The Secret World (Gameplay #3) - All is True
0The more you play The Secret World the more you realize just how much the game is actively working against the traditional MMORPG formula. Sure, there are still plenty of fetch quests, dungeon raids and other silly MMO tropes, but the extent of Funcom's innovative efforts go far beyond what Bioware did with Old Republic, which was merely to bolt some additional (and not always very exciting) dialogue on top of the standard World of Warcraft model and then call it a day. Instead, Ragnar Tornquist and his team have put a lot of structures and restrictions in place which have as their sole purpose to make life difficult for your average quest-hopping, min-maxing, story-disregarding obsessive-compulsive MMO freak. This might ultimately spell the game's doom - since those "freaks" will inevitably be the game's primary audience, at least as far as the raw numbers are concerned - but it's a brave and exciting departure from genre standards nonetheless.
In what appears to be a shocking disregard for post-Fable RPG conventions (yes, that was irony), there are quests in TSW which entirely lack waypoints or other map markers and thus require the player to listen attentively to the dialogue, actually read the quest description and immerse him- or herself in what some MMO fans disparagingly call "the dev story" in order to know where to go and what to do. Also, the number of quests a player can have at any given moment has intentionally been limited to prevent players from mindlessly "collecting" assignments from quest givers across the map and solve all of the objectives in rapid succession without paying attention to the story. It's clear that TSW both demands and rewards thorough exploration, and while the starting Kingsmouth area seemed to be a fairly generic-looking polygonal representation of small town America at first glance it has definitely acquired a more genuine sense of place as I've gradually dug deeper into its intriguing history, colorful characters and dark underlying secrets.