At the facility on East 12th st."
Green Day - Homecoming
Welcome, bees* to the splentacfluous Agartha Mall!
Agartha, the Hollow Earth, was in The Secret World's initial 2012 interpretation a transit hub. Players would bounce between America, Egypt and Romania by zooming to portals growing like fruit along the branches of the world-tree. A rather captivating sight, just otherworldly enough to be memorable, even if said zooming did grow a bit tedious by repetition.
As part of the game's desperate (and unsuccessful) rebranding as Secret World Legends in 2017, Agartha's branches were severely truncated and its trunk re-imagined as a social hub, after the game's repeated failures to make players congregate in fight clubs, theatres or the city of London. Thus the oncogenesis of the Agartha Mall at the world's very heart, a large enclosure lined with shops, bankers and auctioneers, opening into a portal to seasonal content, a restaurant and a dance club on its terraces, complete with a centerpiece chandelier beneath which a Christmas tree or other seasonal nonsense can be inserted.
Note the lack of congregating players.
Turns out it takes more than being given a place to stand to keep customers' interest.
Now, first I have to remark on the sheer idiocy of taking a grandiose, mysterious notion like the Hollow Earth and paving it over into yet another painfully mundane mall. But more amusingly by the time TSW launched, Amazon and eBay were almost two decades old. By 2017 when TSW became SWL and Agartha was mallified, real-world malls at least in the United States had been gradually pushed out of business throughout the previous decade by online shopping. In its effort toward cozy mundane familiarity, Funcom copied an architectural motif that's been moribund since before their product's original launch.
There's something just so... special... about jumping on a bandwagon while it's diving off a cliff.
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* It makes sense in context.
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