A simple maker’s label on an item you pick up can be the one clue that opens up a new strand in the story. Yes, the designers have created multi-paged web sites that you have to trawl through to glean clues about what to do next. It is so you can look up the web pages of some of the characters and organisations you find while playing. How hard are they? Well, without spoiling it, the in-game button to pull up Google is there for a reason. Everyone plays in the spirit of the game, where the challenge is to nut out each quest in turn and unravel the story as you go. Other players in the game won’t proffer you clues or solutions. As you progress in the game, you will find less of the quest markers you are used too, the quests are longer (we had one with 18 phases), and they require not just your combat skills but also a lot of thinking to complete. This means you don’t just hit a hub and scoop up all the quests before heading back out to grind on boars instead, each quest is carefully crafted – and not just in its story, but also in its challenge. Instead, you’re restricted to only one storyline quest and three side quests at any given time. The term quest, for instance, is just not the simple “go here kill some stuff and come back” type you might have seen (a billion times) before.
All of which you would expect from a game in this genre, however they are radically different from what a jaded MMO player would be used too.
The game itself has quests, boss fights, and instances. This system replaces the traditional character-leveling system as you play, you get additional points to spend, and it is up to you where you take your character. In addition to this, you can spend points on specialising certain weapon or magic skills to make them more powerful. You can go heavy on one skill and unlock deeper and more complex skills or you can choose to pick a scattering of each. You are not tied to any one skill in fact, you can effectively have two skill “trees” selected at one time – a Blood Mage wielding a Shotgun, for instance. Each skill has subsequent layers to unlock. The skill wheel takes a while to get your head around, but basically you can choose from melee weapons (sword, hammers, and fists), firearms (pistol, shotgun, and assault rifles) and magic (chaos, blood, and elemental). Sound complex and convoluted? That’s not the half of it! It has three distinct factions to choose from that compete as much against each other as they do against the government, other underground organisations, and evil itself. Sure, it has good and evil, but it also has all the shades in between. Take the game theme for instance: modern times. One thing we can be definitive on, however, is that if you still enjoy the level grind and get off on spending your end game being a show pony, then this is not the game for you. So, if a game comes along that does not follow the recipe, is it in fact an MMO, or are we witnessing something new? The Secret World is one game we hesitate to to pigeon hole in the genre, as it challenges so much of the accepted convention. Charge a fee of $20 a month, and there you have it. That decided, you create a game engine that sees players level their characters as quick as possible so they can get to the end game content and prance about the main city areas showing off their uber gear. You have a theme if you have any sense, you will go with a fantasy one, because it takes little thought to create a “good vs. There’s a standard formula for Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) games it’s tried and true, and, frankly it would be fair to say a lot of people are getting quite bored with the genre.
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