Back in the nineties, Lara Croft was actually a man. Yet Larry Croft never saw the light of day, because one sex symbol named Larry was quite enough. Okay, well, actually, Tomb Raider’s creators vetoed him for being too similar to Indiana Jones. Then, they went back to the drawing board.

This hasn’t stopped other developers from copying Indy, however. In The Secret World, my character wields a whip. She found the whip by using a “time tomb”, called the “TARDIS”. She also has a fancy fedora hat. The other day, she wielded her whip, while wearing her hat, riding on a train to recover an ark. The ark, after all, belongs in a museum.

That quest was great fun, but the obvious ripoffness of at least three IPs got me thinking: how far can a game go in blatantly copying someone else? We all know how paranoid publishers can get about gamers copying games. So what gives with the double standards?

Funcom has detailed the next monthly content drop for beleagured MMORPG The Secret World. Issue #6: The Last Train To Cairo takes place in – where else? – Egypt, and involves time travel.

Players will be tasked with freeing catured warriors of the Marya from Atenist cultists. Good old Said, the undead weapons trader, has advice to offer, and by following his guidance through main and side missions, you’ll uncover the truth behind the Atenist movement. It all culminates in a showdown on top of the titular train racing towards Cairo with a lethal cargo.

The update also adds a new auxiliary weapon, the whip, which is good for buffs and crowd control, and opens up a new ten-man raid in the South Pacific for those strong enough to tackle lairs.

Issue #6 is due in early March and kicks off a Veteran and Recruitment program which rewards long-term members and those who bring in newbies, as well as a new PvP ranking system.

Source: Funcom

Last month The Secret World dropped its subscription fee and moved to a pay-one, play-forever model akin to that of Guild Wars 2. Now, it seems, that move is paying off.

Funcom claims in a stock report to their investors that “activity levels in the game have increased by over 400% as original players have returned joined by thousands of new players”. Furthermore, Funcom reports that The Secret World shifted 70,000 sales in the last four weeks, which marks a 30% jump in sales figures.

It’s not all good news though — an announced restructuring of the company means that the Montreal studio of the developer is set to see some job losses, with further losses across the company. However, no games are set to be cancelled as a result.

Source: Funcom via GI.biz

As of only minutes ago, occult horror MMO The Secret World has gone free-to-play. The change was hinted at in an “end of the world” video starring Game Director Joel Bylos yesterday, but now has been officially confirmed.

Explained in this forum thread, the F2P transition places no restrictions on free players, but you are still required to purchase the game (Guild Wars 2-style). Those who do purchase ‘Membership’ can accelerate their experience gain for 1 hour every 16 hours, get discounts in the Item Store, and occasional free stuff.

Check out all the details below, or click here for our huge review of The Secret World.

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Last month, The Secret World’s game director told us a little bit about the upcoming update and the game’s first raid. Now, there is a new devblog up telling us a little bit more about what went into designing the raid, and what we can expect.

The post goes into some of the challenges the team faced creating a raid for such an unusual skill tree, but also mentions that the raid is designed to be inclusive and introduce players who are new to the concept to the idea of raids. It’s also balanced so that you don’t need to be equipped with the best endgame gear to be able to complete it, and that it’s on a level with some of the game’s Tier-1 Nightmares such as Polaris, Hell Raised or Darkness War.

It’s a 10-person raid that will have a 32-hour cooldown upon beating the bad guy at the end, who will, predictably, drop some phat lootz and hand over some sweet achievements. The post is lengthy and I’ve only skimmed the surface here, so I suggest that if you’re interested you head over to the official site and check it out.

Source: The Secret World

Over at the forum for The Secret World, the new game director Joel Bylos has left a great big post outlining the new features in the game’s latest update, ‘Issue #4: Big Trouble in the Big Apple’. Chief among these are… well, to be honest, he talks about a lot of things. So I would recommend you check it out if you’re at all interested in the game. But let’s just talk about some of the main features of Issue #4.

This fourth update will feature one of the game’s most requested changes, namely reticule combat. If that doesn’t sound like something you want though, Bylos does mention that it’s entirely optional and not an overhaul of the combat system, so you’ll be able to freely switch between the two. Some other interesting new additions include the introduction of the game’s second auxiliary weapon, the Chainsaw, and the opening of the Albion Theatre in London, where we can all put on plays for each other for rewards.

Finally, there will of course be, ‘Big Trouble in the Big Apple’, in the form of the game’s first raid, battling an eldritch horror in the ruins of Times Square. You can “forget about trash mobs and gunning it to get to the end boss as fast as possible; in true ‘The Secret World’ style we will be using the raid to tell a story and immerse our players into our world’s rich atmosphere,” says Bylos.

If this at all interest you, be sure to check out the full post, because this really is the bare bones. Also, it would be a disservice to such an interesting and innovative game to not mention that it does have a free trial available to download (about halfway down on the right there). If you haven’t given it a shot, I do recommend trying it for yourself!

Source: The Secret World forums

The success of The Secret World seemed all but assured: a new and intriguing modern-day occult setting, a level-free system, an evolving personal story, and of course the brand-name power of Ragnar Tørnquist. But despite this, sales of the game have been much slower than anticipated — to the point where Funcom laid off up to half its staff, including the Lead Designer.

That Lead Designer, Martin Bruusgaard, has now come forward to reflect on how The Secret World reached this point. “Looking at the numbers from our (million-player-strong) beta where – and I don’t know exact numbers – but it was something like 80% thought the game was good or great and would recommend it to their friends… the numbers were really, really positive. We thought we must’ve done something right, that people really liked us.”

Asked to identify what they could have done differently, Bruusgaard pointed to the level-free system. “This may be a radical thing to say, but I think it would have helped if we actually had levels in the game. I’m sort of ashamed to say it, but I think that might’ve made things feel more familiar when it comes to players tracking their own progression and telling how strong they are, and knowing where to go. I think people got lost because they don’t have this number telling them how strong they are.”

Bruusgaard concluded: “I think we probably should’ve gone for something that was maybe a bit more familiar (…) If I’m thinking about making the game a more commercial success, I think we should’ve gone more commercial.”

Source: PA Report

We’ve all heard about the troubles The Secret World has been having: Funcom halving their studio number after poor sales, struggling to meet update deadlines. But even if they look panicky to us, these measures appear to have done the trick for the developers, as they have revealed they have no plans to make their game free-to-play any time soon.

Speaking to Eurogamer, Funcom’s creative director Ragnar Tørnquist said: “We do have subscribers and those people are getting a lot of good content with their subscription, and they don’t have to worry about having to micro-pay for everything. It is a benefit sometimes to have a subscription. But of course I understand the reticence of some people – a lot of people – to buy a game that comes with a monthly price tag. That makes complete sense.”

“Who knows what the business model will be like in a year? Or in two years or five years? But right now, yeah, the subscription model is [staying put].”

Source: Eurogamer

The day before The Secret World went live, Funcom announced that their CEO Trond Aas would be stepping down from the board to serve as “Strategic Advisor to the Board and Chief Strategy Officer”.

This went unremarked at the time with the launch of The Secret World, but it has now come to light that Aas is suspected of having done this in order to remove himself from the “primary insider list” of employees, and thus be able to trade in his Funcom shares without official scrutiny.

Aas reportedly attemped to sell 1.5 million of his shares in Funcom in secret, before being noticed by another stockholder and publicly outed. Funcom’s share prices later tanked on the back of poor sales of The Secret World, tumbling from a high of $17 to the $2 they are worth today.

Although Aas was able to sell 650,000 of his shares, he is now under investigation by the Oslo Stock Exchange and Norway’s Financial Services Authority. Aas insists that he had every reason to believe the game would be a success at the time he sold his shares, and is denying any wrongdoing.

Source: The Escapist

The lead designer on The Secret World, Martin Bruusgaard, took to Twitter with his news to claim that both he and the majority of the lead development studio in Oslo had been laid off by Funcom.

“The Oslo office got hit much much harder,” he wrote, before adding that: “I get it tho, it’s a very expensive office. Cheaper to hire someone abroad.”

Despite this, Bruusgaard remains upbeat about the future of the game. “Rest assured that TSW is in good hands,” he wrote. “We have some awesome people working on it, and it’s going full speed ahead!”

Funcom announced a round of “cost-adjustment initiatives” back in August, one of which was apparently laying off up to half of Funcom’s global staff. Which is a pity, because we thought The Secret World was really quite good.

Source: Develop

Funcom will bundle a group finder tool with its next content update, Issue #3: Digging Deeper. You may well ask why such a useful tool was missing at launch, and you’d receive a nod of agreement – but The Secret World sports some pretty exciting server technology at its core which may explain the delay. Once the tool goes live, you’ll be able to group with anybody, regardless of their home realm, thanks to that same single server tech, so maybe it was worth the wait. Funcom has posted a little run down on how to use the new tool on The Secret World’s website. The new content drops on September 11.

Source: VG247

Funcom’s latest financial report has revealed that their latest MMO offering, The Secret World, has only moved 200,000 units since its release in July. According to the firm, they are attributing its lower-than-hoped-for sales to competing MMOs and mixed reviews.

The fact that the release date for Guild Wars 2 was announced 2 weeks before the release of The Secret World is being called a contributing factor, as well as Blizzard’s announcement of The Mists of Pandaria.

As strategies to combat these less-than-exciting numbers, Funcom is saying they will be looking at various “initiatives” to draw in a larger player base, and at the same time will focus on “smaller, more focused online games”.

Source: VG247