Funcom: "We're not going to play it safe"

Funcom creative director and senior producer Ragnar Tørnquist has addressed the recent lay offs at the Secret World developer, and explained its plans for the future of the MMO.

"As most of you probably know, The Secret World team has been through a turbulent couple of weeks," he said on the game's official site.

"We've had to let some people go, and we're in the process of reshuffling and reorganising ourselves around the remaining staff. This is never fun, but it's the way of things: we need to scale down from a full development team to a more cost-efficient live team."

Recent financial reports showed falls in revenue and profit for Funcom, as well as disappointing sales of just 200,000 copies for The Secret World.

He went on to promise that the scaled down team wouldn't stop Funcom adding regular content to the game and while he recognised players had alternatives, "from warring guilds to kung-fu-fighting pandas," there were no plans to change The Secret World.

"We're not going to play it safe. We won't be introducing classes or levels, elves or centaurs, and regardless of the competition, we won't back down from our original vision. We're going to keep doing what we're good at. We'll continue to push the boundaries, and we'll keep reinventing the wheel (quite literally). Five years ago, we set out to revolutionise the genre, and the revolution has just begun."