MMO Weekly 9/06/09

Hello there, fellow game-heads, and welcome to this week's strafing, bunny-hopping, head-shotting edition of MMO Weekly.  In this week's iteration, we'll discuss the biggest surprise I found at last week's E3.  That surprise was a game by Hi-Rez Studios called Global Agenda.

I have to say, right up front, that I'm not in love with the title.  "Global Agenda" sounds like a game about world domination, imperialism, and political conquest.  You know, a build-your-empire game of some kind, maybe an RTS, or a turn-based strategy game. It certainly doesn't sound like a shooter or an MMO.

But that's what it is:  both a shooter and an MMO combined.  For the uninitiated, it's technically called an MMOFPS (that's what the cool kids call a Massively Multiplayer Online First Person Shooter).  As that jaw-cracking acronym implies, an MMOFPS is a shooter with role-playing elements (levels, skills, equipment drops, etc) added in.  For the record, there have been many wildly successful FPS games, and there have been a number of wildly successful MMOs.  There has never been a successful MMOFPS to date, though many have tried.  Historically, MMOFPS games have ranged from uninspiring to downright terrible.

Global Agenda aims to change all that and, from what I saw last week, they may very well succeed.  

Like every other MMO on the planet, you begin Global Agenda by logging in and creating a character.  There are four character classes to choose from at this stage of the beta.  They are the Assault, Recon, Medic, and Robotic.  Allow me to translate:  Assault = a tank with huge guns, Recon = a sniper/rogue with stealth ability, Medic = a futuristic healer and energy-caster, and Robotic = an engineer that makes turrets and bots.  The characters are all human, but the customisation options are quite good.  Using a number of sliders, you can adjust, very precisely, how far apart your eyes are, and exactly how large your nostrils are.  This means that no two characters will ever be exactly alike.  It also means that, when the game goes live, I'll be able to make the ugliest human being to ever strap on cybernetic body armor.  (If you know me, you know how much I appreciate the ability to make deeply ugly characters in every single MMO I've ever played.  I'm sure it's some sort of psychiatric disorder, but I simply cannot help it.  For me, a giant orange afro, a nose like a grapefruit, eyes like a dead fish, and a gaping mouth all look lovely together.)    

The game is played on a series of battlegrounds, each with a different objective.  Some games are simple "kill the enemy" type games, but there exist other variants familiar to FPS players.  As players blast each other to smithereens, they gain experience.  They then level up (there are 20 levels in the game) and get talent points, which they can spend to gain new abilities.  I only got to glance at the talent tree for my character, but it was certainly familiar.  The talents either granted new abilities, or improved some of the abilities I already had.  For example, one talent improved the blast radius of my grenades.  Quite useful, and the more points I dumped into it, the bigger that radius got.  Basically, if you play WoW, the talent tree system will be familiar.