The Open and Shut Secret World: Proportion

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

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"And if it’s around October twentieth and everything smoky-smelling and the sky orange and ash gray at twilight, it seems Halloween will never come in a fall of broomsticks and a soft flap of bedsheets around corners. 

But one strange wild dark long year, Halloween came early."

 

Ray Bradbury - Something Wicked This Way Comes

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"Beyond the worlds vague ghosts of monstrous things; half-seen columns of unsanctified temples that rest on nameless rocks beneath space and reach up to dizzy vacua above the spheres of light and darkness."

H.P. Lovecraft - Nyarlathotep

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Welcome to my comfort zone.

 

The Secret World's version of Transylvania's middle-difficulty zone The Shadowy Forest was also a prime grinding spot. To minimize travel times I'd often split the difference between daily quests and log out in the quest location itself, in this case a ruined village haunted by the ghosts of traitors, but I quickly grew to favor this logout spot for aesthetic purposes much as I did Nar's Peak in LotRO. The abandoned church houses no glowing, vibrating holy relics, no chanting cabals shooting magic finger lasers to keep monsters at bay. Dead faith and chill air. It's simply avoided. Outside roams death. Inside, blanketed by persistent impermanence, a weary immortal can find momentary peace. It's drafty, and quiet, and lonely, and forgotten... and safe.

 

Fans trying to advertise the game would often tout TSW's Lovecraftian themes, and in all fairness the Cthulhu clones are pretty hard to miss, as a screenshot below will demonstrate. But if kaiju from beyond the moon were its only aesthetic inspiration it would fall flat. Contrast is key.

It drew heavily from urban fantasy (comparisons to Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere are unavoidable given their shared location) and in fact concept art from TSW now features among Google's designated reference images for that subgenre. The starting "social" hubs of New York, Seoul and London were perfectly mundane cityscapes where the masquerade is (mostly) upheld, where unassuming civillians grab a cup of coffee and chat about the weather... and where, just around the corner and down some steps, you can find a necrophage operating a produce stand.

 

It also drew, to the same effect, from Ray Bradbury:

The first third of the original release takes place in New England and banks on the same contrast between quaint, parochial Americana and lurking cosmic mysteries you find in Bradbury's horror stories: hick-descended tradesmen with worn shoes arguing above disaffected picket fences about itinerant witches or how they're getting along with their local ghosts, distracting each other from encroaching inevitability.

All in all, despite some concessions to the medium like higher ceilings to accomodate camera angles (that cathedral above's at least twice as big in every dimension as a simple village church from the 15th century would've been) TSW maintained human proportions throughout, complete with human furnishings and human paraphernalia. While the supernatural is pervasive, it is also consistently intrusive, more alien for appearing next to a coffee pot or a mail van or inside a waiting room with magazines strewn on a glass table. The same juxtaposition extends to NPCs, as many of those you meet lack supernatural powers or training yet are shown foiling Hammer Horror escapees by hook and crook.

What this amounts to is a delightful low-key setup for truly impressive monsters and events to retain their impact, say by bursting out of the ground at Times Square:

Even more importantly, transportation to otherworldly locales is all the more disorienting for shearing away from ever-present normalcy.

 

By maintaining a sense of proportion and allowing simplicity to offset exoticism, TSW kept its magic magical.