The Secret World releases on in just a few weeks on July 3rd, and I had yet another opportunity to take a look at the beta this weekend. As you already know from our previous preview, The Secret World is an action-oriented game that plays somewhere between the button mashing of a World of Warcraft game and the more tactical location-oriented button pressing of Funcom’s other title, Age of Conan.
This time around I got my hands on the Dragon faction, a faction out of Tokyo who believe in order through chaos. The opening, however unfortunate, is the exact same as for the Templar: Long, drawn out, and boring. Luckily, it can also be skipped and some of the poor voice actors who appeared in previous beta weekends appear to have been replaced.
Foremost, we need to talk about quests. Quests are, and hold with me here, interesting and engaging. Unlike your other MMOs, you don’t pick up quests by wandering into a hub and nabbing everything in sight. In fact, you can’t. There are hard limits that allow you to only take a very small number of quests simultaneously. Every citizen of Kingsmouth and beyond is unique with their own personality. The presentation readily makes up for the much smaller number of quests available.
While there are a good amount of kill x quests, there are many more that require thought and deduction, offering little or no help on the mini-map. For instance, one of the first quests in Kingsmouth has you talking to survivors to learn more about the fog. It doesn’t tell you who to talk to or even where you should go to talk to them, that is left up to your investigatory skills. Other quests will send you on your way with a vague idea or general area, but no specific pinpoint on your map telling you where to go. Turning in quests is as easy as reporting in via your cell phone.
Perhaps what sets The Secret World apart from other MMOs in this regard is that the game has no levels. Since players are less inclined to try to rush toward end-game, since there really is none, they might feel better sitting back and enjoying the cutscenes and presentation of the quests. When I played The Old Republic, I found myself quickly bored with side-quests. The cinematics did little to numb the pain of quest grinding. In The Secret World, quests are long and spiraling and can regularly contain twenty separate parts.
Keep your thinking caps on, folks. For every brainless killing quest in The Secret World, there are plenty more that will strain your mind and put your investigatory skills to the test. Of course many players will simply have a browser open or beg in chat for answers (the latter being incredibly obnoxious), but there is a sense of accomplishment when you finally figure out the answer.
For example, another quest has you entering the house of a doctor to access the log files on his computer. Your only hint is a photograph that shows fireworks and a hint on the computer about the “song of the seasons.” The answer requires some knowledge of classical music, and I won’t spoil it here. I almost have to question if The Secret World will lose some appeal with its crowd because if you don’t have good deduction skills (or knowledge of classical music), you will probably just wind up looking the answers up online, and that will become annoying after a while.
Crafting in The Secret World is very similar to Minecraft, where you build gear by placing the building blocks in the correct pattern on a grid. Unfortunately, at least in my humble opinion, crafting is still very difficult without reading outside sources and guides for help. In fact there is a crafting guide on the Secret World main page that does an amazing job of explaining the ins and outs of weapon creation.
Combat, as I mentioned before, is a mixture of strategy without going as far as the intricate systems of other games. You will mostly be building energy to pull off attacks that use up said energy, and in the meantime many of the mobs have attacks that need to be dodged. There is a certain level of strategy required in combat, as you have limited space in your active and passive skill section to fill.
We’ll see how the next beta goes. Until then, I still haven’t burnt myself out of The Secret World. The more I play, the more engrossing that the game becomes. Player vs player combat was still absent from the beta but will appear next time.
MMO Fallout 