The MMO genre is often derided for lacking innovation, and for prioritizing loot and level grinding over storytelling and gameplay. Perhaps if more people knew about The Secret World, they might take a different view of what an MMO can be. The following review is an attempt to describe what makes The Secret World both unique among MMOs, and great among RPGs.
The review focuses most on what makes The Secret World great — its story — but also addresses gameplay systems, endgame content, visuals, player community, as well as character customization and progression.
Love MMOs? Then read on. Hate MMOs? Then you should definitely read on.
Story
Life will never be the same again.
Imagine being awoken one night to the strange sensation of a new and unfamiliar power coursing through your body. The sensation is faint at first, a muted buzzing in your head, but gradually it builds, until your own cries of astonishment are drowned out by the cacophony of millions of tiny wings. Your veins are on fire, and it is all you can do to keep from going mad with desperation. All at once, your desperation focuses until it expels the still-circulating fire from your body in a brilliant flash that sends furniture, bedclothes, and ornaments into a dozen different directions with catastrophic force. You survey the destruction around you, but the lids of your eyes grow heavy with exhaustion.
In the morning, you awake from what must surely have been a dream, but all around you are the shattered remnants of an event both inexplicable and impossible. You scarcely have time to make sense of the scene before you, however, as fire courses through your veins anew. This time, though, the fire burns with a softer heat, and you can feel it ebb and flow in response to your thoughts. Without contemplating the action, you raise one hand, palm up, a few inches in front of you; the moment you do so, a single tongue of flame issues from your hand, and comes to hover at eye level. Raising your other hand, you will the flame to traverse the distance between your palms, and to your amazement, it does.
Peering into the flame as it continues to hover over your palm, you try to come to grips with this radical interruption of everything you thought was real. That's when you hear three curt knocks emanate from the door to the hall outside. You fumble for a few moments in a futile attempt to erase the chaos of the night before, but quickly decide that getting dressed is a more practical course of action. Dressing takes longer than usual, as your shaking hands refuse to manipulate buttons and clasps effectively. Despite the time elapsed, the knocks that broke your reverie are not repeated, and you begin to wonder if your unidentified visitor has already departed.
Taking a deep breath, you quickly make for the door and pause a few moments before hesitantly opening it a third of its arc. Before you stands a tall, ominous-looking man with an immaculately-cropped haircut, and equally-immaculate blue-grey business suit. His eyes are obscured by dark sunglasses and his mouth betrays no emotion whatsoever. Both parties remain silent: you, because the appearance of yet another unexpected oddity has momentarily robbed you of speech, and he, because he seems to be studying you intensely. You are not sure how much time passes like this, but you think that you can see one corner of the man's mouth arch almost imperceptibly; you have no time to confirm this observation, however, before a blackness deeper than sleep takes a hold of you.
When you eventually awake, you find yourself lying on the floor, bathed in the rays of the midday sun streaming in through the living room window of your apartment. You feel groggy and weak, but manage to sit upright and begin collecting thoughts. Panicking for a moment, you look furtively towards the door to the hallway, and then survey the rest of your surroundings. You are relieved to discover that he is nowhere to be seen, but your awareness then shifts to a crumbled piece of paper you hold in your hand. Unclenching your hand, you examine the contents of the note. The note has been handwritten, by a skilful hand practiced in copperplate script: "We are the Templars. We have been watching. Seek us out."
Such were the strange beginnings of my character's journey through The Secret World; a journey that took me halfway around the globe, into the depths of hell, back in time, and through the dreams of slumbering gods.
The Illuminati, Templar, and Dragon all wield great power in secrecy.
Your journey will begin in much the same way: Your character will awaken to discover that they have been granted mysterious powers by some unknown agent, and shortly thereafter be recruited into one of three secret societies to fight in a war that the rest of the world may not know about, but is most certainly threatened by. These secret societies are all bitter rivals, and all have their own agendas. The Templar are determined to stamp out evil wherever the find it, the Illuminati seek power at any cost, and the Dragon to exert control through chaos. Despite conflicting agendas and aeons of resentment, however, all three societies are united in one common cause: ensuring that "the secret world" remains a secret.
What exactly is the secret world, though? It is the world where everything is true: ghosts, ghouls, goblins, vampires, demons, witches, zombies, and much, much worse. Unfortunately for the organizations in question, this world has become increasingly difficult to keep hidden from the people who have the luxury of believing that all of the above are merely the products of primitive imagination and ignorance. You see, it seems that at certain points in history, the secret world violently erupts into the mundane world; causing great damage and loss of life in the process. The last time this happened, it resulted in what modern people call "the black plague." This time, the plague has taken on a different, far more virulent form, and whole cities have already fallen: Tokyo being the first.
The Illuminati, Templar, and Dragon were all unprepared to face the sheer magnitude of the paranormal outbreak, and have thus far failed to contain it. Their hope is that the previously-ordinary people all over the world who are waking up with incredible powers and near-immortality will provide the power they need to prevent the world succumbing to "an endless night." And that's precisely where you come in.
Characters
Some unlikely allies will come to your aid.
The characters of The Secret World are a diverse bunch; not just in terms of personality, but also species and plane of origin. As a fresh initiate into one of the game's three secret societies, your first contacts will all be of the human variety—strange humans, to be sure, but humans nonetheless. Pretty soon though, you will be crossing paths with angels, demons, zombies, and other, less easily-classifiable supernatural sorts.
Regardless of what skin they happen to be in, though, each the expertly-voiced cast members of The Secret World is fascinating in his/her/own right. One of my early favourites was a blonde vixen by the name of "Cassie". I met her hanging off the local leader of a cultist camp that had set up itself up on the outskirts of the zombie-infested town of Kingsmouth. The members of the cult clearly regarded her as being little more than a naive adolescent who had joined the cult as an act of rebellion against her controlling parents. Not knowing just how clever the writers of The Secret World were, I didn't think to look beyond surface appearances. It was only when a later mission in which Cassie popped up to deliver her "black kiss" (this is what the game called the status ailment that rendered my character unconscious) that I questioned my earlier impressions.
How could a runaway in a tank top and short shorts incapacitate me, a supernatural "superhero" (to quote another of Kingsmouth's few remaining youngsters)? I had to know, but the game wasn't going to make it easy on me. Some characters are regular chatterboxes, and have expansive dialogue trees for the player to click through. Others, like Cassie, only show up during cutscenes or in the heat of combat, and can't be interrogated. Exploring the game world, and paying attention to even the most insignificant-seeming detail is the only way to learn more about the characters who don't have dialogue trees, but even characters who will happily talk your off have a lot of secrets to discover.
The line separating friend and foe is rarely clear.
Poking around Kingsmouth, I eventually dug up all sorts of interesting Cassie-related titbits. I have to be vague in the interest of avoiding spoilers, but let's just say that she that the bloodline to which she belonged had quite the history in Kingsmouth, and she a lot less naive about what was going on than most. And there's still so much I don't know about her, including whether she's aligned with the "good guys" or the "bad guys."
On the topic of good guys and bad guys, the two are outrageously hard to tell apart in The Secret World. The members of your faction, for instance, may train you up, send helpful information your way, and outfit you with all sorts of wicked death-dealing implements, but you can't really be sure what they're up to—it turns out that there are secrets even within a clandestine secret society. Even the apparently upright and noble Templars seem to put "the mission" ahead of individual human lives, and will actively chastise players who spend too much time doing good deeds for people in peril.
What about the fire-breathing demons and blood-soaked vampires though—surely they live up to their reputation for evil! Not so fast, I'm afraid. It turns out that it might have been humans who corrupted demon-kind, not the other way around. And vampires, well, most of them are mindless, soulless bloodsuckers, but their queen ends up being more of a tragic, flawed, and very human character. That's not to say that demons and vampires alike will appreciate your sympathy so much that they will reconsider tearing out your throat, though.
Character Customization
Dressed for the desert.
When you first sit down to create your character in The Secret World, you could be forgiven for thinking that the range of options on offer are pretty poor. The selection of facial types for both female and male character types is small, and most of them are pretty ugly; as are the various bits of attire you can dress your character in. So if you were hoping to strut out into London, Seoul, or New York with your pixel-perfect recreation of Lucille-era Lil' Richard, you're probably going to have your work cut out for you.
That's the thing about The Secret World: it doesn't make a great first impression when it comes to character customization, or much of anything else. What I hope that this The Secret World review will accomplish, though, is to encourage new players to persevere through the early parts of the game so that they eventually get to experience all the great features it has to offer; and one of the game's greatest features is without a doubt the character customization.
Not only is each and every The Secret World player character able to equip three weapons at once—including everything from flamethrowers and assault rifles, to gigantic war hammers and foul tomes of blood magic—but the player can choose from a selection of hundreds upon hundreds of clothing items to adorn themselves from head to toe as they see fit. Ingeniously, Funcom have designed the equipment system so that the clothing a character wears has absolutely no impact on their stats. The upside of this is that Funcom's outfit designers can go nuts with all sorts of weird and wonderful outfits, and players can go equally nuts mixing and matching them: believe me, that Lil' Richard look won't seem so out of reach after your wardrobe has expanded.
Players can customize a lot more than their characters look, though: the way your character plays is also completely up to you. The two weapons that you start out with, along with a third "auxiliary" weapon that you get later on, determine which active abilities your character has access to. For example, if your character is getting around with both sword and shotgun, you can freely pick and choose any abilities you have unlocked from the sword/shotgun ability trees and slot them into your action bar as you see fit. If you so desired, you might only use the sword to activate some defensive buffs before using your twelve gauge to make it rain zombie parts; alternately, you could go for a "strike and fade" approach, whereby you use the sword to quickly close the distance between your character and the enemy and deal a rapid flurry of cutting strikes before using the shotgun's blowback effect to rapidly rocket to a safe distance before your enemy can respond.
Trendy threads for the streets of London.
As enticing as all that might sound, though, it's when you start experimenting with the mind-bogglingly huge array of passive abilities on offer that you begin to appreciate the many and varied ways that you can maximize your character's capacity for carnage. Unlike active abilities, passive abilities do not require that your character be equipped with any particular bit of gear in order to activate them. That means you can mix and match from any and all of the ability trees.
Returning to our blade/shotgun example, what if we equipped a passive ability that drastically slowed an enemy every time you scored a critical hit with a shotgun? That would mean that the blowback attack that puts you out of harm's way also has a chance of slowing your enemy to a crawl; leaving the poor fellow to nurse his still-bleeding wounds while he slowly shambles towards you so that he can repay the favour.
These are only the simplest of examples. Mixing and matching active and passive abilities is an art form in The Secret World, and those who know how to do it well can deal an awful lot of death (or, healing as they case may be). And if it all sounds a little bewildering, that's because it is; thankfully, the game provides pre-built "decks" for just about every playstyle and weapon combination a starting player could want. These decks function like classes in many other MMOs, but can be freely adjusted at any time by the player.
World
Strange things stir in the fog.
Unlike the vast majority of MMOs, The Secret World is not set in a distant, mythical past, nor is it set in a high-tech distant future. Instead, The Secret World is set our world, here and now. The game's conceit however, is that everything—all the myths, fairy tales, urban legends, folk stories, and conspiracy theories—is true. The reason that folk like you and I aren't aware of succubi, werewolves, wraiths, ghouls, draugr, and unnameable eldritch horrors is because powerful secret societies, in addition to governmental and corporate agencies, work from the shadows to keep the knowledge of this "secret world" hidden.
The wonderful thing about The Secret World's modern-day setting is that the game world is at once familiar and alien. The town of Kingsmouth, where players begin their journey, looks like a typical Midwestern town… Except that it has been overrun by zombies and aquatic monstrosities. Likewise, when the player reaches Tokyo much later in the game, they will find that the familiar cityscape has been completed transformed by the invasion of dark, supernatural forces that ooze out from between gaps in the pavement, and clamber unnaturally down the sides of the monolithic skyscrapers. The horror of the situation that the player finds herself in is enhanced because, when disbelief is for a moment suspended, it seems like something that could actually take place.
"Horror, in an MMO?" Yes, you heard right: There is horror in The Secret World, and plenty of it. To my knowledge, horror has rarely, if ever, been attempted in an MMO; probably because the player's character becoming a nigh-unstoppable killer of anything that moves is the carrot that most MMOs dangle in front of the player's nose. To an extent, that's true of The Secret World as well, but the dread-inducing atmosphere of some of the game's spookier locations, along with the imaginatively, horrifically grotesque monster designs go a long way to setting the player on edge: Especially if he happens to be playing while wearing headphones in a darkened room!
I made the mistake of doing that very thing one night, and my cruel handler sent me into a reputedly-haunted underground car park while he quaffed brandy from the safety of Templar HQ. That the car park was almost completely pitch-black, save for the odd flickering fluorescent light, was bad enough, but the car alarms that would suddenly blare without any obvious cause, or the vaguely-humanoid shapes that seemed to skitter just outside the range of my torch were even worse. When the laughter of ghostly children started ringing in my ears and the tiny burning eyes started advancing in my direction, I was tempted to shut the game down—progress be damned, I just couldn't take any more.
A city at war.
For all my cowardice, though, I just couldn't manage to shut the game down. Even when the game is doing its best to scare you witless, you cannot help but be drawn to explore further and dig deeper into the game world: The rewards simply to great not to. And I'm not talking here about the usual sorts of rewards that MMOs foist upon players for completing this or that objective. The Secret World has those too, of course, but it also rewards the curious, probing player with a deeper understanding of the nature of the various paranormal events that have erupted in Maine, Egypt, Transylvania, and Tokyo, as well as the connection between them. Objects in the environment such as whiteboards, graffiti, computer terminals, posters, and even the designs on various architectural features the player will come across would merely serve as window-dressing in most other MMOs, but in The Secret World they often contain clues to solving the game's many mysteries.
Gameplay
Beating back the demons of hell with hammer and gun.
When it comes to questing in the The Secret World there are several types on offer. A typical Action Mission, for instance, might involve erecting and defending a barricade against hordes of zombies before tracking the hordes back to their origin and defeating a powerful flesh golem. Investigation Missions, on the other hand, will have you hacking into computer terminals, rifling through old town archives, solving elaborate puzzles, and deciphering dead languages in an attempt to get to the heart of a particular mystery in the game world. Lastly, Story Missions advance the main game plot, and have you facing off against resurrected pharaohs, diabolical warlocks, and other suitably-epic evildoers.
In order to overcome said evildoers, of course, you will need to engage them in a bit of old-fashioned MMO combat; and to players of some of the more action-oriented MMOs that have appeared of late, the combat and gameplay of The Secret World will feel very old-fashioned indeed. By default, the combat is a traditional TAB-targeting affair: Attacks, triggered by pressing hotkeys, are directed towards the last enemy the player pressed TAB to target. The upside of this system is that your connection to the game servers has to be pretty horrible before you find yourself at too much of a disadvantage, because quick reactions aren't really called for. That being said, if the lag is so bad that the game looks like a Powerpoint presentation then you're going to have a tough time avoid the nasty telegraphed attacks that most enemies have, and you will probably die in short order.
With up to three equippable weapons at the player's disposal, the gameplay of The Secret World opens up a lot of possibilities.
Completing quests and killing enemies both reward the player with experience points, but The Secret World doesn't have any "levels" in same way that other MMOs do. Instead of gaining levels that boost the player's health, strength, and so forth, experience is converted into ability points that can be spent on unlocking passive and active abilities, and skill points which allow players to equip increasingly more-powerful gear.
In fact, it is gear that provides the best indication of how powerful a given player character is. Weapons and stat-boosting talismans (which essentially take the place of armour in other MMOs) are graded into tiers according to their quality. Players begin using quality-level one gear and end up using quality-level ten gear by endgame. Advancing beyond quality-level ten gear requires players to participate in endgame activities, such as the New York raid, Nightmare Dungeons, or PVP. Strictly speaking, though, players who only care about completing story objectives don't need to participate in any of the above, as a good set of quality-level ten gear combined with a strong build is sufficient.
Graphics
The lighting effects are often beautiful.
The Secret World reached its three-year milestone recently, and the game's vintage is painfully obvious in the dated-looking textures in particular. The game offers some truly beautiful sights to behold, and I challenge anyone to not be awed by the ruined streets and crumbling skyscrapers on show in the New York raid the first time they see them, but getting close to any of the objects in the environment reveals some pretty low-resolution textures, and basic-looking object models. It's a credit to the art design team, then, that the game looks as good as it does.
It doesn't hurt that The Secret World supports some impressive DirectX 11 effects for players who have beefy enough hardware to render them. On maximum settings, the rain-slicked streets of Seoul, and the foggy forests of Maine make for breathtaking spectacles. Unfortunately, the game engine is not especially well-optimized, so even the latest and greatest hardware sometimes struggles on maximum settings.
Atmospheric environments abound.
Endgame Content
Dare you face the beast that brought New York to its knees?
As previously mentioned, The Secret World's endgame content consists primarily of Nightmare Dungeons (outrageously difficult versions of the existing dungeons) and PVP. Players looking for a bevy of raid content won't find it in The Secret World, as there is only one raid, and it's a lot smaller in scale than what World of Warcraft or Star Wars the Old Republic players are accustomed to.
Make no mistake, though, endgame has plenty for you to do. In addition to the above content types, there are also scenarios—think "horde mode" with diverse objectives and random variables thrown in—and the newly-added Orochi Tower challenges to contend. The latter is a particular treat for veteran players, as there are no less than nineteen different paths, all with their own challenges and rewards, the player can take to the top.
Endgame is a place where angels fear to tread…
Having reached the endgame some time ago myself, I can attest to all of the above activities being a lot of fun. I even have friends in the game who only play for the dungeons and/or PVP content. The majority of players, though, play The Secret World for its fascinating story. Fortunately, Funcom understand this, and players who have reached the endgame are frequently treated to DLC expansions packed with new story content. These "Issues", as they're referred to, do a wonderful job of advancing the story, and of giving those of us who are so passionate about the game because of the story plenty to do. The focus on story content does leave a lot of dungeon crawlers and PVP-ers feeling neglected, but the development team had to prioritize after they were downsized in the months and years following release.
Price
Issues #5–7
The Secret World is a "buy-to-play" MMO, meaning that once a player purchases a copy of the game, they can play the game without requiring a monthly subscription. A monthly subscription priced at USD $14.99 is available, however, and it grants a monthly allocation of "bonus points" that can be used to purchase items and content from the in-game cash shop, along with access to AP boosts and other rewards.
The standard price for the base game on Steam is $29.99 USD. The base game includes DLC issues one to four, but issues five to eleven must be purchased separately in order to access the additional content they provide. Alternatively, players can elect to purchase the The Secret World: Massive Edition for USD $59.99, which includes issues five through seven, as well as some helpful starter items.
Several options exist for purchasing the rest of the issues not included in either the base game, or the Massive Edition. The most cost-effective option for new players and non-subscribers is to purchase The Fall of Tokyo, which includes issues nine, ten, and eleven for USD $29.99. Players who subscribe, however, can save up their monthly stipend of Funcom bonus points in order to purchase all the issues without dropping any additional cash. It takes a good long time to make it through the base content as it is, so by the time you do so, you'll likely have the points to spare.
The Secret World only becomes more intense the further you progress.
Lastly, there is the Grandmaster Pack, which effectively packs in a lifetime membership with other miscellaneous goodies. At over USD $200, though, the Grandmaster Pack represents quite a commitment; I didn't purchase mine until I had reached both the endgame, and the realization that The Secret World was going to be something that I'd be playing for as long as EA deigned to keep the servers running.
Player Community
There are some challenges that you will not be able to face alone.
The player base for The Secret World is small, so small that you will often find yourself the only living soul among scores of restless undead. But in all my years of playing different MMOs I have never come across a more passionate, helpful, and close-knit player base than the one for the The Secret World. Of course, you will still encounter the occasional immature troll in the game's various chat channels, but they are a lot thinner on the ground than you would expect, especially when you reach the later parts of the game.
The whispering tide waits for no man.
There are all sorts of possible explanations for the The Secret World's community being as awesome as it is: the buy-to-play, rather than free-to-play, model, or the intellectually-demanding nature of the game's storyline and puzzles. But whatever the explanation, you will definitely appreciate the difference if other MMMO communities have turned you off playing certain MMOs in the past. I know for my part that I was floored when I cluelessly joined in on the New York raid, not realizing that I was underpowered to the point of being useless against the final boss, and instead of admonishing me the members of my raid party gave me tips on how to improve my character and encouraged me to join them again! Things like that rarely, if ever, happen in other MMOs.
Server Stability
Banish restless spirits.
Other than the server being brought down for routine maintenance or patches, I have never experienced any unexpected outages or funky lag problems in The Secret World. As is to be expected, latency for me is a lot higher for me as an Australian player than it would be for players connecting from the United States, but the fact that the combat is only partially real-time means that I'm not at too much of a disadvantage—even in PVP. Unfortunately, the The Secret World does not have a trial version, so you cannot test whether the latency is going to be too much for you until you front the cash for a copy of your own. For that reason, I would advise that anyone thinking about buying the game should closely inspect the system requirements, and perhaps ping Funcom's servers as well.
Some things are better left buried…
Verdict
As much a horror game as it is an MMO.
I hope that, by now, you are beginning to appreciate some of what makes The Secret World unique among MMOs. I certainly don't know of another MMO with forums that are brimming over with posts from passionate fans trying to work through the sorts of perplexing mysteries that The Secret World challenges players with. Nor am I aware of an MMO world that has been as painstakingly crafted as that of The Secret World, or in which players hungrily devour every morsel of information they can find, instead of dismissing it as "flavour text" — which is usually exactly what it is.
Sure, the game is not the most polished or prettiest MMO out there, and the combat is not as fluidly animated, nor satisfying, as some of the best examples in the genre, but I urge people who thought they would like MMOs but found out they didn't, as well as those who loved MMOs but find themselves bored by World of Warcraft clones offering nothing more than another level grind to level 50, a serious chance. And by serious chance I mean that you should let it sink its claws into you. Give it at least five or six hours. Don't rush around trying to blaze through quests like an XP-gobbling machine, but instead soak in the environments, the dialogue, and all the little incidental details in the game world that really aren't so incidental at all.
The closest thing you'll get to a mount, unfortunately.
If you love deep stories, and even deeper mysteries; if you love multidimensional characters, and just multiple dimensions period; if you love the satisfaction that comes with figuring out things on your own, rather than being treated like a dummy who couldn't find his way across the road without a map with a big red dot marked "cross here"; then please, you owe it to yourself to peer beyond the surface, and into The Secret World.
Final verdict: 9/10
Trailers
A warrior for the Dragon confronts a demonic invader.
A Templar knight does battle with a revenant.
An Illuminati mage is rudely interrupted by a hideous demon.
Launch trailer.
