Yet another interview to quell the rumors of The Agency closing.

Kikizo is not a site I frequent because it caters to the console market, but when they post a walk through of the current state of The Agency, I tune in for a few minutes. There are no surprises in the interview, and yes they use the same setting for the agents' mission, the save the pillars mission. Quick aside, if I hear or read about the pillar mission one more time I will get a wee bit frustrated - that mission is tired people! It was cool the first twenty times and that was six months ago.

Anyway, the only real items of note in the interview and preview are the following tidbits:

""The Agency is our online persistent shooter," he [Kevin O'Hara, Senior World Designer] says. "We're not generally using the term MMO, although we do put a lot of MMO abilities that we've learned from our other projects into it."

I should know by now. While at first I get excited to get more people into MMOs, "console port" means short attention span theater and therefore not really a MMO, but I'm a slow learner. Next:

"In a Player versus Player game, even if I play for two years and you start today, you're going to be competitive with me if you're a shooter fan. If you're not a shooter fan, then certainly getting those skills will help you to advance."

Strike two. And two things bug me about this. First, if I play and level up, I want to squash new players. As a new player I expect to be squashed until I level up, that is the way it works usually. Second, I suck at shooters, I want a larger portion of success to be based on strategic moves, not twitch-based moves, but that's just me. And lastly we learn about the game's involvement with real life:

"...some Operative tasks can be carried out while you're offline. "So you might get the schematics to make the super golden gun, and you'll put an operative on making it for you," O'Hara elaborates. "And he'll go off in real-time, and he'll call you on your cell phone or send you a text in real life saying "Hey, it's been two weeks, your gun's done, so you might want to jump back into the game."

Yikes, talk about big brother! Conspiracy theories aside, the gaming world may or may not be ready to have their games calling them. Here is the interesting part; The Agency may be a free-to-play game, can you imagine a scenario where the calls will stop if you pay to subscribe? Too many tinfoil hats in my closet I guess. Read the rest of the walk through at Kikizo and make up your own mind.


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Last Updated: Mar 13, 2016

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