Can You Keep A Secret? Doesn't Look Like Funcom Can.

You know that feeling, when when someone tells you there's something you can't do and even though you didn't want to do it, weren't even thinking of doing it, now you know you can't do it, you really want to? Yeah, I bet you do. Well, I had it today, when I read this news item at MassivelyOP.

It's a long time since I last thought about logging into Secret World Legends. No, actually, that's not entirely true. I thought about it yesterday, funnily enough, although not because I wanted to play. 

It was while I was running through Great Cleave in New World, looking at the dirty snow and wondering if it was the most convincing winterscape I'd seen in an mmorpg. I've always been something of an afficionado of imaginary snow. One of the first articles I ever wrote for a comics fanzine was called "Good Snow Art". 

There generally isn't all that much "good snow art" in mmorpgs. Rift wasn't too bad, particularly when it came to blizzard conditions and whiteouts, but even there everything was absolutely pristine, as it is in most games. 

Snow zones tend to share a certain unreality with lava zones. Make everything the same color and then add some glare so it hurts to look at, that seems to be the general principle. Even the Guild Wars 2 art department, otherwise exemplary, seems to throw up its hands at the thought of grading fifty shades of white. 

New World has some very odd ideas about representing weather but the art team has done a pretty good job with snow. The covering in Great Cleave is scrappy, trodden down with the dirt showing through along the tracks and not too much lying on the exposed rocks. It feels cold and bleak and wintry without the slightest hint of wonderland.

It's good but it's not as good as the snow zones in Secret World, Carpathian Fangs especially. At least, I don't think it is. It's been a while since I was there. Maybe I'm remembering it as better (or more realistic) than it was.

So, yes, I was thinking about logging into SWL just to go check. Probably wouldn't have done anything about it. Even if I'd wanted to do a post comparing the two, I could just have flicked through the hundreds of screenshots I've already taken there. No need to go to the trouble of patching up, logging in, finding the right portal in The Agartha and running halfway across the map to get a photo.

And I doubt I'd have done the post, anyway. I've posted about my feelings for snow before. I don't have anything new to say (Although when has that ever stopped me?)

It's likely nothing would have come of it, if it hadn't been for that news item, telling me I couldn't log in so I shouldn't bother trying. I tried to ignore it all day but by teatime I couldn't resist checking to see if the issue had been fixed. 

According to the update at MOP, Funcom was "looking into it". At least that suggested it wasn't intentional. They hadn't just shut the game down and hoped no-one would notice. 

I found my login details and clicked on the icon on my desktop. The patcher went through its usual four-stage routine, downloaded a few files, then handed me on to the authentication server and thence to the login server... and that was as far as I got. 

I could have left it at that. I'm sure Funcom will get things sorted eventually. They'll give us some notice before they sunset the game. They're that professional, at least.

In a way, it might be for the best if they did close the servers and call it a day. I would lay good odds that The Secret World and/or Secret World Legends would be back in emulated form in short order and I'd also bet that whoever set that up would do a better job of curating the IP than Funcom have.

For now, though, Secret World Legends is still there, even if no-one can log in. And so is the original game. I'd forgotten about that but the MOP article confirms "the original Secret World server is still up and operating", unaffected by whatever's troubling the newer version of the game.

I'm sure everyone can guess what's coming next...

 

It really wasn't that difficult. I found this post on the forums which explains the process in five very straightforward steps. I added a sixth, almost certainly unecessary, step of my own by copying the entire SWL directory and making my changes there. It was 50GB so I wouldn't recommend it. I'll be deleting mine when I'm done.

Once I'd gotten the config file sorted all there was to do was run the patcher again. There was a gig and a half of data to download, which went very slowly. I wrote most of this post while I was waiting. Other than that, the whole process was perfectly smooth.

It's been many years since I last saw my TSW character. I tried to remake her as closely as possible in SWL but I can see now that I didn't come all that close. My SWL character's something of a show-off. The original's more introverted, less flashy, a little bleak.

The other character on the account, who I remember making but not playing, seems to have suffered some kind of identitiy crisis in the long lay-off. Whoever they were, all that remains is a string of numbers and a blank space.

Once in game I spent an inordinate amount of time fiddling with the settings, trying to get the controls to work. Unfortunately, the Nvidia GeForce Experience overlay, which I didn't ask for and can't seem to switch off, overwrites TSW's native controls. That's why the screenshots in this post aren't very good. 

It also took me the best part of half an hour to find the right portal in the Agartha to get to Carpathian Fangs so I could get a few pictures of snow. When I got there, winter seemed nowhere near as well-rendered as I remembered but there were a lot of werewolves wandering around so I was a little on edge. I may not have been appreciating the finer details.

All in all it was an interesting little expedition. It was very nice to reacquaint myself with my original character but somewhat to my surprise what that did was demonstrate that, emotionally, I've moved on. She didn't feel like my "real" character. I could sense an absence. She didn't seem to be quite there in the way my SWL character is.

That might all change if I were to play her regularly but there's precious little chance of that. It's good to know that I can drop in for a visit if I feel the urge, all the same. 

And who knows? One day it may be the only Secret World game left. I wonder which has the more players these days? There were several people in the Agartha as I was bumbling around and there was some activity in general chat. I'd log into SWL to compare but, oh, wait, that's right! I can't.

Let's hope Funcom get that fixed and soon.

Carry The News, Dude!: EverQuest, The Secret World et al.

Inventory Full has no pretensions towards becoming any kind of MMORPG news source but now and again I do read things in my blog feed that I feel I ought to share. I read a couple of items this morning that fit the bill.

One of them will be very widely reported on all the MMORPG news aggregators, I'm sure. The other might not get sufficient attention to draw it to the notice of the niche audience who'd appreciate it.

The first is the news that Chinese gaming giant Tencent has acquired 29% of Funcom, developers of The Secret World, Anarchy Online and Age of Conan among many other titles.

Here's the report from Gamesindustry.biz. As they point out, this still only gives Tencent a minority interest, but it does make them the Norwegian company's largest shareholder.

Funcom's CEO gives the usual, upbeat, positive take, saying all the right things about the new investors having "a reputation for being a responsible long-term investor" and "insight, experience, and knowledge... of great value" but it looks as though the actual transfer of shares happened outwith any involvement by Funcom itself.

I hope this isn't going to affect the motorcycle parts supply chain...

Given Funcom's increasingly apparent lack of interest in the kind of MMORPGs they used to be known for, and indeed for the ones they're still curating, I'm not sure how much this matters. It's intriguing, all the same, especially following Pearl Abyss's acquisition of CCP. and that Chinese mining company's involvement with Jagex. The West is moving East, it seems, at least as far as European MMO deveelopment is concerned.

The other story will, I think, be of considerable interest to a few people who comment here now and then. It was only earlier this year that Wilhelm, blogholder of The Ancient Gaming Noob and longtime Norrath-watcher, drew my attention to a new website and videocast dedicated to the EverQuest franchise.

It's called The EverQuest Show and it's over there to the right, in my ever-growing blog roll. Over just a few months it's established itself as an authoritative voice in the EQ community.

Even Ulthorks watch The EverQuest Show

Most of the coverage revolves around the older of the two EverQuest titles, meaning The EverQuest Show isn't quite the replacement for EQ2Wire I might have hoped for, but it's doing a pretty good job of keeping the news flowing for both titles. It also specializes in covering the wider EverQuest community, bringing some amusing and surprising stories to light.

All this activity seems to have been recognized and acknowledged by Daybreak. The EQ Show team has just come back from a visit to San Diego, during which they "were granted a longform sit-down interview with Holly Longdale, executive producer for EverQuest and EverQuest II" as well as "panel interviews with developers from both EverQuest and EverQuest II about a wide range of topics".

From this they came away with "literally HOURS of video interviews and footage". Once they process and edit all of that it will be available in "several future episodes of The EverQuest Show". I'm particularly keen to hear the Holly Longdale interview, in which she's said to be "very candid about the approach to the future of the games, and the possibility of new ventures."

I wonder if she lets anything slip about the not-so-secret restructuring plans? Can't wait to find out!

The Last Days Are Taking Forever : The Secret World

So, Funcom are getting out of the MMO business. They must be exhausted. Nothing ever really went their way, right from the start.

It must have been sixteen years ago that a beta CD for Anarchy Online dropped through my letterbox. I never did get it to run but I bought the game anyway. That barely worked, either.

AO was the genre's first MMORPG with a science fiction setting or so its wikipedia entry alleges. Despite a first  few weeks so terrible the experience would stand as the benchmark for MMO launch disasters for a decade and more, the game must have done well enough in the end. Funcom went on to develop another, this time using a major fantasy IP.

Age of Conan launched in 2008, leaping onto the MMO stage in a blaze of glory that exploded into accusations and acrimony once players leveled past the extended tutorial. It was a turbulent but not unsuccessful time for the company and clearly MMOs were still where Funcom wanted to be.

Four years later they were back for a third bite of the MMO pie, this time with another self-developed project: The Secret World. TSW took the proposition that Everything Is True and ran with it, offering Lovecraftian horror and conspiracy theories in a contemporary setting, together with some of the best writing and voice acting the genre had seen.

With three AAA games on the slate and their expertise and confidence evidently improving, Funcom was indisputably a major player, a pillar of the industry. Yet none of the three MMOS they created and curated had really set a fire. As a developer, Funcom somehow always seemed to be somewhere off to the side of the real action.

Anarchy Online, which had limped so badly out the gate , trundled on mostly forgotten. Age of Conan, which had burned brightly for such a short time, faded into the background hum, one of those many MMOs that keep on going though no-one ever talks about them. The Secret World, smaller, more focused, more finished, very much a niche product in a market that wanted to be mainstream, never really found its place or its pace.

Funcom's third entry in the field in just over a decade had started well enough. Take-up was strong, reviews were favorable, word of mouth was positive. The thing they didn't have was luck. Or timing. Only two months after TSW arrived Guild Wars 2 opened its doors and suddenly no-one was talking about The Secret World much any more.

That sort of thing happened a lot back then. Still does. It was the age of MMO tourism and the Three-Monther. Players swarmed like bees to every new flower in the field but few settled. Now Funcom had three low-key MMOs, each with a dedicated but ever-shrinking audience. Having "MMO" attached to your product was fast becoming a liability not an asset.

2012 was the highwater mark of World of Warcraft's tide, the one that was supposed to lift all MMO boats but mostly saw them flounder and sink. At that time everything had to be an MMO. Just the acronym printed money or so everyone seemed to think. Except it didn't. Turned out no-one could bottle lightning twice. 

Around then a lot of MMO developers were seeking salvation in the accounts department. Funcom had been one of the very first Western developers to adopt a Free to Play business model. Anarchy Online went F2P as early as 2004, supported perhaps uniquely by a system of in-game advertising placed on virtual billboards that integrated surprisingly well with the futuristic setting.

It wasn't long before all Funcom games ran under one form of F2P hybrid or another. Over the succeeding years the company experienced a number of financial problems but somehow weathered them all, arriving in 2017 with its trio of MMOs all up and running. Just about.

Interest and commitment to the genre Funcom helped found seems to have been waning for a while now, at corporate level as well as among the diminishing playerbase. In the last eighteen months most of what the company produced hasn't been directly in the MMO sphere at all.

First there were two standalone spin-offs from The Secret World, "The Park" and "Hide and Shriek". Both were successful. At time of writing The Park rates three and a half stars and "Mostly Positive" on Steam while Hide and Shriek does even better, with a Very Positive rating and four and a half stars.

That must have set minds working at the studio. Updates for the MMOs dried up but new, non-MMO projects continued to appear. In January of 2017, somewhat later than expected, Conan Exiles, the first Age of Conan spin-off entered Early Access.

A much larger project than either The Park or H&S, Exiles joined the ever-growing army of "open world survival games", a strange phenomenon, in which it seems neither polish nor content are required to print money the way MMOs were once said to do.

With the new direction clearly paying off, the writing was on the wall for Funcom's MMOs. A press release a month ago announced that Anarchy Online and Age of Conan were both entering "maintenance mode", meaning the servers stay up but no new content will be created for either game.

For a month it looked as if The Secret World would escape a trip to the stasis pod. More than that, a whole "relaunch" was promised for the five year old game. And then, a couple of days ago, we got the details.

When Funcom said "relaunch" they meant exactly that: a whole, new game. Secret World: Legends is no revamp of the existing MMORPG. Indeed, it isn't an MMO at all. Funcom describe it as "a shared-world action RPG" because, presumably, the MMO tag is seen as the kiss of death these days.

What differences there are between a persistent, online open world that allows people to share the same virtual gamespace while pursuing solo and group activities and "an MMO" I guess we will just have to wait and see. From what little I can glean so far all it seems to mean is a central hub (a revamped Agartha) and fewer people to compete with over quest mobs.

However SWL turns out, the one thing it will most definitely be - may already have been - is the death of The Secret World. The existing version will remain playable but will never see another update. I've seen it claimed that it will also be impossible to create new accounts for the old game but I can't find anything from Funcom to confirm as much, neither in the SWL FAQ nor any press release or interview so far.

Even if it is technically possible to make a new TSW account, though, no-one will. Why would you? Daed gaem...

Reaction to all this has been surprisingly mixed, polarized even. Longtime players with deep commitment to the game in both time and emotion are devastated. Tyler F.M. Edwards puts it best and Sylow, in the comments there and elsewhere, exemplifies how difficult a transition this is going to be for many. The official forums are running very heavy in negativity, as you would expect.

On the other side of the argument are many people who would have liked to like TSW but somehow never quite could. People who couldn't get on with the combat or those like Isey, who thought the game should never have been an MMO in the first place.

One thing that isn't in doubt is the degree of risk involved in Funcom's decision. The inevitable comparisons have been made both to Star Wars Galaxies NGE and the FFXIV reboot: this is different from both. Funcom isn't sitting atop of a stack of much more successful, profitable games like SOE and SquareEnix were back then. Nor do they have a powerful outside partner giving them orders or a totally disastrous error to make good to give them a pass on bringing down the world to make it anew.

No, this is an act of desperation, a wet-palmed roll of the dice in the casino of last resort. Or it is as far as Funcom's future as a developer of MMOs goes, at least. If they pull this off then Funcom becomes  a game developer with several successful non-MMO properties and three dead MMOs gathering dust on life support. If not, that smoke you smell is all of Funcom's bridges burning at once.

And where do I stand on all this? On the sidelines, I guess. I like The Secret World a lot but I hardly ever play it and when I did I almost always played it on my own. Mrs Bhagpuss, whose idea it was to buy it in the first place, bailed after a month or so, finding it too unrelentingly depressing. Plus she was one of the ones who hated the combat.

I carried on until GW2 launched and played it sporadically thereafter but I haven't logged in for a year or so. I got stuck about 85% of the way into the main story and lost heart. I found it too hard to be fun and, yes, it was the combat again.

As long as a server stays up, TSW will be as available to me as it ever was. I probably still won't log in often and when I do I'll probably just wander around taking screenshots. I love my character but I feel she's mostly at the end of her journey. So long as I can visit with her on a whim I'll be fine with that.

As for the new version, of course I'll try it. But, like MassivelyOP's M.J., I don't enjoy reticule-based, mouse-locked action combat. This may be a fix to the combat issues of the original for some people but for me it smacks of frying pans and fires.

Then there's the starting over. That's not a turn-off. I enjoy beginning again in MMOs I already play and in TSW, as is so often the case, some of the strongest writing and most fully-realized gameplay is in the opening zones. As a DIKU fan I also welcome the moves towards clear progression based on levels and gear. Not to mention that having a fresh, clean inventory will be a pleasure in itself.

It's almost certainly too late, though. I may play out of curiosity but even if the solo-friendly gameplay is significantly easier I very much doubt I'll be working my way all through that long, complex storyline to get back to the part where I got stuck, just so I can find out whether I'll get stuck in the same place again.

The Secret World had its chance to hook me five years ago. It gave it its best shot but it didn't land the punch. In taking such a drastic move towards slash and burn Funcom are gambling there are a lot more people out there who would love TSW if only it wasn't an MMO than there are people who did love TSW while it still was one.

I think its a five year old game with a reputation for being weird and awkward and strange and difficult and a re-badging isn't likely to change much about the way people think of it. The move has, however, gained Funcom great deal of media attention, something they have been consistently good at acquiring over the years, if less effective at converting into profit.

There's a strict NDA on the beta, for which I haven't bothered and don't intend to sign up, so we will know nothing other than what Funcom choose to tell us until it soft launches. Supposedly that will be sooner rather than later.

I'll reserve further opinions until I get a hands-on that I can talk about. Until then, my commiserations to the people who loved this unusual and enigmatic MMO. I hope things turn out better than it looks as though they will.

There may still be hope. After all, FFXI gets more updates in "maintenance mode" than TSW was getting in full development and although everyone can't be Square Enix, Funcom have shown an admirable loyalty to their aging MMOs thus far.

This story may not be over quite yet.

Those Are The Headlines. Happy Now?

There certainly does seem to be a lot of news lately. Come to think of it there always is. If it isn't some game about to close down or some company about to go bust it's another going into open beta or hitting a crowdfunding target. I could link all those but why bother? There'll be another bunch along tomorrow.

To render the whole thing manageable and comprehensible I have to compartmentalize. Does this directly affect me? Indirectly? Do I want it to start affecting me? Can I dismiss it out of hand as irrelevant to anything I'm ever likely to do or want to do or think about doing?

Examples:

Funcom getting into difficulties is notionally troubling. I like The Secret World a lot; even though I don't actually play it these days I'm far from feeling I'm done with it. I own a boxed copy of Age of Conan and I've never even installed that one far less played it but I always have it somewhere in the back of my mind that I will one day.

Blade & Soul announcing a 2016 launch and a buy-in beta, on the other hand, barely raises an eyebrow. I wasn't interested in it before and I'm not interested in it now. A nudge closer to accessibility doesn't change anything.

Every day brings a torrent of similar stories, large and small, trivial and portentous. It's lucky MassivelyOP is there with a big net to catch them all. If we learn nothing else at least we know that if MMOs are dying they're certainly not going quietly.

I have to scan them all, at least. Sometimes there's real, solid information that I need to know. Details of the upcoming server merge for EQ2, for example. Like Wilhelm, none of my characters get merged with any of my other characters so, apart from waiting to hear what happens about names, (there was a bizarre rumour everyone would lose their names and there'd be a land rush to grab them back when the servers open) that one can sit and simmer a while.

Then there's the news that there's going to be news. That's possibly the most annoying kind. It's not quite PR fluff because there's a kernel in there somewhere but it's not really  much more than an appointment to find out a real fact sometime later.

Blizzard did it recently when they trailed the Big Announcement that turned out to be Legion. ArenaNet have just pulled a similar stunt:

"On Saturday, August 29, ArenaNet President Mike O’Brien and Game Director Colin Johanson will host a special fan and press conference titled “Guild Wars 2—The Journey Ahead.” There they’ll be making a number of big announcements that will define the future of Guild Wars 2 and—as many of you have been waiting for—reveal a major feature coming in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns™"

What the future-defining announcements are or the (presumably previously unnanounced) major feature could be I have no clue. All sounds mighty important though. Better not miss it. Pity I'm working that Saturday.

Whatever it is I guess it's something in addition to the "challenging group content...the intense challenges that will define your endgame experience in the expansion". That gets a separate announcement of its own. Or does it? Hard to tell.

I find myself less excited over this than I am nervous.It can't be good news, can it? Doesn't sound like good news. I kind of always thought of GW2 as an MMO that neither had nor needed an "endgame". I guess those days are over.

We'll just have to wait another ten days to find out. Hope I can weather the news onslaught until then. I'd hate to be all burned out before the big day.

Broken Every Code : TSW

 Remarkably apposite.

Massively just posted the rather depressing news that Funcom has missed both of its investor targets with The Secret World and that the company's share price has "lost half its value" in recent days. The full Funcom Investor Relations Update is here.

This is obviously not what Funcom's investors want to hear and it's bound to be depressing news for players who, like me, are really enjoying the game. It's also bad news for anyone who wants to see more innovation and risk-taking in MMO development. Funcom allude to this in the statement when they say "A game like The Secret World, which is not based on a well-known brand, is normally dependent on positive press reviews to achieve successful initial sales".

They're putting what are presumably lacklustre sales down to, among other things, a less-than-stellar Metacritic score of 72%. Now, 72% is by no means a bad score but neither is it a "must buy". It suggests something solid but unexceptional. It wouldn't put most people off buying something they were already interested in but neither would it prompt the average browser to get his wallet out.

You want some, Metacritic? Eh? Do you want some?

I don't use the Metacritic site. I've looked at it once or twice but it does nothing for me since all it does is aggregate reviews from sources I've never heard of and have no benchmark for. I prefer to do my own aggregation of sources with which I'm familiar, bloggers and commenters whose tastes, foibles and biases I know and can take into account.

That's no consolation to Funcom. Apparently many prospective buyers do use tools like this to help them make purchasing decisions and a poor or mediocre score there can have serious financial implications. The MMO seas are very choppy right now and even some big ships are taking on water as EA/BioWare demonstrated so emphatically.

There is a definite silver lining to this stormcloud, however. Funcom emphasize that the satisfaction rating of people actually playing the game is significantly higher than the Metacritic score, running at 84% when measured by Metacritic and MMORPG.com User reviews. This, they speculate, may lead to greater customer loyalty and "a more stable subscriber base". More stable than what? Age of Conan. Hmm...

Well, at least Age of Conan is still running. So is Anarchy Online, for that matter. But both have Freemium payment models. There's no mention in the statement of anything along those lines in TSW's immediate future. Instead there's mention of a number of other positive revenue trends. Nevertheless, I can't but think that some form of Freemium model must be on the cards sooner now rather than later. With GW2 and Mystery of Pandamonium just around the corner, TSW as a subscription-only MMO can only get harder and harder to sell.

Make it and we will buy it.

As a very satisfied customer, I just want the game to stick around. I want to play it but I simply will not have time to play both TSW and GW2 and keep my hand in on the half-dozen or more other MMOs I don't want to lose touch with over the rest of this year. Not to mention the several betas I may or may not be in/get into. Like many players who really like the game, I will still almost certainly be unsubscribing in September because I just won't have time to play but I do want it to be there when I'm ready to come back. Unsubscribing at this time is no criticism of the game, but again that's no comfort to Funcom.

Fortunately, Funcom have been around a while and they don't have all their irons in the one crack of hellfire. I'm confident they will weather the disappointment, adjust and carry on. I believe that when I have time to come back to The Secret World it will still be there. It'll even have grown some.

Well, I hope so. Whatever you think of TSW itself, it represents a brave attempt to do something at least somewhat different in a genre that appears increasingly bored with its past yet scared of its future. Such attempts, especially ones that over-achieve aesthetically even if not financially, need to succeed.

Otherwise its all about the pandas and no-one wants that now, do they?

Oops, I Did It Again: TSW

So it seems we'll be buying The Secret World, which comes as something of a surprise to me. I'd commented on a couple of blogs that I had no plans to get it at launch. I wasn't even going to bother with the beta. I thought I'd wait for the inevitable F2P conversion. Then on Saturday afternoon I happened to mention it to Mrs Bhagpuss.

"I want to play that", she said.

Well, there was a beta weekend going on so why wait? I briefly considered pre-ordering just to get a beta key, but a quick google turned up some German gaming sites with keys left. The 13GB download took a lot longer but in the end we had the thing up and running on both machines and we managed to get about sixteen hours in over Saturday night and Sunday.

There's a lot to talk about. I took notes.

Overview

We're buying it. Will that do? Oh, alright then...

Based on my experiences in the three zones available in beta - London, Kingsmouth and the Argartha - The Secret World is a world that begs to be explored. The setting is deeply atmospheric - immersive, intriguing and mysterious. Also fresh. Art direction and writing are as good as I have ever seen in an MMO. The UI is idiosyncratic and a tad shambolic but it works well enough. Animations are average at best. Visual effects are no better. Combat involves hotbars and tab targeting. Gameplay revolves around Missions. It's a traditional MMO.

Only it isn't. It's an MMO set slightly askew and it's the off-kilter lurch that works so well. Let's break it down.

Look and Feel

There were some arguments in general chat over the "graphics" of The Secret World. Some said the game looked amazing, others questioned their sanity and asked whether they'd actually seen a game made in the last five years. Both views have merit. Compared to the ultra-slick surface sheen of MMOs like Tera or even Rift or the hyper-designed painterly aesthetic of GW2, The Secret World looks plain. There's a distinct lack of sparkle.

  Hopper goes Holborn

What TSW does have is art direction of the highest quality. The detailing is superb. Funcom are making a big deal out of the real world setting and their art team have brought to life a marvelous, magical heightened version of reality that perfectly suits the content. It's our world seen out of the corner of your eye.

I spent a long time poking into every corner, playing with camera angles, zooming in, trying to absorb every particle of information. So much going on all over. So much to think about. Will most of it amount to anything? I doubt it. It's texture and the success of the effect is in the accretion.

This is a game that was always going to live or die by how well it put its case: "Everything is true". Here, you feel, it just might be.

Story

I'm not big on story in MMOs. I'm far more interested in my own characters and their stories than I'm ever likely to be in any tale a developer wants to tell me. This is different.

Watch yer car fer a dollar, Mister.

The writing in The Secret World isn't original, not in the very slightest degree. Influences float on the surface for everyone to see and I don't just mean the street names. It's not what, though, it's where. Writing as sharp and salty as this may be nothing new in other media but it is in an MMO.

My overriding impression throughout my time in London was "This is like being inside a Grant Morrison comic". Specifically, it's like being inside The Doom Patrol. The subject matter, the way the characters speak, the vibe. In Kingsmouth it felt more like being inside Robert Kirkman's The Walking Dead. The spirit of modern comics writing is very strong in TSW. It makes a wonderfully refreshing change from the dead hand of mass market fantasy that chokes the life out of most MMOs.

Sound

If The Secret World reads like a comic it sounds like an indie movie. NPCs talk a lot. To you, to each other, to themselves. I am not at all a fan of voiceovers in MMOs so you'd think this wouldn't be a selling point. Once again, this is different.

Say what Bro?

The voice acting is good to very good. The range of accents used goes well beyond the usual set of stereotypes.
All the way to a whole new set of stereotypes. When did you last hear a Scouser in an MMO? Or a Welshman? The lines are often pretty good and the delivery drips with irony, sarcasm, subtext. Most conversations left me thinking there were things going on that I wasn't being told.

The highest praise I can give to the dialogs and cut scenes is that far from wanting to skip past them I spent much time actively hunting down all the NPCs with something to say and making sure I heard every word.

Coming next: UI, Skills, Combat, Missions