The Secret World is a new MMO RPG from Funcom. I saw countless commercials for this on streams and after a while decide to look into it. But the more I tried to figure out the more confusing it got.
The game is set in current times revolving around 3 secret societies: The Templars, Illuminati, and Dragon. The gameplay comes from the societies trying to deal with pretty much any supernatural phenomenon you can think of. You help deal with these demons, zombies, ect on behalf of your chosen society and move up through their ranks. Pretty much standard fair when it comes to the MMO RPG, but if you watch enough videos you start hearing about it being 'Level-less' and 'Class-less'. If you are like me then you are probably as confused as I was when I first trying to wrap my head around that concept. Now that I have what I would guess is around 10 or so hours under my belt I am going to try to relate some things that took me some hands on experience to truly get a handle on.
Level-less levelsFirst off let's deal with this 'Level-less' problem. Everyone who has played an rpg thinks in levels. "I need one more level to get this new ability then the next boss will be easy", and so the story goes. In Secret world there may not be 'levels' per se, but there are still some things that hold the idea in place. You have an experience bar cut into thirds. When you hit one of the third markers you get an ability point and when you fill it up you get a skill point, thus earning 3 ability points and 1 skill point per bar of experience. Skill points are used to equip Items. For example If you find a very high level Shotgun you can't use it unless you have Skill level 6 in Shotguns. Each progressive level costs increasing amounts of skill points to get to, which functionally creates a 'level' system.
At the same time you put your ability points into any of the 9 weapons. These are fists, hammer, sword, assault rifle, shot gun, pistols, elemental magic, chaos magic, and blood magic. Each section has 2 starter trees of abilities, which you must complete before moving onto the secondary trees. No matter what you are using the 1 of the initial trees focuses more on damage while the other provides support in someway through healing, damage mitigation, snares, ect. An example of this is that in blood one of the trees focuses on healing shields while the other focuses on damage. Each weapon then has 6 secondary trees that have the same amount of abilites as the the 2 primary trees, and just like the primary trees 3 usually revolve more around damage while the other 3 provide some sort of support function that move your character into more of a tank, healing, or crowd control role.
The game seems to in some way evaluate your gear and what abilities you have equipped and then tells you how hard of a time you will be having on a quest you are about to accept. So while there may not be levels it is easy to get out of your depth pretty quickly. I know this skill/ability stuff is a little dense but hopefully this video lets some of the pieces fall into place.
As you get the higher up skills and abilities cost more. At the same time harder quests give you more experience allowing more full experience bar completions, which in turn give you more skill and ability points in one shot. This makes it so you don't feel like you are waiting forever to save up points to get that new ability or a new skill level in a weapon so you can equip that new sword you just found.
One Important note is that if you play long enough you could end up getting every ability in the game. Rerolling seems a waste of time unless you want to experience some of the society specific content. Changing abilities is as easy as opening a menu and dragging the abilities you want in to the 'Active' and 'Passive' bars. Letting you change specs on a whim.
Class-less classesThis concept at least makes a bit more sense to me. The game lets you use what ever weapons and abilities you want with out forcing you into anything. There are only 3 real limitations on this, you can only equip 2 weapons at a time, you can only have 7 active abilities equipped at a time, and you can only have 7 passive abilities equipped at a time. From there it is open to what you wanna do. In addition to the 9 weapons there are 3 miscellaneous ability sections. One that adds abilities to make you more of a tank, by giving you a passive that increase threat on attacks and a taunt. There is one that helps mitigate threat, and on the helps break crowd control effects. By peppering these abilities into your weapon abilities you can transform nearly any character into at least a tank.
When it comes to gear you have a bunch of talismans that augment your stats leaving your clothing to be purely for aesthetics. Meaning you can have gear that makes you top level PvP competive or End game PvE and still look exactly how you want.
While there are no classes each society has 10 or so decks. A deck is a set of abilities that the game has provided to you that create an iconic type character from the society you are a part of. The only bonus you get from completing a deck is you get a special clothing set that makes you looking like one of these icons. I am part of the Illuminati so one of the classes is a hit man looking person, most of Illuminati decks give off a modern day gangster feel. Dragon has more that give a eastern martial arts feel, while the Templar tend to look like they could fit in during the Crusades... aside from the guns of course. Here are a few that are on the site.
http://thesecretworld.com/world/decksOverall I think the decks are a cool idea, but I will be making my own spec and just try to find some cool looking clothes.
Gameplay and QuestingLearning more about some of the quests in this game is really what made me want to look into it. There are your average MMO quests of 'Go kill 5 of that, then 5 of that too', but there are also mind numbing investigation puzzles. So much so that the games provides a browser in game to make it easier to look things up. For example I had to get into a doctors computer to look at patient files, but he didn't give me his password. There was a password hint which was 'The composer of the seasons'. I didn't have to look it up because I was recently listening to Vivaldi, but had I not I could have opened google in game and looked it up. There are a lot of quests, including a lot of the main story line, where they give you clues to lead you towards the next part of the quest with out explicitly telling you where to go. I think this is amazing and keeps it the most engaging MMO I have personally ever played. So far I have had to look up stores in the phone book to figure out the best place to scavenge supplies, investigate the events surrounding a murder from a decade ago, and a whole lot more. I love that the quests aren't straight forward and give you a chance to think rather than just mindlessly run around gutting zombies. I don't want to put any videos here to spoil the quests but if you are ok spoiling a bit here and there and are still on the fence I would suggest looking up a walk through for the quest 'Something Wicked' It's a mind bending side quest that is pretty interesting.
Turning in quests occurs by you phoning in that you are done on your cell phone most of the time, giving you instant gratification for completion. The only drawback in questing that I have seen is that sometimes its hard to click on items you need to interact with. Your character model can disrupt the clicking, as well as the fact that you have to click the actual item most of the time. That means if you are trying to click on a rope you have to get exactly the rope. This can be infuriating on small objects but I personally can over look that for the quality of some of these quests.
Graphics and DialogueHere is where I think a game that has a lot of potential is going to get destroyed by the general audience and raters alike. The cut scene graphics are pretty awful compared to a lot of games out there on the market. The characters are block-y and sometimes the mouths and dialogue just don't match up. In one cutscene I was talking to a guy who was trying to use a screwdriver but looked like he was just rubbing it around on the object. The dialogue works really well in some scenes and terribly in others. I think it comes from trying to flesh out a character too fast using the dialogue. Since they are rushing the character development some of the things done and said just come off cheesy and cliche. So far it hasn't ruined my experience and a few of the cut scenes have worked really well, but it just seems to be the weak point of the game so far.
CombatAs far as PvE goes it seems to be pretty standard. Target what you want to shoot your single target spells at, aim your cone AoEs in the direction of the bad guys, and so on. There is one little variation though, you can have one friendly target and one enemy target selected at the same time. It's not a huge thing but there are some abilities that weaken the enemy target and buff the friendly target at the same time. Most of the weapons run of a resource system. There are abilities that generate them and then more powerful ones that spend them. However most of the generators will generate resources for both of the weapons. This means if you don't like any of the pistol generators, but like the the resource spenders you can still use pistols and just generate the resources through your other weapon. Most spells can be cast while moving giving combat a more active feel, which is hand since many of the enemies most damaging attacks display where they will be attacking and a timer for when it will go off.
As far as PvP goes I haven't really done anything with it yet. I'm kind of afraid since there is no way to distinguish levels. I feel like I will just get stomped to the ground. Hopefully soon I will be able to check into it though.
Overall View: The TL;DR SectionI think this game is a unique and fresh look at the MMO format, and brings a lot to the table. Its puzzle-y quests and sandbox type character building makes it fun. I do wish it wasn't an MMO because sometimes other players ruin the creepy ambiance. If you can make it past some of the poor dialogue and cut scenes I think it's really enjoyable so far. There are a few things I didn't go too far into like crafting, but I haven't done much with them.
One last pro tip for if you get this game: Save your Skill points for when you need to equip something. It makes finding that new piece of gear that much easier to equip when you find it.
