Yesterday Penny-Arcade published a very interesting interview with The Secret World's former lead designer, Martin Bruusgaard.

The Secret World was always a gamble. It was an MMO releasing in a window not long after The Old Republic, and not long before Guild Wars 2. It was explicitly Lovecraftian in many places, a formula which has not historically been commercially viable. It expunged many of the classic MMORPG tropes such as leveling and classes. Its production in terms of time, resources, and cost fell into the triple-A category, though developer Funcom had only mild success with their previous MMO, Age of Conan.

Still, things looked mostly bright for the ambitious MMO: At one point the beta had a million players, most of whom came away pleased. "If I turn the clock back six months, and looking at the numbers from our beta where - and I don't know exact numbers - but it was something like 80% thought the game was good or great and would recommend it to their friends," Bruusgaard said. "We thought this was great. It seemed like people from the beta really, really liked the game. Yes it had bugs and we fixed them, but we always sent these polls, and we had polls popping up throughout the game through the in-game browser and the numbers were really, really positive. We thought we must've done something right, that people really liked us."

For the rest of the article: Life after layoffs.