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

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The MMO Gamer: With the console market in mind, when you sat down with the design, were you going for the traditional MMO demographics, or were you looking more at people who had never played an MMO before, who own a PS3 and may not even know what EverQuest is?

Matt Wilson: I think the latter is probably more the case. When we started thinking about console MMOs, we first thought about where entertainment is going. Back three years ago now, when we were thinking about this at the very beginning, we thought, “Where is the gaming space going? Where do people spend most of their time?”

It seems interesting that there are no real MMOs on the console. But, the fact is the PS3, when it launched, had a hard drive and a network connection by default. That’s really the two magical components for making an online persistent game. We know the time is right to put it on there, but now we have to make sure that the players are there to do it.

When we talk to the console audience, we find that they’re very excited about the online persistent world, but they’re not excited about certain aspects of it.

A good example is when we thought about some game design elements—like Operatives, is one of our critical game design elements—we thought about, “Oh, everybody likes to build stuff.”

We use the word “crafting.” Crafting is not something that people think about as a console player, but they still want to build stuff.

What that means is they don’t want to just click, click, click, click, click, which is the traditional crafting that we’re all accustomed to. They like doing something and over time getting it, and that’s where we came up with the Operative system, which is basically that they goods and services whether you’re online and offline but it’s all time-based, and that’s a mechanic that fits more on the console than a click-crafting system that fits more potentially on the PC side.

There’s a lot of things we thought about, from game design and UI, that the console provided a box to work within. Hal spends a lot of his time simplifying the game, more than making more complexity.

It’s a lot easier to make more complexity in a game than it is to simplify it. To really hit that audience and have them accept jumping into the MMO space, we have to simplify it, we have to lower the barriers to entry, we have to change a few paradigms on how people play, and we have to be willing to accept those.

A simple paradigm is, Hal wrote this bullet down right when we started developing the game that said, one of our key components when developing this game is: “Fun now. No waiting.”

That sounds like a silly feature, like I remember going, “Is that even a feature? Fun now, no waiting?” Not sure it is, but let’s keep it up there, because it represents the opposite of typical MMO, which is, maybe level 10-20ish, you start realizing what the game is. You realize your course in life as an X, a warrior or a mage, that kind of thing. You also realize “My course in life is to get up to the top, so that I can take the next step in the life cycle.”

I think a lot of games have improved that cycle, and I love where they’ve headed, and I still am an addict myself so I must enjoy it. But, when we talk about the console market, we have to shorten that cycle down, and we have to give them an ability to jump in, play for fifteen minutes, have a great experience and pop out, be able to jump in, play for half an hour, get a great experience and pop out.

Jump in for an hour, two hours, four hours—we have to have that scale in there. The other aspect of it is that it’s an action game. Action can’t wait till you to get to the top, or can’t wait till you get to the middle to get the action, we’ve got to make sure that you get in and hit that, and the shooter provides that for us.

If you want to have fun now, no waiting, and just pop in our game immediately and start playing, you can do that. Hal has another bullet called “PvP Anytime,” and that’s what it means. If that’s the way you want to learn our game, jump in and start playing PvP. You don’t have to wait until you get to the top, jump in and enjoy it.

We realized in the shooter market, that there is a demographic out there that has never played the story mode in Halo. There is a demographic out there that has never played Half Life 2, but has played Counterstrike.

What we realized is that there’s two types of people out there when it comes to shooters: People who start in the PvP area, learn, get familiar, and then they’ll go over and play the story. Or, my case, I play the story mode until I feel very confident, and some times complete the story mode completely, and then I’ll go play PvP.

That’s kind of the—I’m all over the board on this—but, the fact is that the biggest thing we had to make sure of is that we provided the “Fun now, no waiting,” paradigm, and really made sure we built the game mechanics to support that.