In Studio Briefing - Part 2
We continue our mission into gathering new intel on SOE Seattle’s upcoming The Agency.
Part 2 – Sent 2/13/09 (Discuss) (Part 1) (Part 3) (Part 4)
JonnyG: The next set of questions is on combat. Will we have a fallback unlimited ammo weapon like in Left4Dead?
Hal: That is actually yet to be determined. We are testing concepts now related to holdout weapons or holdout abilities. The Agency is about resource management more so than a standard shooter, where you fall back on your one unlimited ammo weapon.
Our game is about needing to consider your ammo, consider what kind of weapon you have, and considering what abilities you brought to the field. So if we gave you a holdout weapon, no matter how small the damage level is, you can rely on that holdout weapon to the exclusion of everything else. When combined with skills and enhancements, even a small amount of damage can be significant.
JonnyG: Does facing matter? Ie. Greater damage if hit from behind, only able to target things in a limited frontal arc.
Hal: We have head and body damage right now. We do not consider facing damage at the moment. Once again being an MMO supporting lots of characters onscreen at once, supporting all those projectiles is challenge enough. However, it’s not out of the realm of reason. But until our performance is rock solid with the basics we’re not going to go there yet.
Lorien: There is a concentration on efficiency at the moment more than complexity.
JonnyG: Can you change your crosshairs, size and or color?
Hal: We actually just got our reticule to the point that it’s 98% of the feedback and functionality that we want. Now we’re moving on to building a base scope that hits that same mark. Once we get past that, then variations on crosshairs and feedback can be provided in a snap. We want to make sure (through playtests) that the initial data that we’ve exposed for feedback is rock solid. Then we can start casting that in different contexts.
JonnyG: How much control will you have of your HUD?
Hal: We are a PS3 title first and foremost, so we have to be very careful. Some titles just build a very pretty UI, but leave it up to the player to customize as they see fit. We’d be foolish not to include options for the player, like whether you want to include a chat window that is persistent or comes up automatically. But not having drag and drop, or click and drag functionality on the PS3 means that you’re not going to have the incredibly closed up series of windows, leaving you with a small view of the world.
Not to mention that in a shooter you don’t want to encourage people to have lots of things on the screen as you’re making them less effective as a player. We want to avoid that. We’re hoping to expose flexibility to the player for options of how much UI is presented.
JonnyG: How ping dependent is the game?
Hal: It’s a shooter, so it’s very dependent on having low latency. Because we’re not actually doing phase based resolution, when I aim at you and I shoot, I have to be sure that you’re there. That is controlled by some of the really cool rewrites we’ve done of the back end code for handling moment-to-moment action.
JonnyG: Where are the servers located? I believe the question originated in Australia.
Hal: SOE does have a really great infrastructure for supporting online gaming. Over the last 6 years the notion of having to have physically located servers has been diminishing drastically as speeds have been increasing. However, given that we have an existing infrastructure we’ll be leveraging that as much as possible.
JonnyG: A lot of questions have arisen regarding the Global Domination end-game content, but I’m interested in how they are going to handle the first few hours of gameplay. I doubt our first missions will be “Kill ten Robo-Pigeon spy-bots in Bogota”, so I’m guessing the opening content will be slightly more cinematic in an effort to engage the players from the onset. Corollary to that, what kind of learning curve should be expected?
Hal: I love that question because that speaks to stuff that we are actively working on. Most MMO’s just drop you in the world, find quest, kill monsters. What we wanted to do is put you in a tutorial that while not hyper deep, establishes our spy mood and feel. While on the UNITE mission you learn the absolute basics on how to get around within the first 10 minutes. That includes how to move your character, how to interact with the world, how to use skills, how to swap between roles and alias, how to use your weapons, and how to trigger an Agency Moment… all within the first 10 minutes. It’s a very simple suite of actions, but those actions are how you interact with the majority of the game. Everything after that is depth, and that depth emerges as your character gets more complex through progression. {JonnyG: I can’t talk about details, but can say it is cinematic and exciting!}
We anticipate a very simple starter experience that gets the player set up to interact with the world deep enough that they can jump into missions to learn as they play. Players can also find some alternate tutorials to give them a little more depth before they jump in.
We know that there are two types of players, the one that wants to know everything in advance, they either read manuals or use tutorials. And then there is the guys that think they are superman and understand everything, all they do is play games.
JonnyG: I suck at all my games, but I definitely try to understand them.
Hal: Manual? I don’t need no stinking manual. That player is going to have the option of diving straight into the story or playing PvP matches and learning that way.
I want to thank the development team and SOE Seattle again for taking the time to answer our questions. We’ll continue to release weekly updates, for a preview of the questions that we asked, click here.