What is The Secret World? It's not a parallel dimension, it's not an alternate reality, it's the world outside these blinds. It's down that alley to the left and behind the fence, it's an abandoned warehouse, it's that strange little town in the Middle East, it's that haunted forest, it's all the places we avoid, all the locations that make us feel uneasy, it's the stories on the news about the missing person who people think has been murdered but the story's been covered up, it's the things that the authorities don't want us to know about, it's what the governments are hiding, it's what the secret societies are suppressing. That's the secret world. It's a world behind our world
The Secret World will have no classes or levels. This, Tornquist stresses, is absolutely not a typical MMORPG design; he describes it as an "action-adventure-MMORPG" with "fast, reactive combat". Although there will naturally be character progression and an incentive to play the game for a long time, "The Secret World beings where other MMOs end," he says. "There's no grind to get to a preconceived place." You take your character from the same, blank-slate "regular person" starting point as everyone else, and develop it in any way you want.
Furthermore, the entire game (which we know will include London, New York, Seoul, New England and Egypt as launch locations) will be open from the start, although some areas will be harder than others, and some content will be intended for more highly-developed characters. According to Tornquist, it "doesn't take long" from starting a new character to being able to join in with friends who've been playing the game for months.
Character customisation is completely free, and allows players to explore paths such as dark magic, voodoo and witchcraft as well as martial arts, ancient weapons and modern firearms. "If you want to be a character that has some magic power and ranged combat, you can use a shotgun and a voodoo doll and you can kick some serious ass using just your fists and your feet; you can do that. If you want to focus just in one direction and be a brawny soldier character who wears Kevlar armour and huge combat boots and a headband, you can do that," he says.
Combat will be conjoined with exploration, puzzle-solving, and what sounds like a much more languid, adventure-game style of play. "You can choose: today I don't want to fight things, today I want to explore this mystery, I want to find out about this story, I want go and meet these characters, I want to know what's behind that door, I want to know what's behind the legend of this place," Tornquist says.
The concept video buries us in teasing phrases faster than we can write them down: "Some secrets should stay buried... arctic explorers... now the conspiracy is revealed... we are in the fourth age... Stonehenge is a beacon... vampires... Titans... Earth is hollow.... Atlantis is rising... bees are harbingers... Noah's was not the only ark... Everything is true." No kidding.
On his influences, Tornquist can be clearer, and disarmingly frank. "Things like Sandman and Hellblazer and a lot of the Vertigo comic books, that kind of contemporary, dark urban fantasy. The works of Neil Gaiman, obviously that's a huge inspiration. The idea of magic existing and mythology being a truth in out universe and twisting that a little bit," he says.
If The Secret World's combat and classless society live up to their hype, they should also prove a powerful draw. But God, and the Devil, are in the details, and Tornquist's team has a mighty challenge ahead when it comes to balancing accessibility and a sense of achievement over years, not hours, of gameplay, with no structure to be their guide. Hopefully they can do more than talk their way out of answering that, because we'd love to see it solved.
. Oder irre ich mich da.
