The Open and Shut Secret World: Mystery Machine

Part of a series on the death of a bad game with excellent atmosphere. Presume spoilers.

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I've played a few games on opening day or in open beta (when the term still held meaning) including MMOs, but I find it difficult to describe the atmosphere in The Secret World when the curtain rose back in 2012. You'd normally expect a gaggle of eager young space cadets visibly pausing every few moments to rearrage their hotkeys while they scramble for every last XP point to be first at lvl50... or 60 or 60million, whatever. Indeed there was plenty of mindless powerlevelling to be seen, especially the farther content proregressed from promising concept to stultified execution.

Yet compared to other online games and WoW-clones especially, and comparable only to the likes of City of Heroes, you'd also find a great many more participants excited not only about their status in the game but about The Game itself. This now depressingly deserted street between newbietown's church and town hall teemed with amateur detectives trying to crack The Kingsmouth Code, chasing a trail of sewer covers, an antique painting, clock hands and Bible verse via visual and verbal clues like "In the seat of power, the navigator immortalized"

 

Zone chat was full of admonitions to avoid spoilers and polite requests for minor hints in private whispers... and amazingly enough pretty much everyone held to this rule! Even TSW's various wikis hide clues beneath several layers of hints so as to maximize the player's own input. Such "investigation" missions involved little to no combat beyond simply maneuvering around your current zone, gave a relatively low pay-off for a lengthy time investment... and if I told you they often embodied TSW at its finest, you can probably guess one reason it failed as an MMO. Adventure game puzzle-solving doesn't quite mesh with farming for enchanted spaulders.

Sure, they weren't always ideal.

 

As I complained at the time, too often the designers substituted specialized knowledge for problem-solving ability. The Unburnt Bush for example led you to various altars inscribed in Arabic symbols which you needed to match to corresponding Hebrew mentions of Old Testament plagues. As many pointed out, unless you happen to be fluent in at least one of those languages you'd have a devil of a time googling any of that gobbledygook. For my own part I just winged it without looking anything up, based on length and complexity of symbols, presuming some correlation between the two languages... with mixed success. It does however show the lengths TSW's developers (and players) were willing to go to for a change of pace from the WoW-clone grind.

To facilitate such research, Funcom implemented a web browser in-game, which seems a laughable waste of development time in retrospect given the industry-wide shift to borderless windowed modes for carefree alt-tabbing just a couple years later. They even set up fake websites for various in-game characters and organizations letting you look up imaginary payrolls, ISBN codes, street addresses, etc. continuing the tradition in which they'd launched TSW as an alternate reality game, playing up the urban fantasy feel of slipping into Neverwhere. While I still think it a fundamentally shallow gimmick detracting from the game proper, there's no denying that finishing one of these escapades gave most of us a much greater feeling of accomplishment than killing ten thousand zombies.

Ah, but wait, there's more!

TSW had not one but two kinds of non-combat missions: where investigation focused on adventure game clue-cobbling, sabotage was more about spatial orientation and survival mode sneaking / dodging various hazards.

When it worked, it worked great, like In the Dusty Dark's chasms to be crossed via invisible walkways or sequences of jump pads. When it didn't work...

 

You'll likely hear The Cost of Magic blasphemed by anyone who's tried it, though for my money a later moonwalking mission in Tokyo was even worse. Yes, I said "moonwalking" - don't get me started. While TSW's adventure game roots made investigation missions a good fit and its atmosphere played well toward sneaking past security cameras or skulking demons, Super Mario platform-jumping levels were too much of a genre-bending stretch by far. Not only could TSW's physics and lag not support such fine motor sk!llz, but in order to get your achievement you had to finish the sequence without a single mistake. For all four mission stages.

 

Though often hit-or-miss, these alternate mission modes in TSW demonstrated there was a market for sneaking and clue-cobbling even within MMO demographics. No matter how much we hated some of them, we didn't stop playing because of these challenges. We stopped when they stopped making them.

Better to be frustrated than bored.