Last month during an investor call, Funcom announced a relaunch of The Secret World, to take place in the first half of the year, with the goal of revamping combat, enhancing the new user experience, and overall making the game more appealing to a wider audience. While The Secret World is fortunate enough to carry a very loyal fanbase, the game never exactly performed to Funcom’s standards and has been criticized for floaty combat, among other issues.
Secret World Legends appears to have dropped the “MMO” part of the equation and is instead billing itself as a shared world RPG. What this means for players and how they interact in the world is yet to be seen, however The Secret World as an MMO has always been on the smaller side. You generally don’t see more than a few people walking around at any given time and perhaps a dozen or so at most in hub areas, so we’ll have to see exactly how this change in branding affects the gameplay.
Funcom is excited to announce that their acclaimed story-driven game The Secret World will be relaunched this spring as Secret World Legends, a shared-world action RPG with completely revamped combat, a newly designed progression system, and updated visuals. The game’s full collection of missions and mysteries will be free to play, with over 100 hours of mature storytelling and surprises.
To the dismay of veteran players who have put hundreds, if not thousands of hours into their characters, this is what we know: This is not an update of The Secret World with a new name and brand, but a completely new spinoff (a relaunch of the content with new mechanics, if you will). While the old version of The Secret World will still be available to play and you can link your account to gain benefits in Legends, your characters will not transfer over.
They’ll continue to live on the old TSW servers, so you’ll still be able to log in and play them. You will not be able to play them on the new Secret World Legends server though. It’s a new experience and fresh start for everyone.
At launch, Secret World Legends will contain the original eight zones, with expansions from Tokyo, Nightmare Dungeons, Raids, etc coming at a later date. While all content will be available for free, you’ll be able to buy Aurum as a premium currency to give yourself extra bonuses:
Aurum is used to purchase a variety of in-game items and services in Secret World Legends. This includes but is not limited to: additional weapon pages, extra inventory space, additional characters, exclusive vanity items, and much more!
While Funcom has promised that your characters on The Secret World are safe, early concerns about plans to quietly sunset the title are quickly popping up. The Secret World is no longer available for purchase on Steam, coinciding with the Steam forums being completely wiped.
(Source: The Secret World)
