I've been playing The Secret World beta over the weekend. The atmosphere and world works really well. It has some decent VA and the questing never really bored me. There is also a lack of levels, and I think I'm getting to a point where I'm doing stuff beyond my "hidden" level, as monsters are much harder to take down, and I'm dying more often, but I like that I could progress as far as my skill took me.
Combat and the rest still needs work. While the VA lines are nice, the lips of characters aren't synced to the words. The class system is very open and based on a deck system, so its sort of like Guild Wars in that manner. I accidently made my dude into a tanky character through chaos magic and blades. The skill building system is a little confusing at first, but I made sense of it eventually. You get Skil Points and these are the closest measurement you have to level, as they get earned every X experience points. For quests and XP, you will earn Ability Points (at about four times the rate you get skill points) and these are used to buy abilities in the various ability lines. All the abilities are based on weapon and magic use. If you equip a chaos focus and a sword, then you'll want chaos magic abilities and blade attacks. Half of the abilities you unlock are actual actions you assign to your hotbar, the others are passives you can assign to your passive bar. As of now, you can only have 7 actions and 7 passives, but can swap abilities in and out. Skill points are roughly related to these ability lines and few other attribute lines.
Combat generally feels like a regular MMO. The animations are a bit stiff so there's a lack in sense of weight and crunch, but they added a dodge move that's on a timer CD. Enemies will also show a circle or array of their incoming big AOE attack.
I forget if they're doing a sub model for this or not, but it doesn't feel like a subscription based game. The game is broken up into zones and you don't interact with other players much. Once in awhile you'll fight the same thing together, and in certain cases credit is shared, but in other cases the credit for the kil is not shared. You will also hop into solo instances here and there, especially for the main story quest. The menu lists in an ingame shop menu, but it's not up yet. The most interesting thing about the game is that it has an in-game web browser and many puzzles will give you clues that you can look up on the in-game browser, such as which classical composer would be related to "seasons".
Lastly, the crafting is sort of like minecraft. It needs a tutorial though.
If they clean up the issues and release it as a non-sub model game, it could be worth picking up as a sort of semi-MMO RPG.
