The Secret World Revealed
by K. Michael Alexander
The Secret World or John Constantine? You make the call.
Today FunCom and Ragnar Tørnquist have finally started releasing details of their new MMO titled The Secret World. The premise looks great, monsters and magic in the modern world, little Lovecraftian lore, what’s not to love? I followed this a while back, when it was announced with an incredibly complex ARG. We’re talking April/May 2007 before FunCom had released Age of Conan, a game which sadly disappointed me as a gamer, and unimpressed me as a UI/UX designer. (I’ll riff on this later, AoC recently started inviting people back and I intend on checking it out again and reporting what I find.)
Ragnar Tørnquist impresses me as a game designer, his previous entries The Longest Journey and it’s sequel Dreamfall were good games with great stories, and quite fun despite some control and interface issues. Massively had an interview with Tørnquist and when asked about the makeup of the development team he stated:
No, it’s been it’s own team. This team formed after Dreamfall was done, and most of the team is made of people from Dreamfall, especially artists and designers. We’ve also done hiring and gotten new people onto the team, and as Conan has wrapped up we also got a few people from them and Anarchy Online as well.
While I enjoyed Tørnquist’s previous games I will admit I wasn’t pleased with the awkwardness of the UI or control scheme. In Dreamfall’s case the experience was slightly better on console, but on PC it was clunky and confusing. This partnered with the team from Age of Conan and Anarchy Online (another FunCom MMO with it’s own UI issues) doesn’t bode well with it comes to a simple and intuitive user interface.
I still hold out hope that The Secret World will be everything that I could want, but based on past experience I do so with trepidation. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.