Funcom's Martin Bruusgaard and Joel Bylos share their plans for The Secret World, including the New York raid, new locations and much more.

Crafting a Market

One of the issues highlighted in our own one month review was the plight of having too many resources and not enough toolkits.  Bruusgaard agreed, explaining how the situation came about. “When we made the system, we had to choose: Do we want to gate on resources, or do we want to gate on toolkits? And we chose toolkits. But everyone says the same thing – that they run around with tons of materials, not enough toolkits, and it’s easier to just buy or get items in a dungeon.”

Bruusgaard feels the crafting flow – how resources come in, get processed, and emerge as completed items –is something that doesn’t really progress well in The Secret World and is being looked at. Bylos added that the marketplace has made things easier, saying “[it] was really interesting to see with the release of [the marketplace], toolkits, which are rare, come up on it now. That also was strategic on our behalf, in terms of the economy.” 

Switching to the in-game item shop, Bruusgaard was pleased with the result. “It’s fun to see that players have accepted the item store, because we’ve proven to them that we are not selling power - and that was really important for us. A lot of players were skeptical when they heard that we had an item shop, but now it seems that everyone has accepted it. They can see that it’s purely cosmetic [items].”

Apparently bunny slippers and black clothing have been selling well, with Bruusgaard suggesting that “People want to look like Neo.” Although the team have experience from running an item shop in Age of Conan, they’ve been surprised by the number of requests for proper dresses and skirts.  Longer term, they also want to address issues with breaking up multi-slot items, as well as allowing characters to wear earrings, glasses and hats at the same time.

A Stash of Secret Stories

With so many tales crammed into The Secret World, I asked Bylos if there had been anything left on the cutting room floor. Grinning at me, he replied “Our Wiki is a graveyard of old ideas.” Running during the game’s five year development, Funcom’s internal wiki houses every cool idea that the team didn’t have the time, the technology or the story to implement. 

“To give you an example, we have this shader that we can put on the game that makes people look like they’re sketches in a sketchbook, and we had this whole mission designed around players being pulled through fictional tales like Moby Dick, and being in that world where everything’s white and looks like sketches. You’re playing through literature and jumping from book to book, but we never managed to implement it in the game. We might get to it one day though!”

Bruusgaard chimed in with his own anecdote. “The game used to start in a Haitian kitchen. The first character you met was a really cool character – a Jamaican woman in a wheelchair. As the game progressed, that didn’t really fit the start anymore, so she was taken out. But she’s coming back in, right?”  

Bylos responded: “Yeah, in one of the issues soon we’ll be bringing back that character. You’ll be able to take investigation missions from her”

With so much content either in-the game or waiting in the wings, I asked how much research went in to the locations and missions. It turns out that although Google Maps is a popular tool, they also sent people to Maine, Seoul  and New York. I’m told that guys who built the in-game London are actually from the city themselves. Bylos added: “There’s actually a really cool thread on the forums, where someone who lives in Brooklyn took photographs, and he put side-by-side some screenshots and these photos.”

Creating the missions also requires substantial effort, with a single throwaway word from the writing team leading into the dark depths of internet history. “Every time I write an investigation mission, I have to do a ton of research.” Then again, Bylos thinks the payoff is worth it. “I’ve always believed that you can reward people with items, and you can reward people with money, you can reward people with experience. But there’s something, I feel at least, there’s a reason people like doing mathematics. There’s a reason people like doing puzzles. When you mentally overcome a challenge, it’s very rewarding for your own self-satisfaction.”

As for how Act One concludes, Bylos was keeping that story a secret for now. “There’ll be an interesting conclusion to that situation. I think it might surprise everybody. I don’t want to say too much about it, but it’s going to be very cool to see how people react to what we’re doing.”

“Act two goes a lot of very interesting places and really fills the players in a bit more. If you think about your character in the game, you’re very much a newbie to The Secret World, even at this point, even after you’ve fought through Transylvania. You’re only starting to become somebody important.”

Gareth “Gazimoff” Harmer, Staff Writer