I’m going to start this post with a simple statement:

“The Secret World” is the most
addictive MMORPG I’ve played so far.

I’ve played a lot of The Secret World. An unhealthy amount, in fact. Between a week of no work following the game’s Early Access launch, and a couple of days of illness last week, I’ve put over 100 hours into the game. This isn’t just be scrabbling to get my money’s worth from the box sale either. I only needed forty hours to make that worthwhile on my V4M scale. No, there’s something addictive about TSW’s gameplay, and it boils down to two things.

Decks and Progression

Firstly, the nature of the game’s progression system. There are two incredibly satisfying feelings for any PvE player in an MMORPG: the downing — finally — of that boss you’ve been stuck on for ages; and the satisfaction of the ding. Leveling up.

TSW doesn’t have levels or classes in the traditional sense of the genre. It does have an EXP bar along the bottom of your screen, but that is segmented into three. Each segment you fill nets you 1AP. When you’ve filled all 3 you get 1SP as well. The amount of EXP you need to fill a segment never changes, so as you progress through the game, the later zones offer missions with much higher EXP rewards which fill your bars faster — which is good, because some of the latter abilities in the skill wheel require 50AP to purchase.

The brilliant thing about this is the constant reinforcement, the ding feeling. Sure, you might not be able to buy anything with that AP you just got, but it flashes up on the screen regardless and it adds to your total.

Adding to the satisfaction of the freeform progression is the Deck system. For each of the game’s three factions — Templar, Illuminati, and Dragon — Funcom has included a series of prebuilt Decks, each with their own cosmetic costume reward for completely unlocking all the abilities in that Deck. I’ve unlocked five out of the eleven now for the Templar, and again it is incredibly satisfying to see that “Claim Reward” button light up — even if all the costumes so far have had awkward clipping issues with my character’s not-all-that-long hair.

For someone like me, a self-confessed altoholic, TSW’s system is refreshing. It almost reminds me of what Final Fantasy XIV‘s “Armoury System” could have been. It allows me to be everything on one character, for a start, but more importantly it plays to the psychological hook that makes the completionist in me scream for more.

Of course, without content to give you EXP and thus AP/SP, this progression system would be for naught. Here’s where the second thing comes in!

Repeatable Content

Almost all the missions in TSW are repeatable: only the story and investigation missions are not (barring a couple of small exceptions). If they weren’t repeatable, I’d have run out of content by the time I’d completed my first deck.

Every repeatable mission in the game has a cooldown timer, and when that is up, you can replay the mission exactly the same as you did the first/last time — though naturally this time you can skip the cutscenes if you want.

Of course, the missions that give the highest EXP are on the longest cooldown timers; so missions in the Carpathian Fangs (last of the three Transylvania zones) take much longer to become available again than missions in The Scorched Desert (first of the two Egypt zones). I imagine it won’t take long before somebody plans an optimal route through Egypt and Transylvania to maximise the EXP potential.

As I was finishing that fifth Deck this morning, I came to a conclusion, however — I’m not sure that TSW actually has that much content compared to a lot of MMORPGS. Sure, I’ve spent over 100 hours on it, but a lot of that has been repeating stuff I’ve already done at least once, and in some cases three or four times…

And I started thinking, just how much repetition can I handle before it becomes too much? Even with the addictiveness of the progression system, how long before I start playing less and only logging in for the most optimal EXP-giving missions? There are already a good dozen or so missions that I won’t touch ingame simply because I found them annoying or unrewarding in terms of time/EXP ratio.

Funcom have promised monthly content updates, with a new wave of missions due to be patched in on the 31st July, as well as new dungeon modes and stuff. Trouble is, as much as I’ve enjoyed the four dungeons I’ve done so far (Polaris, Inferno, Darkness War, Ankh) they’re not something I’ll do a lot of. I certainly have poor memories of the Heroic mode dungeons in WoW, so the Elite and Nightmare-mode dungeons in TSW aren’t really something I’m striving towards.

I have seven decks to finish. Just under 50% of the skill wheel left to fill in. The question is how long can I repeat the same missions over and over before I get bored?

The answer: not that much longer I don’t think. While getting those decks is certainly satisfying, I can auto-pilot through most of the missions now.

GW2: Events and Repeatability

Rather than the freeform progression of TSW, GW2 has a much more traditional profession-based progression system. There are eight available professions to chose from, and a level cap of 80. While most of the game has a flat leveling “curve”, as well as a Skill Points system with which you can buy Healing, Utility, and Elite skills, it is quite narrow in terms of what you can do on one character. As an altoholic, this is fine. It will just mean I get to experience eight different Personal Stories.

Where GW2 is most hyped, of course, is in its Dynamic Events system. These area-based goals are, like TSW’s missions, repeatable. They run on tracks and timers, some being triggered by previous events succeeding or failing; others by players simply entering the area. Unlike TSW, the timers for repeatability aren’t so long — beta players have seen events repeat many many times over the course of an extended play session. The timers are hidden, in fact, so there’s no real telling exactly when a specific event is going to pop.

It may be an illusion, but the fact that GW2′s Dynamic Events seem to be so focused on areas of the map make it seem like there is a significantly greater number of things to do in Tyria. 1500+ events, 200 renown hearts, points of interest, waypoints, skill challenges, and now the newly-announced vistas in each zone…

Both games have been in development for five years or more, have taken radically different approaches to the genre, and have come up with unsurprisingly different results. TSW has made me wonder about how my experience in GW2 is going to pan out, however.

Am I going to miss being able to acquire every ability in the game on one character? Well, yes and no — every profession in GW2 has the ability to perform as damage, support, or control; just like every character in TSW can (with the right Deck) perform the more traditional Tank/DPS/Healer roles of the holy trinity. A GW2 character will have to make do with a more limited palette of available skills to pick from, but they’ll still be able to play any role in game with the right build. And since each of the professions has a more distinctive aesthetic and playstyle, will that actually offer a longer player experience than TSW?

I suspect so, especially considering how TSW’s combat is so very resource-management-heavy  — pretty much every weapon in the game works a similar way: spam builder abilities to get “combo points”; use consumer abilities to spend them on harder hitting abilities. It gets surprisingly repetitive, though not yet to the detriment of my enjoyment of the game.

Am I going to enjoy wandering and exploring in GW2 more? TSW’s maps are big and atmospheric, and they do have golden Lore honeycombs to find and random missions out in the wilderness to stumble across — they also have an impressive sense of vertical scale that has, with a couple of people in my cabal (guild), induced a sense of vertigo. But as much as I really do love the atmosphere (Transylvania is one of the most atmospheric, haunting-yet-beautiful zones in any game I’ve ever played) TSW just doesn’t seem to have as much to do at launch as GW2 already has in beta.

Conclusions(?)

I’m not sure I’ve drawn any real mental conclusions from this blog. I wrote it to try and sort out things in my head about TSW. Something is niggling away at the back of my mind. Chances are it’s that £11.99 subscription fee scratching away, asking me if it’s worth it. A few days ago I’d have said yes, undoubtedly. Even now, with the repeatable content, I can keep on plodding along. But after five decks, with seven more to go, I’m starting to lose a bit of impetus. There’s only so many times I can repeat the exact same content.

I have to wonder if GW2 will fall into the same trap. It would be interesting to see just how many missions TSW actually has — I haven’t seen a number anywhere, and I certainly haven’t counted them myself (too lazy)! — and compare with the 1500+ events and so on.

~Demajen