No, not pigeons. Players.
When Funcom relaunched this game as Secret World Legends they also started to describe it as a shared-world action RPG. This isn't the only MMO to have attempted to distance itself from its own genre – I remember Neverwinter went through a phase of being similarly evasive about what type of game it was – but in the case of SWL it's justified.
I have no idea what the game's
population is at this point – not high would be my guess – and my
own experience is no doubt colored by the fact that I intentionally
chose a low pop server when I created this character. I've seen other
players in the main hub of Agartha and there was a good turnout for
the Halloween event during my last run of the game, but in the open
world other players are few and far between. They're usually quite
recognisable though, even at a distance, being the ones that are randomly jumping up and down and running everywhere.
It has to be said that SWL benefits from this sparsity. The fantastic atmosphere of the game remains mostly unbroken by the frenetic activity of other player characters, and there's very little in this game that actually requires a group. Even the group dungeons can be solo'd with a reasonable level advantage.
There's also a couple of places where it's downright awkward if there's another player present and working through the same open world puzzle sequence as you are, or the same kill quota. I had one of those moments you sometimes get in MMOs where there's another player in the area and you can tell from their actions that they're working through the exact same stage of the exact same mission as you are, and in this case it highlighted that mobs respawn fairly slowly in this game, leaving me to cool my heels because all my targets at the Hotel Wahid had just been killed by another player who'd got there slightly quicker than I had.
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