Doc and Dave got a chance to see a walkthrough of Sony Online Entertainment’s upcoming MMOFPS The Agency. While they got to see it first hand, and let the SOE representative do the talking, I thought I’d take a minute to hit the high points and offer my off-the cuff impressions.

As someone that has never played an MMO (or really felt the draw to), I’m probably looking at The Agency through different eyes than a lot of you but I have a hunch, I might just be the type of player they’re looking to draw in with their attempt to revitalize the MMO genre by adding the FPS aspects to it. Nowhere during this demo did I see boring looking screens full of numbers needing distribution, pages upon pages of “loot” in my inventory, or any of the other stuff that usually sets my “safely ignore this” detector to “Snore.”

Basically, The Agency seems to be an attempt to create a persistent spy world where you can choose your player-type at will. None of that “I have a level 65 <insert character type>, a level 52 <insert different character type>” crap I hear about from other MMOs and RPGs. The Agency promotes “you are what you wear” meaning if I want to focus on Support, Combat, Stealth, or Sport, I simply wear the appropriate clothing. If I want to use an alias, I put on my Alias outfit. You’re not tied into a class forever. While I’m sure a high level Stealth specialist won’t transfer to a high level Combat specialist, I like that you don’t have to make that irreversible game-changing decision up front… before you have a good grasp on the game.

There are skills you can hone in the game, what MMO would be worth playing without skill trees (see what I did there? I used terminology I’ve heard MMO players use… remember, I don’t play these things!) Things like Breach, Steady Shot, Defuse are skills you might work on. They mentioned 4-player parties, so it’s pretty easy to see how you might want to carefully select your party before setting out on your instanced missions.

I was also not too surprised to hear your performance will be rated on a bronze, silver, gold scale. That reminds me of some other initiative Sony’s rolled out recently… what could that be? It looks like trophies will be supported in the game as well.

Some pretty funny differences exist between the two opposing factions, Paragon and United. Paragon’s field office (where you can equip, meet up with others, train, etc) has a mechanical bull and is in a bar setting while United’s is a more James Bond-ish setting, complete with Q-like R&D department folks to work on new devices. No mechanical bulls in United’s field office though… Q*bert’s apparently the upper-scale equivalent to bull riding. Who knew?

Probably the coolest thing I’ve seen in terms of the game is the Agency Moments. Those are the really awesome stylized moments where a cool scene plays out for you, based on what you did. A sort of uber-finale if you will. You don’t actively play the Agency Moment, but your character gets to look really bad ass when it’s being shown.

Apparently the game’s currently hip-deep into alpha testing and they plan to do a beta test (on PC first) but the really interesting part is that they’ve currently got the alpha up and running cross platform between PC and PS3. It’s not looking like the game will ship that way, but it’s not for technological reasons… apparently the console and PC fanboys would rather bitch, moan, and ruin the game for EVERYONE than learn to just get along. The whole mouse/keyboard versus controller issue, the hacking of PC games versus consoles issue, the immediate patches on PC versus the certification process on PS3… those are all partial reasons the game will likely not ship cross-platform ready.

All in all, I think we should be paying very close attention to what SOE is doing here. We have the very real chance to see MMOs take off on consoles and if I were a betting man, my money would be on SOE. It may not ultimately be The Agency that’s the break through hit, but I’m betting it’ll be on this platform and there’s a good chance it’ll be from SOE.

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