Continued

In the in-game trailer we got to see that The Agency is going to be based on real time action for the most part; the default setting is third person but a player can switch to first person if he or she wants. It's a theme that Sony Online tried to do with their multiplayer based sci-fi MMO PlanetSide but that game didn't quite become the success that Sony Online perhaps wanted it to be. The trailer showed the main player character receiving an assignment from UNITE to pick up a package at an exotic European style location outside The Succubus Club, a rather evil looking establishment. That person and another player took on the role of agents to fulfill the operation but as one might expect a simple pick-up job didn't turn out that way. Our contact with the package got shot right in front of our eyes and a number of enemy agents picked up the package. Naturally the players in the trailer gave chase and armed themselves with machine guns to take out the bad guys. The trailer showed off tons of AI bad guys to pick off as the players tried to retrieve our target. Ragdoll animations were solid as the player character took out tons of bad guys and the AI itself looked to be non-scripted. At one point the main player's companion was hit by a sniper rifle but the player in the trailer was able to revive them with a defib device. After a few minutes of moving fire-fights the players in the trailer finally got to retrieve the package but that's when we saw one of The Agency's boss characters, a rather mean and very large bad guy who doesn't look like he would have taken "no" for any answer. It was at this point that the in-game trailer ended.

The in-game trailer was just a taste of what SOE Seattle plan to bring to The Agency. One thing that was touched on in the press event was that at some point while playing the game players will have enough experience to actually form their own spy organization. The plan is for your agency to form alliances with other player's in-game organizations. This all leads into what the developers are currently calling "world domination" which sounds like it might imply a way for players to actually fight with others for control of the world. Unfortunately, SOE Seattle is keeping mum at the moment on the specifics of world domination so we will have to see if that will be as cool as it sounds.

Visually The Agency is pretty impressive; the art style looks quite a lot like the current looks of action comic books; not quite cartoony but not completely realistic either like the Splinter Cell series. The Agency is using the Unreal Engine 3 tools from Epic to help build the game (its the first time any internal Sony Online game has used Epic's Unreal Engine tech) which means that there should be no excuse for the game to look terrific. Another interesting features is that the game will be released for both the PS3 and PC platforms. When asked if there were plans for any cross-platform play between the two systems, the SOE Seattle said only that they will be looking into providing such a feature but offered no definite promise.

So will people embrace this new kind of MMO? It's certainly refreshing to hear about a game in this genre that doesn't take place in a sword and sorcery fantasy world and the idea of an action game that's easy to get into is also encouraging. However its also clear that the game is still quite a ways away from launching. Only time will tell if The Agency will be the kind of MMO that will finally bring action fans over to the genre. At the moment the game doesn't have a release date but it definitely won't be out in 2007. We hope to get more info about the game at next month's E3 and over the coming months.