Fan Faire 2009 - Panels - Part 2
We continue our Fan Faire 2009 panel coverage with developers Matt Wilson, Kevin O’Hara, Steve Kramer, and Dan Myer.
Matt: So now I’m going to bring up Agent Kevin O’Hara to talk about the inspirations for the world and where we start with that.
Kevin: Thanks Matt. So the world, as you know I’m responsible for the world, mwahahaha, the world it’s all mine. My job is to work with a lot of talented artists and designers to figure out what we’re going to make, where we’re going to send players, and the type of things that they are going to do.
As we’ve said before, one of the primary objectives of the game is to have you jet setting around. That’s what secret agents do. James Bond in any given film visits 3 exciting places. The beginning, then middle, and the end of the film. We want to make sure that we’re sending you across the world to do different things in different orders, and not being stuck in one place for too long. Or feeling confined to one city or one area. So it’s very important to us, not to make a huge contiguous world where you can walk from one end to the other. Frankly it would be boring to walk from Kiev to Prague, and no super spy would do it. Instead they would take their Lear jet there, or their underground secret tunnel train.
We want to make sure that the space themselves are really big. You go into Kiev in our game and there are lots of streets you can go down, lots of people you can meet, there’s spies everywhere, there’s spy activity everywhere. You might think it’s the real world, if you’ve ever been to Prague, you’ll say this feels like Prague. But there is something going on here that isn’t going on in Prague, or maybe it is for all I know.
There’s landmarks that you go up to, and then you find out that they are secret bases for your enemies. Or you find out that the guy selling flowers is actually someone that gives you access to the secret lair of your team. Perhaps there is a guy reading a newspaper, or is he taking pictures of you. You don’t know. Throughout it there will be lots of side quests you can go on to find out more about the rich history and storyline that we’re going to give you.
Again, it’s a caricature of the real world. We want to make sure that we are really hitting on the elements of what makes spies fun and interesting. So all of our cities that we’re picking, we ask ourselves is this a city that you would see in a James Bond film. We’re not going to go to Fargo, sorry if anyone is from Fargo, it’s not a very spy like town, sorry.
We will be going to Prague, it’s the center of eastern Europe. It’s where the iron curtain was, it’s really evocative of the old elements of the US versus KGB cold war spies. We want to really get into that in all the spaces we have.
The other thing that I want to talk about the world is the areas that you go into. Public spaces, that’s where you’ll see lots of other players, dozens of other players onscreen at the same time, walking around doing different missions, working with each other, taking pictures, collecting intel. Even fighting some enemies that are in the street.
But half the game will take place in instance spaces where put you in small teams of up to four players into your own private map where we can control what happens there. There can be cinematics and scripted events that we put in. Frame rate will be great, and the experience will be first class. And you won’t have to worry about other players coming in and screwing up your mission by killing that one guy that you came to kill.
So hopefully players will get a good mixture of public spaces where you’ll meet other players, see the cool stuff that they have, wondering how and where they got it. And then going into your private spaces and getting a rich first person or action experience.
Matt: Okay, I’m getting ready to show a quick video here, but first a little overview. What I’m going to show you is a little about our Unite and Paragon field offices. Remember Unite is our high end super spies and Paragon is our down and dirty mercenaries. I’ll talk a little bit about what you do in the field offices.
You are what you wear, it’s a very important feature within our game. This is our class system and it’s how you choose what you want to do. Basically we have 3 primary roles; combat, stealth, and support. Inside any of those roles if you switch your outfit, that’s what you are advancing.
You will have to switch within your field office, but it makes it easy for players as they are playing to figure out if I’m advancing this one at a hardcore level, and this one at a lightweight level. Or maybe we just lost our support guy and I want to go back to a field office and switch so we can finish that mission. We really want to make it easy for people to switch, but it’s still important that you have that role and you identify within that role.
That’s why you cannot just switch on the fly, that’s something that’s important to us. Part of an MMO, the exciting part, is working as a group to accomplish a goal. We still want to make sure that applies, and that why the roles are important.
Weapons, I love me some weapons. Operatives are the guys we talked about, and then a little bit about our NPC and factions. Kevin, start it up.
{Editor: I had pictures of the video, but cannot post them. But I’ll give you Matt’s commentary}
Here we go, so in The Agency we will be starting out in two special areas. The Sophia is one of them. I can’t tell you what the other one is. The Sophia is…if you owned a blimp, what would you have in it? Well, you’d probably have a beautiful vista lounge…you’d probably have spaces that people can congregate in…but this is just a small blimp, so you’d probably have bars and lounges and areas that people can meet up in.
This is all part of our entry level experience. We want players to be able to jump in and get started. What would a blimp be without a shark filled tank…with lasers. But the idea is that we want to start you off, I’m not going to talk much about the story as we want you to experience it on your own.
This is where you first get your spy experience, this is where you learn about what’s going on. And it’s also a place where you might have to come back and visit and discover other intrigues that are going on. We really want to make it fun and get people totally involved right off the bat.
The field offices, Unite Flowers, a beautiful little flower shop with….a secret door. This is the main HQ for Unite. A place where you will meet up, have a few cocktails. You’ll change your outfits, your roles, get missions. Standard stuff.
This is one of the locker room areas here where you can change out your roles. We really want to make this a place where people meet up, where people get together.
Paragon, a little different, an ultimate fighting ring, a mechanical bull, pool tables, bars. Everything a good mercenary would want to have. Now their locker room is…I’d say…a little bit dirtier than Unites. If you are a mercenary, who really cares. That’s the infirmary area. There’s the R&D area.
One of my favorite parts of The Agency is you are what you wear. We’re going to provide a lot of different outfits that you can customize based on your role. The first part of this are role outfits. These are outfits that you will be able to look at people and know what role they are playing, combat, support, or stealth.
You’ll be collecting each one of those, and augmenting them as you collect them. They all look different and you’ll be able to mix and match and that kind of thing. But they all have a specific look to them, and it’s profile is important to us. When you are out in the field you’ll be able to identify between combat, stealth, and support.
Alias wear is again one of my favorite parts. This is where you as a player will have both a combat role and an alias with you at all times. Alias is what allows you to get in various places like clubs and the chateau that we showed you last night. This is some of the formal wear, obviously the look is different between Unite and Paragon.
We want to give people options to collect cool things that they can get in and out of. And we’ll enforce that in the game space. The cool thing is that each one will get their own skill set to and you’ll be able to load that out and modify it. So it’s not just that you are wearing something, you’ll be doing something cool too, like intel and that kind of thing.
The last part of this is, we decided that you can make any type of combination in The Agency, this is awesome. What would a player do? What do you think a player would do if they had the rights to do anything that they wanted? Well they would do that. Yes we may allow them to do that, possibly.
Guns, weapons, attachments. This is…we call it gun porn, that’s what it is. {Editor: the video goes through hundreds of combinations of guns and attachments at this point.} That is the ability for you as a player to gain a weapon and modify that weapon. And operatives are going to be the way you do that. You’re going to be able to say I want this, I want that, I found this scope. We want to give a lot of different options on this so you can customize your play.
And then the operatives. Operatives are a very interesting part of our game, because this is our living loot. This is going to be the primary loot economy, these are the guys you want to collect. They have some cool names, like Knuckles. Obviously he is good at something. There are also going to be names like Butterfingers and other things like that. The names should give you a clue as to how good…or bad they are when you put them on a task.
In some cases you may want to sacrifice an operative to get a little further along. Each one of them has a lot of little things that I’m not going to discuss here. But they allow us to give a little more depth that players can discover over time….anyone know what that is? That might be their sign.
NPC’s. You got to have a world of villains and people that you are going against, or working with. You may not know which side they are on. This is just a little cut showing off some of the cool villains that we have right now. Dr. Kessler, notice the little mind control vice on the goons, when I say little I mean huge.
There’s going to be a lot different villains that we’ll open up over time. A lot of different factions that you’ll be able to interact with, each one with their own story that you’ll be able to discover.
So that’s it, no one has seen that except for you guys. So don’t tell anyone. {Editor: Oops} JonnyG I’m going to have to confiscate that camera, sorry. {Editor: Argh! Apparently I forgot to have my operatives distract the guards.}