Q&A with Hal Milton - Part 2 (Operatives)
Hal Milton, Lead Designer, SOE-Seattle, The Agency
[00G] On to operatives, which I think are one of the truly unique and really cool concepts in the Agency. A recent preview mentioned a roster limit of 100. At Fan Faire you mentioned that the roster limit was based upon your overall ranking / level. Can you give examples of how the roster limit would work.
[HM] All final numbers are subject to change as we test and balance the feature. With that in mind, we start you off with very few operatives. As you increase your rank, the number of Operatives you can have in your roster, and the number you can have actively doing stuff for you will increase.
We’re setting a limit that gives players lots of flexibility, but also ensures that players aren’t able to collect all the operatives in the game. That allows those players who don’t care much about Operatives to generalize, get whatever ones they get, and successfully advance their Agent through the story.
However, if you’re one of the ones that really care about operatives and want to specialize in either crafting, providing services, or providing your joint agency with stuff; well then you’ll be focus on collecting the best combat support social operatives, or stealth operatives that meet your goals.
You’ll just need to balance out what Operatives you keep versus which ones you recruit over time. You’ll want to keep advancing to keep expanding your options.
[00G] Great stuff and it leads right to my next question. Operative leveling. In the CES coverage you mentioned that the operatives leveled by using them. Can you explain how this is going to work? How many operative levels are there? How does the level control their abilities?
[HM] Operatives have essentially the same rank structure as players. As they perform assignments you set them on, either ones that are done through the operatives interface or ones that are done via the in world stuff like that steam pipe distraction that we showed off at CES, they’ll gain experience towards a new rank.
As Operatives gain experience they will go up in rank, and when they go up in rank, you will have additional rank-up options to consider. We will spill more on these options as we get more game play proven out.
Regardless, as an operative gains in rank, they are going to get more effective at the assignments that they do. They will be able to take on higher rank assignments with less risk and time associated with them. They are going to gain potentially new specialties that will allow them to take on new assignments or accomplish crafting tasks that they could not accomplish before. And they are going to gain random pros and cons that may increase or decrease their effectiveness based upon certain criteria.
[00G] Since Operatives level, what is incentive to collect more than your roster can hold? What is the incentive to swap a long time operative out for a new one?
[HM] We are going to have tons of incentives. One particularly sneaky incentive that we will have is that some assignments will require you to sacrifice an operative in order to find out what’s really going on. Of course, this depends on what kind of Agency leader you want to be. To support this with minimal remorse, we will have a pool operatives you can potentially collect that end up not being so good. We will even have a limited number that are duds. Players will be able to tell based upon their code name. So if you get an op named Butterfingers who is a stealth operative, he is probably not actually a guy that you will want to keep until the end. However, he is somebody that you may want to keep around for a bit, in case you get an assignment that you want to burn an operative on.
Another reason that you may want to trade out or at least get rid of an operative that you have ranked up, is because another player may have access to operatives that you have never seen before. So, players are going to find reasons to actually explore what all the available operatives have to offer.
There is going to be these trade offs that players make over time, however if you want to play and just say I have collected these 100 operatives, I am a full on role player and I want to pretend that each of these guys are my special unique snowflakes, and I want to keep them safe and nurture them. You are going to be able to play that way as well.
But we are going to provide incentives for players to want to explore other operatives by simply 1) limiting the total number that they can have versus the number that they are exposed to and 2) providing some exclusivity based upon play style.
[00G] Operative Types – we’ve heard about gadget creation and recon, and seen an operative create a distraction by bursting pipes in a mission. Can you go over a little more on the types of operatives and their uses?
[HM] Essentially all operatives are divided into four types: combat, stealth, support, and social roles. Operatives who have those roles can be focused either on primarily providing goods, which is the crafting side of things, or services, which is the back end stuff like financial reports, or investigative work, intel analysis work, etc. Lastly they can perform in the field services, such as the ability to provide a distraction via the steam pipe, the ability to ping your radar with enemies that are nearby, and more.
We are also working on a variety of more fun specializations and you will find operatives to unlock special achievements as well. But I’m not allowed to talk about that yet…
To be redundant, the operative types that you are collecting will be focused on combat, stealth, support, and social roles- each with a focus on providing goods and services to the player. Within those roles will be breakdowns of goods and service providers. Within them there will be breakdowns of ones with particular specialties that enable them to be weapon crafters versus gadget crafters versus outfit crafters versus intel analyzers. Those are the basic types that were shooting for.
[00G] Rarity – you’ve mentioned that some operatives will be more rare than others. Can you please tell us a little more about rarity?
[HM] Rarity is very important; we are totally going to have rarity. Rarity is actually handled in a couple ways. One of the primary movers for defining rarity is the starting rank of the Operative. And then there are going to be very rare, which may be low rank or high rank, but are very rare because of the specialties that come with them. Specialties that enable abilities you cannot get access to any other way. So, we are going to be representing rarity in a way that is similar but not exactly the same as what folks have seen in collectible card games in the past.
[00G] Will the operatives be different for UNITE and ParaGON?
[HM] Absolutely. They will have different sets of operatives. If I’ve played UNITE and you’ve played ParaGON, we have essentially been exposed to different suites of operatives, and we can trade operatives between each other. And if I am a UNITE guy who gets a ParaGON operative, does that unlock any morale stories, or does that unlock any conflicts for the operative who is working for a guy whose part of a different faction. There are some fun ideas there. But yeah, UNITE and ParaGON have their own operatives.
One great example of that are two operatives that are sisters. However, they’re ideologically split, one works for ParaGON, the other for UNITE. The metaphor that the artists took with the card art and the descriptions that we wrote has the UNITE operative as a skier, and the other is, of course, a snowboarder. If you have both of these Operatives in your roster…well, some fun events might play out.
So we have some goofy things like that, but it just kind of makes sense that ParaGON would have a different slate then UNITE would. Plus you’re going to be able to get operatives from some of the minor factions that are located in the game as well. So, even though you are fighting the Bones, you may uncover a Bones operative, who you can actually hire. He is only part of the Bones because his little sister has been kidnapped by them and they are holding her and forcing him to do stuff. This unlocks a side story for you to be able to find his sister, so he is actually free from the Bones influence.
[00G] Can I recruit/kill/kidnap other people’s operatives? Please? Perhaps bet them on PvP matches, or mini games?
[HM] I love the betting. We want operatives to be a resource that people find as a rare thing that they actually want to put into bets and challenges with each other. Recruit, kill, kidnap other people’s operatives… that get a little trickier. We have some concepts in place which I can’t talk about, but what we are trying to balance out right now is the amount of grief versus the amount of happy reward time that the player gets from a system that supports harming other player’s stuff.
We are trying to create a concept of friendly rivalries between players in which they can actually begin targeting each others operatives. But there is nothing that is formal on that yet, we are still kind of hashing out the ideas and making sure that a wannabe 1337 super villain cannot join the game and ruin the fun for everybody else.
[00G] I’m all for keeping grief out of the game.
[HM] For PvP matches think about them being bet on PvP matches. But also think about what operatives could mean for people performing within PvP matches. So there is some juice that we are actually exploring there that we really, really like.
[00G] Yeah that could be interesting in a PvP match. If it’s consensual, if they bring them in to help out in a match, they’re fair game.
[HM] Well that is one key thing, and I have to point this out. For the launch of this game, there will be very few operatives that will ever be seen in the world. For the most part they are abstracted. I want them to be abstracted because that allows us to tell the all global world stories. And we don’t need to generate eight gazillion art assets up front, that gives us something to expand into; which is a really exciting part of being an online game. We get to introduce concepts we can then expand upon over time. For the most part, if you have operatives working with you, they are working with you like Chloe from 24; they are field operatives that are back at the base. They are doing stuff for you to make things easier for you as you are progressing through the area.
We have some other examples where operatives can be deployed in a map. But in that case they may say the sniper whois up in a building, essentially a turret that is firing down at guys for you. Or you’ve deployed a stealth operative into a mission, and he is not actively tracking with you, he is not actually fighting goons, but as you round the corner you may see a guard being pulled up into a vent, so you know that’s your stealth op working for you.
There’s tons and loads more…but I’d rather show you than talk about it.
Now, what’s next?