Are We Ready For Another Puzzle-Themed MMO Like The Secret World?

Recently, I’ve been spending a lot of time in Honkai: Star Rail trying to collect all the treasure chests in the various areas. This is mostly because I’m trying to pad my Special Pass Warp tickets for Anaxa’s return. But it also allows me to collect much-needed materials and do things like complete the Trailblazer’s Eidolons. It also means that I’m completing a lot of puzzles I’d either passed over or missed for one reason or another while doing story quests on the various worlds.

Quite a few of the game’s chests are locked behind puzzles that range from “Well, that was easy,” to “Oh my god, why are you torturing me?” Sometimes, the areas themselves are one big puzzle requiring players to twist rooms around, find switches, and flip things on their head. You can spend a lot of time in one area trying to find your way to a single item. And when doing almost any of the game’s puzzles (with the exception of things like the jigsaw puzzles), spatial awareness is pretty valuable.

Either way, the point is that I’ve been spending a lot of time solving puzzles. I don’t mind it. I happen to like puzzles in games. Although, it can feel like a bit much if you leave them all til later and end up solving puzzle after puzzle after puzzle in a mad quest to collect materials. (Don’t be like me. Just do the puzzles when you see them.)

The side effect of this quest to collect all the things by powering my way through the game’s various puzzles is that it’s made me miss The Secret World again. Not because I don’t enjoy the puzzles in Honkai: Star Rail. When you consider the fact that the primary focus of the game isn’t the puzzles, but that they’re an additional type of gameplay, they’re pretty good – both interesting and fun.

That said, they do make me wish for more in-depth puzzles, ones that require me to have a certain amount of knowledge or to figure out how to obtain it. Pulling levers and flipping things around isn’t quite the same as having to recognize a piece of music or understand a code in order to progress. All the better if the puzzle-solving is part of the actual story. And even better, if you have a few friends, you can bounce ideas off of them on how to solve a particularly troubling puzzle.

Of course, with a lot of games featuring puzzle systems, sooner or later, someone will post all the solutions online. Even as someone who enjoys doing puzzle content, there have been plenty of times where I become frustrated enough just to look up the solution – particularly if I’m doing them with a completely different goal in mind. And that can be a problem for games where puzzles are one of the primary focuses and not just additional content.

It takes a specific kind of player to ignore the temptation. For those playing in groups, you have to be able to trust the others not to just do a quick search and solve the problem for you, sucking all the fun out of it. I’ll admit, I’m a little worried that it would be difficult to find people willing to go through the trouble of solving things the long way. After all, not everyone has a lot of time to dedicate to that kind of thing, even if they’re inclined to.

And, as is the case with most games, players have more than one reason to play. Even if a game tells you that puzzles are what they do, there will be players looking for something else from the game. The same happens with MMOs, where the story is the focus. You still have people wanting to skip the story and get right to the raids. PvP’s the focus? Someone’s there to build a house. So, of course, if we have a game where puzzles are the focus, you’re going to get those who want to do anything but solve puzzles. It’s the gamer way.

So, at the end of the day, it’s really difficult to say that we’re ready for another game like The Secret World – if for no other reason than I can’t see developers believing it’d make money. It’s a shame, I’d love to see one. Or, I’d love to see some effort toward completing the original. It’s still sitting there with people playing it. I’m sure they’d be happy to just see the story completed if nothing else.

That said, the free-to-play space has changed a lot since The Secret World first made that transition. So it might be possible.