Following on from our hands-on with The Secret World earlier this week, we sat down with junior communications manager Tor Egil Anderson to discuss character customization, society loyalties and more!

A Strong Society

There’s another advantage behind the Ability Wheel: players will no longer need an army of alts just to have a character for a specific role. Instead, one character can switch builds and instantly change role. But would this reduce the replay value of The Secret World, or would players look to try out each society? Anderson’s confident that the reverse is true, with players instead focusing on unlocking new abilities on the Wheel and developing their characters.

“It’s going to be cool to experience different secret societies, but the main story is the same overall. So it’s more about which secret society you want to belong to. The depth in the game is really about the ability wheel and developing new abilities, new weapons, and new combinations. The thing is – and you haven’t seen any yet – our dungeons are just fantastic (and that’s not just me saying it). The challenges in the dungeons are way cooler and more dangerous. There’s not much clearing of trash mobs, just a lot of boss fights. There are also heroic mode dungeons, so players will need to find a lot of different builds to do those. In my opinion, the greatest depth in the game is in that ability wheel.”

It’s clear that Funcom is hoping for us to develop a close affinity with our chosen Secret Societies, as demonstrated by over a hundred thousand players taking the online personality test (While I appreciate the intellectual ideals of the Illuminati, I’m a native Templar). I asked Anderson if there would be additional features to encourage loyalty and devotion to our chosen Society, such as leaderboards to track the top contributors or ways for the higher-ups to watch over the low-tier players.

“You definitely get an attachment to your faction. Of course, you choose your secret society based on your philosophy and your mindset, but you will also meet the people in your faction and your same-faction cabal and you’ll grow with them. As for the details on secret society leader boards… I can’t answer that, sorry! But it’s important to note that, in PvP, when secret societies control areas or warzones, the whole secret society gets a buff. So they’ll be helping each other, and they’ll be fighting together. Even if you don’t do PvP, if Illuminati is the top dog, you’ll get the buff anyway!”

The Different World

We saw from our hands-on that Funcom has put significant effort into developing a distinct set of game systems and mechanics, so that The Secret World both looks fresh and feels fresh. With the general trend of MMOs moving toward simplified experiences, we were curious to know: was the aim with TSW to teach players to pay attention to their surroundings, or was moving away from quest trackers and giant shining interactive objects something that MMO players wanted?

“Yeah, we want our encounters to be different – to be deeper. We want our systems to be different. We want to engage our players, and we want them to really go in deep; to study the systems to see how great all this stuff is when you put it together. The interface is like this augmented reality – it’s minimalistic, and it makes the players focus on what’s happening on the screen rather than bars all over the place. 

“As for the simplification of MMOs, when you have mainstream MMORPGs, yeah, they focus a lot on streamlining and simplification. They have their depth through tons of content. There’s that in The Secret World, but there’s also more depth through our game systems. We do have a fairly soft landing in The Secret World, however. The abilities you get in the beginning are very cheap to buy, so you can experiment more before you really specialize and go into the deeper stuff. As well, the missions and monsters in the beginning are easier, and as you progress in the game and dungeons, it gets more and more demanding. So we’re training players to think in a different way – to think of more adventure game puzzle elements. It’s to broaden the mind.”

Wrapping up the interview, I asked Anderson about the unique online mini-game The Secret War. Would we see it, or something like it, continue after the MMO launches on June 19th?

“The Secret War is definitely a lot of fun, but how long it will run, I really don’t know. We just launched it, so we’ll have to see how much people like it. There is a lot of stuff in there, like in-game items, beta access, and even a trip to the Funcom Studios in Montreal.”

With hints that there may be big announcements on the horizon, a teaser about dungeon challenges and the promise of perplexing puzzles, we’re counting down the days until Open Beta on May 11th.

Gareth "Gazimoff" Harmer, Staff Writer