The Agency

We're mixing up the traditional progression structure found in MMOs to create a variety of ways to advance. Instead of players receiving one monolithic "ding!" when they a hit a single level, we wanted to give them a wide variety of frequent gains that make every play session highly rewarding.

When your agent completes a mission they'll gain experience towards their overall rank within their parent agency, as well as experience towards a new title for the role specialty they used to complete it. This will unlock access to new and more powerful outfits, weapons, gadgets, operatives, and skills.

We also have a use-based system for gear. For example, if you spend a lot of time with a particular family of guns, you'll unlock some nifty special attacks. There are also a variety achievements to chase and new operatives to find. Operatives also rank up over time as you use them, giving you even more goals to shoot for.

While we have some grand plans for the "joint agency" system, it will be familiar to players who have used guild features elsewhere. The most common player organisation will be temporary teams. (Don't call it a "party" and make me come over there.)

However, when players band together to create a joint agency they'll open up new content. This includes operative assignments that will require joint agency members to share their operatives on tasks they could never do alone. There will also be consensual competitive hooks that will pit joint agencies against one another.

If you prefer to play the lone wolf, you will be able to solo your way through the entire story and advance your agent to the end. Like everything, though, it's always best to have a few friends watching your back.

We haven't announced the business model for the Agency. As a console action game, we want to keep the barrier to entry as low as possible. We're currently exploring a variety of approaches.

Neither. Development of the two platforms is truly simultaneous. The target platform is the PS3, since it constrains the normally crazed MMO user interface to something manageable by humans. However, using Epic's Unreal 3 engine gives us the ability to develop, play, and test the game on both platforms simultaneously. This lets us make certain a choice we made for the PS3 doesn't completely ruin the PC experience and vice-versa.

Ultimately, players should expect to play a title that feels right for whichever platform they choose to play it on.

We haven't formally made a decision on that. There's a lot of new bureaucratic ground to cover regarding a persistent online world on the PS3, like patches, certification and more. The key philosophy is that we will not compromise one platform's play experience just to support both. If we can make it everyone's gameplay experience benefit from unifying the experience, we will.