Our wisdom flows so sweet. Taste and see.
Wow, I’m not even sure where to start with The Secret World. TSW is an MMORPG that came out in 2012. It features gameplay similar to other MMOs but with a universe and story that really blew me away. It’s a modern setting, but everything is true. Think American Gods, Supernatural, X-Files, etc. I played a little of it when it came out, but wound up dropping it for reasons I don’t really remember. It couldn’t have been due to any issues with the game, because the game is awesome. I picked it back up a couple of months ago and recently finished the story and dungeons: here are my thoughts!
There’s a lot to this gem, so let’s take it facet by facet.
Gameplay
Before we get started talking about The Secret World‘s gameplay, note that what I really love about the game is the narrative mechanics and the writing. If you’re only interested in that stuff, I recommend just skimming this section or just jumping ahead. That said, The Secret World does do some neat things in terms of gameplay, so let’s get into it!
As a game, The Secret World is pretty good. I mean, it’s an MMORPG from 2012, so it’s not exactly thrilling in terms of minute-to-minute excitement, but I enjoyed the gameplay more than I thought I would. Honestly, I expected the game to be a slog that I’d put up with solely for the writing, but it actually felt pretty fresh compared to the other MMO I’ve been playing lately, Final Fantasy XIV. There are actually two versions of the game: The Secret World and Secret World Legends. For our discussion, the differences don’t really matter. Legends is a reboot from a few years ago that streamlined some things, cut some mechanics, and changed the targeting system to feel less like a tab-target MMO. I played a little of the original when it came out, but I spent most of my time with the game in Legends. From what I’ve heard, the community didn’t love the changes, but I was really playing for the story and world, and Legends didn’t ruin anything there. For the rest of this post, I’ll mostly ignore the differences and talk solely about my experiences with Legends as though this is representative of the game as a whole: this isn’t quite correct, but if you know enough about the game to know where I’m wrong then you’re probably not here to learn what the game is anyways.
The ability system is mostly the same as other MMOS: you have builder abilities that generate some resource and spender abilities that are far more powerful but spend some resource. I quickly got into a rhythm that worked for almost all encounters. It sounds boring, and it kind of is when compared to more dynamic games, but it was fast and responsive enough to keep it from feeling terrible. Many enemies have abilities with some wind up time and a ground indicator, similar to Final Fantasy XIV. FF14 is actually a pretty good comparison: it feels a lot like that, but faster and with fewer abilities.
The Secret World doesn’t have a rigid class system, as in most modern MMOs. The abilities you have access to are determined by which weapons you have equipped: you can equip two with one as the “primary”, which regenerates “energy” twice as fast. The game is surprisingly well balanced for different combinations of weapons. I mostly stuck with hammer + shotgun, but I dabbled in elementalism, fists, blood magic, and pistols – nothing really felt bad. Each weapon has a set of active abilities and a set of passive abilities that you unlock using AP and SP which is acquired from doing basically anything in the game. I found that I was able to snatch up active abilities pretty quick but passive abilities took longer: by the end of the main story I had maxed out half of the weapons’ active abilities, but only a couple of passive ability pages. The ability system is decent and I liked being able to unlock everything on a single character. For anyone considering the game, I recommend just picking weapons that fit your roleplaying fantasy, then use this guide to pick the specific items and abilities.
Each weapon has its own mechanic. Hammers use a basic rage system similar to many other MMOs. Shotguns are a bit more interesting: some shotgun abilities consume a shell and when you run out you need to reload. When you reload, each shotgun ability you have equipped rolls a random shell type, each with different effects. Out of combat, you regenerate the currently loaded type, so I often found myself trying to wrap up a fight without reloading if I had a good shell type or else trying to draw it out if I had a bad one. What counts as good or bad also changes a bit depending on what you’re doing: sometimes I need a little extra healing, sometimes I need to apply a debuff to proc a talisman ability, and sometimes I just want damage. Elementalism has a hot-cold mechanic that rewards staying in the correct range for your build by choosing the right abilities to either heat up or cool down. Blood magic has a corruption mechanic. I won’t go through all of the weapon mechanics here, but I really liked the system. It falls short of the more complex gameplay you’d expect from a single-player game, but it felt fresh – even in 2021 – for an MMORPG.
The progression system is more of a mixed bag. Unlike most MMOs, there isn’t much need to grind out new weapons or talisman (armor) throughout the game. Enemies and quests can drop consumable items with a random weapons/talisman inside. It’s hard to luck into exactly what item you need, but it’s easy to find anything on the player auction house. Before even leaving the first major questing hub, I’d already acquired almost every item that I wore for the rest of the game without much effort. I like this: grinding dungeons to get gear to get into the next dungeon is a fine system, but it’s just everywhere, so it felt refreshing to be able to just get what I wanted early.
What I didn’t really like is how you become stronger. There is a leveling system, but you hit max level pretty fast. The main way to become more powerful is to fuse items into your equipment. At first, I really liked this: I got my build working quick then started a predictable progression as I played the game. I really liked how basically any items I found were useful fodder to upgrade my gear and the predictable pace felt comfortable. Where it falls flat is in just how much investment each item needs. If you get to the end of the game and decide that you want to try a different weapon, you’ll need to grind a lot to get that new weapon up to the same power as what you already had. It’s not that big of a deal if you’re just trying to experience the world and the story. Now, when I say “you’ll need to grind a lot”, it’s not that bad when compared with other MMOs. We’re talking hours, not tens of hours, to get a single new item up to a respectable level. Still, it seems silly to require grinding to swap to a new weapon in a system that otherwise supports dynamic build changes very well.
There’s more to go into, but at this point, if you’re interested, just give the game a shot. I like the basic movement and combat a bit more than that of Final Fantasy XIV and a bit less than World of Warcraft. But, I didn’t play The Secret World for the gameplay, I played it for the story and lore.
Ludonarrative (or just “narrative”, if you prefer)
There will be spoilers from here on.
The Secret World‘s narrative structure is just amazing. The game’s narration moves forward via missions of various types. Some of them are the standard MMO fare: go kill five wendigo, go press a button, go talk to John, etc. You receive missions from either items found in the game (e.g. finding an unmailed letter) or directly from NPCs. NPCs have a lot of dialog and pretty much all of it is voiced, which is awesome. I’m not aware of any other MMO that has audio for so much of its text. When you receive a mission from an NPC, they’ll give you the context via a short cutscene. Here’s an example from early in the game: The Breakfast Cult.
Alright, we need a new paragraph to call out just how great the voice acting talent is here. Take a look at the game’s IMDb page. Seriously, just go down the list. We’ve got Jeffrey Combs, Susan Brown, Tim Russ, Nicholas Boulton – we just have a ton of people, both well-known and unknown, from all sorts of awesome geeky things. The most notable thing, for me, is that Steve Blum is only used sparingly. No conversations between multiple characters voiced by him (like in Star Wars: The Old Republic.)
So, that’s most of the game’s missions, and the volume of cutscenes and voiced dialog already puts TSW ahead of much of the competition, but there’s more! There are also investigation missions, which involve some puzzle solving. I mean real puzzle solving: these missions are hard.
At various points I had to:
- Look up specific verses in specific versions of the bible
- Look up the sheet music for Flow My Tears to complete a section
- Decipher Morse code (I had to get my wife to help with this – I couldn’t figure it out -_-;)
- Translate between languages
- Solve fairly difficult number problems (this was actually pretty easy using the Windows calculator in programmer mode)
- Figure out very specific literary references
- Origami
Here’s an IGN page with some more specific examples. I really recommend not spoiling the specifics for yourself: these are some of the most interesting and difficult puzzles I’ve ever encountered in a game, up there with Myst or The Witness, but with much better integration into the narrative. Your character is solving these puzzles because secret societies are trying to keep their secrets, a disaster left only vague clues, or because faeries don’t like to make things easy: they’re not just arbitrary challenges. When a puzzle is frustratingly difficult, it’s just as frustrating in game as it is out of game. At various points, my in-game handler expressed either admiration at my efforts or annoyance at how much time I was wasting, depending on how useful the outcome of the mission was for her, personally.
Speaking of “out of game”, another amazing part of The Secret World‘s narrative is that it incorporates augmented reality really well.
In the mission Hell and Bach, after breaking all the codes and finding all the in-game secrets, I was rewarded with a clue that led me to this real YouTube channel. Several missions will require you to do some sleuthing on the Orochi Group’s website. Maybe I’m easily impressed, but this just blew my goddamn mind. This isn’t some data-collection or monetization trick, it’s just augmented reality done perfectly. Many of the puzzles require looking up real songs, books, myths, and historical figures. You can’t play this game without looking things up in a browser, which I absolutely love. Researching things is so important that the game implements a browser window within the game, though I generally found it easier to just use Firefox on a different screen. In terms of game design, it’s generally good to provide all of the necessary tools to solve a problem, but once in a while it’s nice to have some problems that I have to solve using the same tools I use to solve problems in real life: a browser window, a whiteboard, and a calculator.
Nearly every mission in the game is repeatable and the mission journal provides a good summary for looking back on completed quests (I’m making heavy use of this feature to write this post.)
We’ll get to the actual content of the lore and story in just a moment, but first let’s talk about the in-game lore system. You find lore entries hidden throughout the world. Picking them up unlocks the entry in your lore journal and gives you a good chunk of experience, so finding all of the lore feels rewarding for both the sake of gameplay and for curiosity. The writing quality for these lore entries is extraordinary, both in terms of quality and in how it’s framed. Most lore is framed as a message from The Buzzing, which is to say: bees.
Some entries, however, come to you from the “Black Signal“: the human voice of the “Filth“. Also known as “John”. The difference in tone is clear.
Knowing that all of the lore comes from biased sources adds some great depth. You can generally trust the bees: they give you your powers at the start of the game, after all, but John has some good points of his own from time to time.
Actually finding all of the lore is a fun challenge, but I’ll admit that I used sites such as the CryGaia Wiki to fill in some gaps.
Story and World
Alright, we’re to the best part! The actual writing in The Secret World is just amazing. You really can’t go wrong just browsing around the lore entries, but the best way to experience the game is definitely to play through it and see/hear things as they come up.
The main story is great: it’s complicated without being confusing, edgy without being cringey, and deep without being pretentious. You start off the game by choosing one of three secret societies to join: the Illuminati, the Templar, or the Dragon. I played through a bit of all three and ultimately settled on the Illuminati because I thought they were funny.
I started my adventure with a supernatural fever dream brought on by some bees. This also gave me superpowers. Before I’d even finished completely wrecking my apartment, I got a knock on the door and wound up getting recruited by the Illuminati. Visions of the otherworldly destruction of a district in Tokyo by some sort of capital-F “Filth” bomb hinted at future problems, but I wasn’t ready for more than a taste of that on my first day, so my handler – Kirsten Geary – sent me off to Kingsmouth, a once peaceful town on Solomon Island in New England, that was having a bad couple of days. Along the way, I stopped by the Illuminati headquarters in a random building in New York and took a trip through Agartha in the Earth’s hollow core (a region inspired by the Ways from The Wheel of Time.)
Kingsmouth was probably my favorite region in the game. Shortly after arriving I discovered that almost everyone in town had simply walked out to sea, enthralled by a siren song that came in with a thick fog when The Lady Margaret returned. Fortunately, by the time I arrived the townspeople were starting to return! Unfortunately, they were returning as fishy monsters inspired by Norse mythology. Side note, the game uses “draugr” to describe these beings, but I probably would’ve gone with “aptrganga.” The game isn’t shy about where it takes its inspiration: most of Kingsmouth is inspired by The Shadow over Innsmouth, one of my favorite Lovecraft stories. I’ll admit that I even enjoyed the kind of bad film adaptation, Dagon. Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth was also pretty good, but I’m getting off topic.
After a while, it started to become clear that there are multiple supernatural catastrophes going on in Solomon Island: the fog that returned with The Lady Margaret and the Filth in the Blue Ridge Mine aren’t quite the same phenomenon. Not only did they have different histories, but I could even see if in the unfortunate zombies walking about: some were fishier than others. Along the way, I encountered a number of fantastic side stories and NPCs. I also stumbled upon a few other secret societies. The Morninglight seemed like a standard scam cult: I hung out with their representative in Kingsmouth – Che Garcia Hansson – for a while. The Orochi group appeared to be a sci-fi evil megacorp that reminded me of Wolfram & Hart. The Phoenicians might have been the most troubling though, as they seemed to be involved with the trade of artifacts and clearly had an interest in something from Solomon Island.
Honestly, all of the NPCs and side stories were just fantastic. Summarizing them wouldn’t do them justice, so I really do recommend just playing the game. One of my favorites was Sam Krieg, who’s living through In the Mouth of Madness. As I worked my way through Solomon Island, I eventually came to learn that something very dark and dangerous was hidden deep beneath the ground, watched over by the “People of the Dawn“. Unfortunately, the people tasked with watching over this land were being displaced and a mine had been digging a bit too greedily and deeply. This wasn’t the first breach, but it was shaping up to be the last. One of the game’s early dungeons allowed me to relive The Darkness War, when vikings came with Excalibur to help the native inhabitants defend against Mayans who came to usher in something akin to Ragnarok. Yeah, I know, that’s a lot. I found myself wondering whether Excalibur was also Freyr’s sword… perhaps he didn’t lose it to win over Gerðr, but rather sent it across the sea… Sadly, the vikings didn’t make it all the way home, suffering a similar fate to that of the Lady Margaret. A man named Freddy Beaumont, who I’m pretty sure is Loki, showed up to take the sword and the power, but with some help from the locals, I managed to prevent – or at least forestall – Armageddon. In the supernatural confusion, voices from a frozen cyclopean vista somewhere among the stars promised me power. I shot them down: I’d already received free power from Gaia and I didn’t want to gain a reputation for being spoiled.
I was really blown away by how much story is overflowing from every part of the game. Most NPCs have their own little story and personality, complete with cutscenes and voiced dialog. These little stories blend into the larger regional story, which in turn blends into the main story. Even when the side stories aren’t fully integral to the larger story, they still feel organic. I never felt like I was in the sort of MMO “theme-park” that I expect from games like World of Warcraft. Well, I suppose there was a haunted amusement park on Solomon Island.
Let’s move on a bit quicker now; I’m not writing the game’s novelization here. I’m just giving you a taste of what’s here and some highlights from my journey.
After Solomon Island, I moved on to al-Merayah in Egypt (formerly known as Thinis.) What started with me following up on some fishy relic deals involving the Phoenicians quickly turned into having to deal with the evil god Aten. I explored ancient tombs in missions inspired by Indiana Jones, helped a local defense militia, and worked closely with ancient guardians fueled by the spirits of children but in the form of Egyptian gods. I worked with furious Jinn and resealed a nameless being: Beneath You It Eats Its Name. Seriously, read that entry. I just reread it – again – and I have chills. “The silence must answer it forever!” This isn’t just an arbitrary bit of text found in a room, but a summary of a very long and difficult delve into an ancient tomb. The references to Egyptian mythology and history are just fascinating here, it definitely threw me into a long Wikipedia dive into ancient Egyptian history. As an aside, I strongly recommend reading The Cartoon History of the Universe if you want to learn about ancient history. Seriously, even if you’re already well-read, it’s just a great series. Probably my favorite quest from this region was The Unburnt Bush, which involved reliving the plagues and matching some Hebrew phrases to identify which plague I was dealing with. Just using the Hebrew version of the Wikipedia page for the plagues of Egypt made this reasonably easy. “מַכַּת בְּכוֹרוֹת” was a real bitch.
After Egypt, I had to look beyond the forest. The place was full of vampires, werewolves, Roman zombies, a talking wagon, and plenty of other supernatural beings. The socialist Blajini probably threw me the furthest. The Dracula myth turned out to be quite different from what I was expecting: turns out that Țepeș is a good guy! Well, was, at least at first, but then “is” again. Wait, we’re back to “was”. Transylvania was a really fun zone. I still like Solomon Island a bit more, but that’s only because of how much I like the specific voice actors and references there: Transylvania was definitely much cooler, and I loved all of the Romanian folklore: much of it was completely new to me. The Iele, for example, are similar to some other forest woman myths, but I’d never heard of this specific version. After helping to clean up the local supernatural issues, I pivoted towards investigating some secret Soviet experiments.
All of Transylvania was good, but the ending was definitely the best part. In a sequence that originally came out in a bundle titled A Dream to Kill, I got to explore a secret Soviet lab that was involved in some super creepy experiments on children and had Orochi robot workers! I received some help from a Bond girl, went on a snowmobile chase, and jumped off an exploding bridge. As I made sense of things, I tried to find a young girl named Emma (or is that Anima?) with some serious powers. I wish I’d taken a screen shot of some of the worst of it, but things get… bad. After doing some major badass stuff for the rest of the game, I was starting to feel a bit invincible, but when the Bond girl turned out to be Lilith, the power dynamic flipped around real quick: she chopped off my legs and left me in a basement. (Seriously, watch that link: it’s awesome.) Fortunately, Anime was able to help me in one of the coolest quests in the entire game: I Walk into Empty. I had that creepy lullaby stuck in my head for quite a while.
At this point, things finally started to get real. I thought fighting Akhenaten in a bottomless Filth pit had been bad, but then the whole world started to end. I learned that Gaia is, basically, a great divine machine, binding ancient dreamers and asserting reality as we know it. Turns out that “reality” isn’t all that stable. This all gave me some serious Final Fantasy X vibes, only it’s not just Zanarkand, but the whole world as we know it that’s being dreamed into existence. And that dream was about to shatter. Worst case scenario, there is a failsafe: the Gaia engines can reset reality… but this isn’t ideal. I mean, not just for the people who are alive when reality is reset, but it’s also not a perfectly reliable solution. It’s already been done a few times, maybe it won’t work again. Even if it does, reality doesn’t reset to exactly the same state: some of the laws might not come back online in quite the same way. Really, it’d be better to avoid it if possible.
Fortunately for everyone, I was able to get down into the planet and do some maintenance on… reality. Look, I’m summarizing this quickly, but it was pretty crazy in the moment too. I just loved all of this: it was abstract, otherworldly, mystical… it was just cool.
So, crisis forestalled… again. But the threat wasn’t gone: the Orochi group, Lilith, and Samael Samuel were behind everything, and they weren’t finished. See the cutscene here for Lilith’s bullshit. Orochi’s HQ was in Tokyo, right where things went to hell at the start of the game. Well, I wasn’t a new hire anymore: I was ready to go in.
So, I headed to Kaidan, a district in Tokyo. Quick aside: “Kaidan” or 怪談 is a term you may have seen before if you’re into Japanese ghost stories. 百物語怪談会 was an Edo-period ghost story game reminiscent of One Thousand and One Nights and Bloody Mary. In the game, the storytellers would light one hundred lights in a room with a mirror. Then, they would tell ghost stories one by one. After each story, the storyteller would extinguish one light and look in the mirror. Kwaidan is also a fantastic movie, you can find it on various streaming services.
My trip to Tokyo started off with a cutscene to set the context. Here’s the best version I could find on YouTube. Kaidan is hands-down the best designed zone in the game. It’s dense. It’s also gorgeous.
There was hub for each of the player secret societies in Kaidan. The Illuminati had the Jigoku no Yu Bathhouse, the Dragon had Zeroes Wild Pachinko, and the Templar had Susanoo’s Diner. Side note, Susanoo no Mikoto is a fascinating character: great starting point for a Wikipedia jaunt. Just… everything in Kaidan is awesome. I tangled with oni politics and moonwalked over security pressure plates. I ran errands for a 1337 hacker. I discovered that the Orochi robots had some human parts. Alright, I don’t want to get too hung up on this quest, but it was awesome. It pulled together Egyptian concepts of the soul, a serial killer, Robocop, and a crazy ritual done in a high-tech facility. I also went on a motorcycle chase for a delusional rockabilly named Ricky Pagan (watch this cutscene, it’s awesome!) I also infiltrated a death cult.
That last one was somehow the craziest of all. The Fear Nothing Foundation was just horrifying. I worked my way through their clubhouse, sadly inhabited solely by ghosts, zombies, and monsters. Hiding from onryō was particularly terrifying: a single slip-up resulted in instant death. Lucky for me, the bees always brought me back to try again. As I worked my way through, I stumbled across more and more details regarding the Morninglight cult. I’d encountered the cult many times throughout my journey, but I hadn’t really given them much mind. Well, actually seeing the bodies changed that. Really reading their literature revealed some alarming phrases. “We are all made of stars!” from the same people who ritually practice eating stars. Weird on its own, but even stranger considering that I’d heard similar things from those polluted by the Filth.
It was time to start digging deeper into the Morninglight. The Morninglight and John, the Black Signal. The best way to continue that investigation was to head to The Dream Palace. There, I met Kaoru, an enigmatic woman with a purple secret. I haven’t gone into the Phoenicians much here, but they just kept coming up, always in the shadiest of circumstances. The Orochi group seemed like the big bads… but I was starting to worry that the Morninglight and the Phoenicians might be the greater threat. But, one thing at a time: Kaoru helped me get some more info about John and the Morninglight.
In the Dream Palace’s AV room, I got to see into the Black Signal’s past a bit. Well, and he got to see into mine. In a sequence taken straight out of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, I saw how John was prepared for his role. Side note, this quest got me to finally get around to actually watching that movie and I regret not seeing it much earlier, it’s absolutely amazing. John’s handler was Che Garcia Hansson, a Morninglight figure I’d run into a few times by this point. Che lead John on a drug-fueled romp to prepare him to act as the messenger for the dreaming ones; the filth. This message was the bomb, but it wasn’t supposed to go off when it did. See, John is terrified of Lilith. You can see it in the Black Signal’s thoughts in her lore entry. He got so scared that he transmitted his message early, blowing up everyone’s plans.
Quick side note: I went back to see Che in Kingsmouth after finishing the game, and he actually had a new quick voice line about me being back already. I thought this was a great touch.
John’s really not a bad guy. He’s part of the Filth now, and he’s got some cruelty in him, but I really do sympathize. In any case, the Morninglight were up to some bad things – maybe trying to kick off the apocalypse – but their plans blew up, right on Orochi’s HQ.
Well, I knew where to go next. The Orochi Tower. Sidenote, if you didn’t follow up on the Susanoo Wikipedia jaunt above, you might want to at least take a look at the entry for Yamata no Orochi.
Infiltrating the seat of Samael and Lilith‘s power was daunting, but I had allies: the heads of the three secret society Tokyo branches. Infiltrating the tower is probably the most fun I had in The Secret World. There’s a different section for each branch of the company and they’re all really entertaining. The financial division is called Faust and headed by literal Mephistopheles. He offered me a variety of deals, each with an ironic twist. The food division had discovered a multi-dimensional entity as a convenient source of meat: no matter how much you cut off, more always seems to appear! Ethical concerns, as well as concerns that the gigantic multi-dimensional entity may eventually strike back, were dealt with in the expected corporate way: passive-aggressive comments about losing face or causing problems. I really can’t do this sequence justice in a quick summary: it’s amazing. The whole game was great, but I might replay the tower again soon because it was just so much fun.
In the end, John helped out. I mean, he didn’t come off particularly heroic, babbling about being terrified of Lilith, but he stalled long enough for Samuel to arrive. Turns out that he didn’t condone of Lilith’s actions. For ages, the two of them had been attempting to gain as much power as they could: enough to become gods. But, Samuel had pretty much gotten what he wanted: rich, famous, sexy. Why fuck with reality when you’re already on the top of the world? Whether Lilith was simply impatient or Samuel lost his balls, it didn’t really matter to me: he was here to control his partner and he was fine with ending things peacefully with me. For now, problem solved and crisis averted!
Well, except for Morninglight.
So, here’s where things get kind of disappointing. The game does continue from here, into the New Dawn expansion. I did play it, and it does continue the story, but honestly, it wasn’t great. It had its moments, but it wasn’t up to the same quality as the rest of the game, and it ends on a cliffhanger. I don’t really expect the game to pick up again, given that there’s been no mention of another chapter in years.
For my response, I’d rather just end here. Though, I do want to call out some of the highlights.
- Much of this area involved joining the Morninglight cult, which mostly consists of doing chores. This is kind of a cool idea, even if it is really boring.
- The Aigamuxa are really interesting and I’d never heard of them before.
That’s actually about it, just the two things. That said, I really do hope that the story continues. There’s still a loose thread hanging with Morninglight and its leader, Marquard.
Closing
Alright, that’s The Secret World! Honestly, part of me wants to go on: the game has just so much to offer. There’s tons of awesome stuff that I haven’t gotten to… but, I don’t want to ruin it all by flattening it into a text response. The game is free on Steam and I sincerely recommend giving it a try. There’s a subscription system that makes teleporting free and doubled AP and SP gain: you definitely don’t need it, but I did use it to make things easier on myself.
Oh, one more thing!
Multiplayer
So, The Secret World is an MMORPG, but I mostly played it solo. I did, however, spend a little time playing with my brother and with my wife, and it was a lot of fun. The dungeons have story difficulty that makes them solo-able, but they’re much easier (and more fun) with at least one friend. There are also some “simulations” made for either one or two players that are a lot of fun and a great way to grind out some material to improve your gear. Playing The Secret World as a single-player game is 100% viable, but if you have a few friends that would be interested, try to get into it at around the same time.
