Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

Ten Ton Hammer: You are giving players plenty of quest options in the game. Can you talk about the types of quests and how they will be interwoven into the storylines?

Ragnar Tornquist: There won’t actually be any ‘quests’ in The Secret World – there will be missions. Semantics, perhaps, but our missions are quite different from traditional quests, something that’s crucial to how this game will look and feel and play. It won’t be like any MMO you’ve ever played.

I can’t say too much about it now, but it’s got more of an open world vibe to it, and players will be able to pick and choose the kind of gameplay they want to focus on – you’re never stuck with just one option, just one type of gameplay. It’s all about what you’re in the mood for, how you want to have fun today – if you want to fight monsters, great, you can always do that, there are more than enough evil beasties to go around. If you want to dig into a mystery or an investigation, solve puzzles and play mini-games, chat with non-player characters – well, you have those options, too. There’s exploration, espionage, sabotages, story and lore – and all of these various gameplay mechanics reward you for the time you’ve spent playing. You don’t have to just keep killing things to develop your character. There are plenty of other ways to gain skills, pick up cool items and weapons, clothes, and so on.

We don’t want to limit the player to just one way of playing – we want to empower the player and allow anyone and everyone to have as much fun as possible, the way they want to have fun.

We use the phrases ‘be who you want to be’ and ‘play how you want to play’, and we actually mean it.

(Incidentally, anyone caught using the word ‘quest’ on our team has to pay a small fine. True story. I think we may have enough money for a real shindig soon.)

Ten Ton Hammer: The theory of modern day reality breaking down into the supernatural is a great setting for an MMO, what made you jump at this type of IP?

Ragnar Tornquist: For me, personally, it’s the kind of setting I’ve wanted to see in games for more than ten years – even before we started looking at making an MMO. There are so many novels and comics, movies and TV shows that take place in this sort of contemporary dark fantasy setting, and I find it really strange that no one else has made a game in a setting like this before.

Also, since I was a kid, I’ve been infinitely fascinated by ancient history, lost civilizations, cryptozoology, urban legends and conspiracy theories – so to me, this is the perfect universe for a game, and the perfect framework for telling stories, and it’s a dream come through to be working on this game.

For Funcom in general, I think we saw that there was a real potential to do something new and different, to fill a hole that hadn’t been covered by countless medieval fantasy worlds and alien planets (and we know everything there is to know about fantasy worlds and alien planets). And that also meant doing something new and interesting on the gameplay side, and not following exactly the same kind of MMO template as everyone else.

Ten Ton Hammer: How is development going on the game? This is some of the first footage we have seen, are you meeting your development milestones?

Ragnar Tornquist: Development is going really well. We’re currently close to a hundred people in Oslo and Beijing, and we’re growing every week. We’ve been working on The Secret World since 2006, so obviously we’ve got a lot more in store than what we’re showing now – but all in good time.