We got an exclusive interview with Lead Content Designer Joel Bylos to talk about what goes into creating The Secret World's mysterious setting and locations.

Just last week, we got to see the latest developer blog post from The Secret World Lead Designer Joel Bylos, where he talks about some of the early steps that go into creating a compelling world that players want to explore. Of course, with so many interesting points being brought up in the blog post, that only made us want to ask more questions!

We reached out to Funcom to grab a ZAM exclusive Q&A with Bylos to see if we could get a few more insights relating to his latest blog post. Read on to find out more about what went into creating The Secret World's... world.

ZAM: We're here with Joel Bylos, lead content designer for The Secret World. Thanks for lending us some of your time, Joel!

Joel Bylos: It's my pleasure, thank you for your interest in The Secret World.

ZAM: Typically, fantasy MMORPGs tend to feel like quilts of land, where each zone is developed entirely from the designer's mind. With The Secret World, however, it seems like that real world premise comes with a lot of historical information that the team needs to incorporate. What has it been like to work with a premise that already comes with a pre-set geographical layout and tons of history layered into each location?

Joel: It's pretty daunting, to be honest. People have lived in some of these locations and a lot of people have visited them. It's a matter of finding the essence for us, the few things that really define a location. What makes New York unique as a city? What do people remember of Egypt when they have been there?

The history side of it is actually rather useful. Because these locations have so much history, we can pick and choose the pieces that tie into our game and leave the rest. We don't contradict it, we just don't touch it. 

ZAM: On that same note, given the amount of preliminary research that needs to happen to create a zone, how does the team select a new area to develop? Do you identify a need and then find a place to suit that need, or is it the other way around?

Joel: The locations tend to be determined by the story. The entire world is our playground, but the player has things to do for their faction and certain locations simply become more important to them than others. But because the story is so grounded in history (the secret history, which overlaps with what you learned in textbooks) the story couldn't take place in other locations. It can't be just plunked into area we want. Locations are generally a huge part of the story.

ZAM: We've heard of investigative missions before, namely that you want them to be quite freeform with no guidance at all. Given the abundance of information on the internet, it seems like it will be tough to balance between creating quests that players will naturally want to explore, versus creating a quest so subtle that most will just resort to reading forum guides. How do you plan to approach the creation of investigative missions?

Joel: They are challenging to get right, of course, but I think that with investigation missions it is very clear to players when they are on the right track. Our approach is not that players should ever be confused about what to do, only that they need to puzzle out how to get the information that they need to do it.

It's exacerbated by the fact that no two players are the same either. Some people get flustered and complain about investigations where other people feel that they are too easy. Sometimes your intuition works for you and other days it doesn't.

It's our greatest hope for The Secret World that people will play how they want to play on any given day. And if they are frustrated and not in the mood for digging into an investigation, I would hope they would enjoy one of the other mission types or go join PvP for instance.

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