I only have played maybe two hours, but the game is designed with small levels (or zones if you want to call them), where you follow your story line like you would most RPG games. The areas I have been in were not that big, and even tho you do see people walking around...there are instances were your char is alone (how your char starts, the story cut scene and the first Tokyo dream level are solo events). So yes, I do think everything is instanced in this game. But I have not got that far yet...so things might change later on.
There are a lot of good things about the game tho. Maybe you can check it out at your neighbor's house if you can. The Secret World does not have a huge open ended world like let's say WoW or even SWTOR to some degree (Star Wars has planets but each one is still open world design). WoW feels like an MMO, and I thought SWTOR felt like a single player game, but The Secret World takes it to the next level.
I'm trying to think of games that reminds me of The Sercet World to compare to. Indigo Prophecy came to my mind at first. The theme and story telling are close (not the gameplay, just the over all feeling). Or some of the BioWare RPG games too. But Indigo Prophecy is what I keep thinking about because of the weird stuff you see in game haha.
I hope that helps you understand what I'm saying, Garborg. Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of very cool things about The Secret World and some of it's features...like the way the game is integrated with the internet, and it even has video helpers telling the players about the different features of the game. Very cool stuff indeed.
I think The Secret World is worth buying just for the story content alone...and just think of the online elements as a bonus
P.S. One of my guild mates said this below when I talked to him about the "single player feeling" of the game.
Quote:
It does and it doesn't. Most of the time, like in WoW and SWTOR, you end up just running from quest area to quest area. But sometimes you'll end up just randomly grouping with people for a mission or two, and of course there are the dungeons in every area.
I think what makes it feel more like a single player RPG is the attention to detail, the voice acting, and the cut scenes. For some reason the lack of those things in WoW didn't make it feel so enclosed, which is kind of odd to me. I feel that with WoW's move towards introducing a lot more cinematics with Cataclysm, it got a little more "single player" for me.
But the area's are connected via your main storyline. It covers the three areas in the Solomon Islands (Kingsmouth, The Savage Coast, Blue Mountain) and continues to Egypt then Transylvania. I don't know what comes after that though since I'm getting my ass kicked in the last tier of the Egypt storyline I need to pick up some more AP to work on an AE deck for that part.