The MMORPG That 100% Deserves A Remake, But Will Never Get One

Look, we all have our favorites in the genre. That MMORPG that's your comfort place. Sure, you go and try the "new sexy" on the market and it's "ok," but it probably won't become your main game. You play for a while, you make some new friends (or maybe you are playing BECAUSE your MMO friends are), but you eventually end up going back to your true love. Maybe there's a new expansion for your main game, maybe it's just because you miss the game, or maybe it's just that feeling of familiarity.

Eventually, though, most of those MMOs will stop receiving updates. Games that run for decades are the exception, not the rule. We've seen far more MMOs go dormant or flat out shut down compared to how many have made it to their 10th birthday. That said, sometimes we even STILL go back to them. We could have unfinished business to mop up or maybe we're introducing others to the game.

It's nice when the game is still around to do that. Hell, I just installed Rift again for no apparent reason.

It's even better when your game gets a "remake" or an update. Blade & Soul isn't a game I have all that much personal nostalgia for, but when I sat in on the original press preview event and got to see the remastered NEO version, some in the presentation absolutely loved seeing the opening cutscene again in its remastered glory. I knew what they were feeling. It's great to see.

There's one MMORPG out there that if I had my way would 100% get the remake treatment. The problem with it getting one is two-fold, though. 1) It technically DID get a remake...ish, and 2) it'll just never happen.

Funcom, for all the interesting gaming work they do, doesn't exactly have a tremendous track record. Looking back, they have a real tendency to start with solid ideas and compelling stories, but I feel like launch always comes just before it really should. That leads to tech issues and not quite fully-finished systems. Post-launch, the team spends a lot of time fixing issues, which slows down new content development, and eventually the project gets abandoned in favor of their next big idea.

To me, no MMORPG is more emblematic of that process than The Secret World, and it's a real shame.

For those that maybe never played, The Secret World was an MMO in a modern setting. Cities like New York and Tokyo saw three factions vying for control over supernatural forces running amok. Political intrigue, logic puzzles based in the real world, investigations, bribery, conspiracy theories, it was all there. Sure, you could speed through things via online guides, but if you wanted to be immersed in the Lovecraftian world, there was actually a browser right in the game that you would use to investigate certain missions. There were even multiple websites built by Funcom that were fronts for secret (fake) businesses that contained clues you needed. Honestly, it was awesome.

Then there was the combat...

The classless system was cool. Deciding what two weapons, again modern weapons like rifles and katanas, you would equip and having those determine your available abilities wasn't the "common" occurrence it is now. Being able to skill up in all the weapons and swap was nifty, too. Once in battle though...oof. Look, it wasn't terrible and if you liked the universe enough you can play through it no problem. However, the combat was flighty, lacked any real impact, and for some weapons telegraphs were a bit scattershot.

On top of that, the game suffered from some serious tech issues initially, many of which were never fully addressed. Sometimes the browser just wouldn't work. Other times a quest that you were multiple steps into would bug out and you'd need to drop the quest and start all the steps over again. Yeah, it was a mess sometimes.

Five years after its launch, The Secret World received a pseudo "remake" called Secret World Legends in 2017. The MMORPG converted to F2P and combat was one of the largest focus points of the remake. I was extremely hopeful for Legends. Literally, combat was kind of the only thing I wanted reworked, and now they were doing it? How awesome is that!? While the original The Secret World would no longer be for sale, if you owned it, you could still play it if you wanted to do so. In fact, you still can today, I'm downloading it (very slowly) right now.

Legends dropped and did contain some reworked tutorial content and the promised combat revamp. As it turned out, though, this wasn't the more "technical" rework many of us wanted. Combat was still built on the original system with a few slight improvements. Most of the "combat rework" Funcom had done was actually on the interface and how many of the weapons worked. Pistols received a weird, almost slot-like loading mechanic and other weapons received new meters or HUD elements to make them "more interactive" to use...which wasn't the main problem, sadly.

Then some of the original writers at Funcom left the team and everything just kind of stopped.

Secret World Legends hasn't had an update from the team now since the 5th anniversary event back in 2022, and even then it was pretty basic, as were the holiday events cycled in and out previous to that. The last "content" update was a dungeon and raid rebalance patch in October of 2020.

The community, albeit a small one, is really what keeps the game going these days. They create their own events in game and outside of it. Heroes, capes, you know the deal.

Looking around the MMORPG space these days, we still don't have anything even remotely like what The Secret World tried to do. There was a time where CCP Games was experimenting with an MMO in the World of Darkness IP that could have been similar, but sadly that never came to fruition. Even just a modern setting isn't something often seen, investigation and actual puzzle-solving even less so.

Can you imagine if someone decided to remake The Secret World today, maybe in Unreal Engine 5? Damn, I'm salivating just thinking about it. Would it sell though? That's where I'm conflicted. Surface level, I don't think there's an MMORPG out there that deserves a remake or a second (third?) chance more than The Secret World. Having a box fee, Funcom was looking for launch cash. It's one of the reasons I think they launched just a shade too early...and they paid for it. Almost 2 months after launch, Funcom reported that the game sold 200K copies which obviously didn't meet expectations and led to massive losses at Funcom. While they did try to mention the launch of Diablo III and Guild Wars 2 as factors, it was really the mixed reviews that did it in. Most of those reviews focused on, you guessed it, combat and tech issues.

Both of those can certainly be addressed in a remake. This isn't a situation like Bless Online where the core fundamentals of the game are so jumbled and broken that multiple releases can't save it. That said, I guess I'll have to hit up the OG servers tonight, as I'm never getting the remake of my dreams here. I don't think it would do well enough to warrant the remake, but there will always be a part of me that wonders "what if it had been more technically sound?"

It's been years since I last touched the game, though, so maybe I've forgotten a lot of the puzzles. If you'll excuse me, I need to go pack for my trip to Kingsmouth.