Earlier today, I spent a considerable amount of time with one of Sony Online Entertainment’s newest creations, The Agency. The game is affectionately referred to by its developers as an “online persistent shooter”, which really translates, I suppose, into a grand online experience featuring spy action and military finesse. While The Agency hasn’t even yet entered the alpha development stage, it’s still got some grand ideas to bring to fruition. It follows the conflicts of two rival factions, the U.N.I.T.E. agency, which is rooted in spy work and closely resembles something out of a Bond film, and the Paragon agency, which is considerably more military-oriented. You can choose to be a member of whichever faction you like.
Once you’ve made your choice, you can then put on an outfit to assume a role. Rather than implement a class system, the development staff behind The Agency felt it would be less restrictive if they allowed free, on-the-fly switching between roles. However long you spend working within a specific role, you will be awarded experience specific to the role and thus grow within it accordingly, improving your abilities in that area.
But what if you don’t want to (or can’t) spend every waking hour playing The Agency? Perhaps in an act of pure mercy, the game provides the option to recruit operatives—NPC’s that provide you with goods and services over time—to stand in for you and keep you updated while you’re away. So that way, you can go to work or head to school, and if anything materializes in the game world, your operative will contact you via cell phone text message (not kidding here) to make sure you’re aware. The developer on hand made certain to joke about the possible implications of receiving such a potentially inflammatory text message, unbeknownst to your colleagues that the question of whether to kill a particular hostage is actually simply in relation to a videogame you’ve been playing (try telling that one to your boss). Seriously though, we’re sure the game will make it clear that it’s only, well, a game.
Apart from all of that, these operatives can complete tasks for you while you’re away so that you aren’t always falling behind if you elect not to play for a while. It sounds like a well-considered feature that may remove some of the dreariness frequently associated with the red-eyed addiction necessary to succeed at most massively-multiplayer online games.
It’s also possible, of course, to engage in some PvP action. This can happen at any time; there are casual as well as organized “official” PvP scenarios in the works. In addition to this, there are main missions and career content in the works as well. All of this content can be completed on your own, without the help of friends if you like, but there’s a catch. The game awards rankings to each of your successful operations, and it’s very tough to achieve a gold ranking without multiple agents cooperating to pull it off. Plus, if you really play nice with others, there are also guilds to be joined, and within them, members can share operatives to further their cause.
Teams are made of four people—so things will definitely stay intimate when you’re working missions. Whether in a team or by yourself, if you’re spotted while out in the world by a foe, one of two things will happen. If you’re simply in your role (without any sort of alias to help conceal your identity), they’ll immediately begin to attack you. But if you’ve assumed an alias, your alias meter will simply deplete a bit. This provides an incentive to dress up and leverage a façade. If you happen to get killed, you’ll return to a checkpoint—or, if you’re lucky enough to have brought along a field medic, he/she can revive you at that point. But even returning to checkpoints doesn’t have to be so painful; you can even bring along a field specialist to drop additional checkpoints along the way in preparation for the worst.
I’m hardly what I would consider to be an MMO fan (in fact, I’ve never touched WoW and its ilk), but I can appreciate the appeal that such games bring to the table. However, I have known plenty of avid MMO players over the years, and thus, I also recognize the limitations of the formula. The biggest issue, of course, is the common complaint that they simply consume too much time. People will tell you that if you don’t play literally every day, you’ll quickly fall behind, and thus, as a result, you’ll no longer be competitive. The Agency looks to try and change all of this through its implementation of the operatives system. If this pans out as well as it’s meant to, it could prove to be an innovative step in the right direction for MMOs looking to appeal to an audience beyond those who can and are willing to play several days a week for hours at a time.
Finally, I’d like to close by simply saying that Sony Online Entertainment has also provided a version of Q*Bert in The Agency, playable within the U.N.I.T.E. base on an old-school arcade machine (Q*Bert rocks, by the way). When asked why this was included, the SOE representative simply replied, “because we could, because we own it.” That’s awesome.
