14 DAY TRIAL // Funcom is ready to move on past Age of Conan. While support of the 2008 MMO will continue, the weight of the company's development power is shifting towards the creation of another MMO, called The Secret World. And the biggest thing the game has going for it at the moment is the promise that it will feature no classes at all.
Almost all of the current gen MMOs are based around character classes, which determine the role a player will have in the game and the skills and items that he/she gets to use. A classless MMO is something entirely different. Basically, players that sign up are ready to choose and learn a variety of skills, each of them related to one task that they can perform in the game world, and can then apply them to situations that they encounter. The upside is that players have more freedom and can customize their experience with the game. The potential downside is that the developers need to make sure that each situation presented can be tackled in a lot of different ways, depending on the players’ skills.
Ragnar Tornquist, who is the senior producer and director of The Secret World, stated that “It is great to finally be able to talk about The Secret World, after several years in the dark. The real world is such a rich and fascinating setting for an MMO, and we are able to draw inspiration from ancient history, stories of lost cities and forgotten civilizations, folktales, urban legends, conspiracy theories and pop culture. We are building a game that mixes modern day Earth with terrifying monsters, dark and occult magic, cool weapons and awesome powers - and it's unlike anything you have ever seen before in an MMO.”
The Perfect World aims to simulate three real world cities, New York, London and Seoul, while populating them with fantasy-inspired monsters that only special humans can see and fight. It's a nice premise, marrying real world spaces with fantasy monsters, but it remains to be seen whether the classless concept can be implemented or not.