• The Secret World – It’s an Adventure!

    The latest beta weekend for The Secret World has just ended and while I’m still quite excited for the game I’m starting to have some worries as well. Specifically, while the game is close to what I’ve been looking for I’m not sure that most people playing are looking for the same thing I am. The Secret World is a game based on exploration, investigation and discovery. Yes, there are combat missions. Yes, there are missions where you have to “go to location x and kill y of critter z”. But the main story missions require thought and investigation. Based on what I saw rolling past in the chat window, I’m not sure most players realize that. I easily saw hundreds of requests for “What is the solution to (some mission)?” It isn’t clear if the players in question had tried to solve it on their own and failed, but a number of them were rejecting hints and demanding the solution. They are trying to power through the content just to get their characters leveled up. They’re looking for end-game content. The problem is that in this game the game isn’t about the end-game. As the cliché says; it’s about the journey, not the destination. The beauty of the investigation missions is that the solutions to them aren’t in the game! You have to do real research yourself to solve them. While some players will welcome this challenge I think it is frustrating a far greater number. This isn’t an

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  • It’s Not Reality, It’s Just a Fantasy

    I took a swing through a bookstore the other day, the first one I had been through since the demise of my local Borders, and as usual went to check out the SF section. What I found, also as usual of late, was that most of it was actually fantasy. Mostly Urban Fantasy, actually; so much urban fantasy. I didn’t find anything (my reading pile is still big enough that I don’t need to grab anything just to have something to read) but as I left I started wondering what happened to the Science Fiction shelves of old. I remember when Science Fiction and Fantasy were two different areas in the stores and the SF shelf was the larger of the two. No longer. Of course, part of it is the popularity and success of such things as the Harry Potter and Twilight series which of course have spawned their imitators, but this just changes the question as to why these series became so popular in the first place. I think it is because that, based on what Science Fiction promised us, Science has failed. I’m not talking about “where’s my flying car?” here. Up through the 1950’s and 1960’s, everyone thought that science (Science!) would solve all of our problems. Robots would remove all need for menial labor. The Atom would provide all our energy needs. We would be living in a utopia fueled by the fruits of science. Reality didn’t match that. We are constantly told of the

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