Lead Producer Lorien Gremore Talks SOE’s Upcoming spy-shooter, The Agency

By Steven Crews | October 15, 2009 | | Filed under: Features, Interviews

The MMO Gamer: As I’m sure you know, one of the prime hobbies of gamers is griping on the various forums that exist on the internet.

Some of this griping that I’ve read about The Agency actually got into a fairly interesting debate: Whether or not the game fits within the classic definition of an MMO, or going even further, if it should be called an MMO, at all.

The argument ran that The Agency isn’t so much an MMO, as it is an FPS with some persistent elements attached to it. What do you say to that line of thinking?

Lorien Gremore: I can see why they would say that, actually.

But the missions that our designers are working on right now are evidence to the contrary. We’re seeing a lot of the district play that comes into your career at many different points.

You might be in Prague, and experiencing play with a lot of different other players, you might have come in at your field office and gone out into the city, encountered many other players doing missions that you are also doing there, that are large play spaces with lots of different people in them, collecting intel, engaging in public combat, all of those types of things.

These areas are big enough for that, there’s shops, there’s secret spaces, photos to be taken of suspicious objects, things like that. They’re all out there in the world.

We’re really trying to create a balance, where you’re encountering a lot of social situations, chances to get into groups with other people, just by merit of the fact that you guys are doing the same sorts of things in the same sorts of places.

Just as you would expect in a normal MMO, just as you would run into someone perhaps with the same types of objectives as you have, and help them out along the way, or they might help you out, as well.

Maybe exchange some favors for each other, as far as, “You distract this guard so that I can take the picture, then I’ll distract the guard for you so that you can take the picture.”

We like to encourage that, and we’re really trying to create a good balance of that kind of thing.

We recognize that a core portion of the MMO space is that socialization, and that opportunity to come across a player who might need your help, and find that that’s a good chance to have an experience that goes way beyond what you would encounter in a normal shooter.

The MMO Gamer: How do you balance that MMO flavor, and the expectations of a traditional MMO player, who might be an EverQuest 2 subscriber and is now looking forward to The Agency because they’re a fan of SOE’s games, with the expectations of an FPS player who owns a PS3, and not even know who SOE is, but just looks at the box and says, “Hey, I can be a spy and shoot people in the head!”

I mean, just the combat system, alone…

The FPS player who may have come from Counterstrike or something, expects that you shoot a player in the head, they fall over dead. The MMO player has the expectation that you can lob giant fireballs that are ten feet tall at a guy a hundred times before he dies.

How do you get to a happy medium in the game?

Lorien Gremore: It’s a difficult balance, for sure. We’ve had feedback from both sides, and I think it’s important to have both the MMO players who are excited by the fact that they can create an arsenal of weapons and be useful in different ways in different types of parties, and also shooter players, who are looking for that “feel,” that really solid, “I’ve taken down that enemy in the way that I expected him to be taken down.”

That’s something very visceral that we need to deliver on for the experience.

I think as long as we do find that point, where it feels good to a shooter player, a core shooter player, a Quake player, that kind of person, who says “I expect my weapon to behave in a certain way, because of the upgrades that I’ve put on it, because of the way that I’ve outfitted myself with particular bonuses,” and such, as long as they have their expectations in their head about the way that weapon is supposed to behave.

If it feels right for them, I think the shooter player is going to be satisfied by the combination of skills and upgrades that we allow, that are more from an MMO angle.

It is a difficult balance, and we try very hard to work on the process and the systems a lot. Our skills designers, our systems designers and such are really focused on that as a particular goal for us.

The MMO Gamer: I like to ask this question toward the end of interviews, because I find that a lot of people I talk to have this pent-up rage, like “You guys never ask me about X, Y, or Z, and now that you have I’m going to talk about it for 30 minutes!”

So, rather than blindly stumble about trying to figure out what X, Y, or Z is, is there anything that you personally would like to talk about? The sort of thing that people such as myself sticking the microphone in your face don’t generally ask?

Lorien Gremore: What I like to talk about when I talk about The Agency is the theme. I think it’s so important that we’re coming to a point where this is just a new story, and that’s what really seems to grab people.

When I was at FanFaire last year, that was the thing that drew everybody over to talk to us. It was the idea that, “I take my kid to FanFaire every year, because they play EverQuest 2, and that’s a cool thing for them. But I never thought I’d really play an MMO,” is what these people were telling me.

And now they’re saying that this is a concept that they really enjoy, they enjoy the action movies, they enjoy the explosive interactions and gameplay, they like the idea that it’s sort of a grown-up style of MMO, that really appeals to a group of people who might not have ever considered playing an MMO.

Also because it’s on the console, it’s just opening up different things to different people. As a console owner you don’t have to worry about upgrading your PC to meet the graphics requirements of a game, you just know if it works on that console, it’s always going to work on that console.

You don’t have to worry about being a technical person who’s savvy about the graphics card and the RAM and all of that. You just have the console, and you play it.

I wanted to make sure that this is a game that opens up some areas of people’s interpretations of MMOs, that they can really get into it, and enjoy some of those social aspects that they may have never considered important to them, before.

A shooter player may not have particularly wanted to get into a team, maybe he’s done cooperative play before, but never really thought of joining a team and becoming part of a joint agency, or something like that, but might experience that differently in this game, because it is just an engaging set of ideas, and as long as you’re enjoying the set of ideas and thematic elements of the game, as long as you’re having a good time, you’re open to these new experiences.

The MMO Gamer: I like to round my interviews out on a more philosophical note, as opposed to “What is your game, when is it coming out, and how many exclusives are you going to give me?”

So, why do you make games? Why do you wake up every morning, go to work, and do what it is you do?

Lorien Gremore: That’s a funny question, because I’ve been in, I guess you would call them “massive” games for almost ten years now.

I started out in MUDs, and creating levels for characters in MUDs, and missions and quests there, and that for me was all about the experience that people had, that is truly unique to having a group of people playing together.

Initially it was role-playing, for MUDs it was all about that idea that you really lived in that fantasy world, and you really experienced that from a personal perspective.

Some of that has been lost in MMOs, recently. I think bringing it back to some degree, bringing it to a point that you’re not neccisarily living the life of an elite agent in a very personal sense in your mind, but that you get that feel of it, that you get that excitement of it, that it really captures your imagination.

When I look back on some of the stuff that I worked on, what I’m proud of is that people have had the kinds of experiences that they post screenshots of, that they write about on their blogs and forums and such, that they really felt connected to.

A lot of it is because of the group play, they wouldn’t neccisarily post on their blog about how they bested Splinter Cell, but they would post about an experience that they had because it was in a group, because it was part of a team, because it was part of a larger, sweeping challenge that an MMO can give you.

To me that’s the uniqueness of it, and that’s why I love to work on MMOs.

The MMO Gamer: Thank you very much for joining us, we appreciate it, and we hope we can do it again some time.

Lorien Gremore: Thank you!