In Studio Briefing - Part 1
JonnyG recently had the pleasure to sit down with a group of developers from Sony Online Entertainment’s Seattle studio who are working on of The Agency. The devs included Hal Milton, Lorien Gremore, Steve Kramer, Chad Haley, and Corey Dangel. They showed some current footage of the game and then we sat down and got to the meat of the meeting, getting as many questions from the forums answered as I could. Luckily, I scored and got all but one answered.
Part 1 – Sent 2/6/09 ( Discuss ) (Part 2) (Part 3) (Part 4)
JonnyG: Will weapons be restricted by role?
Hal: Weapons not so much, the skills that come with weapons more so. If you are in a stealth role you should not anticipate ever wielding a heavy machine gun. If you are a combat agent you will have a wider range of weapons at your disposal. So there will be some restriction but, it will be mild, you’re not going to have to worry about being stuck in a role and never finding something that will be of use.
The biggest thing that differs between weapons, even the ones shared between roles, are the skills that go with them and how you unlock those and when they are available. If you are a stealth agent you should anticipate having a slightly lesser degree of flexibility if you need to use a rocket launcher on something as opposed to a combat or weapon specialist…So I guess the overarching answer is yes.
JonnyG: Can you go into details on some of the signature abilities that the roles will have?
Hal: We talked about a few that you just saw. {JonnyG: lucky me, sorry folks I tried to snag footage, but they aren’t ready to release it yet}. When you think of combat, you should think about skills that enable strength to absorb a lot of damage.
On the stealth side we’re going to have some real signature abilities like the grapple skill. Most everyone will be able to use zip lines, but to be able to grapple up to a particular point from which you could possibly snipe, etc. is the domain of stealth. Stealth includes disguises as well.
On the support side there is a variety of skills based upon whether or not it is medic support or tech support. Tech support doesn’t usually involve phones but it does involve things like traps and munitions, the ability to repair or give armor, the ability to give boosts to health recovery rates, aura effects, etc.
So, if you were in a group of three so we can divide up the roles fairly evenly, you would definitely assume that your combat guy is going to throw on a bunch of armor buffs, run out to deal a bunch of weenie damage, and do a bunch of pulling. The stealth guy cloaks around to do a lock pick through a security checkpoint to get to a sniper nest to provide coverage so the support guy can come forward and hack the defenses of the area in order to shut off turrets so that the combat guy can proceed forward and they can make it to the next chamber or encounter space. (Whew!)
JonnyG: So will the missions be designed to require multiple roles in order to complete?
Hal: Sort of. We are balancing that carefully, as we want to support a solo player. If we ever designed a main line story mission that you couldn’t succeed in by yourself, then we’ve failed. So, the way that we are balancing that is through side missions that can be very specific in what they call for, so we can have a side mission that is fully optional that says you have to stealth your way in and do X.
Then on the career missions to get those silver and gold ratings, that’s where we are going to nest more specific objectives that may require teamwork, multi-role support, and/or operative support.
JonnyG: Great stuff. What about cross-pollination of skill types within the roles?
Hal: Just like any well balanced title there’s always going to be a good sense of counters, I mean combat, stealth, and support have to have good counters for each other… slightly weighted towards one role or the other, but each are effective. Then within them the concepts of buffs, de-buffs, DOT’s (damage over time), area effect, etc. Those cascade to all three groups.
So there will be some dead similar skills, reloads, refire rates, etc. that will be shared among the groups. And then there will be dedicated skills that act as the differentiating thing that I uniquely do within the world, such as the support guy having a drain stamina aura that causes the stealth guy’s stamina to drain faster which will cause them to de-cloak.
So if you are a cloaked stealth guy and you’re thinking you are going to be bad ass and you see a support guy you have to think twice about that as you don’t know if when you get close your stamina will drain and you become visible.
JonnyG: Sounds cool. What are some of the unlockable weapon skills that you earn with weapon experience?
Hal: The unlockable skills include things like a charge up skill that allows you to do massive pass through damage that ignores armor. Other ones that we’re exploring are things like a ricochet shot that literally allows you to see a laser target bouncing off walls so you can try and do shots around corners.
Lorien: The bank shot is just so cool; the ability to go around corners is awesome.
JonnyG: The ability to curve bullets?
Hal: It’s not quite the Wanted thing, but if you want to think about it in terms of weapons there is a whole host of skill shots that we unlock. It’s almost like an alternate ammo type that you temporarily invoke. And then you’ve got skills that enhance your ability to aim, fire, and reload.
And then you’ll have some others that are effectively super-uber area affect things, that basically means the player stands there looking like a jerk going aaaaaahhhhhhhh {JonnyG: Hals imitation of Duncan wielding the mini-gun was concluded to the best ever by the group} while doing cone based damage to any enemy in front of them. Duncan is shown in one of our previous videos using this skill.
JonnyG: Last question on progression / character skills. One of the things to do in other games once you’ve hit the level cap is to level an alt. With the “you are what you wear” concept reducing the need for that, what do you see players doing once they hit the max cap?
Hal: You do have one primary motivator for an alt, and that is you’re either part of UNITE, even if you’ve created your own joint agency, or you’re part of ParaGON. Choosing a faction is not just about looking cool, it also means a suite of operatives that will be available to you, potentially weapon sets, skills sets, and mission content. So that’s one of the reasons that people will want to actually build alts.
If you hit a cap, it’s probably only for one of your roles or one or more weapon families. You’ll have the option to advance all of the roles available to your character, which represents a different goal than the standard one character, one class, one level cap. So, you might max out one of your roles, but odds are you’ll still have a ways to go and plenty of content to play through before you max out all of them.
One of the things that we wanted to do was not make our curve such that a player maxes out a base level and they are done. Instead, they can max out and go through all the story content which will unlock access to a lot of the meta content. But you’ll always have a reason to come back to make your way through all the weapons, all the roles, etc.
So, it’s like having all your alts at once, which is kind of fun.
JonnyG: Do you see people building one or two characters and maxing them out completely more so than building a set of characters?
Hal: It’s hard for me to predict behavior, but as we’ve anticipated in design, we’re thinking that someone will stick with one character for a while. Then they’ll think, “if I build an alt on ParaGON maybe I can do some surreptitious operative swapping.” Then they will probably concentrate on two. The only time that they may concentrate on more than two is they may want to take one guy quickly through one track, another through another track, and not just bury it all into one character.
Either way, we’re cool with that. Because we avoid all tank-mage syndromes, as you can’t have everything at once, it’s always gated by that outfit. You’re not going to be able to cast spells and soak damage.