The Secret World Devs Talk Progression and Guiding Players with a "light touch"

The Secret World opted to go with a more skill-based system as opposed to the traditional leveling system used by many other MMORPGs. In a new interview with Rock, Paper, Shotgun, Lead Designer Marten Bruusgaard and Lead Content Designer Joel Bylos took some time to chat about the team’s approach to character progression design and how they have deviated from more traditional methods of questing by trying to guide players in less intrusive ways. Bylos pointed to World of Warcraft as an example in comparison of how the two differ.

I think I said before that I believe World of Warcraft uses a very heavy hand to guide players. It says, ‘pick up this stuff here, go and do these missions in this place here, do all the quests then go this place here and do the quests there’. That’s very heavy handed. In our game, we try not to be as heavy handed.

Check out the full interview at Rock, Paper, Shotgun for more and even a later appearance in the interview by Creative Director Ragnar Tørnquist, who returns to chime in on group play and tease Bylos about his GDC comments.

Source: Rock, Paper, Shotgun