The Open and Shut Secret World: On Its Last Whale

"the children of the night are calling"

Juno Reactor / Ed Wood

 

I've been putting off my farewell to The Secret World long enough. A bittersweet topic for me, not merely because despite myself I found much to enjoy in TSW's mangled mix of brilliance, tedium and ineptitude, but because it's been a staple here at the den since its inception and fed me more references than any other game. Even my MMManifesto, half the motivation for starting a blog in the first place, began as a Dark Days Are Coming forum post. In late 2011 I was still playing City of Heroes and dreaming still that I might find a single virtual world into which I could finally lose myself, a worthy matrix to Case, a cure for meatspace. I'd been keeping an eye on TSW's development ever since 2007, pre-ordered it with a lifetime subscription and dove in with uncharacteristic glee.

I've ranted more than enough about its failings. Rumor has it that albeit pretty at face value, its underlying code was a mess and every new patch brought new bugs. Perhaps that explains the snail's pace of post-launch content, and unfortunately instead of investing in a much-needed overhaul, Funcom decided just to let it hobble along and try to milk it for however long it lasted, saddling players with timesink after timesink in place of actual development. From the start, TSW was, even more obviously than other such cases, a single-player game with a multiplayer pretext for forcing digital rights management.

 

It went far beyond the usual MMO grind of farming ten thousand zombies a thousand times over, or the terrible, tacked-on PvP minigames meant to keep players invested by keeping them at each others' throats to no synergistic effect. The Tokyo expansion, while good in many ways, also introduced a secondary leveled-loot grind akin to LotRO's "legendary" gear. Development time sank more and more into funny hats and other cash shop adventures. Players were given an irrelevant "museum" to build up purely by grinding. Even when so-called content was released, it consisted more and more of text adventures or dull walls of text (bestiary lore) unlocked by combing old zones. Open world locations were recycled into grindable "virtual reality" instances. The Legends relaunch forced players back down to zero, gutted instance variety, dumbed down gameplay and lengthened the grind, and at the same time diminished lifer benefits. An entirely new minigame consisted of shuffling static portraits around. A new daily grind pitted each player solo against series of damage sponge minibosses each taking minutes to put down. To add insult to injury, Funcom started releasing separate spin-off games (The Park, Moons of Madness) to bleed its few remaining adherents with "new" products instead of delivering their much-awaited further chapters.

 

And now?

It's been a couple of years since I bothered even logging in for my daily rewards but for nostalgia's sake had always intended to write up some kind or another of post-mortem, and now's as good a time as any. For one thing, given TSW's emphasis on dark fantasy slews of mythical monsters, Halloween has always been its magic time. For another, I logged in a couple of months ago and realized its profitability has likely dipped far enough into the red to be scuttled entirely.

There's only one account selling amusement park currency in the cash shop, implying they're either down to their last whale or even sadder, forced to seed the market themselves for lack of interest.

While I've done plenty of bitchin', I've rarely mentioned the high points which kept me and others coming back. So join me, if you will, over the next month, as I shed a lycanthropic tear for one of the most engaging piles of wasted potential in video game history.