Fan Faire 2009 - Panels
Our operatives infiltrated Fan Faire and returned with the intel. This page contains the contents of the 2 panels on The Agency.
Director M: All right everybody! How are you guys feeling after Saturday night, was it Saturday night…oh it was Friday night. <i}{Editor: A Heckler yells out: How are you feeling…okay maybe it was moi} I don’t know what day it is, I love it. I feel like last night was Saturday night, but obviously it was Friday.
JonnyG: We all saw you drinking those martini’s on stage last night, we understand.
M: Is everybody still all pumped up being here? Good…are you ready for tonight? We’ll go ahead and get started. Today we have our Agency panel. We’re going to go over some inspirations around The Agency, the art style, kind of the way we develop the world.
Then we’re going to show you some footage that I don’t believe we’ve shown even the press. So new stuff exclusively for you. Unless you were here yesterday. And if you were here yesterday, that’s…ah nevermind.
JonnyG: Be nice now, we are fans.
M: Then we’ll show you an abbreviated walk through, it’s the stuff we showed at the keynote. It’s a really cut down version of what we’re showing hands on in the booth, so I highly encourage you to check out the whole thing in the booth if you haven’t already. If you have not had time to sit down with the developers and go through the build I really encourage it as I’m going to go very fast through it.
I’m going to do some quick introductions first, my name is Matt Wilson. I’m the creative director for The Agency at Sony Online Seattle. We have Kevin O’Hara, a design lead for The Agency, he is responsible for the world. {Kevin laughs maniacally “the world…I am responsible for the world!”} Next to him we have Steven Kramer is one of the designers on the PvP side of the game. And then we have Dan Myers over here, a producer on The Agency, as you can see by his outfit, he’s also ex-MXO, The Walrus. {Dan yells not ex yet and the crowd roars} And then have someone who has actually infiltrated you guys, he’s our technical director, Alex Pfaffe. {He’d blown his cover long before this as shown by the photo’s in our gallery} If you have questions about code or all that magic stuff that makes the world go around, feel free to ask him questions.
So who are we…We’re SOE Seattle. When we started this project our core premise was to bring the action game mechanic together with the MMO online persistence that’s been the main components of MMO’s over time. We really wanted to bring more of a mainstream MMO and bring it to both the console and PC. That was our original inspiration.
The vision around The Agency is a simple one at its core, live the life of an elite agent. What that means to us is the action, the adventure, and the intrigues that the spy and espionage genre is known for. We were inspired by movies like James Bond or the Bourne series, that kind of thing.
In fact, I’ll ask my question now, don’t fail me. I’ve asked this around the world, and so far across the world, across multiple years that I’ve asked this question, no one has failed me. How many people here know who James Bond is, raise your hand….If you don’t know who James Bond is raise your hand. Whew, still 100%.
The main thing is we want something that is recognizable. Just like Everquest and other MMO’s out there have pulled from inspirations like Lord of the Rings and other classic fantasy. It’s very easy to jump in and recognize what you are doing and know what a spy does, what kind of missions you’ll be doing. How do you fit within the world? All of those things we wanted to have happen, we didn’t want to invent some crazy thing out of our heads that wasn’t recognizable. And it just makes it easier for us honestly.
The other aspect of it is fun now no waiting. That was actually a core feature we thought of when we started building this project. And as much as that’s not a feature that you normally put on the back of a box, it was a core principal for us as we developed the game. That means that every game system that we do needs to supply that. Which means easy access, easy entry, accessible to players and on top of that it’s fun right now with no waiting.
When we think of what a spy does, we go how does that translate to fun now, no waiting. And how do we move that into the game systems. That doesn’t mean that you’ll never wait within our game at some point, but it does mean that everything that we try push around the game systems really should make it easy to get in and accessible. And have fun immediately.
Paragon or Unite? That’s our mercenaries or spies. When you start off in The Agency you start off in our of our established agencies. Paragon are down and dirty mercenaries, these are Jack Daniels drinking mercs, guns for hire. Duck tape, bubble gum, hard machinery, bust the door down, explosives, you name it, that’s what they are about.
Unite on the other side, they are our uptown spies. This is James Bonds agency if he were in our game. They love martini’s, they have the coolest gadgets. They are the uptown where Paragon is the downtown. We want people to be able to identify right off the bat what kind of spy are you, what kind of toys do they want to have. We want to give people a flavor that they can identify with. So, how many people here would identify with Unite? How about Paragon? Paragon why did I not know that? Who likes to blow crap up? {Editor: enthusiastic reaction from the crowd}
I think that’s a cool thing, we want that. We want people to identify with their agents within our world.
Living Loot – this is our operative system. The inspiration around this is: You guys have probably collected at least one pelt in a game if not thousands. The goal is we want loot that is kind of living loot as we call it. The reason that we call it that is you will collect operatives, these are people that help you within the world. You’ll get them from mission rewards, making contacts, and that kind of thing. These are folks that you use within the world. They work for you both online and offline.
Again, the fun now, no waiting principal applies to them to. Meaning we have a crafting system inside the agency, but it’s a click crafting system. Because spies don’t click. What it is, is a real time crafting system. What that means is you put that operative on a task, like build that golden gun, and he goes it’s going to take me about five hours to build that gun. And you go off on your merry way, you go lose some money at a casino, or you go shoot it up somewhere else. The fact is, he’s doing your business, and after five hours, he’s like boom got the golden gun ready, come back to the field office and pick it up. Even better is that they’ll do it offline for you. So you want to build that really cool thing that takes maybe a day, or two days, or even a week, you put them on it. And whether you’re online or offline they are doing it for you.
So we really want to make it easy to have that experience. What we all want to do is build stuff, but what we all don’t like to do is click constantly to build that stuff. We want to make the combinations and recipes the cool part of it, not the fun of…clicking.
So build your own agency, this also revolves around the operative side. When you first start out we’re going to give you one operative similar to Moneypenny for James Bond or Chloe for Jack Bauer. You want someone that is helping you out, getting you used to the world. They are going to be able to help you on your first missions, kind of get you rolling.
Over time you are going to collect more operatives, you are going to build out your own agency. You are building it out one way or another, depending on what operatives you are collecting. Over time you are going to join up with other players and build a joint agency, which is the equivalent of our guild system. That’s where you and other players will combine together to build other things. On top of that you’ll be able to compete and do missions that you wouldn’t normally be able to do on your own.
The last part is world domination, and I can’t tell you anything about that, wouldn’t want to need to kill you.
So onto building The Agency. Over the last couple years we’ve really focused on a few things and I’ll talk about some of the advantages that we’ve had and then tell you where we are. We’re doing both console and PC development simultaneously, and if you saw any of the stuff that we did at E3, you saw both a PS3 and PC playing together on the same servers cooperatively.
A question I’m always asked is whether we plan to ship like that, well no we’re not sure. And we probably will not. The reason is that we want to make sure that’s done right and we don’t want to rush it. There are things that are difficult to do on both those platforms at the same time. Is it something that we are interested in doing, absolutely. But we have to make sure we phase it out correctly. Why can’t we ship it at the same time, part of that is that controls, gameplay controls. If you are playing competitively, a mouse and keyboard versus a controller, whether it is true or not, there feels like there is an advantage to one side or the other. And that’s always going to be there. But you can mitigate that, there’s ways to allow people to know what they are playing against and that kind of thing. We know it’s an issue, but the fact is we can fix it over time, it’s just a problem that we have to address.
The 2nd problem is updates. How many people have ever played an MMO that has had an update, raise your hand. Alright, that’s good, if you didn’t raise your hand, you haven’t played an MMO. That’s the whole point of MMO’s, it’s ongoing content. It’s us as a development team continuing to update this stuff. Right at launch you live and die by those things. And the last thing we want to do is compromise either one of those platforms by not being able to do an update for whatever reason. There’s a certification process on the PS3 that is required, and we don’t want the PC to be compromised. Or the PS3 to be compromised. Is that solvable, we think it is, but it may not be solvable right at launch.
Unreal 3 is the middle ware that we’re using to develop our game. A lot of shooters have shipped on Unreal 3. The idea behind that is when we started we picked Unreal 3 because we really wanted to focus on getting that shooting done really quickly, using an engine that can get us their quickly. While we focus on building a massively multiplayer game with a large scale world, focusing on the MMO part of the game.
Tools and pipelines. There’s a reason, I know now, there’s a reason why a lot of shooters only ship with 8 hours worth of content. It’s hard to make that level of content. We’ve had to invest a lot into tools and pipelines to allow us to build that large scale.
The big advantage that SOE has, we’ve already developed a lot of MMO’s. We want to take advantage of that back end infrastructure to jump start where we are on The Agency.
So the aesthetics of The Agency. Well when we started we really wanted to figure out where we landed within the spectrum of an art style. If you think about these different games, team fortress, gears of wars, half life, we fit in the middle of the realism versus stylized. We didn’t want to go fully stylized like team fortress, but we also didn’t want to be realistic. Because the further you go towards realistic it also gets in a weird mode.
So we wanted to go for a more caricature look, over exaggerated, still doesn’t look real. But it gives you a style, and something you can identify with, but it’s still grounded. And I think that was a really good choice our art director made early on. And it’s allowed us to do a lot of cool things from the clothing to the weapons, etc.
On to the setting. It’s the same way, we really don’t want to build a hyper realistic world. Our art director said it the best, which is “in a lot of these shooters that you find, you find yourself always trying to run away from it, because the world is falling apart and there’s aliens, or a post apocalyptic world, and you’re just trying to escape.” What we really want to build is a place where people want to run to. People live inside these spaces and we want to make a world that people want to vacation in. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t going to be scary places around the world, but we really want to make it feeling like a space that you can live in. If you look at some of these pictures, you get the jet setting, cocktail culture with a rock and roll edge. And make sure that it fits the whole vibrant, sexy, and inviting throughout the space.
Then the overall character style, how do you project Unite and Paragon. Early on we picked 2 archetypes, Cassie Nova and Duncan..who we never gave a last name. {Editor: I heard someone from the dev table mutter something about Donuts at this point. Dan points out that it isn’t that he has no last name, it’s just not been announced. To which Matt quips, that’s right, he’ll get a last name in our first expansion pack.} Basically we have Cassie and Duncan, and what we started thinking about was what really represents that. Cassie is definitely sexy, classy, and powerful. We really wanted to make sure that people identified with that. Really being able to build around the power of that, that’s what we started with Unite.
Paragon, it is really easy to fall in love with this meathead. Because exactly, that is what he is, somebody who shoots first and might ask questions later, and hopefully someone else will clean up the mess. And that’s the whole idea, the overall bravado of Paragon. Where we keep the sophistication and intelligence of Unite.
These are just examples. What we really want to do is provide the ability for you to make something that fits within that box inside of those two areas.