Editor-in-Chief Chris "Pwyff" Tom sat down with The Secret World Lead Designer Martin Bruusgaard to go in-depth on crafting, server architecture, persistent warzones, and PvP rewards!

Be sure to check out ZAM's hands-on preview with The Secret World from last week!

Two weeks ago, I went up to Montreal for a second exclusive hands-on preview of Funcom's The Secret World. In comparison to my first visit, this event was more about getting more in-depth with the game to see its inner mechanics at work. Of course, this also meant that I needed to step up the depth of my interview questions, so when I sat down with Lead Designer Martin Bruusgaard, I knew this was my opportunity to get as many discussions going as humanly possible. What follows is an extensive in-depth interview on some of The Secret World's inner mechanics, including a run-down on crafting, TSW's international server architecture, persistent warzone PvP, and PvP rewards. It's a bit of a lengthy read, but trust me when I say it's packed full of information! Onward!

ZAM: Hi Martin, thanks for having us up here! As you probably saw on the forums, I consulted with the community for a few of my questions, so I'll take credit for the good ones and I'll blame them for the bad ones! So I'll get to the big one that's on everyone's mind…

Martin Bruusgaard: Crafting.

ZAM: Crafting indeed! Do you have a crafting system set, or is it still in development?

Martin: It's set and it's working. It's not in today because of two things: one, we wanted you to focus on the content, and two, the distribution of the materials aren't done yet. The items are done, but who should drop what isn't done yet.

ZAM: How are you approaching crafting with The Secret World?

Martin: So… I really should have practiced how to answer this because it is somewhat complicated, but I'll try [laughs]. The way you create an item is… somewhat inspired by Minecraft. It's a grid that you drag items into. If you want to make a shotgun, you need to "make" a shotgun. Like, the shape has to be a shotgun. The sword has to be a sword shape, hammers have to be hammer shaped, etc. Each of our items consists of three parts - that goes for all items in the game - and each item has a prefix, a core, and a suffix. So you can have, for example, a Bloody Hammer of Doom. Bloody is one part, Hammer is one part, and Doom is one part. All of these three "items" you can craft. So you can craft a Bloody prefix, and the Bloody prefix might inflict a bleed, or it might add to your penetration or crit stat. 

In order to learn the shape of that prefix, you need to deconstruct a prefix. The way you deconstruct is pretty self-explanatory; you put a hammer in, for instance, you deconstruct it, and you get some parts. But when you do deconstruct that hammer, you see the pattern of the different parts… I wish I had some visuals for this!

ZAM: I'm pretty sure I'm following you.

Martin: It's not as complicated as it sounds! But you're basically learning shapes. Different kinds of shapes create different kinds of items. Different kinds of materials create different kinds of stats on those items.

ZAM: In terms of your approach to crafting, some MMORPGs have the idea that crafting is just a supplementary mini-game that players can grind out in a day while watching movies. What way do you see crafting contributing to what The Secret World is?

Martin: So crafting is not just about clicking a button and getting your item, I can say that. As for the reason why we have this crafting system, well, it's really because of the open-ended nature of our ability system. You want the gear you're equipping to match the build you're bringing to combat. If you have a penetrate build, you want to bring bonus penetration gear, but we don't want people to be grinding and hoping that penetration gear drops. We want players to be able to create exactly the gear that they want. That's why this is more of an open crafting system; it's not very progression based. 

In most MMORPGs, you start at level 1 and grind your way to 300. Here, it's more based on your skills and your ability to remember shapes. In Minecraft, for example, everybody learns how to make a pickaxe immediately but not everybody was able to make the Hell Portal. But we do teach the players shapes through deconstructing.

So to go back and answer your question, we want crafting to be a way for people to get the gear they need to fulfill the character that they want to play.

ZAM: That brings me to my next question about crafting in relation to economy. There's a very robust game here; how do you see crafting and the economy working together to contribute to that "MMO" part of an MMORPG?

Martin: We've put a lot of effort into creating a solid economy. It's obviously impossible for you to test it right now, and it's even hard for us to test it right now. However, player interaction has always been a very high focus for The Secret World. We think that with this crafting system, a lot of players will be trading and specializing. So some players will be able to say, "I can make very good penetration prefixes," and other players - the ones who aren't interested in crafting or the ones who just don't know the shapes - will go to them.

ZAM: Would you almost consider crafting to be separate from the leveling experience? One thing I've noticed is that a lot of current MMORPGs think of crafting and gathering to be supplementary to the solo character leveling experience, where crafted items help keep your character's gear up to date without running dungeons. This contrasts with a lot of older MMOs, where the crafter and the fighter occupied completely different spheres. In those kinds of games, the crafter was someone who didn't really focus on using the items they crafted; rather, players would focus on making money and fulfilling economic demands. Where do you see TSW on this scale?

Martin: I would stress that crafting is mainly a tool for making your character who he/she wants to be. Let's say you're an achiever and your main goal is to [censored] things up. If that's the case, crafting will be important to you in one way or another. If you choose to craft for yourself, you will be able to create the items you need to do more damage. If you don't want to do that, you can pay someone to do it, like other crafters. But there's no progression in the crafting system. There's no crafting skill. It's like a supporting tool in order to supplement our ability system if that makes sense. [laughs].

ZAM: So as I understand it, you see crafting as supplementary . . .

Martin: Supplementary is a good word.

ZAM: . . . supplementary to the real core of the game, which is the progression, the abilities, and "creating the character that you want to be." 

Martin: Exactly.

ZAM: Alright, moving on then, another hot topic is server architecture. The Secret World is one of those rare games where you have players from all over the world interacting with each other and expressing a real desire to play together. In terms of architecture, do you have plans to make EU-exclusive servers? Will you employ region locks?

Martin: At the bottom, it's a single server that we will split into shards, basically. Originally - and this was four years ago - we said, "One server," and that was it. But because of the persistent PvP, we realized it wouldn't really work if you had one server. The playfields had to have a population cap, and if we did employ population caps, then only a very small percentage of the player base would be able to do the persistent PvP. So we decided to split the player population up into servers. All the mini-games, however, will be cross-server.

When it comes to if we'll split between EU and the US, we're still testing that out. We've seen that if we put a server on the East Coast in the US, we get a ping of about 70, which is fairly acceptable.

ZAM: From Europe?

Martin: Yeah! We haven't made a decision yet, and we're trying it out. But even if we're going for one or two splits, the foundation is still a single server split into different shards.

ZAM: So there won't be region locks where I can't play with someone from Europe just because of hard barriers.

Martin: Nope.