Month: August 2024

The last time I revisited The Secret World a couple of years ago I raved about its skill system, the ingenious wardrobe feature and its quite flexible take on the holy trinity of tanking, healing and dealing damage. What I didn’t address in the end – despite promising as much to y’all – is why I think the game’s quests are simply the best the MMORPG genre has ever seen, the likes of which we’ll probably never see again.

So let’s finally talk about that now. What is so special about these quests anyway?

As you may or may not know, TSW’s game director up until launch, and creative director for a while afterwards, was Ragnar Tørnquist, who’d set out as a video game producer and designer during the nineties with the stated goal of modernizing the adventure genre. On that front he was most notably responsible for the Dreamfall series.

This mindset of his also had a huge impact on The Secret World’s design though. In many ways it is an adventure game, just one with the usual MMOPRG trappings built around it.

To address the elephant in the room first, back when the game came out everyone was talking about Investigation Missions. Indeed these really seem to be borrowed directly from design documents for an adventure game, as they require an amount of riddle solving that’s basically unheard of in the MMORPG genre.

They didn’t pull any punches here either. You need to solve math sequences as seen above, decipher morse code (in the form of audible beeps, or the blinking headlights of a car), and you regularly have to figure out where to go next in less than obvious ways. Examples for this are following the instructions of a GPS you picked up from a crashed car backwards, or recognizing a house you’ve only seen in the background of a photo in the game world.

A really nice touch is that they’ve actually created real-world (but fake) websites containing clues for some of these missions, and also included a functioning browser to look these up directly in the game.

Now, depending on how much you like this sort of stuff doing these missions is either really fun, or possibly rather annoying. As long as you play solo it’s no big deal if it’s the latter because walkthroughs were, and still are, abundant. If you’re in a group however, this being an MMO and all, you better hope that everyone has about the same level of dedication and patience, else there might be a conflict of interests sooner rather than later.

Me, I’ve only ever played the game’s story content either alone or as a duo, which worked out just fine (better as a duo, actually). Every now and then I did consult walkthroughs though, because some types of riddles are really not my cup of tea, and even as a fan of oldschool adventure games my patience isn’t endless.

That all being said, if you ask me the investigation missions were hyped up a bit too much anyhow.

First of all, there’s only about a handful of them in each zone. The other mission types, especially the relatively “normal” Action Missions, are much more prevalent. More importantly though, many of those other quests, even those labeled action, aren’t your bog-standard Go here and kill X of these either. I’d wager that more than half of the game’s missions require that you read, look or listen carefully to stuff that’s happening around you, else you might find yourself at a loss one way or another.

A simple example: an early side mission in Kingsmouth is triggered by looking at a dead woman’s phone. A message she’s received outright tells you where too look for something hidden, and the location is even marked (roughly) on your minimap. However, it does not directly tell you the code for the keypad. Instead the message says “The code is the first song he planned to sing on Sunday”. As it turns out the item is hidden right next to the church, so you need to go inside, look for the chalkboard with the song numbers for Sunday Mass, memorize the first one and type that into the keypad. Voilà, mission done.

In my opinion this is actually where the game’s quests are at their best, because they strike a good balance between making me think and be attentive on the one hand, and just running around, exploring and killing shit on the other.

I’ll keep it brief regarding Sabotage Missions. These are basically stealth missions where you need to evade enemies and cameras, bypass or disable traps, stuff like that. Many players loathed them, which doesn’t surprise me at all, as some of these are the most unforgiving quests in the whole game. Personally I think they’re servicable and provide some gameplay variety. I don’t hate them, but I don’t love most of them either.

Regardless of mission type, TSW really has quite a few cool things up its sleeve that I’ve never seen anywhere else. Not every idea was pure gold of course, but there’s a lot of awesome stuff to be experienced here.

A couple of times during the course of the game, when a quest nudges you to look for clues in the spirit world, you actually need to die to be able to see them. This becomes routine relatively quickly, but first time around it blew my mind! Bonus points for the afterlife looking really gloomy and spooky.

Almost every quest has some kind of picture, chart or sketch attached to it, some even have whole books to flip through. These were obviously crafted with a lot of love and care, and they make everything feel much more real. The attention to detail devoted to such “minor” things is just astounding.

Even tutorials on how crafting works are done in this fashion. I really dig it!

Some missions grant you access to special items, too. Upon entering a pitch-black parking garage you find a hard hat with a headlamp attached, in order to fight a fire you’re given a hazmat suit to protect you from the smoke, and more.

The great thing here is: you get to keep these items even after the mission in question is done. I don’t remember whether the hazmat suit can actually perform a function anywhere else in the game, but the headlamp sure does work everywhere, and I’ve used it more than once in dark areas to find my way around. The suit, if nothing else, is one more wardrobe item to collect and wear, if you so choose.

The three factions, the Illuminati, the Templar and the Dragon, are very distinct, so much so that a second and third playthrough may well be warranted just for the differently flavored mission debriefings and cutscenes.  Should you choose to side with the Illuminati, for example, your agent handler will be one Kirsten Geary, who is as snarky and uncompromising as they come. I’ve very rarely taken screenshots of quest text in other MMORPGs, but I have at least 50 or so of KG’s debriefings alone.

If that’s not enough of an incentive to reroll, each faction also has about a dozen exclusive outfits to unlock, like the one seen below. Many of them have different looking male and female versions too.

Speaking of cutscenes and story presentation in general, I think the game does an excellent job with this despite character animations definitely not being one of its strong suits. Playing a silent protagonist works well here, and the NPC voice acting is terrific without exception.

And one last thing: each and every quest in the game is repeatable. They do have a cooldown, and missions that are part of the main story only become available again once you’ve seen it all the way through to the end (if I remember correctly), but nothing’s ever one and done if you don’t want it to be. There are missions that I’ve finished dozens of times, some just for quick and easy XP, others because they’re just that much fun!

So everything’s perfect, no complaints whatsoever? Well, not quite.

In addition to the deficiencies I listed in my other posts linked above it’s only fair to say that more than a few quests can be a bit annoying, some even to the point of being frustrating. This is especially true if you play solo. A couple of paragraphs earlier I talked about patience and dedication, and to really enjoy TSW I think you need a good deal of both.

If you do have these traits and also like adventure games as well as RPGs you really can’t go wrong with The Secret World though. My recommendation: go play it while you still can!

Blaugust 2024 post count: 3

As mentioned last week I’m back to playing The Secret World right now, and as always I’m having a ball! This is such an amazing game, and it still pains me that it wasn’t successful enough to warrant its further development. I’m not complaining (too much) though, as I’m just glad that I can still play it as is.

This time around I’ve even decided to freshen things up a bit. Until now I’ve always just dusted off my main character to play some scenario missions, a handful of favourite quests, and, if I was able to drum up a few more people, a couple of dungeons.

However, by now the latter is out of the question as there are pretty much no other players around anymore – within the span of two weeks I’ve seen a grand total of three other people, all of them standing or sitting around in Agartha, apparently AFK. The other stuff, as great as it all is, I can unsurprisingly do only so often until it becomes stale again.

Hence now, more than eleven years after I created my main, which was also the only character I’d ever played since then, I said to myself You’ve never seen the story from a Templar’s perspective, just roll up a new alt! So that’s what I did.

Best decision ever! Playing through Kingsmouth with a character that doesn’t steamroll anything that moves without breaking a sweat is such a great experience, especially after all this time.

By now the game has reminded me, more than once I might add, that it can totally kick my butt if I’m not careful. The need to be cautious fits the game’s setting and atmosphere very well – feeling a sense of dread would be a lot harder if the game was easy as pie.

Of course my years of experience do help quite a bit, and I’m very happy with my build choice of wielding a shotgun and an assault rifle. I’ve pretty much always used at least one melee weapon, that being my trusty blade, so this is quite refreshing too.

After just over two weeks I’m halfway finished with Blue Mountain, the game’s third zone, which means that I have five and a half more ahead of me (not counting Tokyo, more on that later), as well as various storylines that were added post-launch, like the awesome Indiana Jones and James Bond homages, and of course the questlines to get hold of auxiliary weapons like the rocket launcher and chainsaw. Great times!

Speaking of those eight launch-zones – I remember some people complaining at the time that there wasn’t enough content in the game. I disagree. Consider this: I’ve done it all before – twice – and it has still taken almost a week each to play through the first two.

Believe me, I’m much faster than I was back then, and not only because I kill stuff quicker and don’t die as often. More importantly I also remember quite a few details regarding most of the quests. Next time around I’ll finally talk about how awesome everything about the quests in this game is, but for now let’s just say that there’s more to them than just following X’s on your minimap and killing shit. Much more.

So, yeah, I think there’s content here for many very enjoyable weeks if not months, and that’s not even counting dungeons, raids and scenarios, which are obviously meant to be repeated ad nauseam.

I don’t think that I’ll move on to Tokyo with this character once I’ve finished everything Maine, Egypt and Transsylvania have to offer though. I do quite like the zone, which was the first and only new one they released after launch, but they really didn’t do the game (or themselves) any favors by implementing the AEGIS gear system. I remember vividly getting my ass kicked upon arriving there with my fully dungeon- and raid-geared main, and I’m not much inclined to repeat that experience with less strong gear. Maybe I’ll just hand the baton to said main at that point and revisit Tokyo with him.

I guess we’ll see. Until then I have a load of awesome content still ahead of me, and I’ll savour every minute of it.

Blaugust 2024 post count: 2