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 1 of 5

By Paul Semel

When you consider that it's their job to save people's lives, it's kind of interesting how spies are usually a solitary bunch. Sure, Sydney Bristow sometimes teams with Marcus or Vaughn, and Ethan Hunt has his IMF team, but once their missions start, these secret agents are always going it alone.

But there are new protocols for the spies in The Agency. In this upcoming PlayStation 3 and PC release from Sony Online, wannabe Bonds can go solo, but they'll really want to team up online to fight bad guys in a co-op third-person action massively-multiplayer online (MMO) that's less 'Spy vs Spy' and more 'Spy y Spy.'

At least that's the way it was described to us by Executive Producer Matt Wilson and Lead Designer Hal Milton when we interrogated them recently about this game -- though what other information they shared is strictly on a need-to-know basis.

Crispy Gamer: Let's start with the basics: What is The Agency?

Hal Milton: It's a game where people get to live the lives of elite agents within a massively multiplayer environment.

Crispy Gamer: Where did the original idea come from?

Milton: We were a company called Fire Ant, which was just five of us, and we had a bunch of ideas for games. One of them was called Espionage, and we loved that idea so much that we evolved it out into The Agency. Of all the things that have been done in the MMO space, it just seems natural to have thousands of people interacting with each other with all the secret shenanigans and hidden motives and other things that go along with the spy genre.

Matt Wilson: Yeah, we had worked on fantasy MMOs when we were at Microsoft, and so we not only wanted to get away from that genre, but we specifically wanted to aim at the shooter audience and adapt that to MMOs.

Crispy Gamer: How exactly does that work, though? From what you've described, it sounds like World of Warcraft, but everyone's a spy. But if everyone's a spy...

Milton: Actually, that's the great thing. The world of our game requires a lot of logic in order to justify itself, so early on we decided we didn't want to set it in the real world. In the real world, spies usually don't carry weapons and they're prized for being able to fit in and go unnoticed. Our world is more about the kind of spies you see in movies, so we've crafted a world where spies are so ubiquitous that the general populace is actually bored by them. Well, until they become collateral damage.

Crispy Gamer: But the footage I saw made the game look like a third-person shooter.

Milton: We actually support on-the-fly swapping between first- and third-person, since some people prefer first-person for when they're shooting and third-person for when they're sneaking around.

Crispy Gamer: Cool. But what I saw made it look like a co-op shooter -- where does the MMO aspect come into play?

Milton: When you first log in, you're in a big field office, and there are people and non-player characters (NPC) walking around. You can choose to go into that public space and interact with them, or put together a team, or maybe run into some bad guys down an alleyway. Then you and your party can go to an area of private missions, which are a lot more complicated and might include things like driving missions, shooting missions, or stealth missions.