Secret World Legends Announced

There is some interesting MMORPG news out! Well, “shared-world” news, that is. Some time back, Funcom mentioned in an investor report that they were planning to “re-launch” The Secret World, and Internet speculation ran rampant. Nobody knew what that actually meant. Today, we found out.

Funcom is planning to launch a new free-to-play game called Secret World Legends (the official acronym is apparently SWL, judging from my Twitter feed). This game will be a “shared-world action RPG.” You can read all the announcement information yourself on their site.

The good news is that the existing game, The Secret World, will remain untouched and work as before. The bad news is that it will probably remain untouched and neglected for the remainder of its lifetime, which might not be very long if Legends is successful. (That is pure speculation on my part.)

For me personally, Legends sounds like a good thing. Details are sketchy, but I certainly wouldn’t mind a combat overhaul to something a little more modern (possibly console-friendly?). TSW combat has always been an odd hybrid of tab-targeting and action combat, doing neither very well. I also found the progression in TSW a bit too strange so I would welcome a change there too. And, I’m completely anti-social in MMOs so the ability to play the whole game solo is a plus for me.

People who won’t be happy about this are those who have invested a huge amount of time and effort into TSW, and like the game the way it is. Funcom isn’t saying this, but I can’t imagine they are going to run and update both games in parallel, at least not for long. I could see them shuttering TSW in a year or two, although I think it would behoove them to leave a server running in maintenance mode as long as they are able to.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m definitely interested in learning more about this new game.