It is Taco Tuesday, and that can only mean one thing: lists of things describing things. Before I dive deep, I want to preface this with a small note. I generally write the Taco Tuesday piece days, and often a week in advance. The timing of this Taco Tuesday appearing on the same day that Funcom announced layoffs is pure coincidence. So without further ado, here are my top five reasons for playing The Secret World.

Quests Are The Fourth Pillar

I like to think of The Secret World as succeeding where The Old Republic, in a way, failed. While the cutscenes in The Old Republic brought a level of immersion that isn’t normally seen in the MMO genre, it was little more than a gimmick. The personal story was always worth keeping up with, but the whole system was just a veil added on to hide the quest grinding required to level up. A veil that didn’t work all too great.

The Secret World follows the formula I’ve talked about with RuneScape: Quality over quantity. There are a much smaller selection of quests in The Secret World compared to your average MMO, but each quest presents a unique and interesting story with memorable characters and events.

My personally favorite quest so far is an impromptu tower defense that tasks the player with setting up area-of-effect traps at various roadblocks. Some traps would cause damage, others would stun, and some would slow movement, but it was ultimately up to the player to take charge of crowd control and ensure the traps weren’t destroyed. This quest was insanely difficult, because at the later stages your trap placement needs to be perfect, and there is a lot of trial and error in play.

Characters and Storytelling

Normally I couldn’t care less about characters in an MMO. The random NPCs in the world with generated names, standing idly and doing little more than repeating generic phrases, offering generic quests, and shouting random pop references and internet memes. They don’t excite me.

Luckily all of those generic people are dead in The Secret World and are likely roaming around as the faceless zombies whose heads you will smash in along the way. What small population has made it through the apocalypse are rife with things to say and tasks for you to accomplish. Every character you come across is unique and memorable, even if the creatures you fight are coupled into classes.

The Secret World has done what few others can accomplish: making the player want to know what is going on in the world, and actually interested in playing through quests for a reason other than gathering experience.

Combat Isn’t A Mindless Endeavor

This sounds terrible, and it is painfully true. The Secret World takes a more tactical approach to combat. Your stature and positioning is important when it comes to blocking or avoiding enemy attacks, and your more powerful attacks are mostly reliant on first inflicting status effects on your foe.

My chaos character is equipped to deal with almost any situation, from large crowds of mobs to single foes and boss characters in between. While the random nameless mobs employ your regular method of running in a straight line and attacking, the world is well populated with foes that require more finesse to defeat.

Indicators on the field require you to pay attention to combat, and just the fact that I can’t run through areas in a stupor watching Netflix places The Secret World on a level above a large number of its bedfellows.

Levelless Gameplay

I’m sure there are people who will dispute this as a negative aspect of The Secret World, but I see it as a positive. The idea that the world presented by Funcom is all about exploration is just encouraged by the fact that the game doesn’t herd you through zones. In level-based games, once you out-level a zone, you have to choose between dumping the story and moving on to the next area, or taking a hit in experience gain (and eventually a complete loss) in order to continue questing or exploring the entire map.

The Secret World sits somewhere between the very incremental increase in power that you receive in games like Darkfall or Mortal Online, and one level being the difference between getting your ass kicked and beating an NPC without breaking a sweat. So the game isn’t so much about making the transition from this powerless weakling into a demi-god able to bring down fire and rain, but rather about taking your character on a journey from the discovery of their new found powers into a position of comfort in the new world.

I Want To Play It

Easiest to point out, hardest to explain. The combination of everything that makes The Secret World fun and unique culminates in a game I just simply want to play. I always know that a game is going to keep my attention when, while writing the Why Aren’t You Playing, I keep having to pull myself out of gathering screenshots as an excuse to keep playing. I also know it will hold my attention if I have to turn off Netflix because I can’t pay attention to both at the same time.

So the factor of The Secret World coming on the edge of Funcom’s CEO departing and the company taking a massive hit in its stock value, admittedly Funcom’s next couple of quarterly finances concern me. Hopefully Funcom can bring in the revenue it needs to keep development going for The Secret World, and they are guaranteed to at least have my fifteen bucks a month.