"Fun now, no waiting,” says senior game designer Kevin O’Hara. It’s not the last time we hear him say it either – during our time spent with the development team it became clear it’s something of a mantra. He is of course referring to what they’re looking to achieve with The Agency and the fact that regular MMOs need a lot of time invested in them before they truly get going – before they let you get to the fun stuff. “We just want people to get straight to the fun,” he offers simply.

And it is fun. At least, it looked that way – there was no hands-on time at Fan Faire 2009, it was strictly hands-off watching a couple of members of the dev team running through a mission set in and around a Swiss Château.
Graphically it edges towards Team Fortress 2, but nowhere near as stylised. It’s humorous, but not entirely unbelievable. The Agency is all about the jet-setting, cocktail-swilling culture with, so the team say, a side of rock ’n’ roll. “Vibrant, sexy and inviting – the sort of world you’d want to be part of,” adds Kevin. If you didn’t already know, the game is set in a world full of espionage in a universe where supervillains are essentially ubiquitous – so spies are everywhere and everyone’s fine with that.

We learnt a little about Prague and Kiev – at least that they’ll exist in the game – along with a whole host of James Bond, Jason Bourne and Jack Bauer-type locations. It makes sense since it takes its inspiration directly from all three.

“We’re building on the Bond mythology like other MMOs build on Tolkien’s Middle Earth, and for us accessibility is key,” says Kevin. Since SOE’s trying to make an accessible, immediate MMO, the style makes perfect sense – who hasn’t heard of James Bond? Who doesn’t love at least a few of the movies? No one. People love Bond, and by extension people love spies and the world they populate. There’s no doubt it’s a great base for the game, and something that Obsidian’s forthcoming RPG Alpha Protocol has picked up on, too.

But that’s the other interesting thing about The Agency: it’s by no means a traditional MMO. It’s a persistent shooter (and if truth be told, that’s how the devs would rather we refer to it, too). Ultimately, and as Kevin goes on to sum up, the game is about mirroring the action elements of popular console games and shifting them into the MMO arena. It quickly becomes clear that SOE is determined with this – not to mention DC Universe Online and Free Realms – to broaden the genre over the coming years. As far as SOE’s concerned, MMOs as we know them today are just the tip of the iceberg, and it won’t be long before the persistent worlds we associate with the genre become as ubiquitous in games as the spies and supervillains that feature in this one. “We want to introduce that amazing buzz of entering an MMO for the first time and seeing all those people running around and realising that you can interact with them,” Kevin enthuses.

… continued