The Secret World is celebrating it's first month of release by giving everyone a chance to play for free!
What is the Secret World?
The Secret World is a game set in the modern world, with a twist. Everything is true. The Illuminati, Vampires, Ghosts, Ghouls, The Mothman, Wraiths, Demons, all exist in some form or fashion. Within this framework are fully fleshed out and voiced NPC's assigning missions and the like to agents of one of the secret societies (More on them later).
What this means for us as the players is that an entire planets worth of Mythology can be called upon. And also a story that morphs as the content ages. Funcom has stated that with some events the world will take drastic changes, i.e. dead NPC's buildings destroyed or created, etc and they will be doing monthly to bi-monthly content upgrades, i.e. new quests, new zones. In fact the first content pack has already been released: New players leveling up now have several missions and quests that they can go on that didn't exist just a short month ago.
So ok it's story driven, what's the basic premise?
There are several secret societies within the world, the player has the option to join one of three (I won't go into how powers are achieved etc), and they waver between being marginally at peace with eachother to being at eachother's throat depending on the changing of the seasons. Each of these societies attempts to keep the secret word at least marginally under wraps, however as the game starts shit has hit the proverbial fan.
In New England an entire region has fallen off the map and into fog, dead vikings, ancient monsters, and Native American horrors stalk the land. The laughter of children has been stolen by the bogeyman, and the wendigo stalks the earth.
In Egypt an ancient roman legion stands to arms once more, as biblical plagues slash the land. Locusts and scorpions contend with Djin, and even the mummies with their life eternal stir from their crypts.
In Romania... well do I even need to say it? Ancient forest gods. Vampires. Werewolves, and an angry gypsy wagon (Yes the wagon itself is upset, don't ask).
So I hear this game doesn't have levels, that's weird.
This is kind of a half truth in Funcoms marketing. Technically true but in reality there is a system that works kinda like leveling. As you bumble along doing quests you earn two kinds of experience. AP and SP.
SP is skillpoints, and determines what quality level of items you can use. AP is ability points, and can be spent to buy your spells and the like.
This is the AP wheel (As you can see, mine is rather filled out). Each weapon has two inner wheels and six outer wheels. The inner wheels tend to be generalist items, and the outer wheels tend to be specialist stuff. Like if you wanted to be an Assault Rifle healer, you would load up on just two of the AR outer wheels. There are two kinds of skill, Active, and Passive. Actives are buttons you press, and things happen. Passives are modifiers to those actives, i.e. one Active may be say a fire bolt, and you could also have a passive that increases the damage of firebolt. At any moment you can have two weapons equipped (i.e. right now I have an assault rifle and an elemental magic focus equipped), and this allows you to use active attacks for those two weapons only. But you can have passives equiped from anything. This allows you to slap together some pretty interesting builds, as each tree has 10 skills in it, usually 5 passive and 5 active.
This is the SP area: as you can see, much simpler. Each rank indicates what level of gear I can equip (Note when I said it kinda has levels, well this is where they are, at the moment I'm a level 10.... just about everything). SP accumulates a lot slower than AP, but it's entirely possible to have 10 SP in chaos, be able to use any chaos weapon in the game, yet not have a single chaos attack purchased.
But what does this all mean? It sounds like it can get complex!
I enjoy complexity admittedly. To give you an idea of how this all works I'm going to break down my build. And how combat works in general.
First, in a way every class is a rogue: Everyone builds resources by attacking, and spends them by attacking or healing. Some weapons start with full resources, some start empty. Some are built on the character (i.e. if I kill a mob with my last building attack, I keep the resources) some are left on the monster (So I lose that three stack I just built).
At any given moment you can have two weapons (In my case it's an assault rifle and a elemental magic focus). Seven active spells, and seven passive modifiers.
This build is not unique in it's ability to use the skill system to it's fullest. There are tank builds that build up to the point where each glance sets off an auto heal, or auto strikeback, there are secondaries that fire off heals any time you hit a target that is afflicted, there are secondaries that automatically drop the damage of a target by 33% if certain conditions are met: and a careful deck builder will find a way to meet those conditions within his deck. From what I understand there are even a few healtank builds being tossed around that allow you to eschew a healer entirely for bosses that do light damage and mostly kill via gimmick.
One thing that will amuse most healers is in this game it's DPS that usually does the cleanses and the like, so there's a bone tossed to you
But enough about the skill system, what's the gear look like!
The only visible gear in this game are weapons. All of your stat affecting items are just talismans you secrete around your person. Your look? Is entirely up to you. There are clothing shops in the game where you can go try on clothes: mix and match, and become either a fashion disaster or a stunning diva.
There are also Deck Outfits, each faction has some premade decks for you to build towards and play as to give you an idea of what you like (They are generally sub optimal), and when you finish building a deck, you get an outfit that comes with it like so:
This is for the Magus Deck:
Some other of my clothing:
And also the templar uniform!
Some other stuff I've seen around, bear in mind that Outfits are stuck the way they are, and regular clothing is mix and match so you can get some real fashion disasters (Grady come rescue these people).
This is a deck outfit and one of my favorites:
And this is a reward from doing some super hard dungeons:
And some more fashion victims:
(holy shit)
Every one of these had to be a dude:
And obligatory solo dungeon screenshot with no costumes at all:
Enough about people and their shitty and or great taste in clothing, hows the dungeons?
The dungeons are actually a lot of fun: someone listened when people said "Fuck 3000 trash pulls just to get to a goddamn boss". Most of the dungeons will have two trash pulls, boss, two trash pulls boss, and a few are just long strings of bosses and the cutscenes telling the dungeon story. The fights all have some form of gimick ala world of warcraft raids. The difference between this game and WoW though: is you have been dealing with these gimicks for the entire game. It doesn't just facefuck you like in WoW. Did I mention regular monsters have gimmicks? Don't worry: they are easy to figure out, but yes... you actually have to dodge things. No more just standing there and mashing a button. If a regular mob is about on par for you for damage and queues up face raper 3000 it may behoove you to get behind him while he's swinging.
I'm going to FAQ up a few more questions then wrap this up.
Is there PVP in this game?
Yes! There are factional warzones that if they are held give everyday players buffs. If my faction holds most of the warzones I get something like a 15% bonus to experience gain, a damage buff, a resilience buff, various ratings changes etc (We're actually getting our asses kicked at the moment which is unusual).
What's crafting like
Kinda like minecraft. Most crafting resources are gotten by breaking down items. I.E. all the unwanted weapons you get break down into metal. Then if you want to build an assault rifle, you build the assault rifle shape out of the metal in a big square and drop a weapon kit into it and voila, a new gun! Don't sell your crafting shit! All of it upgrades (5 level 1 metals make 1 level 2 so on and so forth).
My friend rolled on bloodfart, meanwhile my character is on lightningtard, are there server transfers?
Good news: The servers are all linked together. Custom chat channels work between servers, you can be in a guild no matter what server you are on. If you want to quest with your buddy he just invites you to a group and summons you to his server. The next time you log in you'll be back on your own, but it only takes like four seconds. My guild is spread out amongst ALL of the servers. A few minutes of invites and we can all be in the same place (if we want). Oh and no more warlock summoning. Just pressing the "Meet up" button takes you immediately to the nearest resurrection point to your group member.
So like, what's the verdict?
I'm enjoying it a lot, I love the lore, I remember every single quest giver in the game because they all had interesting stories, scary stories and in a few cases downright fucking terrifying stories. Endgame content right now is very hard 5 man dungeons and outdoor world boss raids.
Things I like:
The combat is fairly dynamic, and if you learn what mixes well you can really kick ass.
There is no limit to what you can be. Since it's skill based if I continue to spin on missions and get experience for doing dungeons eventually I can unlock every skill and ability in the game (I'm almost done with the skills already, abilities... may be a bit longer). What does this mean? If I keep a tank, healing and dps set in my bag, properly statted, I can with the press of a button become a tank, healer or DPS. Right now I'm pure DPS with a bit of pocket healer thrown in, but about six hours work down the road I'd have a competant healer, and a mildly retarded tank (Enough for basic dungeons). A little more work and I have all three. If I fill out all of the bars I can have different types of tank and healer.
The Secret World: Free Weekend
Linear Mode
