The Agency Preview

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The final piece of The Agency's picture is PVP, and that's the least clear right now. It will divide into standard multiplayer maps for "blowing off steam", contested zones that give perks to the faction that controls them, and crossover story missions, in which UNITE and Paragon agents might stumble across each other and compete for the same goal. You'll earn weapon experience, role titles and gear through PVP as well, offering a combative progression track for your character.

You can bet on the result of matches, and even on your performance in PVE missions, as well as in gambling mini-games. However, you might not be able to bet currency or operatives, if these are open to real-world trading. "Gambling will be a weird road for us to navigate, because the things that can have real-world value we can't expose to gambling, otherwise it becomes real gambling, and that's kind of destructive", notes Milton.

PVP will also tie into The Agency's own achievement system: service awards, which Milton calls "our version of trophies. We'll have PS3 trophies, but we'll also have service awards, and service awards are either one shot, like every achievement you've ever seen, or repeatable and provide you bonuses to experience, influence and can possibly unlock operatives or other features. So if you do really well in PVP and max out a given achievement, you may earn a rare operative as a reward."

It's becoming clearer than ever that we could just keep asking about The Agency, and Milton and his colleagues would just keep telling. But our time's running out and this preview is already too long. There are two pressing questions left. One - how is the game going to make money? Subscriptions, item sales, DLC? SOE won't be drawn on this, but they do say that they're after the "lowest barrier to entry" for console players, which probably rules full subscriptions out.

Is that a Squirtle?

Secondly - how do they think PS3 players are going to respond to it, and can they make a game for that audience without compromise? Console gamers have very different expectations, and The Agency already boasts an awful lot more detail in the game design - and, to be fair, a little less detail in graphics - than your average Call of Duty fan is used to.

"I'm not overly concerned about [the graphical detail] to be honest," says Dangel, "because I think as long as we're delivering that compelling fantasy, that you feel like you're living the life of an elite agent, there's plenty of non-traditional-looking games, non photo-real games that take all kinds of artistic approaches and they do quite well."

Milton is more bullish still. "There's a lot of pre-conceived notions about what MMO means," he says. "For people to say, you first have to respect these stats and these chat types and these logs and these types of UI widgets - no you don't, actually. So when we started off to make this, it wasn't about re-creating a traditional MMO and then re-casting it for console. It was just, what's interesting about persistence and socialisation, and how do we get that controllable with a very limited set of buttons on our PS3 controller.

"We need to be able to bring people into this space, and we need to do that by saying, hey, you know those games you like to play? Well start playing this one, and then you scratch the surface and, oh my God, there's all this other crap, and then you come back a week later and all this other stuff is waiting for you. That's something I want people to experience."