No MMO ever quite lives up to its promise. But that doesn’t stop me believing the hype. I guess I’m always looking for something to replace those early days of EverQuest, with a whole new – and scary – world to explore.
And to be fair, I had a few great nostalgia-generating moments in the early days of WoW, looking out over the snowy mountains in Dun Morogh. Or getting slaughtered in EQ2 groups, in Blackburrow or even in Antonica in the early days. I enjoyed Rift from the second public beta weekend right up to the point that the lack of flavor turned me away from the game. But it doesn’t take long before the excitement of a new environment to give way to repetitive grinding.
Well, there’s another game right around the corner that promises to be interesting without the grind. While I’m not quite gullible enough to believe that completely, there are several aspects of The Secret World that could be very appealing.
First, it’s a contemporary dark fantasy. No elves, no dwarves. There was a time when that would have been a negative, but high fantasy can get stale. I seem to have lost my connection to those worlds, at least temporarily.
Then there’s the promise of discovery missions, of learning a story rather than just killing everything in sight. Not that combat is uninteresting, but in most games there’s little more. Perhaps that’s why I’ve focused so much on crafting lately in EQ2.
And the ads for the game, and the previews, have talked about a very story-intensive experience. Of course that’s appealing. So I’ve been following the game for a while; quite closely since the collapse of my Rift experience, and have been convinced that this will be a game that I’ll enjoy.
But not without reservations. Partly, for one, because of videos like this. As exciting and entertaining as the video is, it’s only a concept teaser, and has nothing to do with game content. For a long time, Funcom released very little in the way of in-game videos, and when they did they were still staged, having no user interface.
For another, the exposure Funcom gave to the gaming press has been very carefully controlled, with very limited glimpses into content. So articles have uniformly had high praise, but they all say the same thing, and cover barely a couple of missions.
Trying to read between the lines, though, The Secret World still seems a game unlike anything I’ve seen before, and I’ve pre-ordered and am taking part in the open beta.
Interestingly, the beta hasn’t done much to change either my enthusiasm or my reservations. I had a blast running around in Kingsmouth last weekend. Beyond the introductory mission to kill N zombies, there were very few quests in the “kill ten rats” category, and those that there were had purpose. And the story which progressed through multiple segments with cutscenes was fascinating.
But then, Kingsmouth was one of the few places that the gaming journals got to see, so this doesn’t at all help show me that there will be sufficient content for a game that isn’t all about the grind. And combat wasn’t exactly sparkling. As important a factor as combat is going to be in any MMO, if it gets tedious, then the game’s going to be boring, whatever else there is to do. Now, it didn’t get tedious last weekend, but it is a possibility, given the limited options at any given time.
For me, story is the most important aspect of a game. MMOs have largely relied on a story backbone but very little interaction of that story with questing and other gameplay. The Secret World appears to be a game where story is crucial, and my concerns are whether the writing can power an MMO for a sufficiently long time, and whether, once story comes to completion, the game can continue to be interesting.
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