No, really! I’m quite serious! The CHINESE–you know, the guys who just banned horror movies in their entirety from the country–have created an MMO, and by all accounts, it’s not half bad. Called Secret Online, it’s just recently launched a North American branch. Described as a “free-to-play massive multiplayer online adventure”, Secret Online takes players into Chinese mythology, around the Qin dynasty by all indications, it features two hundred static maps and an infinite quest generator.

Also of interest is that Secret Online also has something called a “persistent realm history” in which players can permanently affect the time line and events that take place on a particular server. Other gamers who enter in after these events will find that their storyline would have been much different had certain elements remained unaltered, or were altered differently.

Beta testing for Secret Online’s North American version will start in May, and priority goes to the players who register an account on the site’s forum.

So I confess to some curiosity. Granted, there’s definitely some propaganda elements involved here–if the central powers of China didn’t have a hand in this game’s development they at least had a hand in its approval–but still, I find myself somewhat curious. What kind of game would China, a society that’s pretty much shunning cultural advances (can you even access Wikipedia from anywhere in China right now?) actually produce? Is it any good? Does it PLAY well? Are there lessons for us to learn or is this just some low-ball effort on the part of the Chinese to distract us from the whole systematic butchery of Tibetans horrendous abuses of human rights nigh-fascisistic society fact that, jeepers, they’re a LITTLE DIFFERENT from us!

And to keep up with the rest of the MMOs out there, try the MMO trivia on Kwanzoo.

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