The Good, Bad & Ugly of The Secret World, EA's New MMO

Iris Ophelia's ongoing review of virtual world and MMO fashion

The Secret World launched yesterday after a lengthy beta period and piles of pre-release hype. This game is not a standard MMORPG, to say the least. Involving a secret world (get it?) of societies embroiled in the occult, it takes place in contemporary locations like London, Egypt, Seoul, and even a sleepy seaside New England town, and arms players with a wide variety of weapons (modern and ancient alike) including sledgehammers, khopeshes, shotguns, and voodoo dolls. Just take a look at the release trailer:

 

As incredibly cool as I think The Secret World is, it leaves me feeling conflicted. When I write about games, products or pretty much anything I like to present a fairly straightforward opinion-- You know, like "3 Reasons I [Love/Hate] This Game, OMG!". But The Secret World doesn't make that easy. Every part that I love has a bad side to it, and every part that I hate has a good side too. In fact, there are a lot of things that The Secret World does very well, and just as many things that it does very poorly. So... Why not talk about both?

 

Character Customization

The Good:

Customization in The Secret World starts out strong with a character creation engine that allows for a lot of variety in terms of faces, hairstyles, and outfits. Because clothing doesn't affect your stats at all, you're free to look however you like with no penalty, and the starter clothing selection is more than enough to ensure that everyone looks different from the start. If you want even more clothing the prices at the in-world store are very affordable, the styles of the pieces available are broad enough to allow for everything from "librarian-chic" to "skanktastic" to coexist peacefully, and you can even try a piece on your avatar before committing to buy it. The Secret World's character creation is also quite racially diverse-- Tons of realistic ethnic facial features are accounted for and included in the character creator, so your character won't just look like they're in blackface (something far too many MMOs struggle with). The result is that avatars in The Secret World are, from what I've seen, way more diverse and interesting than in any other MMORPG.

The Bad:

The character creator is incomplete, in two significant ways. First of all, there are absolutely no sliders or settings for your avatar's body. Even basics like weight and height are completely absent. Considering the high level of customization in all other areas, this feels like a tremendous oversight. Second, they've already announced a plastic surgeon and barber will be implemented in-game in August so people can change their hairstyles and features after character creation. Plenty of games do this, and it's a great idea... except that when these two things launch, they'll come with new features and styles for character creation that aren't available now. The idea of being able to revise a characters appearance after time is great, but using this to push out content that presumably wasn't ready for launch is a little irritating.

The Ugly:

I have no problem with cash shops in free-to-play games. A game can't make money off of my enjoyment and appreciation alone, so I don't even mind the cash shop in a game like Guild Wars 2 (of which I'm already a huge fan) which has an up-front cost but no subscription. When a game has that up-front cost, plus a subscription, PLUS a cash shop, it makes me feel less like a customer and more like a cow being milked. This is the kind of thing that can sour the relationship between gamer and game (and lead to a prompt account cancellation the second that my beloved Guild Wars 2 is released).

 

Missions

The Good:

The way you accept missions/quests in The Secret World is a little limited. There are different kinds of missions, and you can only accept a certain number of missions of certain types at a time, otherwise the new mission will pause the old one (which you can then resume later). This might sould like a Bad or Ugly point, but this system has actually grown on me. It forces you to connect more with each mission and each NPC-- you invest a little more with the story and the circumstances because you're not just checking off points on a list, trying to clear everything and move on. Though this system can feel clumsy at first, it ends up being more organic and human than you would think. The Secret World also has quite a few clever puzzles that require observation and wit to decipher. You can look forward to solving riddles, deciphering codes, scouring employee databases on real websites for in-game companies (which was super cool!), and even Googling a Dutch artist or two. It's wonderfully refreshing when an MMO doesn't just drop everything in your lap once you've killed enough boars.

The Bad:

The icons are not as clear as they could be. A mission with a brown icon will take the same slot as a mission with a yellow icon or a red icon. And you can only have one of those missions, though you can have three of the blue icon missions. I'm sure it makes perfect sense to someone, but I constantly have to remind myself of what I can and can't take at a given time.

The Ugly:

Those puzzle missions? Some just don't connect in any tangible way, and others ram head-first into the limitations of the game itself. Here's an example (and a spoiler): You find a message on a cellphone about a secret keypad outside the church. The message mentions that the passcode is a hymn the priest wanted to sing at his first service. So where do you find the number of that hymn? Framed on a panel with a bunch of other random numbers hanging in the church. Why not? The best part of this mission, however, is that if you've turned your settings down so your computer can run this graphically-heavy game at a reasonable pace you might not even be able to see those numbers as the texture will be unreadably blurry.

And don't even get me started on the puzzle that asks you to transcribe and then translate morse-code. Unless you're keen enough to distinguish every dot and dash perfectly, look forward to breaking your immersion by looking up the solution online. Though I don't want the game to hold my hand and walk me through everything, it would be a good compromise if the game game simply updated your journal to include a transcription of the morse code segment after you've listened to the clip once, allowing you to translate it yourself... or hell, just let me slow the audio clip down so I can keep up! Then of course there are the puzzles that involve clicking things in a specific sequence, but if anyone else is around doing the same mission they'll innocently but invariably mess it up for both of you... What it boils down to is this: When the puzzles work they're incredibly satisfying, but when they run into the limits of the game itself it's beyond infuriating.

Skills and Abilities

The Good:

Abilities in The Secret World are pretty unique. You can have two weapons equipped at a time, and every weapon has skills or abilities that compliment the other weapons.  This flexibility lets you build a character that plays the way you want to play them. Because the points for these skills are rewards for doing missions (which are almost all repeatable) and defeating enemies rather than for simply levelling, you can spend them unrepentantly and even level up every single weapon if you want. In The Secret World, skill points spring eternal.

The Bad:

With such a variety of abilities available, maintaining and switching between "builds" (sets of abilities and gear) for certain situations is crucial. For example, I have builds specific to single target, multiple target, and survivability-based fighting strategies, and it makes the games combat much more manageable. Unfortunately, build management is not very easy in The Secret World. Updating a build involves making a new one and deleting the old, and builds have to be updated whenever you change your equipment (called "talismans") at all. This leads to a lot of "Wait, I have to update my builds" moments in a group while you fiddle with the interface way more than necessary. There's a simple fix for this, of course: an "update" button in the gear management window. Until we see that feature added, my groupmates will hear a lot more whines of "Wait!" from me.

The Ugly:

With variety comes confusion. While I like the presentation of the ability wheel in The Secret World, I hate how horribly confusing it can be to navigate from tree to tree and tier to tier. Tons of fiddly minimizing and maximizing make it hard to compare one skill to another, and all the subtle secondary effects most skills have can make it tricky to put together a really effective build. While the game currently offers "decks" (which are suggested, thematic builds that give you some guidance... and a cool costume for completing one), there aren't decks for every weapon combination in every faction. Right now, I'd kill to move the Genius feature from iTunes into The Secret World-- Look at what I have now and suggest a couple things I can get that would work well. Is that so much to ask?

For better and for worse, The Secret World still casts off a lot of the tropes and conventions that players have come to expect in their MMORPGs, delivering a one-of-a-kind experience. Maybe it's not going to be a "WoW-killer" (as Hamlet is so fond of talking about) but what makes The Secret World work for me, flaws and all, is that it's not trying to be. It's not trying to have anything to do with that sphere of gaming, and instead it's focussed on its own original ideas and mechanics. Much like Guild Wars 2, it feels like the kind of game we should have had a long time ago if developers hadn't become so obsessed with making WoW-killers instead of making original and innovative MMORPGs. For that alone, I think The Secret World is well worth the price of admission.

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Iris Ophelia (Janine Hawkins IRL) has been featured in the New York Times and has spoken about SL-based design at the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan and with pop culture/fashion maven Johanna Blakley.

Comments

[Veritable Magic]

Very good summary. Kinda disagree on how much you can customize the character at start up. And I totally agreed with you on the "milking the cow" thing until I played the game after beta. You can buy things to upgrade your look with either type store. *rl money vs ingame currency* So you really can avoid that whole spending additional if you choose. And I believe consumers are at fault for all the greedy tactics going on with businesses these days. So, to me, if you want to make a point. Dont spend extra money in the store. If you dont care that they are "milking the cow" go right ahead.

So far your gameplay, even your "look" arent severely affected by whether you spend additonal dollars on the game. So far.

[Eddi Haskell]

So the entire point of the game is to kill things?

[Darling Monday]

Great review Iris :). I agree with most of what you said here and I'm enjoying the game so far! I'm pretty sure I won't be playing that much when GW2 launches though lol.

[Rin Tae]

Great review! I played it in the beta and very much agree with what was written. Including the part about playing GW2 once it is out instead of secret world ;P

However apart from the need to pay up front AND subscription it was the lack of immersion that made me decide to not play it. I mean. for a 'secret' world a lot is happening in plain sight and there are surprisingly many armed people running around the cities. The character customization (a very important thing for me) was limited too, but even then I guessed that it only was because of the beta-nature of the game. That they obviously released the game without upgrade to the system is ... strange

And don't forget the single player instnaces that break up any team ....

It was a fun game but from what I have seen I would rather see it as a free to play title. A freind of mine said after seeing it .. it might be free to play within a year but I guess even then GW2 wins for me :D

[Iggy]

@Eddi, yes. And look good while killing things.

This is why game designer Jonathan Blow is considered such a heretic. He wants to make art.

It's worth a look at "The Most Dangerous Gamer" about Blow's disdain for the industry that made him rich.

But I'm a snob. I skip paying $$$ for the summer blockbusters and watch something nutty like "Putney Swope" on DVD instead.

[Kathryn]

I have to disagree with some of your impressions about TSW. I agree with some of what you presented though, so I guess I'll start with that:

I agree that the limited number of missions of various types, definitely does help to keep one's focus on the story of what they are doing, instead of just plowing through the content like a shopping list.

I also agree that the build management systems in the game are woefully inadequate, and do not accomplish their goal (to make switching builds easy). On top of the issues you pointed out with failure to allow easy updating of builds, the gear management system is also amazingly buggy with gear (even when you go through the tedious steps of saving it right), and more unforgivable, it dumps the gear that you use in any build you're not currently using into the general inventory scattered amongst the trash loot. This makes it extremely easy to sell off your prized gear. (Suggestion: put all your best gear into it's own inventory bag, and manually change your gear out, and then use the recently player-made mod for managing your ability loadouts.

I also agree that one of TSW's greatest strengths is that it's not trying to be a "WoW killer", it's going in it's own unique creative directions and ignoring many market conventions. This makes it less intuitive and easy to get used to playing, I've seen some avid wow players hate it for being alien to their UI sensibilities. But it's worth the effort to play something that is very much NOT yet another flavor of wow.

Now the disagreeing:
"...avatars in The Secret World are, from what I've seen, way more diverse and interesting than in any other MMORPG."
No. Just No.
Not I don't think so, not I disagree, just flat out No.
Your unique and diverse character (present in your screenshots) looks identical to my main character in every way except hair color. And what's sad is that our characters constitute about a quarter of the population looking pretty much exactly like that (same face & hair).
There are NOT diverse face options. There are 8, 2 african, 2 caucasian, 2 indeterminate hispanic or arabic, and 2 asian. That is all. If you have a particular race in mind for your character, there are a whopping 2 options. Almost all of the adjustments you can make to the faces are actually just replacing the basic nose/mouth/etc. with the same artwork after being deformed slightly by a smudge or skew tool. The result is that all of the other options, other than the original basic ones, look malformed. And so we all, the entire game population, pretty much just chooses a face, and ignores all of the really bad facial modifying options. So literally, there are 8 faces of each gender, and that's it. Then there's hair... must be about a dozen styles, but they're all short except for one which is a bun. Most of the hairstyles look butch or unnatural. The super-short pigtails even slant outward at an extremely awkward angle to try to avoid clipping any gear or clothing options. If you want long hair, you're screwed. For women, if you want "non-butch-dyke" hair, you have like 2, maybe 3 options.

Every character is the same height (either gender). every character is the same build. there are no geometric (mesh deformation) sliders in the game at all. Just 8 faces, and 2-3 passably decent haircuts.

Quite literally, you could come up with more diversity or uniqueness of appearance in EQ1 or DAoC (1999 or 2001). And Lineage 2 (2003 release) simply blows the secret world out of the water as far as character looks. And I'm specifically mentioning early genre games with 'meh' character design, just to drive the point home. TSW has the most backwards, uninspired, generic, badly drawn, and creativity-strangling character creator in any mmo of the past decade. Your generic clone of everyone else in the game is rendered beautifully in DX11, and can sport a wide variety of clothing, but the character creativity itself is a disaster.

Mind you, I'm speaking of the faces, and the standard unchangable body. The clothing system is actually very nice. You can mix & match clothing in a manner which is very agreeable, allows for a lot of customization and creativity, and everything actually 'fits' well (due in large part to the standardized body shape). The clothes are great. But the character wearing the clothes is a generic clone of everyone else in the game, and probably 4 faces (total, for both genders) account for 95% of the population.

In beta we were told to wait for the miracle patch, that there would be great character creation 'soon'. But this dev team's idea of "great character creation" is not even remotely close to anything of the sort.

There is the promise of further options and an in-game capability to change existing characters' appearance sometime in august... but frankly, after 2 rounds of sitting through "ok HERE is the super great creator, infinitely better than the last one!" in beta and headstart, I'm not convinced the devs know a creatively satisfying character creator from their own behinds. And I'm saying that as someone who 'likes' the devs. The creator is not going to improve in very meaningful ways because they've painted themselves into a corner with the design of the creator, and the player avatar coding. They approached it with character customization (apart from clothing) being less than an afterthought, and they made design choices which will not now allow it to be anything better than an afterthought now. Obviously I have not seen what is in store for character creation/modification in august, but at this point they are the little boy who cried wolf, and I'll believe they actually have a passably decent character creator when I see it (and I'm not holding my breath).

Anyway, that one point more inspired me to reply than anything. TSW's character creation is so very very remotely far away from "way more diverse and interesting than any other mmo". I can only conclude from that idea, that you haven't played many mmo's outside the "wow & clones" set. Get on youtube and search character creation in Aion, City of Heroes, Champions Online, DC universe online, star trek online, Tera, etc. Even Age of Conan (TSW's predecessor from funcom) had a noticeably better character creator than TSW, and AoC was no industry yardstick for mmo character creators.

Ironically, the rest of the things I disagree with, are positive about the game.

cash shop... it's for cosmetic items. and that's all. really. It really is "fluff", and there are enough cosmetic items in the game that you can earn through achievements or buy with game currency, that there is no real restriction imposed by opting not to spend any real money on fluff. Presumably, they presented the cash shop as a way to pay for a full time cosmetic item creator, to ensure a large body of diverse appearance items, pets, etc. This logic basically works for me... but I understand if it doesn't work for everyone.

Keeping track of what missions you can accept without dropping your current mission is actually pretty easy. And you will get used to it quickly. That's not really a 'con' for the game, it's purely a matter of getting used to the game's approach.
You can accept up to 3 side missions (often 'gopher' oriented). These are almost always found out in the field, and generally involve finding something which leads you towards some type of action.
1 dungeon mission... hard to confuse that one. Bear in mind that if you join a dungeon group, you'll automatically get the mission for that dungeon when you enter, so the only time you really need to mess with it, is to re-take the mission to re-set a dungeon for multiple runs (and/or to see the mission-giver's cinematic).
1 primary mission (action missions, sabotage/spying missions, or investigation/puzzle missions) aka 'everything else'.
you get used to it fast, it's not really a con.

The investigation missions are not an 'ugly' feature. They simply aren't. They're extremely hard, and extremely satisfying to solve. They are basically the 'fun part' of any challenging point&click adventure game, ported into an mmo. If that's not your cup of tea, that's fine. But they are for the most part a spectacular addition to the game for myself and many others. It really took me a couple days to fully appreciate the fact that I was playing an MMO... and in a few days it was asking me to use my brain more than my job does in a few months. Obviously some will hate that. I love it.

Going to split my disagreement on the investigation missions a little though. There are times when they are flat-out tedious. Where instead of forcing you to rack your brain for hours, exploring and trying to have a stroke of genius to solve it (good)... they just present you with "busywork" (bad). Some of the egyptian ones are especially bad about this, where there is no difficulty in figuring out the trick of the thing, but immense difficulty in manually translating the coded cyphers and such. I have found myself maintaining integrity on the 'how' of solving things, but throwing in the towel on the tedious manual labor of transcribing things once I've figured out how to do it. Example, I figured out a code, confirmed it by translating the first word of a message, and then went to look for spoilers because lengthy transcription work itself isn't my favorite pastime.

But the hymn mission you mentioned, that's one of the easy ones. And it's quite common for hymns to be displayed in the front of the church as such. And the pastor's optional dialog will even tell you which hymn you're looking for, if you happen to chat with him a bit... it's great design. But yeah, the graphics settings issue with the readability of the plaques is a known bug if the game is set at low settings, it's an mmo launch, there's bugs.

The morse code mission... simplest way to solve it (all while staying in character), is to download a morse code translator ap for your smartphone, and play the message while holding your phone up to your computer speakers. I mean, your in-game character has a smartphone... it fits. But uh... yeah, honestly I didn't think of that. I sat there with pen & paper, cussing at the code which played too fast, and eventually I went and grabbed the sound file in the game client and played it at slow speed in my own audio program, so i could jot it down (less 'in-character', but not quite spoiler territory). It's annoyingly fast though, agreed. And in that vein, 'some' of the investigation mission content is annoyingly difficult for the wrong reasons.

"Right now, I'd kill to move the Genius feature from iTunes into The Secret World-- Look at what I have now and suggest a couple things I can get that would work well. Is that so much to ask?" yeah, to my thinking, it kinda is too much to ask. I mean, min-maxing in an mmo is a puzzle game unto itself. It's something which spurs much debate, controversy, discussion, etc. Personally, I love this aspect of mmo's, and I devote a substantial amount of time to theorycrafting game builds. Asking for the game to tell you what you need to add to compliment your current abilities? that's like asking for a crossword puzzle that's already been solved. I think you're completely missing the point of all that diversity of build options.

In spite of my feelings on the matter, the game developers HAVE taken pity on those who don't enjoy such theorycrafting and scouring parser data... they have the pre-made 'decks', such as Thaumaturgist, etc. There are over a dozen of them, catering to a variety of play styles. they are basically a set of abilities which work well together. And if you collect all of the components of a deck, you unlock a themed outfit unique to that deck. That's been around since very early beta. Just stick with one of those, until you understand why the parts of it work together, then you can extrapolate from there, or build another deck to try another playstyle, and unlock another outfit. I don't think the pre-designed decks are the best possible combinations in the game, but they're effective. so... yeah. They kinda have a feature for that.

Overall, it's a very likeable game, with a few glaring flaws. I find when I play it, I don't get enough sleep, because it makes the time fly, and keeps you thinking "just 5 more minutes.." which is a very good indicator of a quality game. The game's sense of atmosphere is amazing. And on a much smaller budget, they show bioware how voice acting and cinematics in an mmo should actually be done. And the writing... it puts the writing in aion to shame, and aion's writing set the gold standard. There's been a couple plot twists in TSW that I never saw coming, hollywood hasn't pulled that off in a long time. Plus, the single-server technology means you can log in and play with any other TSWer, anywhere in the world, on a whim. I'm a bit of a fangirl for TSW, but I'm not drinking the koolaid. There are some rough edges and flaws. I'd give TSW a B+ as-is, and it could still be improved into a solid A. Some people whine about it not being F2P, but AAA mmo's never launch as F2P, that's something which comes much later in an mmo's life cycle. I know guild wars 2 is touted highly right now, but the hype is *definitely* way beyond the reality of the game. I'm looking forward to owning GW2 as well, and playing both games. But the hype? In a nutshell "you get what you pay for".