First Impressions

So what's all this hullabaloo about The Secret World? Let's start with the basics.

The Secret World is a new MMORPG by Funcom, the studio that brought you Age of Conan, and way back when, Anarchy Online. It's also the brainchild of one Ragnar Tornquist, familiar to adventure gamers the world over thanks to Dreamfall and The Longest Journey. Like those seminal titles, The Secret World seeks to conjure an immersive, fantastical realm of myth, magic, and in some cases, horror. Unlike the adventures of April Ryan, though, The Secret World is your story, and it takes place in the video game equivalent of the real world (not to mention Hell, portions of a hollow Earth, and many other mythological settings).

There's an undeniable Lovecraftian influence, there are zombies and assault rifles, and there's a three-faction setup that asks players to join forces with noted secret societies like the Templars and the Illuminati (as well as the less-familiar Dragons). Did we mention battleground PvP, a Minecraft-inspired crafting system, and skill-based progression mechanics that depart from traditional MMORPG classes and levels in favor of player-made builds (drawn from a pool of nearly 600 distinct abilities)?

As you can see, Funcom is throwing everything at the wall, and luckily for you, Massively has been keeping tabs on the game's development for a number of years now. We've also managed to spend quite a bit of time in the beta of late. Click past the cut for a roundup of our best coverage, including guides, impressions, interviews, and basically everything you want to know about The Secret World.

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During the first 10 minutes of my time with Heroes & Generals, I killed once, died twice, and drove a tank, a jeep, a half-track, and a bicycle (not necessarily in that order). I also rode shotgun on said tank and said jeep, manning a nifty vehicle-mounted machine gun in the process.

I marveled at the visuals, took way too many screenshots of my squadmates looking at the blow-away badass in-game map (it's the little things, amirite?), and generally had a helluva good time. Did I mention that all of this happened in a browser?

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Here I am making myself crazy once again. Why? Why do I insist on visiting games that I know will provoke issues both physical and mental? I guess it's because lately I have been fascinated with MUDs, or multi-user-dungeons. They are better described as text-based MMOs or choose-your-own-adventure books written with thousands of other players. It's a fascinating concept, especially when you consider how dissimilar it is to today's modern, easy-to-play offerings. The ancient design of the MUD now feels fresh, so much so that I have decided to dedicate a future article about the possibility of MUDs' viability in today's three-dimensional world.

I have found some good and some very bad over the last several weeks. I've also stumbled across brand-new versions of the migraines that often bother me when I concentrate way, way too hard on PC text. I have to admit that my issues do not seem that common, but it is important to look at a game from all angles, even from the angle of someone who has specific issues. BatMUD has tested my patience over the last few weeks and several hours. It's also shown me some wonderful adventure and sparked my imagination.

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I spent an hour romping through the woods of Salem last Friday with Seatribe head honcho Bjorn Johannessen. The tiny indie company (current dev population: two) is hard at work on its followup to Haven and Hearth, an acquired taste of a sandbox game notable for its no-holds barred approach that includes permadeath and the ability to summon (and kill) criminal characters -- even while their lulz-loving puppet-masters are offline.

Publisher Paradox bills Salem as "the crafting MMO," and boy it's not kidding. Over the course of this particular dev tour, I saw crazy amounts of tradeskill functionality, all kinds of cool world-building stuff, and ultimately, more than enough reasons to spend time with the game when it launches later this year.

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So The Secret World's mission system treads well off the beaten MMO path. It's pretty cool, actually, though portions of it may irritate quest-grinders who just want to blow through zones on their way to the game's equivalent of a max-level toon.

For the rest of us, there's a nifty interface, some challenging puzzles, and plenty of well-written quest text and dialogue to keep us entertained for weeks at a time.

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Believing in The Secret World takes a certain of amount of... faith. And I'm not just talking about Funcom's less-than-stellar reputation when it comes to bug-free MMO launches. No, the very foundation of this particular title rests on a narrative about things unseen, and that cryptic, otherworldly esoterica informed every moment of my time spent in the press beta over the last couple of days.

The basic premise, of course, is that everything is true. Every myth, legend, and spook story that our rational minds scoff at has a place in this particular riff on reality.

The Secret World is also quite heretical when it comes to gameplay. It eschews the tried and true class-based approach for a complex grimoire of a skill system featuring an ability wheel made of hieroglyphs and higher math (or so it first appears). To come right to the point, though, I bought into the game almost immediately.

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This column will turn two years old on May 8th, 2012. I'm proud of not only the fact that I have been able keep up the column with a decent amount of content and writing that has slowly gotten better over that time but also the fact that I have introduced the readers of Massively to so many games that they wouldn't otherwise have known about. Recently, I have increased my efforts by streaming odd and indie games as well as writing about the relatively new world of mobile MMOs.

This might all seem like I am attempting to build some sort of indie hipster street cred, but the totally honest truth is that nothing thrills me more than exposing a new game to the world or giving an older game some much-needed sunlight. If someone posts, "This game is still around?" in the comments section, I call that a win.

From now on, I am going to tweak how I do things for Rise and Shiny in order to raise the quality of coverage. Let me explain how as well as give you a few figures to illustrate just how many titles I have covered.

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I'm dying on the beautiful beach outside Firefall's starter town. As I lay bleeding from a hundred holes and generally making a mess of my shiny new bumble bee-colored battleframe, my avatar collapses to the sand and says the funniest thing I've heard in a while.

"Grandpa!"

This is delivered in his best rural Georgia twang, and it lessens the sting of my latest newbie move. The whole scene is Firefall in a nutshell: It's fun, frustrating, and funny all at once.

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This all feels very familiar.

The gorgeous Asian aesthetics, the sexed-up avatars, and the hordes of high school tykes runting and squealing in global chat take me back to September of 2009 and the opening gyrations of the themepark orgy that was Aion.

Only this time, there are no angel wings, there's but one faction, and the game's called TERA.

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Funcom's The Secret World has had a big weekend at PAX East with its first public chance for hands-on interaction! It's a game that's been stirring up quite a bit of interest; the classless, level-less progression system, secret societies, and sword-and-automatic-rifle genre-bending are just a few of its selling points. My ears tend to perk up when the game gets mentioned, so of course I was all but falling over myself to hop into the playable demo this weekend. Walking away from that experience, though, I'm unconvinced.

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In the service of Massively's ongoing PAX East 2012 coverage, I spent some time today in and around the TERA booth, ogling the pretty trailers and getting a seat in a group press demo to tackle some fun high-end content in the form of a five-player encounter with an Argon boss. Read on for an overview of what I saw!

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Many words come to mind when you mention Dungeons & Dragons, but "action" is not usually one of them. So at first glance, Neverwinter might seem like a bit of an odd beast. The game is meant as an action-based MMORPG that takes place in the distant future of the beloved Neverwinter Nights series; it's being developed by Cryptic Studios and published by Perfect World Entertainment. While the game isn't yet in open testing, the early version was playable on the floor of PAX East, and we had a chance to sit down with Cryptic Studios to discuss the game's development.

I came to the show with no real expectations about the game beyond the fact that I knew the companies involved and was distantly aware of the game's development. I walked away more than a little impressed by what I had seen. However odd the collection of elements might seem, the game itself certainly piqued my interest.

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Some of you probably know that I first got into the blogging scene with my Warhammer Online blog Waaagh! Back then in early 2008, I was a veritable Mythic and PvP newbie, and I spent a good portion of the lead-up to the game's release reading up on Dark Age of Camelot. I figured that, after all, WAR would be built on the foundation of DAoC. In a way, it both was and wasn't.

The one thing I never did was actually play DAoC. Older MMOs can be quite intimidating; they have deep-rooted communities and tomes of updates and history, and they were more rough around the edges. Rough in their cores, too, if we're being honest. So the intimidation factor kept me away until this past week, when Massively readers sent me on a quest to Camelot for the first time in my life.

Last week readers voted on the character I was to roll. An impressive 82% of you said to check out the realm vs. realm ruleset and roll a a Midgard (43.2%) beastly (40.8%) hybrid (43.3%) character. After reading some of the recommendations in the comments, I ended up making a female Troll Skald on a traditional server. She may be lumpy and bulky, but I took a shine to her right away.

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In the wee hours of this morning, the press NDA for World of Warcraft's Mists of Pandaria expansion came tumbling down, and our sister site WoW Insider has a bounty of coverage to share. The much anticipated -- and much debated -- expansion is slated for release this year and will include a new continent, the Monk hero class, the Pandaren race, pet battles, a level cap increase, and a massive overhaul of the game's talent system.

World of Warcraft players are undoubtedly fixated on the expansion, as January's 4.3 patch was announced to be the last major update to the game before MoP arrives. You can check out all of the juicy info squeezed from the press beta groves after the jump, including hands-on impressions and insights you won't find anywhere else!

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