The Agency: An Interview with SOE

We infiltrate Sony Online Entertainment to discover its PS3- and PC-bound project - potentially, a shooter like no other.

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Firing up the preview build, O'Hara introduces us to The Agency's principle antagonists. "When you first get into the game you're going to make one very important decision - well, two: which gender you want to be, and then which faction you want to pick. We've got two factions in the game you can join, and they are Paragon, which is a paramilitary global operations network - these are the guys that are your mercenaries, kind of down and dirty, they drive the hummers and fix their guns with duct tape, drink whiskey... They're clearly for the rough and tumble crowd.

"The other option is U.N.I.T.E., which is the United Nations Intelligence and Technical Experts, and they're more the super spies, they're all about class and style. They'll be wearing the best clothes, have the best gadgets, they'll be drinking Martinis. It's really just what type of player you are. Both factions will have the same types of classes with mostly the same kinds of abilities, it's more what weapons you get, what type of missions you go on."

He goes on to discuss the initial classes, which are pretty orthodox on the face of it. "At launch we'll have six different roles you can be in, which fall into three broad categories: support, stealth and combat."

O'Hara and two of his SOE compatriots wheel out a few examples for the purposes of the demo. "Sophie is our stealth character, so what she'll be doing for us is sneaking around, getting past guards, unlocking special areas to get the group through it, or doing surveillance under doors to figure out what kinds of enemies are in the next room. Our main character James is going to be the combat guy, so he's just there to kick butt basically, go in and shoot. Rex is our doctor here - he's the "medic" character - and he'll have the ability to give buff heals to the group, or if somebody falls in combat to revive them real quick with an adrenaline shot. It's best to keep him kind of in the back, although he does have a gun."

What skills you have depends not merely on which class you adopt, but also, more ephemerally, on what outfit you're wearing. Players can swap in and out suites of abilities whenever they return to HQ, much as the latest online shooters let you switch classes when you respawn. "One of the main principles in The Agency is that you are what you wear, so similar to Free Realms, if you want to play a combat guy that day, you go to your headquarters, put on your combat outfit and then you're playing that role in the group. If you need a Medic you can say "Hey, I'm shot, I need to play the Medic today," put on the Medic's outfit, go out and team together and so forth. But you're not locked into any role."

Each faction gets its own headquarters where you can interact peaceably with other players, shop, kit out your spy and accept missions. O'Hara treats us to an insider tour of U.N.I.T.E.'s pad, the entrance of which is cunningly veiled by a florist's stand. "One thing we really want to do is get the style of U.N.I.T.E. here, with the sleek curves and cool blues to the area. You get more of a 24-type feel or James Bond certainly is a big inspiration... Whereas Paragon would be XXX, Vin Diesel, the A-Team."

The HQ is more than a mere lobby area or set of character screens: O'Hara explains that it "gives flavour and a sense of persistence, because every time you come back here we might have a different little skit going on... during holidays we'll have a snowman with a flamethrower or something, just to give you the feeling that the world's more alive."

It's here that we're introduced to one of The Agency's light-hearted distractions: a Q-Bert coin-op cabinet. "We have Flash games within the game," O'Hara reveals. "Most of those will be more spy games like high-stakes poker... The first thing we were able to get in was Q-bert, because Sony Pictures was good enough to just give us the code for that." These mini-games aren't entirely throwaway affairs, as some of them hide vital content. You'll need to max out your Q-Bert score, for instance, to impress a certain Operative (more on Operatives in a moment) - "he's the uber-Geek where he only respects you if you get 5,000 points at Q-bert. It's just a little minigame, a little unlockable portion."

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