Comments for Endsights:
During my hands-off demo at the Penny Arcade Expo Saturday and subsequent sit-down with Funcom about their upcoming MMO, The Secret World, the first question that popped into my head was this: How will this game be different from Age of Conan?
Not so much in the sense of gameplay or theme, but I was more concerned with the launch of The Secret World compared to Age of Conan. A brief history lesson is in order: Funcom released Age of Conan last year to stellar sales and fairly decent reviews. Yet, the game is currently floundering because the game suffered from glitches in the main over-world and a lack of high-level content.
After wincing from the premise of the question, The Secret World creative director Ragnar Tornquist said that the development team had learnt some lessons from Age of Conan and said it was likely that they will learn some more with The Secret World. MMOs, however, are notorious for rocky starts—and it a lot of ways, is the nature of the beast–and it was good to see Tornquist be completely honest and up front.As for the game itself, The Secret World still appeared to be early, but still showed a ton of promise in the demo we were shown. One of the biggest things that stuck out to me was the level of competition Funcom hopes to bring to the game through “Cabals” (guilds, essentially) and social networking integration. Tornquist told us that there would be leaderboards for virtually everything you can think of: crafting, kills, deaths—you name it, it is likely being tracked. Through that, you’ll be able to go to Funcom’s website and check out who the best crafter on your server is, and what it will take to overtake them, or who the best Cabal is in one category or another. Then, your accomplishments (apparently it can be set up automatically) can be tweeted or Facebooked about, in the hopes of fostering competition between friends and enemies alike. Funcom is also planning on handing out titles to players for their accomplishments, which seems to be a nod to The Lord of the Rings Online’s title system.
In addition to detailing the leaderboard and social networking strategy, Funcom also shed a bit of light on the different classes that you’ll play as in The Secret World: Dragons, Templars and Illuminati. These three factions are in competition during the game, but mostly for prestige and control of the world. These are secret societies, after all, and they thrive on being “puppet-masters”, as Tornquist called them. Interestingly enough, the Templars are “as close you’ll get to good guys” in the game, so it appears that while you are moving toward generally good means, you’ll be a bastard about doing it.
Each of the factions has the same goal—defeat evil—but have different styles of meeting that end. The Dragons, Tornquist said, are more disruptive and unpredictable; the Templars brash and in your face; and the Illuminati secretive and rogue-like. It was not clear whether or not these styles will come to bear in the gameplay, as The Secret World has no levels or classes in the traditonal sense. Instead, you’ll pick and choose the spells that you want to use, rather than being stuck in a pre-determined path.
Funcom also detailed one last new item, called “Agartha”. This is an alternate universe, where players and Cabals will fight over resources called “Anima”. It is envisioned as the main PvP area, but will have impact on the PvE overworld. Players and Cabals will fight over “cells” in Agartha, which when controlled by one of the three factions, will give different advantages to the faction that controls the cell in the “real” PvE world. Tornquist is hoping that players and Cabals feel an investment in the cell that they have captured, and will want to defend it against any attacks from other factions.
The competition aspects of The Secret World definitely sound intriguing, as does Agartha. Unfortunately, though, we still did not get any hands on time with the game and only saw a brief glimpse of a gameplay video, which did not give a whole lot of details on what it will feel like to play the game. Even still, I came out of the demo cautiously optimistic on the game, and eagerly await more details.
Sounds like good news to me.
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