I love that you'll be fighting these ...things that are both new and different (for this genre, at least) and yet they're also familiar and iconic. In so many of these games you're literally playing rat catcher. Pest control. You're sent out to squash spiders and slaughter boars, and it's boring.
In TSW, it's more than just fighting zombies and scary monsters - you're fighting chainsaw killer death golems and Lovecraftian abominations from the abyss. Things that will be new to our eyes but are old, ancient threats in the back of our heads.
And they fit into the story. Not just the overarching world story, but the local stories of the mist closing in around a town or the dark, evil things appearing in alley shadows. Every beastie and ghoul in the game is there because they're part of the game's story, a story that's very cool, a story about how all these conspiracies and myths and boogiemen are real and have agendas that you're now a part of...
That's the sort of immersion and interest that makes gaming great.
I'll also point out this provocative quote about potential PvP provocation :
RPS: You’ve said you’re going to try to make players hate the other factions. How are you going to do that without making players hate their own faction?
"... We are going to give players missions that are all about sabotaging the other societies, trying to steal their secrets and destroy their networks. We’re definitely going to make players feel like their faction is the one with all the right answers. ..."
Could that be PvP quests he's talking about?
At the very least, I like the ...antagonization between the different factions. If you're going to make a good PvP game, make the players actually want to kill each other and fight for their faction. Generic Red Team vs. Generic Blue Team scrimmaging doesn't make for a compelling game.
A lot to love so far, at least on the drawing board.
One major catch to all this, to me, is the emphasis on puzzles, which I might very well hate.
I know a lot of folks are interested in this, but I'm just not sold on the implementation of it. I want a game that makes me have to stop and think, I want a game to make me have to dig, to seek, to discover.
But I don't want to have to alt-tab and google in the process. I don't want to have to look up spoilers or strat guides, I want the game to provide me with the tools to find those sort of answers in-game, using a player's own ingenuity. It's bad enough that the MMO genre is so mired in dungeon strats and endgame boiling down to step-by-step, paint-by-numbers class builds going through the motions, literally doing 1-2-3-4 rotations through read-the-instruction-manual raid encounters.
I don't know, maybe playing internet detective will be great fun. Putting a little Sherlock Holmes / Scooby Doo mystery action in a MMO sounds like a great idea. I'm just not sure googling names or begging in chat for shortcuts is the great challenge or grand communal adventure they want it to be...
"The hardcore will have the satisfaction of solving it, and everybody else will have the satisfaction of not having to solve every puzzle."
Hrm.
Not really a great tagline for a game. The Secret World: The Satisfaction of Not Having to Solve Every Puzzle.
I'm not sure I like the idea of General Chat being turned into some ass-backwards version of a high school geometry class....
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