E3 Interview: SOE Seattle’s Matt Wilson Discusses the Design and Conception of The Agency

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The MMO Gamer: The reason I asked that was, out of morbid curiosity, in quote-unquote “the beginning,” what were some of the ideas you bandied about this vast new project you were going to be working on, and how did you settle on this notion of the world-wide spy ring?

Matt Wilson: It’s actually a great question, and I’ll give you a few little tidbits that really nobody knows about:

Hal Milton, if you ever meet the guy, our lead game designer, he’s a ball of energy. The guy just thinks about game design non-stop all the time, and he’s an awesome person to work with. Way back at “the beginning” we decided that we wanted to come up with a more mainstream approach to the MMO space.

The first thing we had to do is we first thought about what made games like EverQuest and World of Warcraft successful, and why are they so accessible to people, versus something that’s a little more obscure—I’m not going to mention any names—but more of the obscure ones that’s like made-up IPs, and that kind of thing.

What we thought really helped out with that is before I played EverQuest I knew what an elf was. Before I played EverQuest I knew what a troll was. Even World of Warcraft uses a lot of those same bits that, you know what skeletons are, you know what rats are, it’s recognizable. You know what a warrior is. There’s a lot of stuff in there that makes it easy to play the game, you’re not relearning everything.

We wanted to hit that, and we wanted to make sure we did it well.

I remember coming in to work one day, and we talked to Hal, and I was like “You need to come up with a bunch of ideas, and then we’ll throw them up against the wall and see what works.”

I want to say within less than three hours he had twelve different ideas. We honed it down, and a couple of ideas that hit the floor instead of ones that we kept was one related to more the mafia, 1920s gangster type thing.

Another one that I was really excited about, but it would be hard to get it off the ground was more of a kids pranking MMO—believe it or not—based around pranking other people, things like that. It was just some of the obscurest stuff in the world, all across the board.

The one we really liked out of the twelve was spies. When we started thinking about it, the spy and espionage market is just a vastly untapped market.

When you look at the James Bond movies as an example, I think they’re on their twenty-second or twentieth—they’re in their twenties, as far as how many sequels they’ve done, and if you look at the business side of it, they’ve made more money on every single sequel that they’ve done, it’s one of the few franchise that continues to make more money.

And, if you look at the Bourne series, and a lot of the mainstream spy stuff, it’s just everywhere, and it’s really recognizable, and that’s why we hit that.

The MMO Gamer: You mentioned the James Bond series, and I wondered: Do you think that the genre, the spy feeling, might lose some of its punch if you’re in a game where everyone around you is either a spy or a mercenary?

Matt Wilson: You know, it’s a question we thought about when we started the game, and our approach is Disneyland.

I say that in a weird way, which is that we’ve decided just to embrace it. The world, our world, is not the real world, the depressing world of real-life spies. It’s the fun, over-the-top spy world.

On top of that, our world *is* a spy-world. We want players, as they’re walking through the world, to see another player zip lining across.

We want to see the explosion out on the side—that’s kind of the Disneyland aspect of it, if you see somebody coming across in the public space, someone zip lining out of a building and landing, you’re going to walk up to them and go “How did you do that? Where do I get that mission? I want to go on that!” And they’ll go, “Oh, well you have to do this, this, and this!”

Part of it is just embracing that, that it’s Ok that there’s spies all over the world, similar that there’s warriors all over the world, similar to that there’s space pirates everywhere, that kind of thing.

The fact is there’s a lot of spies in the world, and that’s the fun aspect of it.

The MMO Gamer: Having settled on spies, was there any sort of debate on the major gameplay features? Or was there always this feeling that you were going to make a shooter out of it?

Matt Wilson: Well, when we first started thinking about the game, we definitely wanted to go for fast action. We felt that was where we wanted to move the space a little bit. Now is the time when we can start approaching that, the hardware has the capabilities, the back-end servers have the capabilities, we’ve done enough MMOs at SOE now to know all the latency aspects we have to attack. Now is the time for us to move forward on that kind of stuff.

We did want to go action, and I think as soon as we chose spy as our genre, it made 100% sense to go that route, because spies have the over-the-top action, they have the shooting.

We always wanted to go for what I would call a shooter, more than a first-person shooter, something really quick and fast.

Once we actually started playing the game, we decided to settle on both the first and third-person, and a lot of that is because as we started doing focus testing we found that some people really like to play third-person and they do not like first-person… it helps them navigate, it helps them move around easier.

Some people play exclusively first-person and that’s the way they like to play, and then there’s a group of people who like to switch back and forth. We really wanted to support that.

But the game mechanic of shooting, we felt that especially because we’re going after the console market, that’s where we wanted to be.