Friday, August 02, 2013

Game Director Letter – July 2013

Hi all,

The warmth of summer is upon us and most of the dev team is back from their vacation and raring to go on Issue #8. I’ll keep this update short and sweet.

First of all, I wish to thank everybody who joined in the celebrations of the first anniversary. It was a huge success, some technical glitches aside, and it was amazing to see the way the community came together to form a great hunt which purged The Secret World of the Guardians of Gaia almost as soon as they appeared.

It’s also been a great learning experience for us and will help us to direct large scale events in the game in the future. Thank you to everyone involved, and let’s make sure that the second year of The Secret World will be as amazing as the first!

There have been quite a few community questions regarding the Fusang Pet - it will be available through another event at a later date for those who missed out on it during the anniversary.

Moving forward, we are splitting the development team into two different areas of focus - the systems driven updates for Issue #8 and the content heavy new Tokyo playfield for Issue #9.

Issue #8 begins at the Council of Venice, the location where players will be able to access the Scenario system. From there, players will need to earn certification for entering Tokyo by running a certain number of scenarios. The plan is to ship Issue #8 with a number of Scenarios, some of which will be free and others which will be available for purchase in the Item Store just like in other Issues.

The Augment system, which allows you to improve almost all of the abilities in your arsenal, will also ship with Issue #8. The Augments, which require crafting to create, are made from base drops which players can collect during the Scenarios.

The Augment system and Scenario system go hand in hand and, in reflecting the growing versatility of the player with regards to Anima, as you increase your skill in Augmentation, your ability to store Ability Points will increase. Some of the more expensive Augmentation upgrades can cost several hundred AP.

Then, there is Tokyo. This is the one that people have been eagerly awaiting for a while, and we aim to meet all of those expectations. We’ll be pouring all of the lessons we have learned over the past year into Tokyo and we’re very excited to start letting people into the zone.

As I have mentioned previously, Tokyo will be broken down across several updates. Issue #9 will contain the first half of the zone - including an expanded section of Venice and a return to a location that everybody will recognize immediately.

Other updates will contain the second half of the Tokyo zone, and other important parts, such as the Tokyo Lair and the Orochi Tower, which has both a solo and component and a group dungeon. Tokyo also includes a location which will reveal the next zone where we will be taking the story.

We’re very excited about the work we are doing on Tokyo and the zone is a massive urban landscape which really highlights the setting and the strength of The Secret World.

I look forward to telling you more about it, over the coming months.

Cheers,
Joel

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