[Trailer] The Secret World

One of the most secretive upcoming games is definitively Funcom's The Secret World, Ragnar Tornquist's new project, the visionary creator of The Longest Journey and Dreamfall. The Secret World (TSW) is an MMORPG that promises to be vastly different from the genre norm, deviating in both setting and gameplay mechanics, doing away with both level progressing and the subsequent grind factor.

The setting of the game is based on a contemporary version of our world, and it promises to provide players with a quite scary experience, something that MMORPG's in the past have consciously shied away from.

While it's too early to tell whether TSW will live up to its promises, especially when considering that Tornquist's previous games though brilliant, they never moved passed the conventions of the adventure and action-adventure genres, one can hardly doubt Funcom's ability to hype their game.

The official site contains an entire psychological test that chooses the game faction that is most suited to your personality*, and I was glad to discover that all three available factions reside in different shades of grey, nothing appears to be morally black or white in TSW.

In the recent PAX convention, a cinematic trailer was unveiled for the game, though it shouldn't come as a big surprise to anyone that it does not reveal much about the game itself, nor its world. Still, it's visually very impressive and appropriately moody, so it works great as a teaser.



TL;DR version:

The Secret World promises to be an entirely different kind of MMORPG, free of all the annoying elements of the genre, such as level grinding. Fans of said genre know better than to take such comments at heart, given that countless games have already made that claim only to introduce a different kind of grind, yet with TSW, even if the grind rears its ugly head again, at least we'll have a unique setting and an genuinely intriguing game world.

That's something.

* I ended up in the Illuminati, which isn't really a big surprise.