Premeditated Creation, Puzzle Solving Wonder

Now that I have started playing The Secret World, I could not be happier with my game choice.

It started with the very beginning of the game: choosing a faction. In The Secret World, the player chooses between three possible factions: the Illuminati ("Sex, Drugs, and Rockefeller"), the Knights Templar ("Deliverance From Evil"), or the Dragon ("The Art of Chaos"). Each faction has a different home location (New York City, London, and Seoul, respectively), a different mission, and a different relationship to the in-game events.

Choosing a faction was an incredibly difficult decision. Unlike other (MMO)RPGs that I have played, I wanted to embrace premeditated character creation this time around. In other words, rather than simply creating a junk character to get used to the mechanics, I wanted to start with a well-thought out character from the beginning.In the past few weeks, I've been exploring The Secret World's skill and ability system, reading through descriptions of both active and passive skills, skimming the artwork and background information on each faction, trying to create a history for my character to make her feel more real.

But all of this preparation did not help me make the choice.

When creating a new character, the first screen shows the icons for each faction, it's tagline, and the opportunity to watch the introductory video for the faction. Naturally, I watched all three faction videos again, hoping that one faction would suddenly take the lead. Unfortunately, no such thing happened. The Illuminati is concerned primarily with power

I ended up rolling a d4 (Table-top RPG lingo for a four-sided die). I rolled a one: the Illuminati.

After that, it was simple to connect the dots for my character: because The Secret World has fairly limited amounts of face and clothing customization, the actual design went fairly quickly. Dark hair, wrapped up in a bun to keep it out of her face while she slings magic, fights with a sword, or blasts the baddies with a shotgun. Tasteful makeup that matched her skintone. Clothing that one could easily fight in: a jacket, dress shirt, jeans, and some Converse. Glasses (because glasses are cool).And then a name.

And thus, Alanna Christiansen, newest member of the Illuminati, dropped out of grad school and decided that the best way to fight the patriarchy  was to become the baddest bitch in town, pairing blood magic with claw weapons. (I'm not going to lie, my skills pairing was inspired by two sources: the film Ginger Snaps (2000), and The Secret World's ability deck for the Thaumaturge).

EDIT: After a few hours of game play, Alanna's look wasn't really working for me. I bought some credits for the item store, and refitted her in black jeans, buckled ball-crushing boots, a grey double-breasted trenchcoat, some welder's goggles, and some red fingerless gloves.

But none of this was even as exciting as the puzzles within the game. For example, I am about to start a long mission/quest during which I will need to trace Illuminati iconography across an entire town to uncover the organization's secret history. I was ready for a long, difficult quest when a Tutorial Hint popped up and informed me that The Secret World has a built in internet browser to assist in doing the necessary research to complete the puzzle quests.

I am now going to take a break and play through some of the quest before I continue on this line of thought.
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The main part of the puzzle quest was riddles: after following the iconography from the Church to the Pier, I had to crack a riddle in order to learn the next location; and, after I found the correct location, I had to break a second riddle. The use of the in-game browser was critical to finishing the quest. While it also allows for players to access walk-throughs in game, thus enabling the circumvention of the actual puzzle, access to Google facilitated the solution of the riddles. For example, the riddle I was particularly proud of cracking was:

"Time is the province of Kings and Gods. The hands of time point to truths written by kings in the words of God. The path is open to the enlightened."

The solution to this riddle required that the player critically examine the environment around her/him to gain the additional clues, and then use Google to solve the riddle. (Specifically, in this case, a clock in the Town Hall was set at 10:10, which referred to the biblical Chapter 10, Verse 10 in 1 Kings, which reads ""And she gave the king 120 talents[b] of gold, large quantities of spices, and precious stones. Never again were so many spices brought in as those the queen of Sheba gave to King Solomon." Through paying attention to cut scenes, lore, and other sources of information in the game, I knew that the first governor of the location was named Solomon Priest; consequently, his home was the next location. Then, "120" was the keycode to enter the basement of the house.) While this has not been the only investigative/puzzle quest I've undertaken, it has been by far the most thrilling (and the most difficult). But this points to my favorite facet of The Secret World's gameplay: unlike other (MMO)RPGs, The Secret World rarely spells anything out clearly; it is up to the player to think through the quests (rather than just aimlessly slaughter mobs of monsters).