Part of a series on the death of a bad game with excellent atmosphere. Presume spoilers.
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Let's talk factions.
It is by now a largely unexamined tradition for MMOs to divide players into factions as a way of ginning up some imitation of competitive spirit, regardless to what little extent these reflect the functionality of sports/game teams. The Secret World featured three playable "secret societies":
From top to bottom: the Dragons' mystical temple of abstruseness, the Templars' stately mansion of respectability (lycanthrope on zombie horse not included) and the Illuminati's subterranean techno-brutalist bunker, appropriately enough under a skylight. Get it? Illumin-nevermind.
In practical terms, the factions held absolutely zero relevance to the bulk of gameplay being mostly single-player with a small-group PvE endgame timesink. But, as TSW made a point of slavishly copycatting as many WoW-clone "features" as it could it also included the timesink of PvP instances divided by the factions into a three-way fight to out-score each other in various point hold, capture the flag and other standard team game scenarios. Now, PvP was a terrible idea from the start and was always going to be a half-assed affair. Tellingly, the Legends relaunch barely bothered pretending to include it.
1) As fundamentally a puzzle-solving, interactive fiction title, TSW was farther removed from team-play than either WoW-clones with their RPG-inspired classes or FPS series. The PvP and PvE fan bases were irrevocably split from day one, and the former rapidly realized it could find better gameplay elsewhere.
2) Its graphics and character models, while aesthetically superior, were neither fluid nor distinctive enough to ensure playability in a fast-paced, unpredictable PvP environment.
3) A game system can be designed either for PvP or PvE, but crowd control, healing, damage output and other considerations simply work differently depending on whether you're fighting adaptive, self-interested equals or an overblown monster with a specific set of abilities whose job it is to provide a fixed challenge and look impressive before taking a dive to boost customers' egos. TSW's skill system was borderline workable for PvE, but utter crap for PvP.
4) The instability ensured by a three-way divide can work well enough in games like Planetside which establish stable, large-scale objectives and rely on a few players coordinating groups of forty others. But mixed with ephemeral, ten-minute fights in randomized matches, the same instability largely guarantees one side will rapidly capitalize on the other two tripping over each other. From my recollection, the power-mad Illuminati would routinely trounce the more idealistic, adventurous Dragons and Templars.
Ah, but that little tidbit brings us to the flipside: character.
While TSW's factions were ultimately merely cosmetic, the quality of mission writing, dialogues, backstories and general atmosphere mapped more successfully onto player personae than in most games' "pretty vs. badass" or good vs. evil split. Here you're all antiheroes to some extent, powermongers staving off Ragnarok #4, split instead between different flavors of spy movie villainy. The Dragons play the long game, foregoing straightforward attrition in pursuit of ultimate cheat codes, the Illuminati relatively shortsighted and pragmatically snatching at every advantage, and the Templars ruthless, dyed-in-the-wool aristocrats tending toward reliability and draconian judgments.
You'd be hard-pressed to find these attitudes expressed during gameplay. Usually, all you'd get is snippets of flavor text at the beginning and end of each otherwise identical mission, flavored differently for each faction, plus occasionally a short cinematic. Nevertheless, the distinction came through in wording and voicing, consistently and insistently marrying a mere cosmetic difference to human tendencies whether it's nouveau-riche swagger, pointed nonsense or peremptory declamations. They did a good enough job to even lure me away from my usual Chaotic Neutral mindset to the only faction with enough integrity to own its nature. Look again at the pictures above, for instance. All three advertise opulence in some form, whether it's maintaining low-density real estate in the middle of a metropolis like Seoul (note apartment buildings in the background) or displacing New York's subterrane to hide a bunker the size of a village, but only the Templars just built. a. fucking. palace. like they mean it.
Respect.
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