By Staci Krause
Action! Adventure! Intrigue! Sony Online's Seattle office has been hard at work
on an upcoming First-Person Shooter style MMO titled The Agency, which will
offer players the chance to become spies. At E3, we got our first glimpse of the
game, with a pre-rendered trailer we were told was in-game footage. It looked
pretty darned nice.
The story itself will allow players to immerse themselves in the world of
spies, akin to the James Bond movies. It's set in the modern world, one players
will hopefully be pretty familiar with. One thing that was made clear to us
during the presentation is that they aren't taking themselves all that
seriously. There will be a lot of cute moments in the game and some that pay
homage to video game history and more. The game will be somewhat campy, although
there's nothing campy about the gameplay.
It is a shooter at its core, with some vehicles and other types of gameplay
thrown in. Set in modern day, players will travel the globe, completing missions
for whichever agency they decide to join. In the demonstration, we were
introduced to two characters created by the company to be the iconic figures for
the game. Just in the names, you can see how not serious the game is intended to
be taken. The team of Cassie Nova and Gavin Eissen exploded onto the screen, as
Cassie tried to come in all secretively and Gavin came in guns blazing. After
some words, we got onto the real gameplay, which makes great use of the
environment. Cover is going to be important, as well as tactics. It's not so
fast-paced as to be considered a twitch shooter, but it's fast enough for most
adrenaline junkies.
Since this is more like a shooter than a role-playing game, they didn't want
players to get bogged down with character development. It's a persistent world,
but instead of leveling in the traditional way, instead players will be
collecting really great gear and vehicles. We were shown one such vehicle, with
a caveat. It was decked out in every imaginable gadget - think what Q would
provide James Bond - but they told us it would be very difficult for a player to
actually get all the things on this car. Regardless, it looks like there will be
a wide variety of items for players to collect and that's basically what will
make this game persistent. There is also going to be a range of clothing
including, we were happy to hear, what they are calling Bordello Ware. Who
hasn't wanted to dress like they worked in the red light district? Oh, and the
red light district? Yah, it's in the game and you'll probably travel there on
missions.
The in-game footage we saw was gorgeous, although don't expect to be hearing
about beta this year. It's still a ways off. But it looks like this is a solid
transition for the FPS-MMO game and this one just might pull it off to
perfection.
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