Massivity: Mind Over Chatter in The Secret World

Filled with sprawling worlds ripe for discovery, teeming with thousands of new people to meet, and capable of sucking up entire months' worth of playtime, massively multiplayer online role-playing games offer one of the modern world's most extreme forms of escapism. Join GameSpy columnist Leif Johnson as he turns a critical eye on the biggest and best of today's MMORPGs and quests for the virtual worlds most worthy of your time.



MMORPGS demand many things of their players, but only rarely do they demand that they think. Even in the genre's best titles, exercises in deep thought rarely grow more complex than experiments with stats and abilities, and creative approaches to raid encounters often vanish once someone posts a definitive strategy on YouTube. With Funcom's upcoming The Secret World, that might all change, or at least Lead Content Designer Joel Bylos and Lead Designer Martin Bruusgaard hope so. During my visit to their Montreal studio last month, I got a chance to puzzle my way through the game's Kingsmouth Code series of quests, and the potential of what I saw left me excited and worried at the same time.


It's hard to discuss The Kingsmouth Code without spoiling the details, so I'll try to keep this concise. The questline is the only known instance of the game's Investigations category of quests, which send players on a series of detective-style missions requiring much more than playing connect-the-dots with objectives on the minimap. In this case, players hunt down a series of clues left by the Illuminati -- one of the game's three factions -- in a New England town by the name of Kingsmouth, which looks like the product of a shared nightmare among Stephen King, Dan Brown, and H.P. Lovecraft. Not only are the objectives never identified on the map, Bylos and Bruusgaard expect you to tab out on occasion and search for solutions on Google. If that fails, they want you to work with your friends to find the answers.

"We've heard people say that that's a really hard mission to put on people right at the start, and that's true, but we also don't want players thinking that they can plow through Investigations," Bylos said. "That's why we slap them with a hard mission at the start."

Again, at least in the context of MMORPGs, "hard" here is an understatement. I originally took on the "Kingsmouth Code" with the intention of sampling it, but it quickly occupied much of the rest of my hands-on time with the game's PVE aspects. The Secret World has a lot of ideas that set it apart from its competition, but this adventure awakened the dozing academic that I thought I'd smothered beneath copies of Kant and Darwin. It felt fresh, it felt innovative, and it even felt fun.

The Kingmouth Code kicks off after a quirky little madman in a chapel tells you that the Illuminati have scattered clues throughout the hamlet. After 20 minutes went by without a sign of any promising leads, I started to worry that I was merely meant to laugh at how nuts the guy was. But suddenly, as I bent over to loot a random enemy, I noticed that the clues were right beneath my feet. Now thinking that the quest was kind of a pushover, I followed the signs to a point by the bay only to find that the first mission was something of an appetizer. Now I was presented with a clue involving a lighthouse, and thinking it was referring to the lighthouse on the distant horizon, I battled my way through dozens of Cthulhu-styled enemies only to find that my initial guess was completely wrong. And the funny thing? Instead of getting annoyed, I found myself drawn even further into the strange world Funcom has created.


Later on, on a new leg of the quest, I learned that a clue was stashed behind a painting by a particular historical Dutch artist, only to find that it was hidden in a gallery of similarly themed artworks. In most MMOs, the only clickable painting would be the one you were looking for, but Bylos and Bruusgaard challenge their players by leaving dead ends scattered among the other paintings. In other words, if you can't identify the relatively obscure artist's work on sight (or, more importantly, if you don't try to Google the answer based on the clues), you could find yourself trotting all over the map and getting involved in needless battles only to find that you were looking at the wrong painting all along. If that's the case, then you have no choice but to start over with a different painting.

Toward the end, some of the developers and my fellow journalists huddled around my computer to see if I could solve the code before we started another segment of the presentation. I admit that I had resorted to asking, "Is this right?" before making a move at this point, but their reluctant answers of "no" and "maybe" represented the most help they were willing to give me. At last I figured it out. It may have taken longer, but my three years of Latin in college saved me from having to look up the answer in Google and I completed the questline at the very last minute. Most strangely of all, I felt a sense of accomplishment that felt more like it sprang from a Myst title than a contemporary MMO.

Bylos hopes that quests like The Kingsmouth Code will bring players together and foster a sense of community. "I'm really hoping that people will reach out in global chat and say, 'Hey, I'm doing the Kingsmouth Code and I don't want someone to spoil it for me, but could someone put me on the right track here because I'm sort of stuck?' And then you make a friend because you talked to someone," Bylos said. "And that's kind of the goal of MMOs, right?"

Bruusgaard noted that the idea originally sprang from their work in ARGs, or Alternate Reality Games. "In the ARGs, we saw how thousands of people worked together to solve these really, really, hard puzzles, and that was amazing to watch," Bruusgaard said. "Joel had the idea of implementing these into the game and not being afraid of asking people to look outside the game for answers. And you know what? The feedback on this has just been fantastic."


I share Bylos' and Bruusgaard's enthusiasm for this aspect of The Secret World, but I worry that the community might make such questlines feel more like disasters than innovations. After all, anyone who played World of Warcraft prior to the Cataclysm expansion remembers the dismal legacy of Mankrik and his search for his dead wife. Poor Mankirk lost his wife to a bristleback raid, and for years he implored Horde players to find her body among the wastes of the Barrens. Almost no one waited to stumble upon her body by chance (as was likely intended). Instead, you could count on someone asking where he or she could find Mankrik's wife at least once every five minutes on populated servers. Mankrik's wife arguably became the butt of more jokes than any other NPC in the game's history as a result, and some players found the barrage so annoying that they avoided the zone altogether.

In Kingsmouth, there are about seven quests like this, and each involves more than finding an NPC. I want to believe that players will use their own brains to make sense of the clues or keep their questions among their friends, but I can also see the Secret World's global channels morphing into "Barrens Chat From Hell." Instead of "Where is Mankrik's wife?" players will ask, "What Illuminati symbols are they talking about?" and "Which painting am I supposed to choose?" and "Does anybody know what the Latin inscription means?" And that's only the beginning. Bylos and Bruusgaard intend for something like The Kingsmouth Code to exist in almost every zone, which excites the academic in me but leaves the MMORPG player shuddering in fear.

Of course, I could be wrong; the very structure of Bylos' and Bruusgaard's game might prove the savior of its Investigations. The Secret World has no levels in the traditional sense, which means that players aren't obligated to undertake a questline for experience points, and the absence of any traditional gear aside from weapons ensures that players won't feel cheated if they ignore it. If players want to skip an Investigations questline, they can -- and largely without guilt. That's partially because Investigations are aimed at a particular audience.

"I think the average age for a gamer is like 35 now, and I like to think that people from that age group sort of enjoy this kind of thing," Bylos said. "But not everybody does, though, so our quest structure gives them some options."

In a perfect scenario, Bylos and Bruusgaard both see this decision as making their game attractive to players who are jaded with the standard model of MMOs. "I think a lot of games focus on the solo aspect of the game too much," Bylos said, "so we want to see players working together. Some of these Investigations are going to be so hard that you'll need to look at university papers on a language that four people in the world speak."


Let's be clear -- I want to see more quests like this in MMORPGs. Few things depress me more about contemporary MMORPGs than their tendency to yank players by the nose, and I admire every nuance of how Funcom designed The Kingsmouth Code. Not once did I find their clues ridiculously difficult; not once did I doubt that the answers lay just outside the reach of my mind. But in a genre in which many players never even "read the quest text," can we count on a community of players who want a genuine mental challenge outnumbering the thousands who want instant items and answers? Or will those nagging questions sour this promising aspect of Funcom's upcoming title? Blizzard made the right decision when they put Mankrik's wife to rest; I'm not so sure if Funcom is wise to bring her back -- regardless of how many zombies are running around Kingsmouth.


Leif Johnson is a Chicago-based freelancer who likes sushi and long walks along the Brandywine. Find out what he's doing over at his blog or follow him on Twitter.