14 DAY TRIAL // The Secret World, an upcoming MMO from Funcom, will use a classless and skill based progression system that the developers believe will encourage gamers to experiment with their character builds and their play styles.
Joel Bylos, who is the lead content designer working on The Secret World, told Rock, Paper, Shotgun that, “The first time we gave the systems to the developers to play with, the first time they were played internally, people went in with this class idea. They thought, ‘I’m Mr Hammer, that’s what I am, that’s what I want to be.”
He added, “So then they are hammer guy with the dash. And then they think, ‘when I do the dash I can also knock people over, so let’s take another skill from elsewhere that hits the prone monster hard’. By the end of the process they’re playing a character totally different from what they used to be at the start.”
Bylos believes that the need to experiment is deeply ingrained in the human psyche and that gamers will try out different skills and abilities for both aesthetics and for gameplay purposes.
The various gameplay challenges, mainly boss fights, will also force gamers to search for novel approaches and for skills that can deliver particularly good results against unique enemies.
Funcom, which has previously created the Age of Conan MMO, says that it will make it easier for players who are accustomed to a class based experience by offering a number of templates to choose from, even if they hope that they will only be used at the beginning of the game.
One problem developers have to solve because of the classless structure is how to group players for dungeons, which means that the search and pairing system will be a little complicated, asking players to create groups that show a wide range of game skills.
The Secret World will be launched during 2012.