The Secret World is the only MMO that gives me the creeps when I’m playing it at night. The sights and the sounds put me on edge when I’m playing in a dark room. One minute you are doing normal MMO things like picking up quests in town or crafting a double-barreled pump, pump zombie shakers, and the next minute you’re standing in a dark forest straining to see what is around the next tree. It makes you grip your mouse tight and sit on the edge of your computer chair in fear. All that stuff is pretty scary, but I discovered a nightmare in TSW that scares the crap out of me.
I’m not at end game in TSW yet, but I’ve reached as far as Blue Mountain or BM for short. I think it is fair to say I can spot a nightmarish trend forming in this game. For a realistic architecture based game, TSW is missing one key detail, toilets. Yeah, I almost dropped a hot steamy one in my pants when I figured this out. My mind started racing and my palms instantly became moist with sweat. I could feel the hairs on my butt closing my sphincter tight like a Venus Fly Trap holding on to a juicy morsel trying to escape back into the light. Questions bombarded my mind faster and faster. What if I’m playing a Dragon in Seoul and I have to pinch off a mammoth Mud Dragon? What if I’m a Templar and I need to go to the temple of Templars and pray to their porcelain god? What if I was in New York and… who am I kidding, I’ll just piss in the street like everybody else does there.
No matter what starting area I chose, there was nowhere to poop, pee, or puke. I call them the “3 Personal P’s of Power” or 3P for short. You might be thinking, “This guy is nuts! This is a game not real life. Why is he so freaked out about not having potties in a video game?” I’ll tell you exactly why this freaks me out. Read on if you dare…
)
I don’t mind not having special place to take a Cleveland Steamer in fantasy games because back in those days people wiped their butts with bark or gnomes. They didn’t have electricity to flush or a sink to wash their hands when the toilet paper breaks in mid-wipe and their finger nail scrapes the corn and dirt filled trench like a backhoe. Fantasy games are an uncivilized setting. TSW on the other hand, is modeled after the real world.
The next time you log into TSW, go to the Sheriff’s station in Kingsmouth. You’ll notice a lot of people around the station, but not a single place to do the 3P’s. Even after you adventure away from the station, you’ll get quests to go into the Kingsmouth sewers. Why in the world would a town have a sewer system without toilets? Did they just pull manhole covers back and fire away? No wonder why The Fog came to Kingsmouth; the people are disgusting pigs. The Fog is there to cleanse the area of toiletless poopers. Oh, and the sins of the Unpooping People don’t stop at Kingsmouth.
)
As you travel deeper into the mysteries of TSW, the lack of places to relieve yourself becomes more apparent. The Savage Coast has a huge amusement park. You won’t find a single porta-potty anywhere. Do you know how many gallons of barf are ejected from cotton candy wielding kids everyday in an amusement park? According to a random survey I made up, 1 in 3 children throw up every day at theme parks. Add that to all the dirty diapers, deep-fried corn dog-induced diarrhea, and you have mountains of human waste just waiting to produce zombies and mutant crap monsters. Don’t get me started on traveling all the way to BM and finding out I have a BM of my own brewing on the back burner.
You can now see my own personal nightmare come to life. In a world beautifully detailed after our own world, Funcom left out the most important place we spend our time. We would live in a world full of mutants, monsters, zombies, and thinks that go plop in the night if we didn’t have toilets. The world of The Secret World is not overrun by some mysterious Fog, it’s a world contaminated by the 3P’s. If humanity can’t puke, pee, or poop in private peace, we can expect phantoms and fart monsters to find us in the fetal position waiting to die from our bowels about to explode. TSW might be scary at times, but the thought of not having a toilet in the real world scares the crap out of me. And I have no where to put it.
