Funcom reveals 'The Secret World' - a new MMO set in modern day Earth

[Eyashusa]

Templar here. Game looks cool. Somehow I never heard of it until this thread got bumped.

[Sutekh]

Dragon ftw. Yeah game looks pretty neat.

[GorestabbCoE]

Templar here. Looks pretty cool but after Failcom's rape of Conan I'll be very wary.

[Zehn - Vhex]

Originally Posted by The Ancient

I got dragon. I wouldn't be surprised if Templars are in short supply. Does anyone really want to play as the religious zealots?

Who the fuck wouldn't. Religious crazies in modern day society, yeah, boring and stupid. But give me a sword or gun in one hand and a holy symbol in the other and by fire you shall be purged heathen.

[TheYanger]

Yeah really. Religious "I don't approve of your television program and am petitioning" is gay.
Religious "You're evil, I'm going to chop your fucking head off" is badass.
Templar ftw. One of the most badass organizations in the history of everything. With guns and magic. yes plz.

[Flight]

I've gone with Templar, which was my result from the assessment quiz.

Official forums are here; once registered, you have to align yourself with one of the three societies here, before you can enter one of the main forums.



I'm expecting big things from this game. In this thread, we've recently underlined a number of the innovative MMO elements Tornquist introduced via Anarchy Online. This game will be just as, if not more, groundbreaking for the MMO genre. The man is a true innovator and has a great deal of creative talent.


Think Cthulhu in a skill based MMO, add a twist of Illuminatus and Shadowrun, with a deep skill, stat and item system.


Just as we need to totally distance Final Fantasy XIV from XI, to have any understanding of what the game will be like, we need to distance this game from Age of Conan.




Some of my random ramblings reposted, for people late to the thread (totally disjointed and extremely messy, but decent background info for new readers) :






Short (4 min) vid of Tornquist being interviewed at GDC '09 (remembering Tornquist had ZERO to do with Age of Conan, but was responsible for AO, The Longest Journey and Dreamfall).

Question : This project started before Age of Conan, but what have you learned from Age of Conan's launch that you can apply to this?

Ragnor : *laughs* I knew that question was coming! But no, you're right, the original project, called Cabal, started in 2002. I think that Conan had a pretty good launch and it's holding incredibly well. I mean it's one of the best selling PC games in the last year, which is really fantastic.

In terms of a launch, Anarchy Online had a horrible launch, but the game was pretty deep. Once they actually fixed all of the bugs, the game has obviously lived ever since and is still going strong. With Conan, they had a pretty smooth launch, but I think people realized that aspects of the game weren't quite what they had hoped for or what they had expected.

I think a combination of those two launches shows us the importance of not only a technically perfect launch, in terms of server uptime and things like that, but to also have a game that's proven to work for a long time, to have a longer beta period, to make sure that we're very very confident about the RPG system, and to invest that extra time. I think that's our team's takeaway; to be absolutely sure that we have the content and the mechanics that will support people for a long time and not just for that initial launch month.

He flat out says Age of Conan only has enough designed into it for a month of content and had nowhere near enough testing of core features, during development.

And I REALLY like the sound of :

There's tons of stuff for the hardcore MMO players, like the whole skill based system and the tweaking that you do to those types of systems with numbers and all the items we'll have, and that will be a hardcore player's dream.

This will be nothing like Age of Conan and all the broken dreams it brought with it, with its poor item system and a class system that is forever broken, beyond belief. Ragnor will bring Anarchy Online like depth to the stat, item and RPG systems.






TSW Image posted by Rinthea, which has been my desktop for the last two years (thanks again Rinth .








Time line on the Games Development here.



12 years since Ragnor started bouncing the ideas around for it ! Like a couple of other folks have said, Ragnor is possibly the best creative person at Funcom and someone I'd want on board if I were making an innovative MMO. But yeah, only a few years into the actual hardcore development.



Heres the blog from Ragnor three years ago, which is linked from he above source :

I have a problem. I don’t know what to call the project that I’m currently working on, because the name is secret, the working title might also be secret, and since I don’t want to mess up any plans, let’s start by just calling it ‘The Game’.

Okay, so what is ‘The Game’? ‘The Game’ is:

- Online, massively multiplayer, and persistent. (Might as well get that one out of the way.)
- Completely original.
- Not at all what you’re expecting.

What ‘The Game’ isn’t:

- In any way related to The Longest Journey or Dreamfall. (Sorry, guys. That’s not happening yet. That does not mean, however, that it’ll be three years until we start working on the sequel. It could very well happen sooner - if it happens at all. Because I’m not saying it will. But I’m working on making it happen, one way or the other.)
- Your standard elves-and-dwarves fantasy MMOG.
- Ready to be revealed yet.

Yeah, okay, not a whole lot of substance to any of that, was there? Sorry. That’s all I’m willing to say right now, but there’s more to come. Soon.

(By the way, I’m sick of calling this game ‘The Game’. So let’s call it NBT - Next Big Thing - because that’s what it is. At least as far as I’m concerned.)

Depending on how you look at it, NBT’s been in production for a very long time, or a pretty short time. Prior to Dreamfall, we worked on a project which metamorphosed into NBT - codenamed, coincidentally, ‘NBT’ - and it was moving along quite well when priorities got shifted around, the NBT team - or most of it - became the Dreamfall team, and Age of Conan became Funcom’s next MMO. This stuff happens often: games get delayed, cancelled, put on ice; we’ve all been there, every one of us who’ve worked in this industry. It happens. You move on. You make something else. And that something else was Dreamfall, so I’m pretty happy about the way things turned out.

Besides, with almost three years in the thinking box (and plenty of brainstorming meetings) between NBT-of-yore and NBT-of-today means the game is leaner, meaner, and worthy of the moniker. I am, in a word, psyched to be working on it. Again.

But the history of NBT goes back more than four years. The concept has been bouncing around in my head for the better part of a decade now, and while this game isn’t the same game that I dreamed about in 1997 - or in ‘99, when we wrapped up The Longest Journey and I was pitching my next project - it’s definitely a close cousin. So this is a real dream project, a game I’ve wanted to make for a very long time, and now it’s actually up and running for everyone to see.

Ragnor seems to have unwittingly (?) given a preview of what sorts of classes the skill sets will be built around in one of his recent blogs :

and particularly in how players can become exactly who they want to be, their secret selves, both visually and in terms of powers. Everyday adventurers and superheroes; guardians of the secret world; champions of Gaia. Warriors. Explorers. Cryptologists. Cryptozoologists. Mystics. Magi. Demonologists. Storytellers. Historians. Travellers. Lovers.

/endShill

[Flight]

Couple of other points :

i) It's slated for a 2010 release, but it's been stated we will find out much more about the game through 2009.

ii) Tornquist has stated that they want social networking and Alternate Reality Gaming to play a significant part in TSW.



Based on the above, expect to start seeing ARG emails in the immediate future. Sign up now or miss out.

[Flight]

Latest entry from Tornquists blog gives a small insight into the creative juices that are going into TSW (it isn't specifically about TSW).

‘Trolsk’ is a wonderful and uniquely Norwegian word. Loosely translated it means trollish – of trolls, in the mythical sense of something magical and unreal – but to really understand what it means you have to experience Norwegian nature at its moodiest and most spiritual.

Ancient forests and mountains covered in a thick, swirling mist; brooding clouds; a light drizzle; pines and moss and bogs and lakes and streams and rocks – combining into the peculiarly Norwegian terrain most famously illustrated by the renowned artist Theodor Kittelsen. A landscape in any season where strange, mystical and mythical shapes emerge from nature, giving rise to the old stories of troll and nøkken and huldra.

This is trolsk. And there is something almost Lovecraftian about the darker side of it. Something spiritual, primal and eldritch, something shadowy and somber and often terrifying. Something immensely powerful. There are few things that fire up my creative engines the way this landscape does. In fact, more than anything, the Norwegian mountains and forests fuelled my early love for myths and fairy tales, for the fantastical and spiritual and dark, and it’s been a red thread through everything I’ve done.


Sadly, outside of the collected works of Asbjørnsen and Moe and Kittelsen’s art, the Norwegian folk tale has never been done justice in any medium. There’s a lot of Norwegian horror films these days – good horror, even – but most of it could have been made anywhere there’s snow and woods. Zombies and serial killers aren’t unique to Norway (even when they are frozen Nazi zombies). The vast reservoir of folk tales and legends has been left untapped by modern media.

So for a couple of years now, I’ve been working on a story that I hope will turn into something that captures the spirit and mood of trolsk, modernising the Norwegian folk tale and translating it into something that could work as a film, short story or graphic novel – perhaps even an RPG/adventure. It’s been on the back-burner for a while, but after a too-brief trip to the mountains this summer, I felt a call to continue, and I know now where it’s heading. I understand the core of the story, the themes, and how it’s going to play out. And it’s exciting to see these vast and misty shapes take form.



Traditionally, trolls were a far cry from the bushy haired gnomes of pop culture. They were pure forces of nature; ancient giants of immense power that resided in the deepest, darkest forests and highest mountains; creatures of stone and earth and wood and grass. Unfortunately the idea of the troll has been subverted and commercialised into innocuous and silly creatures with button eyes and huge red noses, a far cry from Kittelsen’s wonderfully dangerous creations.

The idea of the troll in my story is of something almost godlike, an ancient force of nature inherent in the hills and valleys, lakes and deep forests of Norway. Not as a character itself but more a framework and thematic foundation, something the characters in the story have to relate to, and perhaps even interact with.

[Rayne]

Originally Posted by Flight

And I REALLY like the sound of :

As do I. But as I say that, I also hold hope thats its far more intuitive and tutorialised than AO's systems were. Because ultimately, if it isn't, it'll drive this game deeper into its own little niche than AO went. Innovation like that can only be appreciated when it can be clearly understood.

As ready as the genre may be for something new and completely different, I don't think its quite ready for something thats as advanced as AO was for its time. AO's systems were easy to master, but only after you took a fair amount of time to learn and understand them.

Things like the effect of buff trickledown, overequipping, and "stepping" your character into, as well as out of, items and gear will be incredibly alien to all but an avid AO player. This could very well be metagaming at its most intense ever. So it will need to be as easy to understand as possible right from the beginning. Because "dumbing it down" later will be utterly impossible without rebuilding the game from the ground up.

[yknits]

Originally Posted by Zehn - Vhex

Who the fuck wouldn't. Religious crazies in modern day society, yeah, boring and stupid. But give me a sword or gun in one hand and a holy symbol in the other and by fire you shall be purged heathen.

This inspires me... just imagine how crazy RP servers would be!

[Greyskye]

Hadn't been following this game but am interested now. Templar looks good to me so far.

[TKarrde]

This sounds pretty much awesome, at least in concept. signed up.

[Tyen]

Signed up~

Illuminati

[Zehn - Vhex]

Originally Posted by yknits

This inspires me... just imagine how crazy RP servers would be!

"Neca eos omnes. Deus suos agnoscet."

[Flight]

Originally Posted by Zehn - Vhex

"Neca eos omnes. Deus suos agnoscet."

Wonderful, Zehn. +2, if I could.


'Kill them all, God will know His own.'