The Secret World
The Secret World arrived in 2012 as a deliberate outlier in a genre dominated by dragons and pseudo‑medieval kingdoms: a modern‑day MMO about conspiracies, occult horror and the idea that every urban legend you’ve ever heard is true somewhere. Built by Funcom under Ragnar Tørnquist’s direction, it launched as a subscription title published with EA, then struggled commercially before being reworked into the free‑to‑play Secret World Legends in 2017 with revamped combat and progression. What has always set it apart, in both incarnations, is the way it treats story and setting as the main attraction rather than just a frame for loot and raids.
Tørnquist’s pitch was straightforward: take a recognisable version of our world and layer every myth, legend and conspiracy theory on top of it until the seams start to show. Players join one of three secret societies—the Illuminati in New York, the Templars in London, or the Dragon in Seoul—and are then thrown into a shadow war against eldritch forces that bleed into reality from places like the Hell dimensions and the filth‑choked depths of Agartha. Each faction has its own philosophy and tone: the Illuminati are cynical power‑brokers, the Templars are authoritarian “we keep you safe so you don’t have to know” traditionalists, and the Dragon embrace chaos and long‑term manipulation. The overarching story threads through multiple locations—Solomon Island off the New England coast, Egypt, Transylvania, Tokyo—drawing on whatever local folklore and history fits.
Kingsmouth, on Solomon Island, is the game’s first major questing area and probably its most iconic. It looks, at first glance, like a sleepy New England fishing town: clapboard houses, a church on a hill, a diner, a gas station. But the streets are empty of the living and full of zombies and worse, the coastline is littered with wrecks, and there’s an unsettling amount of occult graffiti and Illuminati symbology scattered around if you stop to look. Environmental details—peeling posters, boarded‑up storefronts, handwritten notes and half‑finished newspaper editions—tell you that this didn’t happen overnight, and that the town had secrets long before the fog rolled in. The sound design leans heavily on creaks, distant sirens and wind, giving the impression of a place that is holding its breath.
The game’s progression system reinforces that sense of being an operative rather than a class stereotype. Instead of fixed classes and levels, The Secret World uses a level‑less, skill‑based system built around weapon and ability decks. You invest points into weapon trees—pistols, assault rifles, hammers, blades, blood magic, chaos magic and so on—and mix and match actives and passives to build a role that suits you, whether that’s a gun‑and‑magic hybrid healer, a melee brawler with self‑shields, or a pure damage dealer built around exploiting specific states. That flexibility encourages experimentation and lets the same character pivot between soloing, group damage, tanking or support by swapping decks, which fits the fiction of a highly trained operative learning new tricks as the investigation widens.
Where The Secret World really distinguishes itself is in its mission design, especially the investigation quests. Rather than simply sending you to kill ten monsters or click on glowing objects, these assignments ask you to decode ciphers, examine environment clues, look up real‑world references and draw connections between scraps of information. The Kingsmouth Code, for example, has you follow Illuminati symbols hidden around town, interpret Bible verses, and notice Latin mottoes on manhole covers in order to uncover a secret basement and an Illuminati relic stash. Other missions send you trawling in‑game browser windows for historical references, parsing music and artwork, or navigating by cryptic, lore‑rich hints rather than waypoints. It can be obtuse and occasionally frustrating, but when it works it gives the rare feeling that you’re solving a mystery rather than ticking a box.
Outside Solomon Island, the same design philosophy extends to other regions. Egypt’s zones mix sun‑blasted ruins, cult compounds and buried horrors, drawing on local myths and colonial history; Transylvania leans into vampire and werewolf folklore; Tokyo brings in urban legends, techno‑occult phenomena and the fallout from a catastrophic event in the subway. Each area has its own art and writing team, which helps keep the tone and internal logic consistent within a region even as the global story threads everything together. Throughout, strong voice acting and often razor‑sharp dialogue—from weary innkeepers and conspiracy theorists to smug demons and quietly terrified bureaucrats—anchor the surreal horror in very human reactions.
Commercially, The Secret World never quite became the breakout success Funcom hoped for, but its influence and reputation have lasted better than its subscriber graphs. The 2017 Secret World Legends relaunch kept the core story and areas but shifted to a free‑to‑play, more action‑oriented model in an attempt to reach a wider audience, and the game remains available today with its full suite of story content free to access. As a proof of concept, it stands as one of the clearest examples of how an MMO can make narrative and atmosphere the central pillars of its design, using modern settings, deep lore and genuinely challenging puzzles to create something that still feels singular in the genre.
