GDC Interview: The Agency Lead Designer Kevin O’Hara

It was my final day of infiltrating GDC under the guise of a reporter, and I had just received new orders: I was to attend a meeting with one of our moles inside of SOE, who would give me a classified briefing as to the progress of our new MMO mind control program.

Our man would be waiting for me inside the bar of the W Hotel, across the street from Moscone Center where the larger convention was taking place. My cover story was that I was going to be there receiving a demo of The Agency, one of SOE’s new upcoming titles.

I’m sure the irony of being assigned the task of previewing a game revolving around spies was not lost on headquarters. They always did seem to enjoy their own dry wit.

As I approached the designated rendezvous point I made out the face of Kevin O’Hara, formerly known as Q3PO, when he was the community manager for Star Wars Galaxies.

I wasn’t even aware that he’d come over to our side—but, the identities of most of our operatives were on a need to know basis. Hell, my own mother could have been working for us and I wouldn’t have heard about it.

Seated off to his left was Taina Rodriguez, a younger woman who I could only assume was his handler, sent there to monitor his actions and ensure that he didn’t give away anything more than he was supposed to.

As I closed to within speaking distance, I offered a brief nod of recognition, and issued the prearranged challenge: “Is the tablecloth red?”

This should have immediately brought the reply of, “The turtles are green.”

Instead, it was met with only dumbfounded stares and a stony, awkward silence.

I knew at that moment that something was very awry. Why wouldn’t these two know the answer to the challenge… unless…

The temperature in the room suddenly seemed to rise by ten degrees, and all I could hear was the pounding of blood in my ears as adrenaline flooded my veins: Jesus Christ, this was a setup!

Instantly, I felt all the old training kick in: My hand reflexively moving towards the Colt .45 tucked into my waistband, eyes scanning the room for potential targets, jaw clenched in preparation to pierce the cyanide capsule in my molar at the first sign that capture was imminent.

I considered turning and making a break for the door—it was only ten meters away, at most, and I could shoot my way out, if it came to that.

But no, out on the street it would be that much easier to take me alive. Here, they would at least have to contend with witnesses. I was going to have to make a stand.

After a few long moments had passed with no one springing forth from behind the bar with an AK-47, no poison darts flying at my neck, and no men with metal teeth wearing bowler hats appearing from out of the bathroom, I decided that, perhaps, I was a bit hasty in my original assessment of the situation.

There must have been some kind of mistake, and I really had been booked for an actual demo of the game. They thought I was here for a media appointment.

I took a deep breath. My jaw unclenched, my hand once again dropped nonchalantly to rest at my side.

If I was going to make it out of here alive I was just going have to play this one cool, and act like a normal reporter would, so as not to arouse any undue suspicion.

Proceed to the next page to read or listen to the interview I conducted to cover my escape.

Press play to listen to the interview.

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The MMO Gamer: Here we are at the final day of GDC. It was a long five days, but it’s almost over, and, tomorrow we all get to go home and sleep for fourteen hours. But for now, I’m here at the W Hotel with Kevin O’Hara, a lead designer on The Agency.

So, for those among our readers who may be unfamiliar, please give a little introduction to The Agency and what it is you do on the project.

Kevin O’Hara: Gladly. I’m Kevin O’Hara, the lead designer in charge of world on The Agency. The Agency is an action shooter, spy-genre game, which has elements of MMO, persistent world. We are taking the experience that SOE has in making MMO games and applying that to the first person shooter aspect that you’d find in Halo or Counterstrike.

Our catch, though, is you live the life of an elite agent. So, in the game you’ll be one of two sides, a mercenary or a super spy, going through and stopping world-shattering plots.

The MMO Gamer: I guess my first question is: Why spies? You have the two basic core archetypes, fantasy and Sci-Fi, and then they kind of branch off from there…

What was the impetus behind the selection of this setting?

Kevin O’Hara: I think it was looking at the market share and seeing what was needed in the space. There are a lot of fantasy games out there, and there are a lot of good science fiction games that are coming out.

For an action shooter, which is what we really wanted to make, the most successful ones tend to be near-future, or present-day contemporary, modern weapon games. The spy genre is particular successful not only in the mainstream console games, but also in PC games and especially in movies.

You know, James Bond, the Bourne Supremacy, all those movies really show us that in order to hit a mainstream audience we should go for something more contemporary that people can instantly identify with.

The MMO Gamer: This isn’t the first time SOE has tried to make a shooter. I played PlanetSide, from beta through launch, and I seem to recall it not doing particularly well once it went live.

What made you decide to go back and try, try again?

Kevin O’Hara: First, I liked PlanetSide as a game, but its fundamental flaw was that it was a PvP only game, and massive battle only game. It lacked good instant action where you could just get to the fun and start playing and shooting things without having to go through any waiting for shuttles, or things of that sort.

So, I think we’ve learned a lot of lessons from PlanetSide.

But also, the team we have that we’ve built in Seattle has a lot of experience with first person shooters, or even action shooters, so we really wanted to leverage that experience: what makes first and foremost a good shooter game, and then apply all of our MMO knowledge to make it a good persistent world game, as well.

The MMO Gamer: The Agency made a lot of news when it was announced by being, if I recall, SOE’s first planned free to play title.

SOE was one of the pioneers back in the late nineties of the subscription model—so, do you think this indicates a shift in the industry towards free to play, or is this just going to be just a side project on your part?

Kevin O’Hara: As a correction, our first free to play will be FreeRealms, which comes out this year. And we as a team really want to watch that to see how it does. We have not officially announced what our model is.

We are intending to support whether it’s going to go to subscription based, light subscription, micro transactions, ad revenue, our game design decisions are trying to make it so that we can work with or incorporate any of those models, but really we want to see where the market is going.

To me it feels like there’s still room in the industry for subscription based, and Xbox Live is proving that shooter fans will pay for content, but, at the same time the Eastern influence is really showing us that there are other methods of distributing a game of this size.

The MMO Gamer: Another of the interesting decisions, I thought, was planning to release the game for the PS3.

There haven’t been a lot of successful console MMO titles, aside from Final Fantasy XI. There have been a lot of console MMO titles that have been canceled. What made you look at that area and say, “We can do better than these guys”?

Kevin O’Hara: I think it’s having the right product for the space. Which is why, like I said, we’re going mainly for the shooter audience. Obviously, a game like Halo is immensely successful on a console, but other MMO-types of games aren’t as successful.

I think our type of game really fits that model of play, and our persistent world knowledge will bring that more to the forefront.

The MMO Gamer: As the world designer on the project, what are some of the problems you run into working in the “James Bond” style, as opposed to, say, science fiction that you worked on with Star Wars Galaxies?

Kevin O’Hara: When you have a science fiction license, or working with fantasy, you have a lot more room to make up stuff that the players can do that’s harder to do in contemporary-style games. Going invisible in a contemporary game is something that people don’t buy as much, because they don’t understand the technology behind it.

So we had to be a lot more cognizant of what’s possible. But also because we’re a spy game, it’s not what spies actually can do in our real world, it’s what people perceive that they should be able to do.

Because everybody feels that there’s a grand conspiracy where spies have technology that’s way beyond what you see in the military. As seen in any James Bond movie back in the sixties they had laser watches. So, we’ll definitely play to that aspect to it.

The MMO Gamer: So, you have the superheroes. But, all I saw in the demo were their sort of bumbling henchmen.

Could you tell us about some of the supervillians you plan on having in the game?

Kevin O’Hara: Criminal masterminds that have plots to destroy the world, or take over governments.

You work your way up to them, so what we’ve been showing right now is meeting up with their goons. But at the next level you’ll have their lieutenants who might actually have some advanced weaponry, or some items which aren’t sci-fi but certainly get more of a grandiose boss-type feel to them.

The big bad guys, though, you might not just be fighting in a gun combat. You’ll be going against them in a game of high-stakes poker, or meeting up with them in their volcano lair, or something of that sort. I think we’ll be showing more of that later this year.

The MMO Gamer: You mentioned that the game is designed to be very easy to jump into, get into a mission right away, no waiting, that sort of thing.

So, how is the world designed from that perspective? Are there open areas, for instance, like PlanetSide, where you can jump in your Aston Martin—or whatever it’s going to be—and go for a drive, or is it going to be more the lobby and instance system?

Kevin O’Hara: We do want a hub-and-spoke feel to it, but our hubs are not small little lobbies. They can be big sections of a major city, such as Prague, which you can go around in. Because we want to be fast action we might unlock taxi points, so that you can get to one side of the map very quickly from the other side.

But, oftentimes it’ll be the director saying, “You’ve got to go on this mission, you’re in Prague right now, the mission takes place in Kiev, head to the motor pool and you’ll do a quick cutscene and you’re there in Kiev ready for the next part of your adventure.

Another thing we really want to get across with the “fun now, no waiting,” is PvP anytime. If you are in the middle of a mission and say “You know what, I’m tired of this, I want to play PvP,” you just bring up a window on your PC and you can instantly jump into a multiplayer combat map.

The MMO Gamer: Who would you be doing combat against? Opposing guild, or can you join different factions in the game?

Kevin O’Hara: There are two different factions in the game, we call them friendly rivals. There’s UNITE, and ParaGON. One is the super spies, Paragon is the more mercenary style who will do anything for a buck—but they might have a heart of gold.

They tend to get in each other’s way, and will fight each other. They’re not direct enemies of each other, because of course there’s hugely bigger bad guys they both eventually have to team up and fight against. But, oftentimes you’ll go into PvP maps, if you want to, and that’s where UNITE will be facing off against ParaGON, because their missions might have slightly different paths, or might even be in direct competition with each other.

The MMO Gamer: So what would a player get for jumping into PvP and shooting someone up? Is it just for fun, or do you get advancement, items, or things of that nature from it?

Kevin O’Hara: There will be a type of advancement you get from it. There will be the possibility of some items. There will be a prestige of sorts, a ladder ranking system…

At the same time, it’s very important to us that if you’re the type of player who can’t stand PvP—we’re hoping you’ll try it out, because it’s going to be different from most MMO PvP you’ve played before—but, you won’t have to PvP to be successful in the game. Nor will you feel like you’re really missing a lot if you if decide to stick with just the player vs. environment type areas.

The MMO Gamer: On the PvE side of the game: The demo mostly focused on small team actions, and tightly-packed instances… are you planning on having anything like, say, raids on the evil genius’ volcano island lair?

Kevin O’Hara: We are discussing the possibility of using raids within the game. Obviously, it’s very important to a lot more of the hardcore MMO players, who we also want to invite into the game.

But, first and foremost we’re working on the smaller team missions, because that really works better with the type of game we’re making as an FPS. But, raid content will happen, in some form or another. At this point though I don’t really have anything I can say about it.

The MMO Gamer: I always like to ask one philosophical question to balance out all of the game stuff.

Kevin O’Hara: Okay.

The MMO Gamer: Why do you make games? Why do you get up every morning, go to work, and make this [motioning towards the screen]? What compels you?

Kevin O’Hara: For me personally, it’s that I like to entertain, and I think entertainment is a viable occupation to have. I respect immensely firemen, and nurses—my wife’s a nurse, actually—and I so much admire how they’re helping society in very obvious ways.

But, I think that whether it be movies or games, entertainment is important as well. Making people enjoy their life, and enjoy the time they spend doing things, especially with other people—which is why I like massively multiplayer games. It’s validated for me, in that healthy and happy is important to me. So, healthy my nurse wife will take care of, and happy is something that I take care of.

The MMO Gamer: Alright, well thank you very much for taking the time to speak with us.

Kevin O’Hara: Of course.

The MMO Gamer: We appreciate it, and we hope we can do it again some time.

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