The Agency HQ

Missions

The heart and soul of any secret agent based game is the missions. Players will be tackling illicit activities such as drug smuggling, assassinations, espionage and counter intelligence. We don’t know a ton about the missions yet, but here is what we know.

• Missions will have multiple objectives.
• You will earn a bronze, silver, or gold medal for each mission based upon which objectives you complete.
• This allows you to continue the storyline (ie. fun now) by getting a bronze medal thus reducing the frustration factor.
• You may replay a mission at any time to try to get a better medal. You will not re-earn the loot/exp for medals you’ve already completed, but can earn new rewards for completing harder medals.
• Teams will be up to 4 players. Originally I thought this was due to it being a shooter, but I found out that it is more due to the dynamic cinema used for transitions and the agency moments. They are building in 4 character spots and animations within each of the cinema’s.
• Cross over missions will have a team from both UNITE and PARAGON in the same mission.
  • Each team can have up to 4 players.
  • It is not PvP, both UNITE and PARAGON teams are on the same side, just with different objectives.
• Missions can be private(instanced), public, or public – private.

Sample Missions

• Prague - District 23 - this mission takes place in one of the seedier districts of Prague. You are tasked with retrieving a briefcase from an operative in front of Club Succubus a rather sleazy bar in the middle of district 42. Sounds easy, well the life of a super agent always seems to have you on your toes. As you walk up on the guy a bunch of goons guns him down and runs off with the briefcase. You follow the goons, a bunch of low lives known as the Bones. As you race through alleys fighting goons on every side you get to see the neat spawning of The Agency. Instead of monsters spawning in front of you, they spawn in buildings and come running out doors and leaping off balconies at you. You can also note that they take cover and work together to try to bring you down. After reviving a downed team mate using a portable defribulator you come to a big square. The sniper mode is put to great use, showing the power of the sniper. Then we get to see a melee move where a goon gets too close to Cassie and she knees him you know where, then slams him with the butt of her rifle. After clearing the square, an Agency logo appears in the middle of the square, signifying that you can start an Agency moment, and our heroes jump onto the merry go round and spin it to shoot in all directions. The mission video ends with a boss coming onto the scene with a huge chainsaw.
• South America Recon - this mission looks like a recon mission to a base hidden in the jungles of South America. You start by boosting each other over the wall. Then you use a neat gun to shoot a camera high onto the wall above you. You watch as your target meets and exchanges a suitcase with someone, taking pictures all the time. Unfortunately, a guard sees you and the alarm is raised. You jump in a jeep with one person steering and the other controlling a big gun mounted in the back. You shoot over a tower and it makes a ramp over the fence and the chase is on. A helicopter attempts to stop you, so you need to drive well enough not to get hit, while trying to hit it with your gun. You come upon a cliff and the Agency logo appears signifying an Agency moment, which includes jumping your jeep off the cliff into the helicopter. Bye, bye bad guys, hello parachutes. You parachute to the bottom of the cliff where there is a conventiently located bar. Realizing that your guns and stealth outfits might be out of place you slip into a changing tent, and change into your Alias outfits and enter the bar.
• Prague - keep Das Komite from blowing up the embassy - the newest mission we’ve seen has a group of 3 UNITE agents following a bad guy, taking him out, infiltrating the building he was trying to get into, and protecting it from people trying to blow up it’s support columns. It starts showing off a field HQ, and how you would outfit your character with weapons, gadgets, and skills. The you meet up with your group mates and try to follow the target. Following involved getting close enough to the target to follow without them seeing you. A circle above the targets head was used to show his awareness of you, with green meaning you were good, yellow/orange meaning that you better get out of sight, and red meaning you’ve been spotted. Once spotted the group takes out goons in the garage and then shows off using a “breach” action to knock down the door and get a jump on the bad guys. We then see an enemy knock over a table to try to create cover, but the 3 super agents are too much and take him out. They then use an operative to create a steam pipe distraction, ie a jet of steam blasts the enemies and the good guys clean up. They come to the catacombs underneath the Embassy and find the enemies attaching bombs to the columns supporting the embassy. The support person tries to de-arm one of the bombs and is killed, but they have a medic with them who revives. They move into a room with 4 columns supporting the embassy, if you can protect all 4 you get a gold, protect at least one and you get a bronze. They quickly lose a column, but show that you can shoot the bombs as the bad guys carry them in to plant them, quite messy in a good way. After they clear the room for a bit, one of the goons runs to a truck and the agency logo appears. This agency moment involves grabbing a bomb that falls from the truck tossing it at the truck and shooting it in mid air. Bye, bye bad guys! Great stuff. Check out a walk through at Game Trailers, part 1, part 2, and part 3.
• Sample from GameInformer interview - A character has been told to meet an NPC that’s located in a casino, because somewhere in that casino is a boss criminal and he’s got a bunch of intel in his office that could explain why a bunch of bodies have been showing up everywhere. So a character puts on an alias to get into a nightclub, because the fact of the matter is that nobody is going to let you into a club with an M-60 strapped to your back. He goes through his outfits and finds one that says “high-class nightclub”—a tuxedo. Or if he’s in ParaGON, he picks out a high-end club outfit. He puts it on, attaches some credentials to that, which enhances his alias’ rating, and he heads off to the nightclub. Entering the nightclub with his alias, he’s also got underneath that alias whatever specialty outfit he’s put on. It’s that whole example of the guy sneaking through the back tunnel, stripping off his tuxedo, being in his combat outfit and moving forward. He enters the casino, talks to this NPC who says, “The elevator is in the back. The guards take shifts from there, and you’ll be able to get into it if you walk away.” He walks to the back, sees a guard walk away, hits the elevator and gets transported into the upper levels of the club, which are actually a private instance for that character. He then changes out of his club outfit, and he’s wearing his stealth-ops or assassin outfit. He moves through the area and comes across a group of guards who spot him. He then has to resort to gunplay, shooting them down, and manages to get into the main boss’ office. In that office is a safe, he cracks the safe, gets the intel and all of a sudden a ton of guys burst through the door toward him. At the window, there’s now an agency-moment icon. Agency moments are moments that, based on you, your party, what specialty you are or what stuff you have, will appear and let you do cool things, smart bombs, escapes, acrobatics, etc. He hits the agency moment, his character breaks through the window and ziplines his way down to the street. He’s now effectively completed his mission. He’s now back into the public space. We used the cinematic of him ziplining down to the street to transition him from being in a private space back into the public space. Now, he can open up his PDA, hit his mission journal and let his contacts know he’s finished it, or he can go back to the main field officer at HQ and turn it in for a reward that way.

Driving / Chases

A spy game wouldn’t be complete without thrilling chases. There are still a bunch of unknowns about driving, but this is what we do know:

• There will be 2 types of driving within the game. Static driving is used as a transition to a new part of town or the world. Driving missions allow you to control the vehicle.

• Once you complete a driving mission, the driving portion will be unlocked for play against other players.



• One of the video’s showed a jeep with 2 characters in it. One driving and one shooting a big gun. Hopefully this means that 2 or more players will be able to tackle the driving missions.
• A big question is what other types of chases will we have? Boat chases? How about skiing? Flying? Parachuting?