When the abbreviation MMORPG begins to stably call the majority of the images of orcs, elves, fantasy fortresses and girls in armored vehicles, it becomes clear: the time has come for a fresh stream. How much can, in the end, look at the hypertrophied delights of the drawn elf, “grinat”, “bait” and, holding his breath, wait until the duli changes next to the character’s name to give him a new level.

Here are the notorious game community developers from Funcom In time, they felt public fatigue from the same type of Korean and quite European multi -user fun. They felt – and offered the world community of MMO fans something completely new. At least tried.

Do not wake the sleeping dragon, as well as two more secret societies

Finally emerging from the beta testing zone The Secret World It is pierced through the theory of conspiracies, light lavcrafts and heavy, protracted zombies-apocalypse. The world here is divided into three camps. Fanatical Templars convince neophytes that the high mission of their organization is the fight against evil. Illuminati wanted to spit on evil, good, temples and templars: they need power and money – simply and tastefully. The Far Eastern Association Dragon builds its ideology around the struggle of order and chaos. In fact, all three secret societies strive for secret, but comprehensive control over the world. And apparently, they do well. Everyone.

Regardless of the chosen party, the game begins with an invitation for us. Nice – or not very – a person tells the hero about his chosenness and strongly recommends that the headquarters of a secret society for briefing, training and receive the first tasks as soon as possible. Literally from the threshold, our character, having not yet had time to really come to his senses, is already in the whirlwind of plot adventures.

Everything is as always: behind – zombies, in front – zombies, underfoot – vile, moved processes, it is not clear what. The usual weekend.

Many starting events, however, are similar to all three fractions. So, in the Templar, that in the Illuminatical skin we will certainly live a small flashback from the life of wonderful zombies in the Tokyo metro. Only in one case, our character simply faints and sees himself in a dream in the skin of another person who made his way through the Horde of Wild Dead Fools some time ago, and in the other-falls into the same magical dream by the will of a half-crazy doctor-experimental. You are not here Wow, where for each race their unique starting quests were prepared.

The main thing is not a suit at all

Not surprising: there is no one, except for human. Indeed, what gnomes can be in the middle of modern New York or Seoul!

At the start, we can choose the appearance of the character, the name-familia and-without fail-the nickname, bring it to the suit-that’s all. By the way, the clothes will subsequently play any fighting role, unlike amulets-dalismans. So, there will be no adventurers dressed in ugly only because it is ugly – an order of magnitude better in characteristics than there is a beautiful.

In general, pupils Funcom followed the path of total cancellation. Having eliminated racial diversity in the root, the developers also refused the classes, and at the same time – from the levels. Of course, this decision, supposedly declaring large gaming freedom, is actually nothing more than a PR. Just players still in the process of “pumping” begin to navigate the level of “shmota”, and not in the dials next to the nickname. We are used to doing the same thing in Endheim any MMO, so a game in which the level is not important, not that in a novelty for us.

But the class system has really undergone revolutionary changes. The purpose and role of the character here turned out to be significantly more flexible and mobile than in the traditional model. The fact is that in The Secret World Class – or rather, “build” – is tied not to the character, but to the weapon used along with the corresponding set of abilities. Two “guns” can be carried with you at once, one of which may well turn out to be a magic focus – a thing that allows you to wet monsters with spells. At the same time, we can type on the abilities of the abilities of any “abedes”. Fortunately there are more than five hundred of them.

Impressive? Take a guboscanator from the nightstand. Only fourteen skills can be taken into battle – seven active and seven passive. This set determines our tendency to “tank”, treatment or a pure, uncomplicated murder of enemies.

Joker does not live in the deck

Now put the Gubskatter in place and get ready for joyful discoveries. It would be stupid to give the player a choice of five hundred abilities, then tightly locked him in a chest of fourteen possible, true? The developers also considered this approach unreasonable and immediately allowed us to change our combat entity at our first desire – as soon as we accumulate enough experience in order to fill the two “builds” with abilities. Further – more. Purely theoretically, the player can buy out at least all the skills that exist in the game to “score” a bunch of different specializations with them. How much time will it take to embody this heroic feat – another question.

We can combine abilities as you like. You can make something completely non -viable from your character – until we find the opportunity to create a second combat hypostasis for ourselves. They will not let us change the ready -made alignment of skills. At least so far there is no talk of it. As a result, many players discover their uselessness in the underground-Radid situation, for example, directly in a collision with the first “boss”.

But with the existing freedom of choice, each character in the process of “pumping” becomes a multi -class multi -station. So, it can perform many different tasks in the group depending on the command staff and the specific “enncaunter”.

For those who are not able to independently determine which direction to develop, and in which – curls, creators The Secret World prepared one hundred percent templates – the so -called decks. That’s where our traditional ideas about classes were driven: each deck has its own name and is perfectly adapted for a specific role. There are eleven such sets in the game.

Synergy, reincarnation, torsion fields

Our hero can own three types of weapons. Each type, in turn, includes three subspecies of murderous tools. Masters of blades, hammers and customs work in close combat. Far battle is represented exclusively by “firearms” – pistols, rifles and shotguns will easily demolish the head of both a zombie and a person. Mages knead their spells on the power of the elements and on the blood or draw power from chaos.

Speak, photographed on the background of the carpet is not prestigious? What about photos on the background of such a carpet?

All this is quite effective and spectacular. The most pleasant thing, the abilities in one branch of weapons skills are often interconnected and allow you to build simple, but effective combinations of shocks and shots, thanks to which not only opponents, equal to us in terms of capabilities, but also those on whose side are a clear forceful advance.

The fact is that the combat system is based on a curious, although not new in essence, the so -called synergy. In essence, gentlemen from Funcom It was simply summarized, streamlined and beautifully called the principle that has long been used in more or less decent RPGs-and not only MMO. Namely – a diagram of the mutual influence of different abilities, types of weapons and effects imposed on the target. That is, if we say, three times in a row hit the enemy with a certain spell, on the third hit the synergistic connection of the spells used with another witchcraft from our arsenal, and the enemy falls under the effect of an automatically used abilities, which takes away a unit of health per second. Not that we never encountered such tricks in other games – it happened more than once. Here, many things are just a little more logically organized. More logical – and at the same time inevitably less elegant.

So, the system of accumulation of the same type of effects on the target known to many MMO fans, followed by exploding these effects with another blow or spell, received the rank of universal law. In every weapon branch of development there are abilities that affect the enemy with a certain amount of “charge”, and there are skills that cause a spontaneous and very destructive discharge of all this potential.

On the one hand, thanks to synergy, the battle almost never turns into the same “jamming” when we press on one or two buttons and kill everyone to the right and left. On the other hand, once building seven active abilities in one effective combination is not that too difficult task. Further removal of oncoming bodies soon begins to give a routine in the spirit of “1 – 3 – 3 – 2 – 2 – 5, 1 – 3 – 3 – 2 – 5 eight times in a row, until you need to use a healing spell tied to the button under number 6”.

Glory to the Internet and Guglu, his prophet

Fortunately, in something, but in “Grinda” The Secret World You can’t blame. Having got out of the starting, training location-London, New York or Seoul-we immediately fall into the thick of quest events.

Maybe the zombies also want to hug and devour the cookies. Maybe this is not the brains at all attracting them in us. And where do we get the brains?

There are not just a lot of quests – they are everywhere. And the only negative connected with them is the inability to collect all the tasks in the location at once, in order to then fulfill what is territorially closer. Our maximum – five tasks at the same time. And this is slightly sad, because not only the quantity, but also the quality of the side branches makes with an enthusiastic and slightly advanced look to rush around the cities, settlements and deserts in search.

Along with the most ordinary instructions like “go and kill” or “collect supplies” there are spy missions and investigations that make you remember the brilliant adventure past Funcom. Having stumbled upon a corpse of a cleaning lady in the middle of the city’s living dead, we suddenly go on the trail of a spy mission, looking for a secret code – and with disappointment we find that our Illuminite authorities are not at all interested in the investigation of this case, because it is the illuminates that are initially worth the intelligence operation. At the same time, if you turn on the built-in web browser https://www.greenwichodeum.com/wp-content/pages/understanding-transaction-fees-for-gambling-with-credit-cards.html that throws us to the real Internet with the real Google inside, we can find that the surname of the priest, behind whom the deceased cleaning lady coincides with the name of the famous novellist writer.

Speaking of an outstanding adventure past Funcom, we mean the first of all The Longest Journey, included among the best -selling and popular game series in this genre. Moreover, nationwide gaming love won both the first part, released in 1999, and the sequel, with which the general public was able to get acquainted in 2006.

Such allusions, hints and reminiscences in the game are full. You can run into an empty eatery – and suddenly find yourself in the middle of the scenery of the first episode Fahrenheit. You can stumble upon the trace Silent Hill or look at the map – and see that the street, on which we are now standing, is named after Howard Lovecraft (Howard Lovecraft).

Lovecraft-then with Silent Hill together and bring us to another feature The Secret World. Here is a really gloomy atmosphere in general. The developers do not hide their desire to make from the game if not a horror, then at least noir. Dark locations, champing and moans of stillborn monsters, suicides, corpses and harsh NPCs – this is this world, by the way, not too large in size for MMO, but quite decent graphically embodied. Even the animation of movements could be called completely natural, if it were not for the compressed, motionless lips of the heroes, who could sigh very believable, support the cheek and twist their heads, but for some reason not to talk humanly.

Night Seoul is like night London and Night New York. There is a suspicion that at night in the rain both Moscow and Istanbul will look like a similar way.

However, the texts of conversations partly correct the impression of strange facial expressions: the rich inner world of the characters is really rich. Local inhabitants – living people with difficult characters and their own stories, with understandable aspirations and goals. There is something to plunge in, there is someone to sympathize. With the ability to create an atmosphere in Funcom Everything is still all right.

The Secret World – The project, without a doubt, is a curious. And even if some of the fresh decisions are actually a quail and regrouping of discoveries, long ago Blizzard, For example. Let there be frank flaws;Let the world are small;Let, finally, have already tired of these zombies spitting from everywhere – for the sake of plot twisters and quest chains, for the sake of a viscous atmosphere, you can again endure the dead and, possibly, even come to terms with some combat routine. Unless, of course, you are ready for everything we talked about, to give fifty euros.

Pros: many original quests;Interesting storylines for each fraction;original skills distribution system;natural dialogs;worthy graphics;A sustained gloomy atmosphere.
Cons: routine battles;flaws in the interface;secondaryness of many solutions;A somewhat overstated price.