A candid talk about The Secret World

After the second official hands-on event of Funcom’s MMO The Secret World we sat down for a candid interview with the game’s lead designer Martin Bruusgaard about ARGs, old school Adventure Games, and the knock-on effect of their somewhat disappointing Age of Conan.

Q: Could you explain the reasoning behind structuring some of the game around ARG-style quests?

Martin Bruusgaard: We started discussing this about three years ago. Funcom had a reputation of not being afraid of pushing the boundaries of what different genres are, especially MMOs. We thought about lots of different possibilities, we actually had racing and lots of weird stuff. But one of the two things we ended up with were Sabotage missions and Investigations. Investigations really fit with the game. We had already done a couple ARGs with great success, it really blew our minds how it took off. We started with ARGs really, really early. Random people would find these tiny clues and suddenly you’d have thousands of people who work together in order to solve these things. We know that – I don’t think everybody will like those sort of missions.

I had a guy today who got really angry. Really frustrated. And we know. It’s not a big deal, it’s not a huge part of the game, we have about three per zone. And it’s just something we want players to work together in order to figure out.

That’s one of the other things we wanted to do with this game. We wanted people to work together. So many MMOs are just solo games now. You just play next to people and then it’s only once you start raiding at end level that you start teaming up. It’s always been a focus to try to get people to play together.

There’s actually an area in each zone that’s called a lair, which is suited for about two or three people. I really wanted to have that group confidence back into the zones. Half of the time you solo all the way to the end and then it’s like ‘now you need five players to kill the boss’. You just get five random people and then the group is bad. That’s not really group play. You have the public quests in WoW – they’re more like a competition. You only try to be the best one there to try to get the blue loot.

I want people to work together because people who play together stay together!

Q: Do you guys have personal experience developing ARGs then?

MB: Personally I haven’t. But we have people at Funcom who have. Especially one guy who has been the main ARG guy, that was his job basically.

Q: I used to play a lot of ARGs back in university, and one of the main issues was you would have a very small, core group solving the puzzles, and a massive audience simply watching it play out. Is that an issue you’re worried about?

MB: I think if I compare the ARGs we’ve done to the Investigation Missions, the Investigation Missions are easier. I think more people are able to solve them than the ARGs. For the ARGs we knew there would be a core group who would go and figure it out. But the splash in the community we get from the ARGs is huge because people talk about it. It’s word of mouth.

In the actual game there will probably be, the solutions will be in some wiki within five days. Two days.

Q: Is that a worry? Or are you welcoming that?

MB: We are welcoming it. We think that the people who like to do these kinds of things, they will do them. The people who don’t, they won’t. And the people who just want the reward, they can look it up. No mission gets you any better rewards than any other mission. So if you just want to get the reward you can look it up and do it. It’s made for people who like to solve those kinds of things and I don’t think they would want to spoil it for themselves.

So that’s how we look at it, and it’s impossible to avoid unless it’s made very dynamically.

Q: Funcom has a history with MMOs but you also have a history with adventure games, can you talk about how that has influenced Secret World?

MB: The main adventure game part mainly comes from Ragnar. Because he worked on longest Journey and Dreamfall. I never worked on those games, I worked on Conan before this. But he has brought a lot of the, especially the storytelling aspect to the Secret World. All the characters have pasts and they’re almost offspring of Dreamfall. And that part is like his baby on this project. He’s a part of everything but the stories and the characters are his baby. I think the way that we tell the story is very good but you’re not on rail or being spoon-fed. It’s more like a big puzzle.

Lots of puzzle pieces and they’re presented to the player. For the players that don’t care, they don’t care. For the players that do, they will put these pieces together and will be like oh! I see, it’s a picture! Oh that was just a corner of this huge picture! Telling a story this way is really interesting because it is more rewarding. Because you think, okay I didn’t really get who that guy was, and then you meet another guy ten hours later and you’re like “oh they’re brothers!”.

Having those sort of “ah-ha! Moments” are very rewarding and cool.

Q: Funcom is one of the few studios who bounce back and forth between making an MMO and making single-player games. What do you think your identity is in the industry?

MB: It’s hard to say because a lot of people remember us from Conan. Conan was probably a lot of people’s first interaction with Funcom. That’s both good and bad. We got a lot of critical voices of Conan, a lot of praise as well. All in all I think it was a good game but it doesn’t matter really!

I think, how should I put this? More like the old school players, they remember Anarchy online, Dreamfall, and The Longest Journey. Where do we stand? I don’t know, now we come out with The Secret World which is sort of a mix between the genres but it’s more MMO than an Adventure Game. It’s not really an Adventure Game but it has Adventure elements.

So I think in five years, I think most people will say Funcom is an MMO company.

Q: Having worked on Age of Conan can you talk about what you’ve learned and brought to this game?

MB: Yep! I think most important is to have a consistent experience. Age of Conan wasn’t consistent. It was great at the beginning and sort of slacked off a bit. And we’ve taken that into consideration and made sure that, for example, whenever you get a quest from an NPC it’s voiced and has a cinematic. There’s equally as much content in every zone. So we made sure the player had a good experience. We wanted to make sure that items matter as well. At the beginning of AoC, you didn’t really feel the impact of getting a new item and in an MMO where progression is super important, that’s very bad if you don’t feel like you’re getting stronger. We also learned about things we did right. We know that people appreciate a pretty world, a world that they can believe in and immerse themselves in. So we spent a lot of time making the world believable and pretty.

Last time you saw London right? It really looks like London and feels like London, and today you saw Egypt looks like Egypt and New York is full of New York personality. So I mean, that we brought with us. And the engine. We know that the engine is really, really good and we’ve just been optimising and adding features for three and a half years now.

Q: What do you think about Conan these days? It’s gone free-to-play and has seen quite a few changes.

MB: Conan has been doing brilliantly.

Q: Do you find that surprising?

MB: I mean, I’m super happy about it. I always thought there were certain… I always felt like Conan was a beautiful flower that had a couple of leaves wilted. And those elements really ruined the pretty flower in a way. Funcom has picked them and people really like the game now, but it’s burned a lot of people and all those people who were burned see there are so many other alternatives out there and they’re like “no, I’m never coming to a Funcom game again”.

And that’s a shame. But that’s why I’m super happy that going free-to-play brought a lot of players back. And they like it. And that’s good.

Q: You’re coming out in the same year as Guild Wars 2 and we’re seeing a lot of free, or subscription-less games. Do you think it’s more difficult this year to come out with a new subscription-based MMO?

MB: I think it’s more difficult to come out with an MMO period, I have to be honest about that. I mean Star Wars just came out and it’s doing fairly well, and Guild Wars is getting fantastic previews. A lot of people are excited about that, including me. I was a huge Guild Wars 1 fan. So am I concerned about having a subscription? I’m not so worried about that, I mean for a triple-A MMO, a subscription is still the most common thing to do. And I feel that we are a triple-A MMO. I feel like we probably are in competition with some others but we also stand out in a lot of ways. The modern-day setting, I think that appeals to a lot of people. The story, the way we tell a story. The factions, the secret societies are new and fresh, everyone has their own agenda. And it creates good PvP. That’s how I feel that we stick out, and we have a chance to… a right to live, sort of, if you get what I mean.

Q: Had you launched last year, when it was essentially just WoW and RIFT bouncing around, would that have been easier?

MB: Hard to say, it would probably be easier – if I remember correctly – Cataclysm didn’t really do as well as they had hoped. At first it did but then not. I don’t know why people were surprised. “Oh there are some new levels, now I get to grind more”. I still play it, I love it, but some people were surprised, I don’t know why. And RIFT, I mean, I actually feel we have similarities with RIFT. But would it be easier? I would probably say yes.

I think Guild Wars will do really well.

Q: Is Guild Wars a worry?

MB: Yeah. That would be for me personally, I’m not speaking for the company here, but for me yeah, I think Guild Wars will do really well. Because I loved the first one, did you play it?

Q: Yeah.

MB: You probably see a lot of Guild Wars 1 in the sequel, and I just love that kind of gameplay.

Q: Is there anything from other MMOs that you’d like to incorporate into Secret World, or that influences its design?

MB: Not really. Not directly but to some degree Anarchy Online. I loved the freedom of it, I felt like a snowflake in AO because of the skill system. I feel you have the same possibility in Secret World. You can be unique, you can come up with combos that no one has ever thought of before, there’s tons of gear and you can really come up with some really cool chain effects based on how passive and active abilities relate to one another. In that sense, being unique, AO has influenced it.