I’ve been hear­ing good things about Funcom’s The Secret World.  The time has come dur­ing the one month post-launch cel­e­bra­tion of the game, where new (and old?) play­ers can play TSW for free over a week­end.  I sup­pose I was impressed: enough to dish out 50 bucks to sat­isfy my hunger after the free lunch was over.

Now the ini­tial rush is washed away, time to regur­gi­tate.  By that I mean writ­ing an impres­sion piece, noth­ing unsan­i­tary or rant­ing.  Well, maybe a tiny bit of the last, but not too much.  I promise!

 

A Mod­ern Story

Vari­a­tion is good.  I tip my hat for an RPG that isn’t medieval high fan­tasy.  I tip it again for TSW’s attempt of mak­ing its sto­ry­telling an inte­gral part of the game­play expe­ri­ence.   I believe TSW is suc­cess­ful at this attempt.  The inves­ti­ga­tion mis­sions are cool and refresh­ing, albeit their replay value is lit­tle after it’s been solved the first time.  And some of these quests made me pon­der the real­ism in design logic: why do peo­ple leave rid­dles and puz­zles in cre­ative places, instead guard­ing them with mod­ern tech­nolo­gies, just so a poten­tial enemy agent can deci­pher and har­bor the secrets?  It’s not that I don’t like the puz­zles.  Some puz­zles should have a bet­ter rea­son to exist… bet­ter than exist­ing just so some­one can solve them.

The game has done a bet­ter job at intro­duc­ing new play­ers to the ongo­ing para­nor­mal con­flict.  For exam­ple, the player enters the first com­bat area fac­ing a famil­iar zom­bie out­break caused by a mys­te­ri­ous fog.  The plot then unfolds, grad­u­ally adding incu­bat­ing sea-ghouls, a tourist out­post of Hell, a mag­i­cal pri­vate school, a haunted theme park, and more into the picture.

There is a prob­lem lies within the sto­ry­telling aspect.  The over­ar­ch­ing pro­gres­sion of plot exists, but is some­what dis­con­nected with rest of the side mis­sions, which by far out­num­ber the story and main mis­sions.  Finally enters a great, ancient evil that the play­ers are enti­tled stop, but the causal­ity between that evil to other lit­tle things could have been bet­ter explained.

It is actu­ally not an insan­ity to expect an MMORPG to have a plot which depth is com­pa­ra­ble to single-player games.  The Secret World’s plot is, in fact, almost feels like it’s a single-player RPG in terms of qual­ity.  Unfor­tu­nately, it exhibits a rather unde­sired prop­erty of single-player RPG: it’s designed for one per­son to consume.

 

The Un-massively

It is debat­able whether The Secret World is a “main­stream” game.  Once the con­fus­ing nature of the game’s Abil­ity Wheel is unveiled, the “car­rot” doesn’t look too dif­fer­ent from just any other MMORPG.  In pur­suit of such car­rot in PvE, play­ers are out doing their own busi­ness, such as com­plet­ing (repeat­able) mis­sions, which to me is more inter­est­ing as a sto­ry­telling medium, or run­ning dun­geons across dif­fer­ent dif­fi­culty levels.

The mis­sions put play­ers in a role of an immor­tal super­sekrethero, who can solve all mys­ter­ies and kill every­thing hos­tile, alone, (unless scripted oth­er­wise).  I spent major­ity of my game­play time doing these mis­sions, because they are numer­ous, and mostly always reveal some­thing that I pre­vi­ously don’t know.  Unfor­tu­nately, as stated before, it plays too much like a single-player game when doing these mis­sions.  It’s per­fectly fine for solo investigation/infiltration mis­sions, but even as I run around in open field, it’s rare to find another play­ers killing the same mobs for over two min­utes.  There is no incen­tive to PUG in mis­sions, when every­thing is doable solo (save the times you can ask in chat if you got stuck somewhere).

Instanced dun­geons is a dif­fer­ent beast.  I heard World of War­craft has a sim­i­lar mech­a­nism, though I’ve never played WoW so I can’t really tes­tify for this claim.  I find them to be bor­ing after learn­ing the scripted events and how to han­dle them, since all it’s left is mechan­i­cally exe­cut­ing the “cor­rect” moves at each encounter.  The “car­rot” of run­ning dun­geons is basi­cally the tiered equip­ments…   Well, I per­son­ally can never see the fun in doing the same thing over and over again, with the near per­fect pre­dictabil­ity, only hop­ing the God of RNG hear my prayers com­posed of key­stroke and mouse clicks, and decide to drop a piece of equip­ment that I need.

These dun­geons are only for a party of five play­ers; no more, no less.  I have noth­ing against small group con­tent, but I have a lot to com­plain when five play­ers being the max­i­mum for grouped PvE con­tent.  To be fair though, it isn’t an iso­lated prob­lem in TSW… games that are sup­posed to fea­ture mas­sively mul­ti­player game­play are increas­ingly reduc­ing max­i­mum party size, in turn mak­ing group con­tent less scal­able.  I miss the old days when con­tents are scaled for 6~8 players…

 

The Beau­ti­ful Bleakness

The Secret World is a graph­i­cally advanced game.  It makes use of the newest eye candy hard­ware by fea­tur­ing a native DX11 and all the implied good­ness.  A nice look­ing game is always appre­cia­ble, (as long as my mid-range graph­ics card and CPU can han­dle,) and this game excels beyond my expec­ta­tion.  Though it also exceeded my expec­ta­tion on how post-apocalypse the envi­ron­ment looks beyond the main cities.  I’m sure such set­ting is appeal­ing to some play­ers, but I find it hard to enjoy the depress­ing mood radi­at­ing from the peb­bles and ruins of civilization.

Aes­thet­i­cally, the vast cloth­ing options in TSW com­pen­sates the lack of vari­ety in char­ac­ter sculpt­ing dur­ing cre­ation.  The library of fash­ion­able, mod­ern designer appar­els rang­ing from casual to for­mal to even more styl­ish attires that are suit­able for evil bust­ing actions.  Last but not least, the cos­tumes are cheap and easy to get; they don’t con­sume inven­tory spaces, and are detached from actual defen­sive stats.  I’m sure the last will bring much joy the need-to-dress type.

 

In Con­clu­sion…

The Secret World enter­tained me for about two weeks.  After com­plet­ing the first chap­ter of the story around Solomon Island, I don’t feel extremely excited for the next Egypt­ian desert chap­ter.  On the other hand, I’m quite con­tent with my “mod­i­fied” ver­sion of the Pal­adin deck, which is more effec­tive for my playstyle after much time was spent on the­o­rycraft­ing the abil­ity wheel.  Now, the PvP in this game is… not some­thing I feel moti­vated to do, given what I heard about it being zergy and all.  Though most impor­tantly, I don’t feel like farm­ing for bet­ter equip and grind­ing for more (pvp focused) skills.

In con­clu­sion of the Con­clu­sion… I won’t be sub­scribed to TSW after this month.  The major­ity opin­ion (mine included) is that the game is built with free-2-play con­ver­sion in mind, and it will do just that sooner or later.  Hope­fully when that hap­pens, this game will have a richer and more refined set of mechan­ics and game­play ele­ments.  Enough to divert my atten­tion from Guild Wars 2, or what­ever I fancy at that moment.