Secret World Legends launches today, a free-to-play reimagining of Funcom's 2012 Lovecraftian MMO The Secret World. Secret World Legends streamlines a lot of the game's core systems to make it more action-oriented and player-friendly. These changes let the story, always the game's best feature, take center stage.

Funcom's pay-to-play, modern-day paranormal MMO The Secret World relaunches on June 26 as the free-to-play Secret World Legends, delivering the exact same content in a slightly different way. As a player of the original game, the whole thing is downright weird.

Despite a unique setting, inventive quests and genuinely creepy vibe, Funcom's supernatural MMO The Secret World doesn't get a lot of play, so they're taking all of the content from that game and putting it into a free-to-play online action RPG called Secret World Legends.

Funcom, makers of The Secret World, The Longest Journey, Age of Conan and Anarchy Online, announced earlier this morning that their forums have been compromised and user data exposed.

The Oslo headquarters of MMO developer Funcom found itself under siege this morning, as Norwegian economic crime unit Økokrim launches an investigation into suspected infringement of the provisions of the Securities Trading Act revolving the 2012 launch of The Secret World.

Funcom's supernatural MMORPG The Secret World makes its big-screen debut in IRL, a Swedish film about a troubled teen who finds happiness in a virtual world. Check out an interview with director Erik Leijonborg at the game's official site.

In the Issue #7 update for Funcom's paranormal MMO The Secret World, the player gets to wear a tuxedo and participate in a James Bond-esque snowmobile chase. There are rockets. This is why I love The Secret World.

There's something to be sad for giving players a fixed set of armour and equipment upgrades to strive for, that perfect set of stat-enhancing items that let other players know exactly how accomplished they are. That something is "boring".

Just a few short years ago, Funcom's Joel Bylos was in charge of level 20 through 40 of Age of Conan, a massively multiplayer online game that was, at launch, widely criticised for a lack of quality content past level 20. Now he's the creative director in charge of Age of Conan, Anarchy Online and The Secret World, and his goal is to make unhappy players at any experience level a thing of the past.

The Secret World seemed like a promising evolution of the MMO formula when it came out earlier this year. But publisher Funcom has hit a series of stumbles that have left many wondering how they were going to move forward. One crucial step was revealed today with the announcement that subscriptions are no longer required.

Halloween is still a week from today, so you'll have to wait until next Wednesday if you want to go trick-or-treating in the real world. (Or at least, if you want to do it without getting the cops called.)

Funcom, developer of modern-day MMO The Secret World, is just not having a good year.

Hey look, it's a video for the changes coming in The Secret World's Issue #2: Digging Deeper update. Plastic surgery, bazookas and an extension of "the Kingsmouth Code" investigation mission — these are things I would have been thrilled about two days ago. Now that lead designer Martin Bruusgaard has been let go, not so much.

It's no secret that The Secret World has been facing some troubled times. Developer Funcom laid off half their staff earlier this month, which would seem to make the promised monthly content updates more challenging to release on time.

Well, at the very least, this fan-made The Secret World trailer is impressive in and of itself. But this isn't the first time we've seen a fan take content from a game and create a fantastically appropriate trailer, sometimes to greater success than the game's own developers.

The era of the subscription-based online game has well and truly ended in 2012. It had a good run, really. Fifteen years is quite a long time for anything to stay static in the land of gaming.

Modern-day MMO The Secret World has a great deal going for it. The world is interesting, there are clear plans for regular content updates, and their new raid looks lovely. It even has a free trial now. But unfortunately, what it doesn't have going for it is subscribers.

Though The Secret World has gotten off to a stumbling start, Funcom continues to aggressively roll out fresh new content, like the August 28 release of Issue 2: Digging Deeper and the promised New York City raid, which in the next few months will give the city a real reason to never sleep.

As it turns out, I was born to be a dragon. In the old adage about a butterfly flapping its wings in China to cause a hurricane in Texas, the Dragon are the ones who put the butterfly into position and tell it when to flap. They are agents of chaos, slipping into and moving through the warp and weft of reality, artfully choosing not so much which strings to pull, as which strings to make others pull for them. They see the pattern. They manipulate the pattern. They are the ones who know that there is a pattern.