The Dark Fantasy MMO The Secret World is set to become more accessible for newcomers in 2015. New content is planned for veterans.
A new letter from the producer of The Secret World has been released, looking ahead to the new year. One of the focuses for 2015 will be on the player experience for new players. They plan to overhaul the “tutorials” and also check whether the fresh conspirators are powerful enough to face the monstrosities that come swimming, crawling, and flapping into TSW. In addition, Funcom wants to see how they can improve the flow of information.
There will also be new content for players in the endgame. In the next update, they intend to conclude the story around Tokyo and also introduce a new instance or raid. The details are not yet entirely clear. Depending on what is agreed upon internally, they could also deliver this in two updates, the so-called releases.
Players who have not yet purchased access to Tokyo will at least be offered something with Venice and the subway, so they can see the AEGIS system in action.
The Skill System Needs to Be Explained Better
My MMO thinks: Yes, the issue with new players is really a key point that is being addressed a bit too late. The “main problem“, the hurdle for newcomers in The Secret World, is the quirky skill system. The “levels” do not increase directly, but relatively clearly: One invests in the ability to wear different tiers of equipment and gets bitten later when changing main weapons. But the skill wheel takes some getting used to.
Especially, players need to dive “deep into the system” early on to recognize which 7 active abilities and 7 passive abilities they want to play later, and how they want to move around. Then they have to figure out how to stay alive until they have these abilities together, and in what form they will provide synergy effects.
There are predefined “builds” that players can follow, but the feeling rarely emerges: Now I’ve played for an hour, and my character has really become stronger. And many MMOs live off exactly that feeling.
This is cold coffee for long-time TSW players. They understood this two years ago and may even be proud of the somewhat crude and quirky skill system that is so different from elsewhere.
Newcomers, who are confronted with the basics of the system after just 30 minutes, will probably see it differently. And to get into such a system, the love and enthusiasm must first be sparked. At that point, The Secret World will likely lose many newcomers. If they want to tackle this now in 2015 – one could have worse ideas. It’s somewhat puzzling why they took so much time with it.
On our The Secret World topic page, you can find more about the MMO. One of the few MMOs that takes place in “today’s” time, albeit in a pretty distorted version of it.
