SOE Officially Announces The Agency, FreeRealms

Today the embargo ended for news on Sony Online Entertainment's two newest Massively Multiplayer Online Games. One, entitled The Agency is slated for the PS3 and PC formats, and will feature a spies and mercenaries theme so far unseen in the Massive genre. The other is FreeRealms, a fantasy title deliberately aimed at non-traditional gamers. It will feature whimsical gameplay and offer users the ability to create their own content, another first for a Massive title. Gamasutra has an interview with Matt Wilson, the studio director of SOE-Seattle, discussing the inspiration behind The Agency . "I think our big inspiration to develop this game actually came from watching movies. If you pay attention to all of the summer blockbusters there are lot of movies that come out around the spy/espionage genre. Whether it's James Bond, or the Bourne series all the way from Mission Impossible or even TV shows like 24 or Alias, it is a really big genre of information that is out there."

Nice troll :), but I will bite

[Anonymous Coward]

SWG was an MMORPG with a difference. You have to remember that most current MMORPG's are Everquest clones. You also got to remember that Everquest clones are RPG's light.

There is typically NO moral choice. If there is "evil" and "good" they are often purely based on race, and completly seperate the players, only to interact in Player vs Player combat. In Everquest 2 players can betray their alignment and go over to the other side BUT that is a one time deal.

You do NOT choose your own alignment like in the heavier western RPG's. You do not really choose anything in an Everquest Clone.

In many ways they are closer to the japanese RPG on rails. You choose your race, this determines wich class you can pick. You then venture into the world were you complete quests of increasing difficulty. With that comes XP that gives you new skills and better statistics. You BARELY get to affect this.

This is important to remember as a lot of recent MMORPG's try to make a big deal about how you can customize your character.

This is BULLSHIT, with Lord of the Rings Online being one of the biggest bullshitters around. Your class will dictate what stat bonusses you will be looking for, a hunter needs agility, a champion might etc. Yes in lotro a guardian can indeed choose the agile way or the might way (block and stun, parry and area-affect-attack).

The simple fact is that Everquest clones will give you your equipment through quest rewards and loot drops, the useless stuff you sell and the stuff that fits your class you use. Do NOT enter an EQ clone if you have a fashion sense. People wear what gives them the right stats NOT what looks good. Color coordination? Please.

In quests you do NOT choose how to advance, your alignment/race/class has quests which you either do, or don't do. You do NOT choose your own path.

So was SWG different? Oh yeah.

First off, no classes as such. Instead you choose your race, and then could make your own mix of wich proffesions you wanted. NO restriction based on race.

Most new players would get started in ALL of them, only later specializing in what they liked best. You could be a sniper/medic, a scout/doctor. Oh sure, some combo's made more sense then others and sadly many players just went for what somebody had figured out to be the most combat effective BUT still, you could choose, and for every uber-specced player there was one who played a combo they just plain liked and fuck the stats.

To give you an example of just how fucking big a deal this is. In LOTRO I am a guardian, this means NO ranged skills until level 30 at wich I can finally shoot a bow. Badly.

There are a lot of humanoids wich run away, annoying as hell when you are a close range fighter. In LOTRO I just got to deal with it. In SWG I could always create a melee character with a bit of ranged to shoot those cowards in the back.

Another HUGE difference was how you got your equipment. EVERYTHING was made by players. Loot drops only contained resources for crafting.

In most everquest clones crafters have to really grind the first few tiers/levels because nothing they make is in demand. Why should I pay you for your craptastic sword when I got a far more powerfull one from a random loot drop?

Another difference is that by default your character was neutral, neither aligned with the rebels or the empire. You could work for either, and even join their sides BUT you did it in the same world as everyone else. NO seperated cities.

A final note of intrest, SWG NPC's interacted with each other. In SWG I been rescued from certain death by imperial patrols, fought alone side herbivours against predators and gained the aid of the locals.

The mobs did NOT just stand around to be attacked or attack, they interaced with each other. This was NOT like EQ clones wich put guards in places to prevent mobs from wandering into safe zones. Imperial patrols were targets themselves and could easily be

Additionally...

[Moraelin]

In addition to what was already said, let's put it like this: the NGE turned the whole game into a whole other genre. It went from being a SF MMORPG to a FPS with a bad interface, plus a rigid no-choices class system which just says which special attacks you get at which level. The most common metaphor for it is that they turned SWG into Planetside, but that doesn't even do it justice: it's a Planetside with a bad interface, and with actually less freedom than Planetside.

Pay attention to that part about turning the game into a whole other genre, please, and you'll probably understand why most people are annoyed by it. Imagine that you've signed up for, dunno, Eve Online because you like the space combat, and after a couple of years it gets suddenly turned into Everquest instead. Oh and you get to choose a fantasy class instead of your customized ship. Sorry, there's no way to play your old character as it was any more.

Even if you don't think that one is inherently a worse game as such, it's the whole thing of turning it into another game. You can surely see how that would annoy a lot of people. A lot liked the old game, and just don't like the new mechanics and wouldn't have signed up for the new game.

And forcing everyone else to pick a fundamentally different character class is a pretty obvious (and justified) reason for discontent. Imagine that you've actually invested time and energy in creating and levelling up a very specific flavour of character... and suddenly you have to pick from a list of 9 fundamentally different ones, because your old combination is no longer available. Imagine that even the interface doesn't work like it used to any more.

If you're familiar with, say, WoW, imagine that you've wanted to play a hunter. Say, a very specific flavour too, like Beastmastery spec hunter, or Marksman spec hunter. You've done quests, you've grinded your epics, you've spent time at the auction house getting just the right kind of equipment for that character. Because, you know, that's the character you wanted to play. (Feel free to replace with whatever class you actually liked, if that makes the metaphor easier to swallow.) Then imagine that a patch came and just deleted that class. In fact, it deleted both pet classes, so switching to Warlock isn't an option either. Sorry, pal, pet classes are out. We'll let you switch to another class, though. You can be a scrapper, tanker, defender, controller or blaster like in COH now.

Oh yeah, also imagine that they just decided to get rid of the talent trees and the old abilities too. Having a choice of spec was so difficult to balance and all. You may have carefully planned advancing your character, but that goes right into the garbage bin. Now everyone gets to be a clone of everyone else, and uniformly get a pre-determined skill every 5 levels.

Surely you see how that would piss off a lot of people, right? It's not even whether the new classes are "worse" as such (although methinks they are.) People get emotionally attached to that character, and having it unilaterally nuked and turned into something fundamentally different... well, it's gonna feel like that character just got raped. Yet that's just what SOE did in the NGE.

Now also imagine that there was a prestige class, available only to people who've grinded the other classes to level 70. (Which actually would be less grind in WoW than the old SWG "hologrind" to Jedi.) So you've grinded like a slave, dumped thousands of hours into mindlessly levelling up a bunch of unrelated classes (half of which maybe you didn't even like in the first place), did the same quests and shot the same NPCs over and over again... and finally got your prestige class. Now you're a Jedi. Bloody finally.

Now imagine that the same patch comes by and nukes all that achievement, and makes it one of the normal classes available to all newbies. In fact, imagine they got rid of the old Warrior class, and made your Jedi just the melee tank class. Yep, that was another stunt Sony pulled in the N

Re:And here.

[777a]

Since most people are mentioning SWG I'll put my comment about PlanetSide (think Tribes with 100's of players and minor character levelling).

I fair enjoyed PlanetSide, a new patch with bug fixes and a heavily requested feature would be released every few weeks, and all was well. The developers were active both on the forums and in the game, all was well, the golden age of PlanetSide.

Then they annouced that they'd bring in clan owned bases and 'platoons' (groups of squads), in the next patch. It sounded really good, really got the clans excited.

Then clan owned bases and platoon got delayed by a few months so the developers could work on 'Core Combat', an expansion pack nobody wanted.

I can't remember how much they charged for the expansion pack, but the concept of it pretty much annoyed me, SOE didn't hire outside developers to create the expansion, they took away the developers who were upgrading the main game.

I can't find out the monthly price of PlanetSide (good job Sony, hiding it from potential users), but I'm going to guess at $15/month.

If $15 / month pays for developers+bandwidth+servers, then if the subscribers are deprived of the developers (bug fixes / updates) for a few months either the monthly fee should reduce, or the expansion pack should be free. Those developer hours were already paid for in the monthly subscription, selling them again as an expansion was crooked.

There was a bit of a backlash, the expasion was pretty poor, many forum members refused to buy it, instead moaning that they wanted clan owned bases and platoons.

A few weeks later SOE released clan owned bases, which couldn't be upgraded unless members of your clan bought the generally useless expansion pack.

After that SOE bug fixes / new features slowed up.

Disgruntled, but still, I carried on subscribing...

A few cheats were well known by the more experienced players, but they were obvious and not used by respectable clans, but used by a lot of idiots, example: automatic weapons would fire 5 rounds/second, by binding the mouse wheel to fire (or using a macro) you could fire much faster.

After SOE not fixing the bugs a player (can't remember his name) did a video demostrating the bugs which had been known about for months. Instead of fixing the bugs SOE banned the player.

That was pretty much the last straw for me, I sent them an angry email and cancelled my subscription.

For me to sign up to another Sony product they'd need to demonstrate vastly improved customer service, and their RIAA / rootkit actions over the past couple of years make me think its got worse. Much worse.

Re:first for a massive?

[Bluetick]

Yeah, but... Second Life isn't a game.