
Final Fantasy XIV. Warhammer Online. The Matrix Online. APB: Reloaded. Tabula Rasa. Star Wars Galaxies. Names that stand as testament to the brutality of the MMO market. When you’re asking gamers to potentially sink hundreds of hours of their lives into your online world, you need to provide a combination of good mechanics, enduring lore and ever-expanding variety that very few have truly nailed, far more have tragically missed, and — here’s the kicker — is arguably impossible to truly define. You can’t even rely on a popular brand to see you through, to which many of the above names can attest, and timing is everything.
Considering all of the above, it’s not hard to see why Funcom’s The Secret World had its work cut out for it from the beginning. Released in 2012, during a time when every twopenny ha’penny publisher was churning out their own Frankensteined-together clone of the World of Warcraft cash cow, The Secret World hampered itself with a box price and subscription fee while free-to-play had become the new hotness. Meanwhile, its strongest suit — its lore and worldbuilding — also threw a new IP into an industry that was arguably in its most conservative and risk-averse period. Thankfully, the gameattracted a strong cult following that has kept it alive, but similarly persistent has been the perception of a game too unfocussed to win the affections of the mainstream audience.

Secret World Legends is Funcom’s attempt to solve this conundrum. A free-to-play reboot of the game, it makes quite significant changes to the game’s mechanics and systems with the goal of making it more accessible, bringing the story and writing to the fore. Set in the modern world, players become involved in one of three clandestine factions resisting and/or exploiting occult attacks on our reality. Drawing from contemporary horror fiction and folklore, the game starts you off in the sleepy (and appropriately creepy) Maine coastal town of Kingsmouth, which is beset by interdimensional sea demons ripped straight from the Lovecraftian playbook: indeed, the first dungeon basically ends with you fighting Cthulhu). This kicks off a career of interdimensional investigation, taking you to such diverse locations as Egypt, Japan and Transylvania.
The coolness of the premise has always been The Secret World’s most appealing factor. As a newbie in the Illuminati, Templars or Dragon (the three central factions vying for global domination), you gradually uncover an entire world of myth, conspiracy and mysticism underlying the mundane reality which most of us assume is all there is. It’s a heady, utterly fascinating blend of Lovecraft, Gaiman and Stephen King that creates an atmosphere many other bigger MMOs would kill to have, aided by clever quest design that often requires you to do actual, internet-based research to investigate. While Secret World Legends has the expected suite of dungeons, raids and PVP, it’s the PVE story that was always the real draw, and makes the similarly alternate-history and conspiracy based lore of the Assassin’s Creed series look positively anemic in comparison, even if the actual writing can occasionally be overstylized to the point of clunkiness. The odd bit of overcooked dialogue or flavour text is, however, easily forgivable when the world itself is so much fun to inhabit and learn about, though the game’s biggest fault was allowing its own mechanics to get in the way of this.

The Secret World made numerous innovations to MMO systems that made great sense on paper, but often felt a little haphazard in practice. It strove for an open, level-less progression system, with an extensive gear-based upgrade mechanic and a massive skill wheel that in theory allowed the player to define their own character build. In practice, however, the game’s often brutal difficulty spikes made progress all-but impossible for players who didn’t understand every nook and cranny of the system. Having total freedom to build your character however you want doesn’t mean much if you end up accidentally winding up with a sub-optimal build that gets constantly pasted by mobs every time you enter a new area, a common issue even for experienced players. What’s more, the huge amount of grinding and research necessary to get one’s head around the gear system (the game’s actual leveling structure in lieu of the more traditional, single-number model) made for a game that overwhelmingly favoured the more mechanics, min-maxing type of player over anyone who was primarily into it for story. Considering that the story and lore were the exact things that were commonly agreed to be keeping interest in the game alive, this was a problem. It made TSW an easy game to love, but an utterly exasperating one to try and stick with.
Secret World Legends addresses this issue by aggressively streamlining the progression system. Characters now have levels, while the gear system has ditched the opaque and grind-intensive crafting in favour of a much simpler method by which looted equipment can be absorbed into equipped gear, thus strengthening it. Also gone is the skill wheel and many of the upgrade system’s less useful skills, which were mainly left unused, only purchased to unlock more crucial skills higher up the chain. Instead, we have a more familiar tree-based system incorporating the key passives and actives. Though the addition of loot crates purchased with real money (or with daily crate keys provided via a subscribed account) is an unfortunate addition, it doesn’t hamper F2P-only progression too much. It’s perfectly possible to play through the story without paying a cent, though new players are forced to unlock weapons one at a time, either with in-game currency or real money (players who owned The Secret World get them all unlocked from the get-go).

The controls have taken a similar swing towards accessibility. Now cursor-led as opposed to the more stationary, traditional MMO method, allows for far more fluid action, hugely increasing the player’s options regarding positioning. For example, I’m playing the Trickster class who main Chaos magic and pistols, and the new system lets me strafe and kite mobs with the guns to whittle down mobs, then switch to the more powerful AOE Chaos abilities once they get into close range. It also makes dodging the game’s many rush attack-based enemies much easier, allowing you to anticipate these attacks and position yourself accordingly, rather than having to desperately fumble at the dodge keys at a split-second’s notice.
Overall, these changes go a long way to providing the action-RPG experience Funcom wanted, albeit with it all using the same engine it can occasionally feel a little stiff. While many players have decried the perceived ‘dumbing-down’ of the game’s systems, it doesn’t change the fact that these players represent a minority serviced by mechanics that, while original, were actively off-putting for most other people.

Our verdict:
It’s fair to say that Secret World Legends, despite its comprehensive polishing, still isn’t the smoothest-playing MMO out there, running on an engine that was showing its age on release five years ago. The changes that have been made, however, have done a great deal to improve the experience and allow players to get the most out of some of gaming’s coolest lore. It now being free, and sustainably so for the player, makes it an essential try for RPG fans of all varieties.
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