The Agency

Our game has the luxury of being in a pseudo real-world setting, so that makes connecting it back to our own all the easier. But kinda like other titles out there like GTA, we have no delusions about representing political or ideological struggles that exist in the real world. We just want to have fun with an earth-like scenario, because the fact of the matter is that real-world ideological struggles are not very fun. There are other companies that are doing great work in creating gameplay around that, but we want our world to be something that players run to, not away from. The world is kind of a painful, dark, depressing place and capitalising on those crises feels... less than enjoyable.

This is something that we haven't announced, but we have some alternate mechanics for operatives that we may support with out-of-game transactions, and we may have the opportunity for players to spin up, at least, a random booster pack that gives them the opportunity to possibly recruit other operatives.

But I want to make this very clear. What that announcement was talking about was a new relationship which helps everybody about having another auction system for players to trade and sell goods. This is not a microtransaction system within The Agency to allow players to buy weapons, outfits, operatives to be effective within the game world. That's something that we're absolutely not planning on doing. We don't want players to have the BFG and screw up everybody's experience because they don't know how to use it.

We haven't announced our business model yet for two reasons. One is, we're still figuring it out as we go along, looking at what the markets are up to, how is the PlayStation 3 evolving from that standpoint. The other thing is Free Realms, another SOE product - it's launching and it's going to have a bunch of new business models that they play with, and we're interested in seeing how those play out before we decide what we're going to do.

The main goal for us is to lower the barrier for entry on the PS3. We're targeting an audience here that's not used to the MMO space, and so we've got to drop that barrier as low as we possibly can.

It's fascinating right now, I have friends working at Realtime Worlds on APB - basically, all of us are trying to... coalesce around something that doesn't make console players feel like they're being nickeled and dimed to death.

Although, Rock Band has nickeled and dimed me to death, and I'm okay with it.

That's very true. That's why we're all trying to re-evaluate what MMO means... Call of Duty 4, Halo 3, Rock Band, these are games that have characters that can exist in an online community and play against each other... Xbox 360 is technically one of the largest MMOs in existence.

Content, content, content, content.

If I told you at the start of this project that we were going to build an MMO and it's going to be based on a shooter mechanic, stay true to that, and feature a hundred hours of content, you'd say we were crazy. And we probably are crazy to some extent. Shooter content is not the MMO content of today; that's just throwing a map down, you throw some spawns in there, you dress it up and throw your missions around it. But cover isn't important, where the AI is located isn't necessarily important. And then you look at how to build a shooter, it's a corridor system, it has cover elements, where the AI is placed is important, where the player actually shoots from is extraordinarily important. I used to always wonder why does it take so long to build shooters, well, now I know.

And there's a big difference between ten guns in your favourite FPS, and the 150, 200, 300 guns that we're doing, as well.