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Although making an MMOG is no small effort – most of them take four to five years to create – it seems like creating a world with such a strong personality would be an even harder prospect to undertake. With this in mind, we asked Wilson if they’d been working on the operatives for awhile or if this was something they’d begun pursuing later on in their development cycle.

“We’ve been working on operatives for almost two years,” Wilson answered. “One of our designers has actually been dedicated to operatives from the get go. Now we’re just adding more and more writers. The nice part about being tied with Sony Pictures is that we get access to their writers and as our framework advances, we’ll be able to add more and more writers.”

After he’d finished thoroughly explaining operatives, Wilson discussed what the SOE Seattle team had imagined for the higher end content of The Agency. Rather than merely including high level encounters, the development team hopes to really explore all areas of the high level systems. “The final part of the game is what we call ‘World Domination,’” Wilson explained. ”This is the portion of the game where you start to build joint agencies with other players to try to achieve globe encompassing World Domination. As you combine with other players, you’ll be able to do tasks that you wouldn’t normally be able to do without a large fleet of operatives.”

Only five of your operatives can be active at any one time.

“At the max you can only put five operatives into play at any given time,” Wilson continued. “However, there are some tasks that require upwards of 500 operatives, and this is when you’d start a recruiting campaign to really bring more people into your joint agency. It’s a positive thing to be able to join people together.”
All of the talk regarding grouping and guilds led me to the next point of inquiry. With the World of Warcraft really hitting on the solo market, the Ten Ton Hammer staff wondered if the game would be soloable. Wilson responded by announcing the three different awards you could achieve from the player missions: Bronze, Silver, and Gold. According to Wilson, these were the big signifiers on whether something could be soloed or not.

“Bronze, anyone should be able to go in solo and complete the mission,” he said. “Obviously the missions ramp up from there and it’s going to probably take a group of people to get gold on every mission in the game. If you want a gold, you’ll need to add more people to the mix.”

Despite all the talk about fighting enemies and fending off the bad forces in the world, the SOE Seattle crew hadn’t gone into any real detail on what sort of evil elements would be present in the game. Would players be able to play on “the Dark Side?” And where were the really big bad guys? Wilson nodded and continued our conversation.

“What we haven’t shown at all yet, are our villains,” Wilson explained. “There are some key villains in this game, because it wouldn’t be a spy game without the ‘super-villain.’ The villains are really the guys pulling the strings. At the beginning of the game, the two agencies are actually fighting against one another, but as you progress you discover these super-villains really are the ones that need to be stopped.”

“Paragon is the closest thing to a “villain” the characters can play – those guys are all about the money – but we aren’t really separating the players into good guys and bad guys,” Wilson continued. “They’re just two agencies with completely different approaches. There are ways to steer your characters one way or another – good or bad – but you’re generally fighting for the side of the right compared to the game’s villains.”

Despite not being the response that some players were hoping for – there are a few who just love to play the most vile characters they can – it’s obvious that those “evil” players can definitely try to find the darkest shade of gray possible. And from the sounds of things, SOE Seattle wants them to explore that option. “We’re really trying to give betrayal a meaning in The Agency,” Wilson said. “You don’t betray strangers, you kill them. So to get betrayal right we’ve had to work hard at finding ways to earn players’ trust to make the feelings legitimate. However, it is a fun form of betrayal.”

Villains in The Agency will be the super-scary variety. Think of the Bond movies.

With a plethora of cross-platform options available to them, we wanted to make sure we were covering all of our bases with the SOE Seattle crew. During the presentation of The Agency demo, the Ten Ton Hammer crew saw several items that looked like trading cards. Since Sony Online Entertainment also holds an online trading card game studio, we asked the SOE Seattle developers if there was any chance of a possible crossover between the two games.

“We’re definitely going to be doing something with the SOE Denver studio,” Wilson said. “Even before SOE acquired the Denver studio, we were already considering a form of gameplay the equivalent of a collectable card game. We treat our operatives just like loot – and therefore just like CCGs – so there’s no reason why we shouldn’t take all this gorgeous card art and build something on top of the game.”

With that, we ended our conversation with the SOE Seattle development crew, shook hands, and went our separate ways. Both Jeff “Ethec” Woleslagle and I couldn’t help but smile on our way out. From this brief glance, we knew that the SOE Seattle developers had hit on something special and with the right touches and tweaks, they could have a solid hit on their hands.

For more details on character creation, the combat mechanics, and some basic ideas of how The Agency will play, make sure you check out our The Agency CES Demo Video featuring all of those things and more!

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