That being said, I hate The Secret World, the newest MMO from Funcom. I've played a few of their other games, including the free version of their Conan the Barbarian MMO, which I also didn't like for other reasons. I was a bit surprised to find that I already had a Funcom account. I'd even played their ancient Anarchy Online MMO ages ago, and hadn't liked it either. So I'm not sure what exactly possessed me to purchase The Secret World on the first day of release to the tune of fifty hard earned dollars. I made a special trip out to Target to pick it up.
I like to imagine myself an informed, discriminating consumer these days. In the past I've wasted probably thousands of dollars on games that I ended up not caring for, and then never finishing. My steam account bears permanent witness to these crimes. Let alone the childhood indiscretions, long since banished via yard sale. Pitfall 3D, Blasto, Lock's Quest, Grand Theft Auto DS, Rhythm Heaven, and Sphinx, I'm looking at you. These are all games I was hyped for, based on previews and trailers and any other nonsense I had consumed. So these days, I try to avoid such trappings. Unless I'm really very certain I will buy the game, I avoid all trailers, previews, and screenshots. That is to say, I wait until the reviews roll in. But something about The Secret World grabbed me, whether it be the setting, a contemporary sort of X-Files/conspiracy/modern mythology type of thing, or the delightful graphics, or the promises of a unified story based MMO that I seem to have developed in my head, based on skimmed RSS feed headlines.
In any event, I bought the game, installed in lengthily, and played it briefly. I should mention that the game has been auto-patching in the background for the past forty minutes while I've been typing and musing and preparing food and eating dinner. I wanted to take some screenshots to accompany this post. It seems to patch itself quite a lot.
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| Look, there it is, patching away. Go baby go! Note the In Game Store prominently displayed on the launcher. Way to predict your eventual Free to Play turn, The Secret World. |
The first step was to watch a lovely rendered set of intro videos, then to create a character. I made a character named William "Billee" Tha-Mime, using the interesting, and mandatory, nickname based naming system.
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| There he is! Billee (sic) The Mime! |
I chose one of the three factions (Templar, Illuminati, or Chinese) and spawned in a starter zone, New York.
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| It's always dull and dark in New York. I can tell it's New York cuz of that bridge and the text what tells you so. |
I created Billee as an elementalist, because I thought it would be fun to burn and electrocute things. Granted I'm a low-level character, but I only have a couple of attacks. Combat is somewhat boring, although there is a dodge mechanic, based on on-screen cues, that is somewhat fun. Generally though, in my short time in the game, I've been fighting groups of zombies who queue up around me to slowly beat me to death and queue up for burning. I don't enjoy the combat. Which is to say, I don't enjoy the actual gameplay of this game. My reward for fighting is moving onto new areas and earning new skill points, or AP or SP or whatever they are in game. There is a confoundingly confusing skill point appropriation wheel in the game.
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| What the fuck does all this mean? |
One of the first new areas I moved onto was Agartha, a lovely zone that serves as the portal hub for the game.
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| Agartha. It's quite nice to look at. |
There isn't much to do in Agartha though, beyond falling off the platforms into endless space, ogling the big mechanical sentries, and using the weird teleport function to teleport around the portal zone. You don't actually run along those twisty walkways in the above screenshot, but instead sort of sidle up to the foyer of them and then get zip-cut to the next set of portals. Go figure.
My first few quests introduced me to the game mechanics, and then shuffled me towards Kingsmouth, a perpetually dark and foggy and awful-to-look at zone set in a small New England town overrun with more zombies. I should mention that the game consists of zones spread all across a present-day Earth, but filled with the undead and quests and other players running around. This isn't a big "world" with zones that can be walked between, from snowy tundra to poisonous forest ala World of Warcraft.
While the graphics are lovely and feature nice lighting, I am not a fan of the settings chosen. Granted, a modern world limits your options somewhat, but I don't want to trudge around dark, grey New York or dark grey New England for hours on end.
But my major complaint with the game is the UI, or the game systems in general. I appreciate that this is a well thought out MMO, with a lot of the modern trappings that players expect. Moddable UIs, and guilds, and other such. But when I'm playing this game, I often don't know what's going on, or how to do seemingly basic stuff. As an example, the character sheet is teeny and non-descriptive.
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| Observe said character sheet, hovering around my character. I guess that's my inventory to the right? |
Then there's the quest system, which is permanently docked to the right side of the screen. There are different classes of quests, which mostly come in chains. I think the one active in the above screenshot is a story quest? Which is different from a main quest? All of the quests consist of either killing X number of mobs, going to Y location and talking to an NPS, or collecting Z number of cruft around the zone. I should mention that if you select a quest giver to read the quest description, I couldn't figure out how to close the hovering text box except to either accept the mission or walk far away out of range of the NPC.
I just don't like the aesthetic of the menus and the UI. There's a very modern sensibility to it, where visually things are well designed, but the actual experience of trying to use it is frustrating. I couldn't figure out how to do basic things, and it frustrated me to the point that I cut my game sessions short. Or important elements of it would be tiny and indecipherable.
Each time I've come back to the game, days or now weeks later, I don't care to continue. Perhaps I'm just a big dummie. I enjoy whacking things in Skyrim, or building things in Minecraft, or constructing complicated parks in RollerCoaster Tycoon. But I do not care for The Secret World. In fact, I hate it. I hate it to the tune of perhaps six hours of lost time and now (checks bank account receipts) sixty-five dollars of lost money, as it's now been more than my alloted thirty days of purchase-approved game-time. That's an extra fifteen bucks for my trouble.
So in the end, I'm now uninstalling The Secret World. Perhaps I'll return to it one-day, once it goes free-to-play and I've read headlines declaring it new and improved.
Probably not. Fuck you The Secret World.
