sonic melange of looped synth samples, yelps of pain, explosions and Melvyn Bragg quizzing a bunch of professors on Nuclear Fusion or the Haitian Revolution.

I found websites that opened portals to radio stations all over the world and I'd often sort my inventory on a Sunday morning to a soundtrack of local news from Saskatchewan or some such impossibly exotic locale. Best of all I discovered archives of radio shows from long before I was born and listened to episode after episode of Academy Award Theater or The Adventures of Philip Marlowe as I murdered orcs or battered gnolls through Azeroth, Norrath or Telon. 

I used to do that. Then I stopped. Why? Because of The Secret World.

If it starts to shake put a bullet in it.

When TSW arrived back in the late spring of 2012 I found myself unexpectedly caught in its mysterious web. Along with a darkly twisted contemporary setting, drawn with astonishing visual detail and verve, came a thick, nested audio track that demanded full and undivided attention.

It wasn't just that quests were fully voiced - SOE trumpeted that little achievement for EQ2 all the way back in 2004 for all the good it did them. It wasn't the mere fact of embedded audio in game - music emerging from jukebox diners and skatepark boomboxes - Anarchy Online had both audio and video playing on in game wallscreens back in 2002.

When it comes to voiceovers and audio, TSW has never expected, like the proverbial dog walking on its hind legs, to impress us just by the act of doing. It's always been about doing it well and in that they have frequently surpassed all reasonable expectations. For the three or four months I played The Secret World as my primary MMO it was simply not an option to listen to the radio at the same time. The in-game audio was just too good to miss.

I did try. I'm good at multitasking audio. I've had decades of practice. I can usually filter all those tunes, triggers and conversations and extract the meaning I need. Always something's going to get lost in the mix, though. With such a consistently high quality of  voice acting and the complexity of the narrative threaded through so much of the game it just wasn't a viable option any more.

So I turned my radio off. Then, when GW2 came along a few months later, another visually and sonically rich MMO, only bright and bold where TSW was dark and subtle, I left it off. Over the past two years I've only occasionally played MMOs with the radio on and even then only Test Match Cricket, which is more of a background hum than something that demands close attention.

You might consider it both ironic and appropriate then that last night I spent the best part of three hours listening to the radio inside The Secret World. What goes around comes around.

First I had to re-orient myself. It didn't take long. TSW is a remarkably easy MMO to drop back into because not all that much seems to change. That might not be great for players hoping to make it their full-time virtual home but for fairweathers like me it makes for a fine welcome back each time I put the key in the old door.

I did notice a few changes. There's a Pet system now that allows you to store your pets in much the same way you store your minis in GW2. That freed up a few welcome bag slots.

The reason I was fiddling around with my pets to begin with was because the first things I noticed when I got to the Agartha were all the cats. Everyone and his uncle had a pet out and most of them were cats. My character has a cat. I'm suggestible. So it goes.

When I'd gotten all my pets safely kenneled I turned to the two messages in my mail. One was from Dave Screed, who seemed unusually freaked out even for him over some short-wave radio broadcasts he'd heard; the other was from Madame Roget about some trouble she's been having with her cats.

The most surprising thing was that I immediately remembered who they both were and where they both lived. That in itself is testament to the strength of the writing in The Secret World. I was able to go straight to Dave in his New York Launderette to get started without needing to look anything up although once I was under weigh I did open a walkthrough because the puzzle-solving aspect of TSW only amuses me when I'm making progress.

As it turned out I barely needed to refer to the cheat sheet. Not because of my Sherlockian way with a clue but because I spent most of the three hours I was playing standing motionless next to a radio listening to some almost supernaturally accurate recreations of 1940s radio drama complete with station identifications and commercials. It was weird, compelling and also genuinely spooky.

If you think waving a katana around in a church is inappropriate behavior you clearly haven't spoken to the priest.

The first broadcast I listened to from inside the Kingsmouth Congregational Church. Not because I was too scared to stand in the Graveyard where I eventually found the radio but because, like a real radio signal, these broadcasts fade and break up as you move around. Inside the church was where I first found the strongest signal that let me hear the audio clearly. Also the stained glass windows are awesome.

The second I heard while standing outside The Black House in Savage Coast. I started off standing next to the radio inside the burned-out ruin but the racket from occasional fights as players less interested in retro-radio than I triggered the ghost that turns up at the end of the quest drove me to stand outside on the porch.

In her post Aywren says the broadcasts last 10-15 minutes but I think it's more like a full half hour. I'll time the next one and see if that's just a subjective impression or whether it really is that long. Either way they are incredibly impressive pieces of work. Frankly, the two I've heard so far are every bit good enough to be broadcast on PBS or the BBC. The sheer quality of the media work, the narrative and the writing in TSW is so far ahead of any other MMO I've played (100+ and counting) it's a joke.

The entire time I was listening to the broadcast those people in the woods were having some kind of party. Weirdos.

It's a tragedy the game hasn't been successful enough both to allow a much faster and more extensive pace of development and also to generate a feeling in the MMO industry as a whole that sharp, literate, sophisticated writers and creative artists are worth hiring. Comparing the quests in TSW to the ones I've done recently in ArcheAge, for example, is akin to comparing an exhibition in a smart, downtown gallery with the pre-schooler's crayonings pinned up on your next-door neighbor's fridge. And I like the quests in ArcheAge...

Never mind. At least we have this. And how fine it is. I'm two-fifths through The Broadcast and halfway through The Meowling (which has been in the game since 2012 but which I have somehow managed to miss until now). More reports to come, assuming there aren't any parts in either where I have to, y'know, actually win a fight, because the one part where the game and I don't really hit it off is the combat.

And yet even here TSW wins. After the first radio show ended and I clicked on the radio to progress the quest a ghost spawned. It was my first fight after my long lay-off and I couldn't remember my synergies so I died in short order. When I got back to my corpse the radio wasn't playing golden age repros any more. As a ghost I heard what Dave Screed had heard: a Numbers Station.

Would I have heard that if I hadn't died? I don't know. Does it mean anything? I don't know.

I like not knowing. I like The Secret World.