More exciting MMO news, Massively has the scoop on the latest astonishing game to be revealed to the world before it really should have been. This time it’s Funcom’s The Secret World. Here are some quotes from the article with a little KiaSA commentary:
If you’ve been waiting for a chance to see what lies beyond the curtain and fall into the elegantly dark setting of The Secret World, then get ready
For the hype machine to start lumbering its way out of the dank cavernous pit where it has slumbered for an age, in search of human hope to feed upon and sate its hunger?
for your first glimpse of what lurks beyond.
Same difference.
At the GDC we got the chance to sit down and discuss The Secret World with Funcom and lay our
Hands?
eyes
Oh.
on a
Close to final copy of the game, that’s been through several testing stages and is almost ready to be previewed by the general public in what we’ll all laughingly refer to as a ‘beta test’?
few cinematics of the game.
Oh.
While we were unable to get our hands around
The developers’ necks for starting the hype with nothing more than a CGI screenshot of some virtual boobs wrapped in a tight vest accompanied by some hand waving marketing waffle that would make the OnLive people jealous?
a playable version of the title,
Ah.
we were treated to many of the game’s basics and concepts. This may not be the tidal wave of information, but it is a start to the flow of The Secret World’s river of fresh ideas.
Translation: “FEED THEM TO THE HYPE BEAST!”
[…] First and foremost, TSW will be an action/adventure styled MMO appearing on both the PC
and some random console – probably the 360 because it’s from Microsoft, as is Windows, so how hard could a port be – to show that they’re hip with the gaming fraternity, even though we all know that it’ll just hit the PC and be “Coming soon” to the console for the next ten years, assuming the game lasts that long.
and Xbox 360.
Bingo. By the way, how’s that Age of Conan port for the Xbox 360 coming along, Funcom?
There is no release date yet, although there are internal milestones that the team is attempting to stick to.
Translation: “We have no idea when this is going to be out, we only came up with the idea yesterday. Geoff has a few design goals written on the back of a cigarette packet, and we got Clive down in graphics to whip-up a CGI video to show to the Hype Waiters [*]. We’ll have some forums soon too, to allow speculation about anything and everything to do with the game, so that there will be maximum disappointment when, funnily enough, the game turns out to be nothing like the wild and unrealistic designs of a bunch of rabid fans.”
The concept of TSW was officially started in 2002, but was unofficially created by Ragnar in the late ’90s.
Honestly, they’ve been working on it for years. Tens of years. Almost, TOO MANY years, for something that they can’t show us any game-play for. Now, let’s all sing the Tabula Rasa song.
The idea was to take
White Wolf’s World of Darkness and make an MMO that was exactly like it, but with a different name?
our universe and overlay it on a world of contemporary dark fantasy. A game with urban locations that takes place in today’s world with fantastic qualities that include the stuff of legends and myth.
Meh, close enough.
Bored now. You can read the rest at Massively. Then I’d recommended a steaming hot bath and an all-over body scrub with carborundum grit and methylated spirit, in order to get yourself clean.
[*] Hype Waiters: People who serve hype to consumers.
In all honesty I hadn’t watched the preview trailer at the end of the article. So I’m quite proud of (saddened by?) the prescience of “CGI screenshot of some virtual boobs wrapped in a tight vest”.
Y’know, I was just reading the Eurogamer preview and thinking (i) “This sounds AMAZING!”, (ii) “Of course it sounds AMAZING, all MMOGs sound AMAZING years before release” and (iii) “LAUNCH TBHDM[1]!”
[1] Theatre Ballistic Hype Defence Melmoth
Theatre Ballistic Hype Defence Melmoth tried to launch, but that stupid Yellow Ranger was on the toilet, so the left leg was missing when all the Melmoth Modules combined.
From the sublime hype to the ridiculous reality. :(
I are sad panda.
Valid points. Sure. Also, ridiculously cynical. Is this the new direction we’re going to take for each and every MMO that’s announced? It’s going to suck until we’re proven right (or possibly wrong, but that’ll be a cold day in hell)? Are we ever allowed to look forward to anything ever again without being labeled as a naive hype-drinker? Because I’d really like to know.
But, all in all, that was a funny post.
Syp: Yes. Yes. No. If you want to indulge in hope every time something nice is promised, your local lottery retailer will be proud to hook you up. Your odds are much better with a scratch-off ticket.
Melmoth: the late ’90s! This game pre-dates Ultima Online! UO, EQ, and WoW are just pale imitations. With already a decade of development behind it, I know this is going to be awesome!
@Ysh: Don’t be sad! I’ll do the happy panda dance, look!
@Syp: I feel that the ridiculously cynical is a good way to balance the ridiculously fanciful. Don’t take it too seriously, satire is meant to provide a negative to the positive. It provides balance to the Force, if you will.
And I would hope that nobody would stop looking forward to something just because they read a cynical opinion of it on a blog.
At the end of the day I’m merely preaching temperance, not abstinence.
@Zubon: How can it possibly fail? It will be Rallos Zek, pre-Trammel and the multi-day Alterac Valley all rolled into one!
Syp: I would accept that this post is cynical only if a single game in the past four years had lived up to its pre-release hype.
Sometimes you need to chuck a hefty chunk of cynicism into the giant-Swiss-underground-tunnel of the brain, and as the super-accelerated cloud of hype smashes into it you may get a brief glimpse of the Higgs boson of realistic expectation. Or a black hole is created that sucks in the entire universe.
But its DAAAARK
you know this is the perfect MMO setting right?
*goes and reads call of cthulhu rule book*
I’m not calling for ridiculously fanciful anything… and yeah, I definitely get the humor of the post. But it’s just very reminiscent, for me, of the attitude that professional movie critics get about five or ten years into their jobs — when they stop getting excited about upcoming movies and start assuming they’ll suck beyond reason. Not because they all will, just because the majority will (or at least, will be lame). That’s when they start hating their profession and it starts to show in their writing.
You say that like it’s a bad thing…
(Oh, another classic) (Pretty much all his reviews, actually…)
I think the Massively “interview” with Ragnar T is just a case of lack of newsworthy material from GDC. If they would have had plenty to report it would more likely only been given a short note.