IGTV: Global Agenda Developer Interview Pt.1

14 Dec 2009 at 22:56:47 by

IncGamers' Bill Vaughan caught up with executive producer Todd Harris, and vice president of game operations Stewart Chisam to talk about the upcoming Global Agenda, its setting and how it is different to any other MMO out there.  In this, the first of our two part interview, we find out more about the world, the game mechanics and the background to the story.  We start off by asking why we can only play as humans...

TH: We do have a variety of non-human elements in the game, but only as combatants - not as player-created characters. So you are going up - Global Agenda's set on a future planet Earth, in the year 2155, so you're encountering cyborgs, and quite a bit of robotic creatures and creations and androids as enemies in player vs environment co-op gameplay, and also some things that you can manipulate as a player like mechs, or drivable robots, in our Agency vs Agency persistent-territory play. Butthe basic player-controlled characters are human characters, and it was fundamentally, probably, just a choice of tone, in that we are somewhat of a fantastical take on science fiction - certainly an exaggerated reality - but we did draw some limits there, and we didn't want to go as far as mutants and things such as that for players.

SC: Although our robotics class does have this cool third robotic arm, which is fun. [Laughs]

TH: I think we recognised that MMO players, certainly, enjoy customising their character, and so even though we made the choice for them to be human, we tried to put as many customisation options in there as was practical. So, a very robust face customisation system where you can literally adjust the bridge of your nose or the lobe of your ear; and crazy hairstyles; a lot of dye technology so you can get custom suits and custom helmets; and even some off-the-wall seasonal items like the flaming Jack-o'-Lantern for Halloween. Those sort of things certainly let you customise your character, but fundamentally you are still a person - at least on initial release! Who knows, maybe one day we'll expand it, but humans for now.

SC: [Laughs] With a jetpack.

TH: At the basic level, some of the concepts are: there are multiple zones within AvA, where a zone is a bunch of contiguous territories, and each piece of territory is represented by a hex map. So there's a user interface element where I can see the map of hexes on the world within a zone, and I can see which ones that Stew's Agency owns versus my Agency. We might be in an alliance and working together, or we might be mortal enemies, out to take each other down. Each zone, as currently envisioned, has a basically dwindling supply of energy that's coming from that zone. It comes through mines that players actually choose where they're going to put, in the world, and harvest that energy. As that energy is dwindling, we are effectively trying to maximise our take. We want to have more hexes under our control, and we want to have the right mix of mines, factories, labs, that help us produce things like robots, or bigger dropships to transport our agents to battle, or hardened respawn beacons that give us forward spawns in a map and are harder for the enemy to take out. We're choosing what sort of facilities we want to build and how we're going to use those resources - effectively, energy coming from the zone, and currency that we can accumulate by doing match-made PvP or PvE and choosing as a group how we're going to use our currency, how we're going to best harness that energy, to try to dominate that region, effectively, before the energy wears down.

That's the basic idea, so there'll be a number of ways to view an Agency and an alliance's influence and success within a zone, or even multiple zones, whether that's total net worth, or the most labs, or the most effective when they go into player vs player matches and take out other groups. So we're really going for a very emergent world there, where small Agencies can make a niche for themselves, and certainly there'll be some larger alliances really trying to dominate the entire zone, if they can.

TH: You can, as a player, actually get to drive around and kind of assume the body of a robot, so for us there are a number of things that are effectively robots but behave like single-player vehicles, so you can inhabit it and manipulate it, and when you do, your camera changes slightly, all your weapon bars change to be those of the robot, and that for us is probably as far as we'll end up going. We'll introduce new devices of that type that give you a different gamestyle and let you be a robot for awhile, but ultimately, the player class is still your home and what you would return to for the basic combat.

TH: It is a hybrid game. In our beta community, we draw off of a few different audiences, and we're expecting that we'll see that when the game is released, as well. Certainly, fans of class-based shooters - so if you're playing Team Fortress 2, if you came from Tribes 2 any multiplayer shooter, and particularly one that has a class-based nature, which those games do very well, we think there'll be a lot for you to like in Global Agenda, because we combine the class-based aspect with jetpacks, but also all the persistent elements we've been talking about.

At the same time, we've got another large portion of our community that come from traditional MMOs and they really like either the hardcore PvP aspect with MMO mechanics, or PvE and the whole complementary gameplay of the tank, healer, DPS combination progressing through a raid. So we offer classes that are really distinct and have some of those roles, but the action is obviously very different, and you're freely aiming your reticule, and a lot of people have enjoyed that as a change from tab targeting. We have about an even split of folks that come from a shooter community looking for a little more persistence, and people that come from a traditional MMO community looking for a little bit more action. If you like those shooter games, if you like Guild Wars with its competitive mission-based style, we think there's going to be something for you to like in Global Agenda.

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