The Agency

What do you want to ask The Agency development team?

2008-06-19T04:50:02Z

Heard about The Agency? SOE is the company behind this in development agent/spy MMO and there's many questionmarks surrounding the game.

What would you like to ask the developers of The Agency?

We're going to interview SOE soon and we'd love to hear from our readers, feel free to add your questions as a comment or email us at community@curse.com. We'll select the most interesting questions and will include them in our interview with SOE.

The Agency is an intense action shooter set in a high tech world that lies just around the corner. Live the life of an elite agent in a persistent online world of super spies and rugged mercenaries, who use both the highest technology and the lowest tactics to accomplish their goals. Featuring cooperative and competitive play, The Agency is designed to provide instant action and long term strategy for all fans of espionage, intrigue, and explosive gameplay.

Paragon

The Paramilitary Global Operations Network is one of the largest private armies in the world, serving clients both upstanding and unsavory. ParaGON's efficient, honorable, and often unconventional mercenaries can be found putting duct tape and high explosives to new and exciting uses on every continent.

U.N.I.T.E.

The United Nations Intelligence and Tactical Experts are the world's most elite secret agents. They are at the forefront of the fight against terrorism, corruption, and rogue states around the globe. UNITE agents are deadly specialists in stealth and subterfuge, with access to technology the public has never seen before.

Even more information can be found here.

The Agency preview by CVG

2008-04-04T12:27:01Z

CVG very recently posted a preview of The Agency on their site. They also got ahold of a couple of screenshots. View one of them below -- check out the rest at CVG's website.

Sony Online Entertainment have been behind the mighty EverQuest, the thoroughly messed-up Star Wars Galaxies, and the innovative online FPS PlanetSide, so you can be sure it was a big deal when they announced a brand-new MMO late last year.

In The Agency, you get to live the life of a James Bond-style agent taking sides with one of two organisations, arming yourself with some cool gadgets and modern weaponry to defeat ridiculous world-domination plots in a fast-paced shooter with the persistence of an online game.

The two factions, ParaGON (Paramilitary Global Operations) and UNITE (United Nations Intelligence and Tactical Experts) differ in their methods and means, but they aren't strictly opposing each other.

"Think of them as friendly rivals who, on occasion, blow each other up," laughs senior world designer Kevin O'Hara. "On some missions, you'll have to work together with the other faction to take down a major world villain. Much of the time, however, the two factions will find reason to get in each others' way."

Apparently there'll be a good number of PvP maps for UNITE and ParaGON to necessitate violence between real players across the world, and familiar modes like Capture The Flag, Deathmatch and Control Point, as well as special mission maps where you have PvE goals - effectively you versus the game, while avoiding the other players.

Full preview here.

Lead Designer Kevin O’Hara interviewed

2008-03-11T07:42:17Z

The lead designer of The Agency, Kevin O'Hara have been interviewed by MMO Gamer. So far there's not that much information out about this upcoming MMO from Sony Online Entertainment. This interview gives you some pretty interesting insight.

The MMO Gamer: I guess my first question is: Why spies? You have the two basic core archetypes, fantasy and Sci-Fi, and then they kind of branch off from there…

What was the impetus behind the selection of this setting?

Kevin O’Hara: I think it was looking at the market share and seeing what was needed in the space. There are a lot of fantasy games out there, and there are a lot of good science fiction games that are coming out.

For an action shooter, which is what we really wanted to make, the most successful ones tend to be near-future, or present-day contemporary, modern weapon games. The spy genre is particular successful not only in the mainstream console games, but also in PC games and especially in movies.

You know, James Bond, the Bourne Supremacy, all those movies really show us that in order to hit a mainstream audience we should go for something more contemporary that people can instantly identify with.

The MMO Gamer: This isn’t the first time SOE has tried to make a shooter. I played PlanetSide, from beta through launch, and I seem to recall it not doing particularly well once it went live.

What made you decide to go back and try, try again?

Kevin O’Hara: First, I liked PlanetSide as a game, but its fundamental flaw was that it was a PvP only game, and massive battle only game. It lacked good instant action where you could just get to the fun and start playing and shooting things without having to go through any waiting for shuttles, or things of that sort.

So, I think we’ve learned a lot of lessons from PlanetSide.

But also, the team we have that we’ve built in Seattle has a lot of experience with first person shooters, or even action shooters, so we really wanted to leverage that experience: what makes first and foremost a good shooter game, and then apply all of our MMO knowledge to make it a good persistent world game, as well.

Read the full interview here.