Fan Faire 2008 - Interview - Operatives and Missions
Welcome back to part 2 of our Fan Faire interview with The Agency developers: Steve Kramer, Lorien Gremore, and Hal Milton. Check our part 1 on PvP if you haven’t read it yet. We finish up with a couple PvP questions, then move right into operatives and missions.
JonnyG: Will there be some open PvP zones?
Hal Milton: On the PvE side they’ll have contested areas. There will not be career missions in the contested areas because that’s kind of cruel to push someone that has to do this mission into a space where there will be danger outside of their control. So we’re testing these contested zones with open PvP and side mission content available, which is really fun.
JonnyG: Will we be able to bring our PvE items into PvP?
Hal: On the PvP side, with PvP Anytime there’s casual and official modes. If you go into a casual mode there may be some of those that we actually allow people to have access to more stuff. It’s not that they’re bringing in their own stuff from the PvE world, it’s just their PvE progress would give them access to a wider array of things that they could use.
JonnyG: What about normal PvP then, are there going to be sets of build outs that you pick from at the beginning?
Hal: Absolutely, we’re exploring both the standard role outfit presets, and then buy/sell menus based upon the match type. We’re trying to have our cake and eat it too, which is really fun. We have to build buy/sell menus for our shops and our world itself. So why not mirror that at match beginning for some of our match types. It’s a tried and true mechanic, Counterstrike and other titles have really proven that out. And then on the Battlefield/Call of Duty side preset load outs are actually pretty cool. And being able to define your own presets as you unlock abilities in PvP. Those are the mechanics that we’re exploring right now.
JonnyG: Last year at Fan Faire you talked about “World Domination”, can you go into any detail?
Hal: We’re still holding that close to our chest. I want it to be something really special and I think it’s going to be fun. At the very, very least if all of us are stricken by some horrible brain fever, there’s going to be Paragon and Unite contributing to an overall global rankings which will be very interesting. These will provide bonuses, and pros and cons to either side. Handicaps will make sure that if one population is higher than the other, the other side is still competitive. How far we take “World Domination” is the thing I’m trying to push people to establish for us. Like can we have exclusive structures and areas that people can gain ownership of. All of this will come down to time and polish.
JonnyG: You’ve mentioned that faction success will have an effect on the world. Is that PvP as well, or strictly PvE?
Hal: One thing that we want to explore is having actual PvP and PvE have some kind of common relationship and common representation. At the very least they’ll be explicit, I cannot say for certain as I want to get that working before talking about it.
JonnyG: Steve mentioned that the current map he is working on handles 32 players. Is that the max size? Do you see going larger?
Hal: We do want to start doing tests going larger. 32 is really great for a number of reasons, one thing is the map size stays at a decent size. People aren’t getting lost, or having to run long distances. And it really provides us with some immediate stress testing, but we are going to explore with sizes larger than 32. The second that performance begins to suffer we’re going to back off of that. We have some interesting ideas for how to handle some space requirements for maps that are larger without turning it into a giant overland that takes 80 minutes to cross.
JonnyG: Is there a meta game reward point to PvP? Or is the point just fragging and leader boards?
Hal: We’re going to be exploring the concepts of matches, rounds, kills, and then the overall leader board standings for the factions themselves. We have some fun formulas that work in there for the final tallies for how we’re going to distribute that. Essentially, what we have at our studio is a whole bunch of people that are really good at extracting database properties and representing those within context. I know that sounds really dry and boring, but we have this luxury that most shooters don’t have. All that data is at our disposal, all of that stuff can be mined. And all that stuff can be represented in a rich variety of ways.
JonnyG: Let’s move on to operatives, one of the coolest features in the game. Operative Cards – What do the letters in the upper left mean?
Hal: The letters are the rank of the operative. When you first recruit an operative they’ll have a base rank that they come in at. E, D, C, B, and A is what we’re currently going with. Rank is one of the things that may affect rarity. The ranks mirror your own ranks, one of the rules is that you can only put an operative on assignment that you are equal or higher to in rank. You can still own a higher ranked operative, but you cannot use them quite yet. You have to push to advance your character.
As they perform assignments, they’re able to increase their rank. Then they’ll unlock a pro or con, specialties, etc. that will help them out.
JonnyG: Can you go into details in what a pro or con might be?
Hal: In many cases they are things that will help their ability to resolve assignments, or hinder their ability to resolve assignments. So, say a guy turns out to be an alcoholic, that would be a con, and that might impact how many skill points it takes to actually resolve a challenge. In the case of a pro, it would be something that impacts his ability to resolve combat, stealth, social, and support challenges. At any rate, pros and cons are the things that make them a little bit better or a little bit challenged when trying to resolve challenges.
JonnyG: What about the symbols at the bottom?
Hal: The symbols at the bottom are the faction of origin of that operative, not all operatives come from Unite, if your from Unite. There is one character that we have who is a bones guy who was recruited by blackmail into the bones as they kidnapped his sister. If you manage to recruit him after running some bones missions. He has his own assignment that he can run to go and try to save his sister, if you choose to let him go do it.
The faction is very important because we’re going to have things like if you recruit all of a given faction and then want to recruit somebody that is in an oppositely aligned faction, they may turn you down, not agreeing with your ideology.
The next one would be alignment, you might see Halo or Horns. So alignment really indicates are they closer to lawful, non lawful, good, evil, that kind of thing. That’s going to also affect recruiting and morale. If you have a bunch of good guys and you bring a bad guy in, the good guys will get upset and their morale will go down.
And then you’ll see an astrological sign. One of the things that wasn’t on there is we also have blood type. So star signs and blood type are stats that will lead to potentially unlocking side stories that relate to the operatives themselves. So by analyzing the operatives, their signs, their blood types, we generate their personalities. The personality templates are linked to stories that can be unleashed, conflicts, romances, etc.
JonnyG: Can an operative have mixed functionality? ie support and combat?
Hal: We’ve been exploring that for a while, whether or not as an operative ranks up you might be able to add kind of sub roles to them. It added so much complexity at the start that our little matrix of stuff kind of exploded. So we’re still considering that, but until we have the other stuff working really solidly, then we’ll start throwing in specialization.
JonnyG: What about multiple roles, can they provide both services and goods?
Hal: Yes, absolutely. Services and goods really relate to the assignments that they provide. Now an operative may have a given specialty that makes them better at a given service or good. There are also exclusive assignments that you’ll have to have a specialty in order to do. Certain high ranking gadgets, high ranking weapons, high ranking intel, high ranking recruiting or headhunter assignments may have to have an explicit specialty like nuclear physicist or a headhunter, or cleaner. Cleaner is one of the very fun ones.
JonnyG: You’ve mentioned that if you’ve crafted a neat weapon but end up needing to drop it during a mission to pick something else up, that you’ll still have it when you go back to your headquarters. Does each Agent have a sort of armory then that they keep an unlimited supply of their weapons that they craft, or do they have to recraft after a certain amount of time or uses?
Hal: What we’re talking about there is that unlike a traditional fantasy game where a sword doesn’t run out of ammo and you don’t throw it to the ground. In a shooter you’ll be shooting, shooting, shooting, click, click, click, and you might need another weapon. Right now we’re exploring ammo drops so that players can actually maintain the weapons that they have in their arsenal and not need to drop them.
Players will unlock schematics and blueprints and access to these weapons that they’ll be able to re-purchase at any time. Part of the point of being an agent is to have an operating budget with your agency, so when you need to go on an assignment you’ll be able to stock up on the gear that your outfit may need if you’re low, or that one special kit that you require.
You do actually have limited facility storage. Rather than calling it a bank, because players will have banks that their money is distributed around, you’ll have facility storage. Facility storage will go up as you go up in rank. We may even have operative assignments that will also provide incremental increases to facility storage.
JonnyG: How does the morale/conflict play a role? When getting an operative do you know the chance that they might need to take 2 weeks off for vacation? or hook up with your best agent and cause you to lose 2 agents for a while?
Hal: You’ll always be aware of what’s going to happen before it happens. One of the things on the card is that you’ll see the red line which is skill points, and the blue line which is morale points. Every time they go on an assignment they’re going to be losing morale. If there are other events that are going on, like guys that they are contrary to, then morale may drop. If their morale gets all the way to zero you may try to put them on an assignment and it may take forever.
How do you regain morale? You take them off assignments or send them on an R&R assignment. Basically you take them off your active org chart and put them back on your roster and let them recharge for a while. So there are always ways to get morale back, and we always provide people a heads up on what’s going to happen.
JonnyG: What about using a website to assign and manage operatives, how will that work?
Hal: Well if you know how to use operatives in the game, you’ll know how to use operatives on the website. It will be exactly the same methodology for selecting them, putting them into an org chart slot. Seeing the assignments that relate to that slot now that they are in there, choosing the assignment, and kicking them off. When you revisit the site, being able to abort the assignment, or assist the assignment to help them out.
JonnyG: Now on to missions. What types of missions will there be?
Hal: We’re planning on a wide variety of missions. The mission system that we’ve generated starts with four primary objective types. Any mission in any game, can be summarized using a little acronym we call PAID; Patrol, Assault, Interact, or Defend.
A patrol mission we know what those mean, go to the location, scout out these points, get back with the intel. An assault mission is pretty standard, you’re going to destroy something, someone, or someones. Interact, that’s kind of go get this, go return this, go bring this to this guy, go touch the brass monkey, whatever you have to do. Defend is defending somebody, an area, or a route.
Then we have a host of dependencies that we build that are relatively interchangeable between those. As we start constructing our actual mission types, the career missions, which are the ones that anyone should be able to solo to get a bronze medal in any role, the primary objectives in those missions will be ones that can be solved in a number of ways. So they can be solved through brute force, or they can be solved through a lot of thought.
As our side missions evolve and the secondary and bonus objectives for the career missions we can through in stealth specific or support specific objectives. That involves things like the first mission that we showed here, which combines a public space non combat follow mission that leads you into an instance, that leads you into a combat assignment that you can split off, and a stealth guy can make his way around, the combat guys can push their way through.
We’re working on some big encounters in which we really mix it up. We have an A level encounter that we’re working on right now, that’s a huge, huge boss thing. I won’t say who it is, but I’ll talk about a scenario that arises from it. Because it’s a career mission, I can go in by myself, or I could go in with a group and we could be whatever we like. We could all be combat and we just kill our way through everything. We don’t care about alarms going off and the extra spawns.
However, in this mission if you actually pay attention at the very opening part, you’re coming off a tram and there is a security booth with a person sending guards at you from either door as she punches the alarm button. And you see her, it’s like how can I get in that booth and shut off the alarm. You could go into the side entrances to the main chamber and ignore it, but then you’ll spot an area where a stealth guy could hack his way into a secondary security area, crawl up through a duct back to the original one, shut down all the alarms, and crawl back to the other place and take over turrets that are in the region. In this case, it’s not actually turrets but a series of pools that guys are crawling out of. You can shut them off individually, but if you’ve got a stealth operative who’s thinking and uses his skills to get into this area he can hit one button and shut them down all at once.
We’ve got a wide variety of missions that range from straight combat to straight stealth, and a pretty interesting mixture of support concepts. Then we try to mix that up with bridge missions. Bridge missions are kind of story bridges, go talk to this guy to get your next assignment. Go talk to this individual to get your credentials to be able to meet with the head of the Prague mob, a Czech mobster named Vilcek.
If you get in good with him, he’ll send you on missions to prove your worth. I love Vilcek because he’s a ridiculous over the top local mobsters who is mad about the foreign talent that’s moving into his town. In order to prove yourself to him he makes you get him some little treasures, but the way he treats these treasures is really funny. Like you have to steal this one very expensive gem, but when you give it to him he drops it in this fish tank. Because he really wanted a pretty bauble in there for his fish.
So we’re trying to create a generic mission system with a really robust set of primary objectives and dependencies that will let us craft focused or generalized objectives to capture that agent experience.
JonnyG: How many of the missions do you see being fully instanced or public?
Hal: I could see there being a sixty / forty split between private and public. The A level missions, the big huge ones, those are always going to be instanced because we want to have the most action happening. B level missions will be a hybrid of public and private instances. And C level missions will either be public or private. Not like a combination of the two. You can look forward to a fairly wide variety of modes.
JonnyG: So for the public missions, will you still have a team of four?
Hal: Yes.
JonnyG: So you’ll just see other teams around? Will they be able to affect your objectives?
Hal: Absolutely. We are going to have the ability to protect people from losing certain types of their objectives. However, there are always going to be the standard online moments like one group wipes out all the Das Komite from the public hotel, you know you can just wait for a bit and they’ll be back. Because we’re a game, these guys aren’t actually being murdered and removed from the scene. Because if we actually removed conflict from our game it would no longer be fun.
JonnyG: What about kill stealing?
Hal: That’s something that we’re actually working on right now, encounter locking. If I’ve actually done enough damage to a guy, you don’t have to worry about someone coming in doing one shot and getting credit for that kill. Kill stealing is something that we’ve got a lot of eyes on the code for.
JonnyG: What about crossover missions? We’ve heard about them briefly, but not a lot of detail.
Hal: I mentioned the contested areas before. The contested areas kind of exist for the side missions. The cross over missions, because there is the possibility of PvP within them, have to be optional for the player. But they have good rewards that go along with them.
A simple example, one we haven’t built yet, but it’s a really good example. Unite is sent in to retrieve an object, Paragon is sent in to protect this object. There is NPC’s in both cases that they are both against. The fun part of the cross over mission is when Unite and Paragon happen to meet up in that space at the same time. In addition there will be some instancing for those missions as well. You may or may not run into the other faction, but similar to some other titles that we love, you’ll have situations where both factions are fighting their way through AI to get to an objective, and then they have to decide whether they are going to take on the other guys. Whether or not Unite poses a threat to Paragon, they need to eliminate them to get out with the widget. Or they need to be able to eliminate them to protect the widget. It’s all about potentially putting the players in the situation where it’s more than just AI that they need to worry about.
That’s kind of the competitive crossover missions, the cooperative crossover missions are the big finales for the acts, not just finales but any A level mission that occurs. An A level mission is usually a crossover point in the story line, where Unite has gone up one chain of events to discover this big threat is happening. Paragon has taken the exact opposite route. They both end up at the same space and can join into a mixed team in that space to take on the instance challenge that follows.
We have a big Chateau mission which we’re working on right now, not to spoil too much. Essentially it’s a elite party that’s happening. Unite gets in because they have the tuxedos and the invitation, they go in through the front door. Paragon disguises themselves as the help and goes in through the side entrance. They are the waiters in the space. The two sides can then interact with each other freely because they are in a public space and form a mixed team. Activate the mission together by talking or using the widget. And we want to reward people for that kind of cooperation.
JonnyG: So it will actually be a mixed team?
Hal: Yes, exactly. Because Paragon and Unite are rivals that occasionally have to join together to take on a threat greater than themselves.
JonnyG: What about seamless instancing, you mentioned being in a bar, which is a public space, and someone activates a mission. Do people on your team just fade out for the others in the bar?
Hal: In that case we don’t want everybody to always see the same fight over and over as multiple people may be initiating that instanced fight. So in that case if all of us were in a team, and another team was in a bar. If I went up to the bar and triggered the mission, the other guys would see us wink out of the space, just like people logging out in any MMO. Whereas, we would see a dynamic cinema begin that would cover the instance transition over to the combat instance version of the space.
JonnyG: What about the vehicle challenges?
Hal: Vehicle challenges are something that we feel very strongly about. And the last thing that we’re going to do is hack those things in. The way we designed it from the very beginning is we have a hub and spoke world and they act as the spokes. So whenever there is a vehicle challenge it’s a spoke between area and area, map and map, etc.
So we still have a lot of work that we need to do on vehicles, if we need to, we’ll hold off on that until it’s ready. That’s very important to us. We’re not going to ship a laundry list of features if they are only half done. So we’ve designed all of them to be fault tolerant. So we’re able to say vehicle challenges need a little more love, so when we bring them into the game they are going to kick serious ass. And they don’t disrupt anything around you.
Essentially they are going to act like any other mission type. Some of them you’ll have a formal mission that’s given to you, others you’ll discover within the world. Go activate the assignment, you’ll transition into the vehicle challenge and take off. There’s always going to be a default vehicle that you’ll be able to use. But when we introduce the feature, operatives will be able to start creating custom vehicles with four points of upgrades that are either performance or visual enhancements. That includes everything that we’ve shown off on our first prototype vehicle that we had, our rocket launchers, machine guns etc.
We have so many ideas for the gameplay, that’s another reason we chose not to do mixed tactics. Because the second you commit to both in the same space together, they both have to exist in the same space together and if they are both not 100% perfect everything suffers. Essentially, we broke them out so both could be the best that they could be.
JonnyG: Will there be multiplayer vehicle challenges?
Hal: Yeah. Vehicles themselves will be multiplayer. That’s one of the big points of it, a team should able to fit into a vehicle. And if it’s only a single player vehicle, then we need to have multiple vehicles for them. And lastly we want to reuse all the PvE versions of those challenges for PvP, competitive races, and chases. Which is just ridiculously fun.
JonnyG: Great, that was my next question. Will there be chases?
Hal: Yeah, yeah.
JonnyG: Will there be members that will be doing the chasing, like two teams where one team is trying to chase the other team down?
Hal: Exactly, you’ve got the brass monkey and need to make it to the end point, and the other guys have to stop you from getting there. It’s going to be either A creative defensive driving on your part to stay ahead and keep out of their ramming or firing. Or B you’ll be able to brake and get offensive yourself, because sometimes the best defense is a good offense.
JonnyG: Will the path you’re on be on rails? Or will there be multiple paths?
Hal: When we put the vehicle challenges in there will be on rails and track style driving. An on rails example for me is the fight that’s on the gondola as it goes up the mountain. Or the NPC driven vehicle where you’re leaning out the window and defending.
The track racing is exactly what you’d think it would be. City streets, driving your car(s), you’ve got a relative freedom of movement. But we’ve made sure the exits and the routes are fairly blocked off.
JonnyG: Great, sounds wonderful. I’m looking forward to the driving part and hope you get it in sooner rather than later.
Hal: I do want to let everybody know, I want to get the vehicles in as badly as everybody else. But I will not let them go into the game for launch if they are not as good as they can possibly be. I’m erring on the side of caution right now, in saying that we’re going to keep working on that until it’s great. And then it will be in the game.
I’ve got to make sure that PvE, PvP, career mode, operatives, intel, aliases, mini games, gambling, leaderboards, meta games and joint agencies, and communication support are all what they need to be. And then you start stacking the fun on that. That’s what makes an online game special, it just gets better as it goes on.
I’d like to thank Steve, Lorien, and Hal for the time. We’ve made it through 50 minutes of our massive 97 minute interview, so be sure to check back soon for the rest.
Fan Faire 2008 Coverage: Session #1 Interview – PvP "Interview – Missions & Combat ":http://theagency.massivehq.com/special-features/faire2008-interview-3 Interview – Death, Gambling, and Influence