While The Secret World (and its ill-fated Secret Legends reboot) still exist and can be played today, they’ve been moved into the retirement home well before their time due to the studio abandoning the MMO for other properties. While The Secret World always had a difficult time attracting a huge population and generating sustainable income, it stood out as one of the most unique MMOs the genre’s ever seen.

Today I want to wax nostalgic as I look back upon one of my all-time favorite MMORPGs and share the special sauce (which probably contains a good dose of Filth) that made it wonderful to play – even if it was far from a perfect game.

The contemporary setting

As we well know, most MMOs are set in some kind of Euro-styled fantasy world, with a smaller portion of games in this genre taking place in the far-flung future of outer space. But when you’re trying to come up with a list of MMOs that take place in the contemporary world, it’s going to be pretty limited – and this title will be right at the top. The Secret World showed us that our world (albeit one with a crazy overlay) could be a fascinating setting that connects with us in intuitive ways. Plus, we got both swords and shotguns!

A commitment to horror

I’m not a gore hound at all, but I appreciate that the horror genre spurs a lot of imagination – and that was an inspired choice for this game. An MMO set squarely in the horror genre? How would it be possible to scare or unsettle anyone with lots of other people running around? Oh, this game did it, and it did it well in many horror sub-genres, including Japanese horror, old world horror, Lovecraftian monsters, and your basic zombie horde.

Twists on myths and conspiracies

While pop culture’s love of conspiracies was long in the tooth even back when TSW released, this title had a lot of fun blending together a whole lot of everything under its maxim of “Everything is True.” So we got famous mythological beasts, secret societies, Biblical figures, and urban legends jammed together and given a Funcom-style twist.

Creative investigation missions

While The Secret World had plenty of your standard side quests, it was the few dozen “investigation missions” that became one of its headlining features. In short, an investigation mission was a quest that utilized out-of-the-box thinking and far more involvement on the part of the player to achieve. They were incredibly creative, such as one asking you to learn Morse code, or another having you go to various websites that Funcom created, or another that had you solving puzzles in a pyramid. You couldn’t breeze through these on auto-pilot; investigation missions required a lot of detective work and puzzle solving (or you could tap out and go to a walkthrough).

Games within games

Along with investigation missions is the fact that you never knew what this game was going to throw at you next. Sometimes it would create games within itself, such as a text-based adventure game you could solve or stealth missions that were brutally hard to the clumsy among us (myself included).

Highly memorable characters

In most MMOs, I can count on about one, maybe two hands (as much as I am able to count) of NPC characters that were written so memorably that I can recall them months or years later. In The Secret World? I could probably list most of them. That’s how vivid and interesting these characters are, and their stories make every quest worth doing to me.

The expanding mythic arc

While we never did get a resolution to many of the mysteries and plot threads laid out over the years, I have to say that the gradually unfolding mythic story arc was nothing short of fascinating. There’s so much going on in this setting, including something called “Exodus” that seems to portend an apocalyptic event.

The mix-and-match combat system

While this MMO’s combat system is, to be honest, an acquired taste (if one can taste it at all), I always appreciated the freedom to mix-and-match between two weapon types and then layer some abilities on top of that (including the ill-fated AEGIS system). There’s just something cool about being able to, say, wing some eldritch magic into an enemy’s face and then follow that up with a shotgun blast.

Very well-done writing

MMO writers don’t get enough credit for the novels and novels’ worth of effort they put into these games, and no more so than The Secret World, which cherishes good writing. Those memorable characters I mentioned earlier? They wouldn’t have come alive if some writer didn’t work hard to imbue each with a backstory, dialect, and connections to the tales you were about to experience.

It intruded on our reality

Out of every MMORPG I’ve ever played, only The Secret World tried to get in my head and make me think — a little — as if this was something that actually was happening in the real world. There were a lot of alternate reality aspects to this game (especially the investigation missions) that required web surfing and phone calls and even doing origami at home. That was a bit of head trickery, but I appreciated the extra immersion.

Everyone likes a good list, and we are no different! Perfect Ten takes an MMO topic and divvies it up into 10 delicious, entertaining, and often informative segments for your snacking pleasure. Got a good idea for a list? Email us at [email protected] or [email protected] with the subject line “Perfect Ten.”