Ragnar Tørnquist On… Storytelling on Rock, Paper Shotgun is a Q&A with the Funcom designer in a conversation that took place before Age of Conan shipped (which, combined with the fact that he was not on the AoC team explains his comment that "Ship a finished game" is the lesson learned from the rocky launch of anarchy Online). The conversation mostly focuses on The Secret World, offering some of the first perspectives on the project:

For The Secret World, our background is in adventure games, so… we’re building an immensely detailed world, and we’re going to spread that over a number of years. We’re not necessarily going to have a set storyline that spreads over a number of expansion packs, but we are going to have a story that involves the players. I think that’s something that people really want – they want meaning when they go into these games. Even if it’s a game where you spend 80% of your time killing monsters, they’re still looking for that meaning – what am I doing here? Even on a spiritual level – I think people seek that always. Not everybody’s going to care about it, but if one out of five people – if that’s important for them – well it’s there, and you can dig into it and spend years living inside this world and finding new stuff all the time. That’s the great things about MMOs – it’s not finite, there’s always going to be more, places that you haven’t seen, lore you haven’t learned. And we’re definitely going to build on that.