Agents Under Fire

With Sony Online's spy game The Agency, you won't just be playing Spy vs. Spy.
12/27/2007 12:00 AM | 0 Comments | Page 4 of 5

Wilson: Real cellphone.

Milton: And the thing is, you might simply get a message saying your vehicle is ready, but let's say you asked an operative to investigate a group -- you might get a message saying. 'Yeah, I found them, but they caught me. They're asking for a million dollars or they're going to kill me. Text '1' to pay the million dollars; text '2' to let him die.'

Crispy Gamer: So what other games do you consider to be the big influences on The Agency?

Milton: Among MMOs, I'd say some of the games from the SOE library like Planetside and EverQuest II, as well as World of Warcraft. For action shooters, we love Rainbow Six: Vegas, Team Fortress 2, Counterstrike, Halo, and Call of Duty. And for our long game mechanics, we took pages out of older games, collectible card games, Japanese RPGs, and other longer, 'thinky' games.

Crispy Gamer: What about the car stuff?

Milton: We're still working on the car challenges, but I think you can expect them to be more arcade-esque, like Grand Theft Auto, Saints Row, or Crackdown.

Crispy Gamer: How about movies and TV shows, what non-game spies do you consider to be an influence on the game?

Milton: James Bond, of course. 'Alias.' Jack Bauer from '24.' 'The Bourne Supremacy.' Even 'The A-Team.' And some older stuff like 'The Third Man' and 'Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.' But at the top it's really James Bond meets a big action movie.

Crispy Gamer: One of the striking things about the game is its look -- it has a very stylized look about it.

Milton: Well, it's a game that's supposed to be playable for a long time, and if you go for something full of all kinds of technological bells and whistles, it really ages immediately. So instead we're taking a different approach.

Wilson: This is a fun take on the spy world, it isn't super-serious, so we wanted to make sure the art style was also fun.

Milton: We actually made a specific call to not represent any real-world ideological struggle in our game. The real world can be a dark and terrible place at times, and we want people to feel like they're heroes, not facing off against the issue du jour. You're not going to be going after jihadists or Osama Bin Laden.

Crispy Gamer: Does that mean that my spy won't be outed by the current administration as a way of getting back at my husband?

Wilson: Oh, that's a good idea.

Crispy Gamer: No it isn't! So what were the influences on the art style?

Wilson: I remember looking at 'The Incredibles' and trying to get some of that in the game.

Milton: Yeah, god bless Team Fortress 2. It was really difficult to convince people that we were on the right track with that art style, so it was good that another game validated that style. We also looked at things like old James Bond posters and the comic book 'Danger Girl,' etc.

Crispy Gamer: Now the game is coming out on both the PS3 and the PC. Will there be any major differences between them?

Milton: The primary difference will be the controls, of course. And people can plug a keyboard and mouse into their PS3s if they want to, but we've developed a pretty tight control scheme for the PS3's controller.