The Secret World (2012)

I can't believe I have never opened my mouth about this MMORPG.

I care about this game. A lot. I have two tattoos about it. My best friend and I bonded over this game, it helped me become a better writer and it helped me shape my passions. I have so many feelings about The Secret World. So many - but let's take it from the top, shall we?

The Secret World was one of Funcom's forays into the genre of MMORPGs, preceded by Age of Conan and Anarchy Online. Differing from these two titles by virtue of its modern aesthetic and storytelling, The Secret World delved into the depths of Ragnar Torniqst's apt storytelling, between fights off fancy among real life cultural myths, legends, and beliefs and diving deep into the esoterica. After much trial and suffering, the game released in 2012 with Electronic Arts and Funcom working together for its release.

It was an action-based MMORPG, preferring a lax approach to a class system and leaving users to theorycraft their own builds: from simple DPS to leech healing, from a pure tank to a heal tank, The Secret World allowed for an approach to the concept of MMORPG that felt novel (to me, a long-time player of Aion and Tera) and made me itch to get my hands on different items in order to see what I could come up with.

The Secret World never got as big as Funcom had hoped mainly because the absolute geniuses decided to release the game next to bigger and more known titles such as World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria and Diablo III and thus had severely impacted the level of sales and the active player base that the game would accrue over the years. Funcom is known to have faux passes and this game was marred by them.

The combat system felt clunky to many (I never understood what exactly people found offensive about it when compared to a standardized experience such as World of Warcraft or Aion) but I never felt like anything else did something quite in the same way. Then there was the dissatisfaction with grinding for the AEGIS system (yet, nowadays, people praise time-sinks based on crafting/gathering mechanism with little to no bearing over the overall game - much like the Firmament, Ocean Fishing, Deep Dungeons, Eureka...)...

Yet the plot is one that still gets praise to this day: bleak and chaotic, dark, gritty with a dash of hope, The Secret World delivered one of the most passionate stories that I had ever the pleasure to play - beating Shadowbringers and Endwalker by such a long mile that I cannot fathom putting them on the same pedestal in my own mind.

The dawning of a world we all feel connected to due to its proximity to our day and age and the fathomless perils that lurk within planes we have no idea they even exist: maws that yawn and swallow planets whole, dimmed stars in the sky, the resurgence of plague of dark and deep origins.

With an amazing cast of voice actors (between them Andre Sogliuzzo and Neil Newbon) and with an array of NPCs that, to this day, are hard to forget, The Secret World only ever lacked one thing: a company that gave a damn about its product.

Nearing its end of life, a news peeked its way in: rights had been sold for a probable TV Series and an influx of cash was injected into Funcom Oslo for the purpose of developing the title. Feels all fine and good until we learn that not only Funcom will not put that money back into the active development of The Secret World but has pushed a piddly F2P remake (Secret World Legends) with the heaviest monetization known to mankind and devolved a large sum of the cash injection to... Dune: Awakening (another failed attempt at a MMORPG, now turned into a Survival game) and Conan Exiles's further DLC releases.

This was my first heartbreak. And it shatters me that nobody will ever live through the era of what The Secret World was.