* Public – you’ll be able to meet up with others in locations around the world. Some missions will take place in public spaces as well, allowing you to meet up with others that are performing the same mission.
* Private – private spaces take your team off into their own instance of the world. This allows the developers to include the over the top action expected of a super spy game including better AI and interactive and destructible environments.
* Public / Private – this is a public area that will spawn a private space for a specific battle. An example given is your team walks into a bar. Other players are in it and you see them, they see you. When you get to the bar, due to a mission one of the players has a boss spawns outside the building and comes crashing through the door to confront you. A private space is created for the boss battle.

A lot of the game will be in these private spaces, but there will also be a good portion that takes place in open spaces like a traditional MMO.

Will this MMO be an open world game, or will it be a number of skirmishes (like COD4 but with a greater story behind it)? From what I have seen of The Agency, I believe it will be the latter… thus not a classic MMO. I think that some of the MMO audience will be captured by this, even new people brought in, however…

The PS3 has the potential to be “THE” MMO console. We need more MMOs of varying genres. Please no more EQ, we already spent a number of years playing that. As a baseline, there should be an original classic-style MMORPG with all the potential the PS3 has to offer. This wildly interconnected next-gen console has been out for 2 years now, with internet capabilities since the beginning, and the only MMO I can play on it is a browser based game.

Please, more MMOs, not just The Agency. Get 3rd party MMOs on this console! What happened to Age of Conan? FFXI would have done great too. Please Sony, more MMOs.

-K

I just hope it doesn’t use the monthly fee system… because I won’t pay a monthly fee. I’d far rather pay as I go for new areas or missions. Some months I’m busy playing other new release games… and other months I may play nothing but a game like The Agency – but I don’t want to be tied into paying a monthly fee for a game I might not play a lot during that specific month.

… besides, it makes more sense to not charge a monthly fee – you want people buying and playing other games don’t you? :)

I’m just across Lake Washington from you. Let me know if you need a beta tester. I’d be glad to brave the nomadic hinterlands of Bellevue to offer useful advice free of cost.

Since the game is a shooter they are expecting people to die, so the death penalty isn’t going to be harsh. When you die you can:

* Be rezzed by the field medic specialty of the support role.
* Go back to the med center at the nearest field office for your faction.
* Go back to a custom checkpoint created by a field tech specialty of the support role.

I hope one of your revenue models is that its free because i’m sure it’d sell a lot better if it were

I have a few questions, if you wouldn’t mind answering. I’ll accept vague answers as I assume that the team is still under NDA at this point:

1. In a game designed for massive amounts of players, it is often hard to discern different players based on their looks alone. This is one issue which I think Blizzard has done excellently with “World of Warcraft”, where the armor/weapon variety is diverse enough to make everyone look unique in battlefields and within populated community centers. I know that Spies/Mercs doesn’t exactly allow for crazy medieval/fantasy armor like most MMO themes, however, does the team plan on making equipment with a wide variety of visual “looks” so as to really make everyone stand out?

2. One of the most important aspects of an MMO, in my opinion, is the sense of community that such games provide. The combat certainly looks intense, however, I haven’t heard much about community centers. Does the team plan on making tremendous centers of trade, communication, and interactment as found in places like Orgrimmar (WoW) and Freeport (EQ2) or will the game take a more spread-out approach with smaller areas for “shady meetings”? (this is a Spy game, after all) Or will there be a mixture of both?

3. The death systems in MMOs always gain a fair amount of hate. Some players find the more punishing systems (as found in the older EQ games) to make the gameplay unrewarding in the long run, whereas others find the less severe systems (WoW) to leave the game extremely easy through the endgame content. Is the team trying to find a balance between the two, or will this game take one of the two approaches?