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Dev Discusses Upcoming Spy-MMO, The Agency
Kheldon writes "The MMO Gamer recently sat down with Lorien Gremore, lead producer on SOE's upcoming spy-shooter MMO, The Agency. They discussed various aspects of its development, such as the 'stickiness' of session-based games, striking a balance between FPS and MMO players, and whether or not The Agency even falls under the definition of a traditional MMO at all. 'You might be in Prague, and experiencing play with a lot of different other players; you might have come in at your field office and gone out into the city, encountering many other players doing missions that you are also doing,' Gremore said. She added that the game's areas are large enough to have 'lots of different people in them, collecting intel, engaging in public combat, all of those types of things. These areas are big enough that there’s shops, there’s secret spaces, photos to be taken of suspicious objects, things like that. They’re all out there in the world. We’re really trying to create a balance, where you’re encountering a lot of social situations, chances to get into groups with other people, just by merit of the fact that you guys are doing the same sorts of things in the same sorts of places.'"
The interview doesn't exactly alleviate those concerns either:
You could play through a mission as a stealth role, and then play through it again as a combat role and get a new experience that way. You may also want to replay a mission because you didn’t get the highest level of rating on that mission.
So if you got a bronze the first time through, you might think, “Well, it’s fun to have the bronze, I can go on and now do the missions that that bronze level unlocked me, but I might want to go back and redo it through the silver rating or even the gold rating
Not exactly something I'd focus on when trying to hype up a game.
I'm not gonna knock the game yet... it has an interesting twist to the normal beat-em-up mmo's so will wait and see how they implement it. As it's an mmo, you will always have the grind factor etc so will just have to weigh up the good points.Some ideas that come to mind are:
(*) it would be cool to be travelling the world disguised as normal npc so other players may not be able to tell you're a player unless they have higher skill and so you never know how many people may be after the same target.
(*) You could be in rival spy-assassin companies and build company/player reputation.
(*) Being able to use sniper weapons, cameras etc like an FPS
(*) Ability for espionage, infiltrating rival companies or sabotaging their objective etc
MMOs, historically, haven't really been able to do anything about the problem that, in game, everyone wants to be the protagonist; but every protagonist needs extras.
Something involving spies seems much more problematic than usual in that regard. Meet another PC? Oh, now what are the odds that he is a spy, no matter how clever his cover?
Pay for intel? Geez, some people have two accounts just so they can have a character of the opposite faction on PvP servers to watch the general chats and trade chat looking for indicators about whether city raids have been discovered yet.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
Beyond that... I can't see how much fun it will be when you know that every single player you encounter is guaranteed to be a spy...
I think I know how to fix it. We don't need no steenkin' computers! Instead, if you sign up for the game, you get phone calls in the middle of the night from someone who plays the "handler" role, and who asks you to do strange errands, like locate a certain package hidden behind some bushes in an industrial area, then drive across town and deliver the package to someone's mailbox. Next morning, you note a surprising coincidence—the TV news says some guy who works for the Ukrainian embassy as "trade liaison" was tragically killed this morning by a mail bomb...coincidentally in the same neighborhood where you delivered the package.
The best part of the game is that you don't pay to play; instead you get paid—achievements are rewarded with actual cash (unmarked $20s) that arrive in a "drop box" known only to you. Downside: the death penalty is severe.
I have to confess I ripped this idea off from a SF writer...um...Charles Stross? The scary thing is, I'm not sure that it wouldn't work.
Great men are almost always bad men--Lord Acton's Corollary