Massively multiplayer; also, secret!

Taking advantage of a free trial weekend, I recently spent a couple of days in The Secret World - the new urban fantasy MMO from The Longest Journey creator Ragnar Tørnquist.

I'm not really an MMO guy. I've toyed with Spiral Knights, Rusty Hearts, Fallen Earth and Dungeons & Dragons Online - adding up to a grand total of about fifteen hours - and spent enough time watching friends playing World of WarCraft, EVE Online, EverQuest II and Rift to know that I'm not interesting in trying those myself. Oh, and I was accepted for the Auto Assault beta, but couldn't get the damn thing working.

The setting and the creative director are what attracted me to The Secret World. I adore The Longest Journey and enjoyed its sequel, Dreamfall. The worlds, characters and stories of those games display wit, energy, originality and an impressive level of internal consistency. The Secret World paints with broader brushes, and isn't afraid to borrow elements of other properties, but it's still a well-realised take on the modern fantasy-horror concept. The tropes are put together in a way which is both logical and entertaining, enough that instead of spending my time going "Oh, this bit is like Mage: The Awakening," I was investing directly into The Secret World to a degree I didn't expect. One big YMMV thing to note: the cutscenes are frequent and marathon. They're well directed and mostly well acted, but my god are they long.

There wasn't much roleplaying going on, which is a shame as a purported strong roleplaying environment was one of the other things which caught my interest. But there was more roleplaying than in most MMOs, which is to say, there was any roleplaying going on at all. And at least in a modern setting people talking about other MMOs in the chat window can be taken as in-character conversation.

That modern setting is well integrated. It's not just a gimmick to make it stand out, although of course, that helps. There are the simple things - energy drinks in place of mana potions, shotguns instead of crossbows - but clever use of the real-world setting goes much deeper, from jumping on cars to set off the alarms to attract zombies, to espionage using webcams mounted on remote controlled helicopters, to an NPC suggestion to look something up on Google. In fact, it may even be too clever at times - I got stuck on one mission, briefly, because I wasn't familiar with a certain element of how church services operate.

I didn't get to do a lot of the much-vaunted investigation missions, which are geared more around codebreaking and old-fashioned adventure gaming than traditional MMO kill/fetch quests, but from what I saw they were well-designed and offer a great change of pace. Indeed, with stealth missions, puzzle-solving missions and even escort missions which don't entirely suck, The Secret World has more variety than any other MMO I've seen. I can't comment on PvP or trading because I did little of the latter and none of the former, but the bread and butter adventuring is solid.

The combat didn't blow my mind but it felt no more or less weighty than any other MMO I've encountered, save perhaps the enjoyably frantic Spiral Knights. It's a little on the 'clicking on things until the health bar hits zero' side of things, but aren't they all? The tactical options didn't seem tremendously deep in my time playing, but I understand that a lot more open up as the game goes on, and they offer a lot of scope for playing your character the way you want to play them. However there's not much visual character customisation (it's mostly punk chicks with blue hair and lots of cleavage, or tough guys in shades) and while there's a lot of skills and abilities, they're all ultimately different lighting effects for doing the same handful of things. The big thing seems to be inflicting and abusing various status ailments, which is interesting, but I'm not convinced about how much depth there is to it for a long game. That said, my main problem with combat and character progression was that to really understand it, you need to have already played the game - again, a common MMO failing.

In fact, most of the things about The Secret World which reminded me of other MMOs were the things I didn't like, the same issues which keep me from enjoying the rest of the genre. The interface is pretty illogical, and in a fashion which means remapping it doesn't help much. It certainly doesn't make any strides towards solving the "requires three hands to play" syndrome ubiquitous to MMOs. One gets used to it, of course, but it took me a while and never really felt properly intuitive. Some elements of the control scheme and menu system aren't explained very well, either.

Overall I must say I quite enjoyed The Secret World - when it worked. Unfortunately the weekend was plagued by server-side connection issues, so much so that the trial period was extended by six hours. There were also a couple of moments of bugged quests, and a driver conflict which wasn't resolved when I updated my drivers. Not a great advertisement, and I have to wonder how happy Funcom and EA are with the free trial given the technical problems which plagued it.

And while I enjoyed The Secret World, I didn't love it. Not enough to pay full price for it when I don't have many friends interested in it, and when things like Spiral Knights and D&D Online are free to play. If it comes down in price, or moves to a microtransaction model, I'd probably take it up. I also think The Secret World would make a great pen-and-paper setting, and perhaps surprisingly I think it would feel quite different to the World of Darkness lines.

Yet I must question the logic of launching a premium-price MMO without a strong, established IP, and without a standard free trial period, even before you factor in the technical kinks yet to be smoothed over. Ragnar Tørnquist has a big cult following, but I don't believe he's someone who can sell a game to a mainstream audience on his name alone. The marketing campaign has been aggressive, but it's being marketed in the same way - and in the same places - as Zynga titles and other free to play games. Will The Secret World entice people enough that they're willing to drop £40 on it, plus a monthly subscription? The game has been modestly well-received, with review scores mostly clumping in the 70% range, but those aren't the kind of numbers to set the world alight.

I'm torn on The Secret World. I want to see it succeed - it's trying new things, and it's bringing a much more interesting approach to storytelling and world building than most MMOs I've seen. But I think it's merely a good game rather than the great game it could be, and that the final leap to greatness won't happen without some necessary negative feedback. Takeup figures aren't out yet - I guess we'll have a better idea of what changes might be made once it's been out a while and the subscriptions stabilise. I have the awful feeling that if it underperforms, EA's solution will be to dial back the elements which make it so unique in a bid to bring it more in line with the field's leaders.

I hope I'm proved wrong there. Selfish as this is - it's not my job on the line - I'd rather see The Secret World as a glorious, ambitious failure than a homogenised, generic hack and slash fest, if that's the choice it comes down to.

Control freakish

Thanks to a free trial weekend on Steam, I had the chance to play Borderlands - the co-op shooter of choice among my friends. Ultimately, I had some fun, but chose not to purchase the game.

You see, there were a lot of things about Borderlands I wasn't keen on. It's not that I think it's a bad game; I just didn't personally get on with it that well. Very high among said things I wasn't keen on was the interface. And I'm not talking about something as simple and easily remedied as key mapping here, although C for crouch? Come on. L-Ctrl is crouch in an FPS, and that is The Way Things Should Be.

No, the problems I have with Borderlands' controls are much deeper. Why is the enter key interchangeable with left-click in some menus, but not others? Why do I stop sprinting when I turn with the keys, but not with mouselook? Why tell me to drive with WASD, when it's the mouse which controls driving direction?

Everything about Borderlands' control system screams that it was made for an Xbox controller. Now, it's a far cry from lazy ports which ask PC gamers to press triangle or right trigger, but I still felt the whole time that I should have been using a pad. Considering that it was developed by Gearbox - who first made their name in PC shooters - I find that a little bit of a shame. It's all small things, but they add up, and Borderlands ultimately played very non-intuitively for me.

ARMA 2 is another game I've struggled to get into, and again, the interface is a significant part of it. "Oh," I thought to myself as I failed to climb over a small wall after hitting all the usual suspect keys and checking the control map, "There must not be a climb key."

A short while later, one of the handy little gameplay tips tells me to press V to climb over obstacles. Now, that mapping doesn't make a tremendous amount of sense, but I can live with that. What annoyed me was the fact that I couldn't find that anywhere in the control map. After checking again, I found it - buried away somewhere in the mass of controls for this game and labelled as "step over." Well, that's certainly an intuitive name for a key which lets you climb fences.

The mouse sensitivity range seems to be much higher than in most games, and after pushing it way down to pan at the speed I like, the precision in small movements was lost. Perhaps it's meant to be more realistic that way, but it's still absolutely nothing like aiming with a real gun, and realism at the expense of basic playability is something I just can't get on board with. Even the relatively straightforward (and super-arcadey) Army of Two took me a bit of time to get to grips with, with some of the control quirks - the selection of sniper mode, for example - seeming needlessly inelegant.

In my old age, I don't like impediments coming between me and my game. My life sucks enough as it is without my supposed hobby, the thing I do to relax, pissing me off even more. More often than not I want to jump in and have some fun, and for me, having to memorise thirty-odd different commands is not fun. Maybe I'll get disowned from gaming by the hardcore crowd, but it's the way it is - every time a game tells me to press a new key, it means another little click of the fun ratcheting down. Of course some of this is necessary, but again it adds up, and in the case of some games it adds up to more than I can be bothered with.

This coming weekend, there's another free trial - this time of Ragnar Tørnquist's supernatural MMO The Secret World. I'll be giving that a try, but I've never been that into MMOs and one of the big problems I have with them is - surprise, surprise - the number of commands to keep track of at once. I'm a big fan of Ragnar's storytelling ability, but will The Secret World's interface get in the way of my enjoying it? I guess I'll find out within the week.