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Global Agenda: Recon Class Q&A with Todd Harris
With Global Agenda heading toward the final phase of closed beta one this weekend, we asked Executive Producer Todd Harris to tell us about the recon class - the most popular class in beta so far (recon edged out the other classes with 27% of the total characters created). Recons play a much more active role in Global Agenda than just sniping from afar. Equipped with stealth abilities, traps, mines, and anti-stealth capabilities, recons are the perfect choice to wreak havoc behind the lines. Join us as we learn more about the roles,capabilities, equipment and tactics of the recon class in this first of four part series.
Ten Ton Hammer: It’s natural to think of the recon class as a bunch of snipers, but recon is a lot more than just headhunting through a scope in Global Agenda. What are the various roles the recon class performs?
Todd Harris: Recon is definitely a very versatile class. Probably the easiest way to explain recon is to tell you how some of the different people here in the studio play the class. One of the tasks recon is particularly good at is hunting the beacon of the other team. In Global Agenda, both teams in PvP have a beacon, which is basically a chance for a forward spawn for their team. They only have one; the entrance to the beacon is in their drop ship or defensive spawn area and then they place the beacon aggressively in the map. That allows players to step through and make a big difference between winning and losing. Since recon can go stealth and easily get behind enemy lines, hunting the other team’s beacon is a task they do often. Travis, our QA lead, is particularly adept at doing that.
Another common task is taking out heavily fortified areas, such as turret farms. When the other team has set up a fortified area - medical crates and multiple turrets - recon has a lot of tools to deal with that. So taking out those turrets is a second task, and Dan, our lead animator, is particularly good at that.
Clearing out blobs of people is another task. If the other team has a lot of momentum and is kind of clumped up around the objective, recon can stealth in and use bombs to clear those people out, since getting caught in a bomb’s radius could mean being rooted for a short period of time (which usually means death). Nick Larkin, our Technical Artist, does that quite often.
Another interesting task is just being a spoiler against other recons. One of the offhand devices a recon can take is a scanner, which will show other recons even if stealthed for a limited period of time. Andy, one of our weapon designers, will often play that role and when recons think they’re immune, he’ll go behind them with a rifle and finish them off.
Recons can also play more of a traditional scout role. They can take bionics, which gives them additional speed, agility, jumping ability, and also the ability to place a decoy of themselves and spec high in melee, basically causing a lot of chaos around the objective. So those are just a few of the recon tasks that we see people in the office taking with the recon role in addition to sniping, which of course is a valid role too.
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While a robotics class works to protect the beacon (stacked blue rings, top right), a recon class makes his move. |
Ten Ton Hammer: Taking stealth as an example, in what ways can players bolster their existing recon abilities?
Todd Harris: You can bolster stealth a few ways. One is through the devices themselves. All of our gear is ranked from one to four, where rank four devices are more powerful than rank three than rank two than rank one - but they also cost more equip points, so you can’t be rank four in everything. So, in the case of stealth, rank four does allow you to stealth longer than rank one because it consumes less power and all stealth has a slight consumption of power. So you can definitely bolster it through your item choice, and you can also bolster it through talents. There’s one talent, for example, that supports a faster transition into stealth. Because you can be unstealthed by taking damage - if you want to get back into stealth quickly, there’s a talent for that. Other talents can kind of indirectly bolster stealth because you can increase your total power pool or the rate at which you get power back.
Ten Ton Hammer: One thing I noticed about the recon class from my brief play session at PAX is that there’s no such thing as a one shot kill (that is, when you’re facing an enemy with full health). Taking away the coveted head shot was a very intentional design decision, I take it?
Todd Harris: Yes it was. The headshot is fun, from one person’s point of view... (laughter) but not as much fun from the other person’s point of view. And really, we are a hybrid of a first person shooter and a role-playing game - we’re a third person shooter. People that aren’t familiar with the game might not know where we fall between tab-targetting and super-twitch, über-macro, nano-second reaction time gameplay. Basically, because it’s not fun to be on the other end of a one-shot kill, and it’s also not very fun as a medic trying to keep someone up and having them drop after one shot, for our sniper role, we wanted to support player skill with aiming but really not overemphasize twitch skill.
So, for us, it’s more about picking your target, picking the right place to snipe from, rather than pixel hunting. We do have a hitbox, it’s not stat-based - I do have to hit you with the projectile that comes out of my sniper rifle, but having a single hitbox around the character felt like a good compromise between player skill and not overemphasizing twitch gameplay.
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Genre: Science Fiction
Status: Published
Release Date: February 1st, 2010
Fee: P2P
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