At E3 2009, Ten Ton Hammer sat down next to href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/taxonomy/term/926"
target="_blank">Global
Agenda’s Executive Producer, Todd
Harris, to get a hands-on play session with the upcoming persistent
world shooter, and we’re happy to report not only that the
game is coming along nicely, but that aspects of GA like pacing, social
aspects, and itemization have a lot to offer the traditional MMO
player.

Character creation was fairly standard, with a few anachronistic
choices like lamb chops and a handlebar mustache, but it all adds
uniqueness to your character. The opening sequence sees several agents
busting in to rescue you from a stasis chamber - what the Commonwealth
uses to salt away and straighten out its dissidents. Instead of a smooth extraction, the rescue team was
annihilated in an explosion that simultaneously busted me out of the
chamber proper. This also explains why your character is feeling a
little weak and perplexed at the start of the game, despite being an
important part of the resistance.

The tutorial, which came next, was a fairly typical progression from
learning movement to tuning in to the basics of combat. Much of this will
be familiar to online FPS players, except for the lack of sprint. Todd
explained that the jetpack had taken the place of sprinting, and I
couldn’t help but feel it was a good trade. Another nice
movement touch was mantling obstacles by jumping up to grab a ledge,
then jumping again to pull yourself up (which may be necessary when
your jet pack is temporarily out of juice and recharging). After
tagging a few baddies I was ready to blow out of there, and jumped onto
a hovering transport for immediate evac.

I soon found myself in an underground facility used for training by the
resistance. It was time to make a class choice, and in true demo
fashion I went not with the class I’d want to marry for life,
but the coolest looking one. My choices were assault, robotics, recon,
or medic - all of which do about what you’d expect save the
robotics class, which builds missile turrets and healing stations,
sporting mobile robot pets and other gadgets designed to highly annoy the
opposing team. I remarked on the robotics guy’s third arm,
and Todd noted that having a distinctive silhouette was really
important to Hi Rez.

In the end, I went with a recon sniper build, hoping to get my Tom
Berenger on. The other recon choice was infiltrator (a built for speed
and melee class especially great at moving up your spawn point, a
critical function in GA’s timed matches), though you can mix
and match abilities to create a more balanced character. Equipment
choices are based on a DnD character creation style point-buy system
that gives you a pretty wide assortment of weapons and capabilities at
the start . GA allows you to trick out your character by, say, picking a
powerful sniper rifle as your primary weapon and maybe gimping yourself
a bit on melee weapon. You’ll also fill your other equipment
slots with a jet pack, stims to restore health, mines, decoys, sticky
bombs, grenades, and more. Clothing and armor slots were about what
you’d expect, but the enhancements concept was fairly new. At
present it’s just a host of open slots where you can equip
player-crafted (roll your own from PvE loot or buy at auction)
persistent buffs, or implants in terms of the lore.

Hi Rez showed the Skills interface for the first time at E3. This is a
classic talent tree that increases the strength of your existing skills
and might add a few new ones. After giving myself a healthy boost to
marksmanship and stealth abilities, we were off to the domed city in
Sonoran Desert via fast transit. Todd explained that the game
isn’t really designed for explorers (with apologies to
Fallout, not much can really live in a post-nuclear wasteland), and the
game is tied together by ways to get you from combat to social areas
and back quickly.

Territory control might not be new to MMOs
or FPSs, but control on a
grand scale by agencies and alliances is fairly unique (the only other
example that comes to mind is Perfect
World). I saw an early version of the territory control
hex map that shows who owns what and what remains to be conquered.
You’ll make a territory yours by running missions as an
agency and gathering enough resources to build your own domed base and
later by capturing the area from other agents. The more territories you
have, the faster you’ll gain resources through the facilities
your agency builds, and the more territory you can conquer. Or maybe
you turtle up and pour those resources into defense.

Assuming all goes
as planned, it’s grand strategy meets MMO levels of player
organization meets FPS, just like the Total War series fused grand
strategy and the RTS. But like any domination game, there’s a tipping point after
which it’s only a matter of time before one alliance becomes
unstoppable. I asked Todd what Hi Rez was doing to mitigate this or at
least make sure that tipping point doesn’t come too soon.
This was the leading thing that Hi Rez wanted to get right before going
into closed beta, Todd said. As far as a little bit of a balancing
factor, different “open” hours are associated with
certain territories. A newbie agency might want to go after a zone with
fewer open hours and less resources, for example. There is a win
condition, and Todd explained that if one agency does dominate,
they’ll enter the actual lore, get a host of bonuses, the
peasants rejoice at having a new protected area to colonize free of
Commonwealth rule, and the fight moves into new areas. In alpha, this
usually results in the winning agency having a target on their head on
the next go-round.

To gear up for some PvE action next, I went with a better jet pack and
mines, hoping to use a common sniper strategy of going vertical to
deal death from above while protecting my back with mines. My weapons
required no ammo, drawing energy from the same pool as the jetpack.
Todd explained that, as an alternative to my strategy, I could deploy a decoy,
go stealth, and find myself a good ambush position. I was soloing an instance designed for a group, so naturally I didn’t last too long. The game
uses a projectile-based damage system (unlike many online shooters, which only check if the enemy is in your reticule when you click to cause damage)
and learning to “lead” enemies when sniping was a
fun challenge.

The map had a fair amount of verticality to it; you drop down on new
encounters like the final boss and had better be ready. Two mechanics
worthy of note: a “rest” mechanic that allows you
to heal faster but with less defense, and a time-wide
“boost” that comes from killing lots of enemies
without getting yourself killed. For recon, this boost allowed me to
run faster and see enemies behind walls. And while GA is a skill-based
game, you gain experience and level your combat skills by killing
enemies and completing missions, not by repetitively using skills. Todd
noted that Hi Rez is considering a skill based system for crafting,
which only makes sense in the repetitive gristmill that is tradeskills.

We were on the attack in the Metal Arms PvP instance, set in the
Himalayas. It was a pretty straightforward capture point-style
instance. and enemies were displayed with a faint red outline making
them easy to spot. The map was an excellent size for the team sizes; the push and pull of capture-point combat easily rivaled what
I’ve experienced in
Team Fortress 2, and the ubiquitous jetpacks add a new
dimension (pun intended) to standard shooter gameplay.

Bottom line: we played several in-development persistent world shooters
at E3 2009, and GA seemed to offer the best mix of originality and
pacing for players that reside more on the MMORPG side of the gaming
spectrum. Unlike many of today’s shooters, gore and
gut-wrenching displays aren’t a part of GA, and this is an
MMO you can definitely play without worrying about the "wandering kid"
factor.  When I had to run to my next appointment, I certainly
wasn’t finished playing. Todd anticipates that style="font-style: italic;">Global Agenda will
be in closed beta this summer, and after getting a taste of the game, I can barely wait.