Interview: Ragnar Tørnquist talks candidly about why The Secret World has more to offer than your average MMORPG.
I’m not the biggest fan of MMORPGs, given that I only have a certain amount of gaming hours in a week that I prefer to dedicate to new titles and old favourites that can be played in small bursts. The concept of being expected to dedicate dozens of hours a week to an MMORPG is scary, to say the least. But The Secret World has me intrigued with its lack of a levelling system, tri-faction approach and ‘meta’ puzzle solving. I recently sat down with Ragnar Tørnquist, producer and director of The Secret World, and discovered he had a lot of interesting things to say about his upcoming MMORPG.
Atomic: I wanted to start with a bit of background, so I was thinking can you tell me the basic pitch behind The Secret World from the perspective of a gamer who knows nothing about it?
Ragnar: For a new gamer, The Secret World is an MMORPG for the PC, of course, that takes place in a modern day real world. In our world, everything is true: every myth, every legend, every conspiracy theory. So there are vampires, there are werewolves, there are demons, there’s a city on the moon, Stone Henge is a beacon, the Earth is hollow, there’s tonnes of really cool myths and legends that we have in our game that the players get to experience and explore. In addition to that, players join one of three secret societies. They’ll take part in a global war for ultimate domination. So players join either The Templars, who are based in London, The Illuminati who are based in New York or The Dragon based in Seoul. And these three factions stand united against the rising evil, so you’ll be able to team up with members of other factions to fight monsters, but they still remain divided in the pursuit of power. So with PvP, you’ll be able to go into these PvP playing fields and duke it out against these other factions in order to hold these important ancient relics.
Atomic: So is that player versus player versus player?
Ragnar: It is. It’s three sides and really is an interesting thing that I think games in the past used to do that we haven’t seen a lot of games do recently, but what it adds is that dimension of people ganging up on a third party. So in a two-sided conflict, you can always end up with one being more powerful than the other and the outcome is already decided. But with a three-sided fight, with The Illuminati for example, holding the Chinese temple, The Templars and The Dragon can create an uneasy alliance and really gang up on The Illuminati to take them off the throne. Then, of course, they’ll start fighting in order to be the ones who take over that again. So you can have a really interesting class-based dynamic in those PvP battles.
Atomic: So does that happen on the ground level as well as in the bigger picture? You’ve got three different factions fighting for power; does that mean at their foot soldier level, I guess you’d say, that you can actually have, on a battlefield, a player versus a player versus a player? And how do you balance that sort of combat?
Ragnar: It sort of balances itself in a way because, I mean, players have access to similar skills all over the place. So the players between the three factions are pretty evenly balanced in the first place. Then, of course, there’s a tactical level of which control points are you gonna take over, which spawn points are you gonna try to take over. We’ll send skirmishers in here, maybe they’ll be protected by the other side, maybe the other third-party will come in to prevent them from being taken over because they have a tactical advantage. I mean, it’s an ever-shifting sort of war map and, of course, it’ll be interesting to see how it plays out when we actually have hundreds of players. But, y’know, I mean, in our view, it’s going to sort of keep balancing itself out because allegiances and control points will shift so often that there’s always going to be places where the combat is happening, where the focus is happening and people are going to flock to that. Other people are gonna take advantage of that. So it’s going to be a very fluid kinda combat situation.
Atomic: And that will shift in real-time on the battlefield?
Ragnar: Absolutely.
Atomic: You mentioned before that it has a lot of mythology and legend, and in your game that’s all true. How did you go about filtering out the good stuff from the crap stuff?
Ragnar: There’s a lot of scary stuff out there, I’m gonna tell you. I don’t know if you ever encountered any of these conspiracies-
Atomic: -Oh yes-
Ragnar: -but there is a lot of crazy stuff. So we definitely spent a lot of time working on the backstory for this game. We started working on it back in 2002 probably when we started exploring these myths and legends and reading up on everything. At the same time we designed our unique backstory, which is ours; it’s something that’s a foundation for the game story. But whatever sort of fits into that is something that we took advantage of. Whenever there’s a myth or legend that seems to fit into our world, we bring that in, but we twist it and make it ours. Of course, there are references, such as Dracula in Transylvania. He’s not going to be exactly the way you’re used to seeing Dracula. Our zombies are different to what you’re used to seeing, really. The Hollow Earth, for example, is a myth that pops up in every culture and every legend all over the place, but we’ve sort of taken that and found the common ideas and then combined that into an interesting view that fits with our world view inside the game. So it’s been a long process and it’s come from a list that’s like a mile long to more focussed stuff. And then, of course, we have tonnes of stuff that we’re gonna do after launch. Y’know, we’re gonna address this and this and this that we don’t have time or space to do that now, we’re gonna wait for those later on.
Atomic: The things you were talking about addressing there, is that more gameplay balancing stuff or is that more narrative?
Ragnar: It’s more narrative and, I mean, an MMO is a living game so, of course, we’re going to add to the content, we’re going to add to the feature list, we’re gonna tweak the balance and we’re gonna add all the multiplayer factions to the game, such as NPC factions that you can ally yourself with. So the game is gonna be shifting its role and, of course, having this reservoir of myths and legends and great real-world locations means that we have such a wealth of things to do after launch and things to add to the game. I mean, we already have a laundry list of locations we want to do on every continent, so we can add to this expanding world.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012