Electronic Vanguard: The Secret World
Created | Updated Jan 11, 2013
Electronic Vanguard: The Secret World
The Secret World is an MMORPG developed by Funcom and published by EA. The game is set in 'our world' or probably a parallel dimension of our world. It's also supposed to play at our time, although the design (especially clothes) it rather looks like the 1990s. The story of the game is meant to be that 'all conspiracy theories are true' and the only thing that stands between survival and destruction seems to be three organisations: the Illuminati, the Templars and the Dragon. Each of those are a playable faction in the game and each of them have a different starting area somewhere in the world. The Illuminati are based in New York and manipulate economy and politics. The Templars, a strong and old community, have their headquarters in London. The Dragon are an Asian organisation based in Seoul, who try to restore order by at first causing chaos. All three are obviously in some kind of war against each other.
No, I did not buy The Secret World, but as an old and for a long time very loyal Funcom customer I had a look at the Beta. Now that the game is released I'm obviously allowed to talk about it and so I do. They also had a 'free to play' weekend where I could test the game again and in the name of research I did it. They say the first impression is important, so this one is mine.
On logging in this weekend the first thing I got asked was if I want to connect to facebook and see what my friends are playing. . . um. . . no thanks. I also fiddled a bit with the settings, trying to make it all look less bad. Which worked up to a certain degree. I still got shadows and textures with pixels for instance. Also my graphics card (a thing of the size of a small dog) made noises like it didn't like the game at all. And as I'm house sitting my parent's house at the moment I don't have my 5.1 sound system and the game didn't like having only 2 speakers, so I never got any dialogue sound in the cutscenes at all.
By the way, I also saw that they have built an in-game browser into the game. I'm not exactly sure how it is really used but I guess this way you don't have to switch to the desktop to read your game walkthroughts. Clever.
At the start of the game you create your character. The options are not really amazing, there do not seem to be a lot of good options. I couldn't find any faces that I found pretty, none at all and the body proportions seemed not quite right either. Additionally the sliders were buggy. As the game is set in the 'here and now', the only available race choice is human of course. And you have a palette of 1990s clothes and – as a woman – bikinis to choose from. The perfect gear for fghting. . . is this really necessary? You also get to choose the organisation that will later find you although in the game story they seem to give you the option to join or not it is all pre-decided. Who knows why they could not really put that decision directly into the game and let you meet all three of them before you decide. It's not like you are 'born' into the organisation by your definition of race like in other games. So why?
What you do not choose at the start of the game is a profession. There are none. Every character can get any skills and use any weapons they like. Skill points are acquired during the game and can be used to unlock skill lines (not trees as far as I saw). It is possible to unlock all skills in the whole game on a single character but – similar to Guild Wars – only a few skills can be ready to use at a certain time. The hope is that this will result in very individual and highly variable skill choices and a big amount of different builds. My suspicion is that in the end people will find out that a handdul of skill sets and combinations are a lot better than others and from then on everyone will use these few skills and there will be the tank build, the heal build and the damage build. Or certain builds will be necessary to find teams for doing certain things in the game, as happens in Guild Wars for years. I hope for Funcom that I am wrong.
The game then starts with an intro scene in which you are asleep in your bed at night and a bee comes through the window and flies into your mouth. This obviously results in you getting magical abilities. As soon as you manage to juggle with fireballs and get a certain degree of control over your new powers the organisation of your choice invites you to their very secret headquarters. That's a lot of trust, yes. All in all your character doesn't ask questions and just accepts everything and does what they are told. You follow their invitation and learn that in fact the world is full of zombies and demons and whatever else and that you have to help to fight them. You also get a vision in which you fight zombies in an underground station together with some other people. It ends in a scene that looks very much like the ending of Half Life, with an underground train and things floating through space. Every organisation has their own way to induce this vision. In one case it seems to be with sex (in case of the Dragon), which I find unnecessary and cheap in a game like that. Maybe it attracts men of a kind and therefore raises sales, I can't tell you.
Next you go to your faction's headquarters and are allowed to choose your first weapon. After a few experiments I can tell you this: pistols have a range of about 5 meters, while assault rifles can shoot an amazing range of 15 meters. Wow. That's realism for you. You can also try 3 kinds of magic. Blood magic is obviously about shooting with blood. Uh-huh. If you choose the Templars your training subjects are some demons hanging on crosses, which is really quite a repulsive activity and I didn't enjoy it at all. The Illuminati get holograms, that's more to my taste, Dragon have simple wooden dummies. Then you go off to find the place you are sent to to fight. (It's amazing what people do without asking any questions just because they are ordered to by someone who looks like an authority, isn't it?) You travel through a kind of plant-shaped portal network which my bf and I came to call the 'eco grid' because it very much reminded us of the grid network in Anarchy Online, another Funcom game. They call it Agartha and it maybe has something to do with the bees from the beginning of the game.
At this point you have no money, hardly any experience, no armour and the game tries to tell you as little as possible about how it works. It just sends you out into the world without any clue about what you are supposed to do.
You arrive at a zombie-infested town where you have to fulfill several tasks to help the few 'real' people (as opposed to zombies) who still live there and fight for their lives. The place is full of street names like 'Elm Street' and hints to Lovecraft and such. The way it was done made me groan quite a bit. It's nice to be reminded of books and movies and have little stuff of that kind in a game, but the way it was done here rather seems like done with a sledgehammer. And I am not even a fan of horror movies and the like and have watched hardly any.
After about one or two hours of zombies and not enough progress to go to a new zone with hopefully different enemies we turned off the game in the beta. This weekend I already gave up after the first town, I couldn't get myself to try it again. Some people may like zombies. I can also cope with a few zombies but this was certainly too much and too repetitive for my taste and the gameplay and fighting as such was also not good enough to keep me interested. I hardly ever give up so fast, honestly. Things I saw about the game show that there are also riddles and some people say the story is great, but Youtube also showed that more and more zombies appear in the game and I just can't be bothered with them. Also the whole stuff just seems so very unreal, not unreal as in a good fantasy game, just unbelievable and senseless.
The initial idea of a game about conspiracy theories and a new skill system that is not based on classes certainly is not bad and could result in a good game, but this game really seems to lack in actually fulfilling the goals it has set to itself. Zombies and demons may be really interesting for a certain target group (and gender?) at a certain age, but a whole zombie/demon MMO (which it appears to be)? For me this is clearly too much, sorry, especially as the story seemed to lack depth.
To me, The Secret World is just a badly designed game. The story seems just unreal and like a patchwork of different things they found in movies and books. Other than that I just found it boring and slightly confusing.
