Funcom's Martin Bruusgaard and Joel Bylos share their plans for The Secret World, including the New York raid, new locations and much more.

Big Issue

It’s not just the New York raid that’s coming in the next few months, but a whole host of other features as well. More missions are being added for players to discover, while a barber shop and plastic surgeon will let players change their characters’ appearance and try out some new hairstyles. Bruusgaard said that while the reception in the MMO community has been phenomenal, he feels that it’s important to prove that the team can give the players their money’s worth by producing regular content.

Also arriving in Issue 2 are Auxiliary Weapons. Players have previously been restricted to seven active abilities, but the next game update will enable an eighth slot exclusively for Aux Weapon abilities. The first weapon to be added is a Rocket Launcher, with the team planning to add further weapons such as flamethrowers and chainsaws on a regular basis.

Each weapon comes with seven new abilities, presented as part of a new Aux Weapon ability wheel. In order to make it viable with most builds, it comes with a range of abilities, with three demonstrated during the walkthrough. Big Red Button provides single target damage, while Clusterstruck takes care of AoE. A rocket jump provides additional movement.

Rocket Launchers aren’t just handed out like candy – they have to be earned by completing a mission from your Secret Society. This basic model can then be upgraded and customized with further items as players progress. Skins that purely change the visual look of the Launcher can be looted from Nightmare Mode Bosses, with everything from a Hellspawn design to an Ancient Mayan look up for grabs. Particularly exotic designs will give players something to show off.

Ticket to Tokyo

Moving beyond Issue 2, Bruusgaard and Bylos were also keen to show their plans for the next zone. Dubbed Ground Zero, we’ll be heading back to the Tokyo subway system first seen in the introduction to the game. In this instance, we’ll be playing through the sequence in reverse, emerging into the sprawling streets of a massive urban location.

Bylos explained to me that the zone continues the story of The Filth, in a way that’s influenced by Escape from New York and Outbreak. The explosion witnessed at the start of the game kicked off a chain of events, with the Japanese government sealing off a section of the city with huge concrete walls. Anyone infected is thrown into the zone, creating an atmosphere of survival of the fittest.

“Being in japan gives us a lot of opportunity to draw upon the mythology and create really cool monsters. We have some of the best monster designers in the world who make some really freaky creatures. We can draw on everything from Japanese pop culture, anime and going forward into the science fiction angles that they have as well.” With the mysterious Orochi Group being headquartered in the city, it’s likely we’ll also be able to find out more about the company.

With a targeted release of early in 2013, Bylos explained how this will conclude the first part of the story. “We consider it like a TV series. Season One launched with the game. You get almost every episode of season one, like LOST, except for the last episode. Tokyo rounds it out, answers a lot of the questions players will have, and then kicks it into gear with Act 2.” 

Beyond Ground Zero

While it’s great to see the team producing new content for players to enjoy, I also wanted to understand what else is on their plan. For an MMO that’s barely a month old, Bylos explained that they were chasing down a few errant bugs. “We had some bugs in the mission scripts that were very hard for us to see prelaunch. Even in beta, with many thousands of players, the scripts didn’t break. And then some of them broke at launch.” He also added that on a personal level, he’s looking into a design for an event system, adding social areas for players to meet up and implementing more fiendish investigations. He’d also love to cater for player crafted conspiracies, allowing us the ability to create our own missions.

Bruusgaard was more PVP focused, commenting on making Stonehenge fairer for all factions and tracking down why Eldorado almost never spawns. Longer term, he also wants a better system for rewarding support such as healers and tanks in PvP, as well as generally making “moment to moment gameplay” snappier and more responsive, polishing combat animations and effects. 

Bruusgaard also discussed the issues he saw with the persistent warzone. “Fusang Projects isn’t really playing out the way that we thought it would. Right now it’s very much a circle zerg, where players hop from facility to facility, just cap it and when they’ve done their mission they just leave. And that’s not really how we wanted them to play. So what we’re working on right now is to pace that zerg a little bit, give players a reason to defend and make it a bit harder to capture. We’ve also seen that the whole zone feels a bit flat, it doesn’t have a climax, so we want to make the middle base a bit more important and valuable than the others.”

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