The Secret World: Custom Combat
An updated look at fighting ghouls and ghosts in Funcom's upcoming MMO.
March 15, 2012 March 16, 2012 March 15, 2012
There are no rigidly defined classes in The Secret World. You begin as a member of one of three factions, create your character, customize your appearance, and set foot in Funcom's world without ever limiting the range of combat options available to you. The Dragon faction, for instance, starts in Seoul. A peculiar figure in a raincoat lures you down the narrow streets as ghostly voices urge you forward. Soon you stumble into up a staircase and into a hotel room populated with sinister-looking characters. A cut-scene triggers and all of a sudden you're in the middle of an M-rated romantic encounter.
This story presentation, along with the lack of an upfront class decision, helps to set The Secret World apart from its competition. The important story scenes are fully voiced and presented in a much more interesting way than Star Wars: The Old Republic's dialogue sequences. The characters don't just stand still as the camera shifts between two or three characters. Characters move and the camera isn't pinned to an anchor point, lending to the scenes a more movie-like quality. The writing in what's been shown is oddly humorous, giving The Secret World's paranormal fiction a certain type of levity that contrasts with the type of self-seriousness typical of other MMOs.
As you begin to level your character, you'll define your class by investing in parts of a skill wheel. There are no restrictions initially, but to unlock the most interesting skills you'll need to specialize. That means focusing on magical powers, sledgehammers or shotguns, which fit neatly into the tank, damage dealer, healer archetypes commonly found in MMOs. The nice part is you can save and swap builds easily, letting you switch to a healing role if your group is full of damage dealers.
Once you've unlocked a number of skills, you have to fit the ones you need onto a limited-slot skill bar. There are over 500 skills total, so it seems there'll be an enormous number of possible builds. It's too early to tell if there'll be just as many useful builds, but given Funcom's extensive experience creating MMOs (this will be the studio's third after Anarchy Online and Age of Conan), there's reason to be optimistic.
Encounter design appears to be well-done. Funcom showed off a late-game dungeon run and skipped ahead to the multi-stage final boss encounter. Upon first approach, a group of NPCs were worshipping a crater at the peak of a mountain. They peeled off from their trance in waves and attacked, and as they were defeated their souls arced through the air and landed in the crater. After their defeat, some kind of demonic cross between a dog, dragon and bull charged out of a pit at the peak of a mountain. The huge creature could spit black goo then pull you into it to stack damage, send out shockwaves to blur your vision and summon minions to throw off your attack patterns. The monster also unpredictably switched targets, so your tank needed to scramble to recapture its attention.
Eventually a new mechanic is added to the fight as a friendly NPC descends on the scene. His presence multiplies the damage output of your party, but if you're not careful he can die. Now not only do you need to concentrate on continuously damaging the boss but keeping the NPC alive, which is difficult because the boss begins to transform its minions into walking bombs. To survive, not only do you need a good tank and healer, but you also have to stay mobile to avoid the boss's area of effect attacks and exploding minions. It seems like an exciting fight, and features an odd ending. When you finally kill the demon you're able to examine the floor of the mountain crater. Instead of a shadowy expanse of grey rock, the mountain walls give way to a yawning black space populated with planets. Funcom isn't saying yet what this means, but the same cosmic backdrop appears in other sections of the game, hinting it's an element that might link together The Secret World's diverse cast of monsters, real-world settings, and time travel elements.
As for how the combat feels, it's not exactly the action-game style of something like Bluehole's Tera, but it feels less artificial than The Old Republic. With a shotgun, for instance, you get a number of short-range area-of-effect attacks, which makes sense. Against large groups of enemies it was particularly satisfying to use, as successive blasts flattened groups of ghouls in a darkened suburban complex.
The crafting system mirrors the flexibility of the skill system, letting you combine components to craft exactly the type of weapon you want. Called Transcription, the system allows you to break weapons down into component parts, then rebuild them with the statistics you're looking for. So if your skill build is built around penetrating strikes and critical chance, but your current sledgehammer has the improper stats, you can open up the Transcription system to fragment the hammer into components that form a T shape using a Minecraft-like grid.
The next step is to forge better component pieces by combining inferior metals into higher quality ones. With a few more upgrade items, you reposition the new materials on the grid to produce a higher quality hammer. A separate process is required to get the desired stats, so you again combine components to produce a glyph associated with bonuses to critical hits and penetrating attacks. Then you combine the glyph with the reforged hammer, and finally, you have a Fierce Hammer with the appropriate statistics. That may seem like a lot of steps to get the item you want. In comparison to many other MMOs, it is. Funcom is confident that placing such an emphasis on crafting components will help fuel a more active economy, opening up more interesting and meaningful trading as players custom-build their loadouts.
As with many MMOs, it's difficult to really get a sense of what a game does right without extensive play time. From what's been shown so far, Funcom seems to be on the right track, offering a fictional world that isn't boilerplate sci-fi / fantasy and an intriguing open-ended class system. The launch date of June 19 isn't very far off now, and you can expect more in-depth impressions of gameplay style and questing structures in the months ahead.
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Connections for The Secret World (PC)
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