The Secret World: Interview Gleanings

SBFord

After a pair of top notch and very juicy interviews with Funcom developers, MMORPG.com Lead Writer Bill Murphy has thoughts to share about what we learned about The Secret World. See what Bill gleaned from the interview and whether or not you agree. Leave us a comment or two.

We’ve recently scored a couple of great interviews with the staff at Funcom concerning The Secret World. I’m currently writing this about a week prior to my flight to E3, so that I can do my part to make sure our site runs like normal while most of our staff is away in LA surrounded by game-hungry people, loud music and copious amounts of body odor. If anything new pops up between the time of writing and the time of publishing which negates this info, you have my heartfelt apologies. That said, I’d like to spend this week scouring our recent coverage and pulling out some nifty details in the best way possible: with bullet points!

Read more of Bill Murphy's The Secret World: Interview Gleanings.

adam_nox

If there's progression and gear stats, then it's not all end game.  Anything non repeatable is also not endgame.  Endgame is something players can keep doing when everything else is done, and if it involves pvp, you've only hit endgame when your gear and general character efficacy is competitive with other participants.

Figure

This is definitely still my game to watch, because it seems that the developers aren't afraid to change the game when it comes to conventional MMO wisdom.   

Levels, classes?  Nope.  Each character can pick from the same 500 skills to populate their abilities.  Considering there's 7 active and 7 passives you can slot at any given time, and assuming that's roughly split 50-50, here's how many combinations that means: Literally trillions of possible combinations.  That's Trillion, with a T.

While the 'working' combinations will become apparent quickly, the fact that there's just so much open space to personally innovate means that adept players will have plenty of time to break the game wide open with a myriad possible combinations.  If you want to play some crazy hybrid, it will be possible.  Sort of like older school WoW before the forced talent tree commitment.   There's a lot of running space here.  Hopefully they won't ever change this or try to cleave too tightly to the 'guideline' builds for balance, but every indication is that they seem to want to maintain 'true freedom' in gameplay mechanics.  This is the sort of sandboxing element I can get behind.  I'm not really an architect or an artist, so I'm not a fan of minecraft/SL style open world sandboxing in an MMO and trend towards the themepark style of play, but this is one sandboxy thing I really like.

Puzzles as endgame?  Sign me up.  

Modern sorcery?  Check.

Hopeful it lives up to the promises.

WhySoShort

MMORPG's coverage of The Secret World seems to be too focused on the positives or straight facts of the game. Give us some critical coverage. Show us some cons to the pros.

ProfRed

Originally posted by WhySoShort

MMORPG's coverage of The Secret World seems to be too focused on the positives or straight facts of the game. Give us some critical coverage. Show us some cons to the pros.

How could they when they haven't been able to play the game.  They only have the same interviews and data we have and of course it will show the good about the game since it is coming straight from Funcom.  Hopefully soon TSW will be playable at a convention and we can get the bad with the good.

cheggelund

I love the mission types. Very excited about this one.

 

Also, at this stage in a game, you won't find much negative news or criticism about a game. The information released is very controlled.

 

--Chegg

xmenty

Originally posted by WhySoShort

MMORPG's coverage of The Secret World seems to be too focused on the positives or straight facts of the game. Give us some critical coverage. Show us some cons to the pros.

 This ^ 

Figure

There's not going to be a lot of critical coverage until we get some hands on time with the game.  Gamescon and Pax Prime will have more discerning opinionmakers at them.  Once the beta leaks begin trickling as well, we'll know more about how much of the game is polished.

Keep in mind that no media organization has played this game yet.  They've only [i]seen[/i] it being played.  Once they have people outside of the developers playing this game, we might get more to go off of... and even then, without spoilers on the investigative missions, it will be somewhat difficult to get a grasp on this game.

Give it time.

Mimzel

At this stage of the development it wouldnt be very professional to be *speculating* into the negatives of an unpublished game. If they have facts, then fine - go for it. But as someone above mentioned, the information given by the developers is highly sensored. 

All games deserves a fair chance. Speculation into the negatives isnt fair at all, and could actually be pretty harmful to the industry as a whole. Of course, over-hyping is also detrimental to the industry, but that's a topic for another thread.

eric_w66

Assuming there's 250 active skills and 250 passive skills, you get a very large number of possiblities....

If my math is correct: 11,126,241,217,000 combinations of 7 active powers (same for passive). So over the 14 slots, you'd get

123,793,243,618,869,641,089,000,000 combinations of active and passive.

That said, in the end, I suspect it'll be closer to 5 "GOOD" ways

Figure

having people find the 'good' ways is all fine, but the fact that you can still experiment and aren't locked to the templates is good.  Part of the fun in the original ititerations of WoW was that you could mix specs up a bit at the expense of the highest parts of each tree.  There were talents in the middle of trees that could be exploited to greater use than talents at the end of the trees.  I hope that this game maintains tons of choices to allow people to constantly innovate.  WoW, with Cata, made trees that force locked you into a commitment to a particular spec, and the reduction of talents as a whole lead to basically defined classes and the illusion of a choice.  

Imagine if you will, if every classes's abilities and specs were pasted together into one class but that you only had the same amount of points.  A ton more choices, but I'm hoping not.. catalyzed choices where the best choice becomes obvious and everyone becomes the same.

Deathofsage

I was under the impression you'll still have to acquire the skills. You don't really start with access to all 500 (being able to choose 7 active and 7 passive) do you?

If yes, ew.

If no, it's not much different than leveling or skilling. There is a grind and some people, especially on second+ characters, will be racing through it.

Jojin

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uk57oisDDJ0

The explination of skills starts at around 9:40.

rpgalon

Originally posted by Deathofsage

I was under the impression you'll still have to acquire the skills. You don't really start with access to all 500 (being able to choose 7 active and 7 passive) do you?

If yes, ew.

If no, it's not much different than leveling or skilling. There is a grind and some people, especially on second+ characters, will be racing through it.

you don't need to pick all of them, they said that you can have "access" (don't start with) to all the 500 skills in a couple of hours, but you can just grab the 14 you want and go smash... you don't need reach max level (grab all skills) to be competitive.

Figure

I'm curious if the skills being in sequential order means that you need to only acquire the 6 skills below it, or that those 6 skills need to be both acquired and slotted to slot in the 7th in sequence.  Guessing that it's only acquiring because that would make the most sense, but I hope that doesn't mean that the 'best' build is a bunch of end of cell skills, or if it does, make it so I can gain enough experience to eventually acquire (but not slot), every skill in the game.  Actually, that'd be a bit of an endgame for some people, completing the entire skill circle.  Hopefully it will take a long time and that the path will be fun, so you don't have like 200 day 1 players with maxed out skill circles in a matter of a month or two.

And expansions I could see as very easy... heck, you could even tie some skills to certain accomplishments.  Very simple system, with quite a lot of depth.

Ysharros

Squeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

 

Where's my beta spot?!

 

Shadows59

Just hoping I get to beta test this game

Feydaway

Is there going to BE a beta test?  No signup on their page.  Maybe it's "secret"?

Figure

limited beta test is currently active as of may.  Very very closed at the moment and so far no one's leaking anything about this game.  The 'secret society' test currently serves as a backdoor beta test and after you get added their mailing list, they send you an email with small text and the end that you've been added to the beta signup list.  The signups are certainly more low key than they are in other games, as befitting a high concept game like this one, but they are there.  The original ARG that lead to the (previously secret) forums also served as a backdoor sign up page.

dageeza

Everyone should keep in mind that TSW is a funcom project which means there is always cons usually on more than one front..

However my interest in this game is still very high even though the game will need to sell itself to me at some point because talk is cheap especially from funcon..

waynejr2

Originally posted by Figure

This is definitely still my game to watch, because it seems that the developers aren't afraid to change the game when it comes to conventional MMO wisdom.   

Levels, classes?  Nope.  Each character can pick from the same 500 skills to populate their abilities.  Considering there's 7 active and 7 passives you can slot at any given time, and assuming that's roughly split 50-50, here's how many combinations that means: Literally trillions of possible combinations.  That's Trillion, with a T.

While the 'working' combinations will become apparent quickly, the fact that there's just so much open space to personally innovate means that adept players will have plenty of time to break the game wide open with a myriad possible combinations.  If you want to play some crazy hybrid, it will be possible.  Sort of like older school WoW before the forced talent tree commitment.   There's a lot of running space here.  Hopefully they won't ever change this or try to cleave too tightly to the 'guideline' builds for balance, but every indication is that they seem to want to maintain 'true freedom' in gameplay mechanics.  This is the sort of sandboxing element I can get behind.  I'm not really an architect or an artist, so I'm not a fan of minecraft/SL style open world sandboxing in an MMO and trend towards the themepark style of play, but this is one sandboxy thing I really like.

Puzzles as endgame?  Sign me up.  

Modern sorcery?  Check.

Hopeful it lives up to the promises.

 Sure, but if you offer 50 different weapon types and each one has 6 skills available for it is that really the same as 300 unique and interesting skills?

Thorqemada

I do not really believe that there be not similarities between different skills.
For example guns and rifles be ranged weapons its natural they have similarities.
Maybe the difference from a rifle to a bow is a bit bigger, a bow is able to be used in an artillerie way while a gun/rifle needs a LOS.
While i dont believe this is implemented in TSW i think 50 weapons with each 6 skills count as 300 skills!

We dont know yet how it works out, i only hope its fun to experiment around and that they have the balls to let players balance themself as long the gameplay is in a reasonable window.

Usualy the companys tend to give the whiners to much room and if a player wants to fight with a flyswatter its the players decision and its reasonable that the player with the baseball bat hits harder while he wont kill as many fleas.

When will they ever learn?

Figure

Originally posted by waynejr2

 Sure, but if you offer 50 different weapon types and each one has 6 skills available for it is that really the same as 300 unique and interesting skills?

Definitely not, but we don't know if that's the case or not yet.

JarodD

Originally posted by Figure

Originally posted by waynejr2

 Sure, but if you offer 50 different weapon types and each one has 6 skills available for it is that really the same as 300 unique and interesting skills?

Definitely not, but we don't know if that's the case or not yet.

I'm sure that at least some skills are specific to weapon types. We've seen that in the skills video. But there aren't 50 different weapon types. There are three types of melee combat: hammers, swords, and hand-to-hand. There are three types of ranged combat: pistols, assault rifles, and shotguns. There are also three types of magic combat (blood, chaos, and elementalism), but I don't know if there are specific weapon types associated with those or if weapons even play a role with magic combat.

I think all of the skills (both active and passive) are going to fall into those 9 major categories, but there may be some additional skills that are outside those categories completely (maybe generic stuff like stat bonuses and such). In any case, I think the most likely breakout is that each of the 9 categories has a roughly equal portion of the skills, so that's something like 50-55 skills per category. Not sure if those are equally split between active and passive skills.

At least this is how I'm interpreting the "skill wheel" shown in the skills video. Am I interpreting that incorrectly?

waynejr2

Originally posted by Figure

Originally posted by waynejr2

 Sure, but if you offer 50 different weapon types and each one has 6 skills available for it is that really the same as 300 unique and interesting skills?

Definitely not, but we don't know if that's the case or not yet.

 so it's ok to promote all those skills when it will come off as unique to the casual player.

Figure

If that's all the case, here's a potential breakdown.

3 schools with 3 skills in each school(9 total), 7 skills per cell, (guessed)8 cells per school skill would be the closest correct math.

9 x 7 x 8 = 504.

So if the recent assumptions are correct and divisions are equal(somewhat dubious assumption), then 8 cells will be devoted to each school skill.  (which means there's likely 56 different skills associated with... for instance.. pistols) And if they cut the passives and actives in half, we have 28 different active skills associated with pistols and 28 passives.

 

Hrm.  Not sure what to think about this.. then again it's all guesswork and there's a healthy amount of assumptions made here.  What does everyone else think?