Executive Producer Todd Harris sat down this week with TenTonHammer for a detailed review of the Recon class within Global Agenda.

Some excerpts are below, but be sure to read the entire article.

Ten Ton Hammer: It’s natural to think of the recon class as a bunch of snipers, but recon is a lot more than just headhunting through a scope in Global Agenda. What are the various roles the recon class performs?

Todd Harris: Recon is definitely a very versatile class. Probably the easiest way to explain recon is to tell you how some of the different people here in the studio play the class. One of the tasks recon is particularly good at is hunting the beacon of the other team. In Global Agenda, both teams in PvP have a beacon, which is basically a chance for a forward spawn for their team. They only have one; the entrance to the beacon is in their drop ship or defensive spawn area and then they place the beacon aggressively in the map. That allows players to step through and make a big difference between winning and losing. Since recon can go stealth and easily get behind enemy lines, hunting the other team’s beacon is a task they do often. Travis, our QA lead, is particularly adept at doing that.

Another common task is taking out heavily fortified areas, such as turret farms. When the other team has set up a fortified area - medical crates and multiple turrets - recon has a lot of tools to deal with that. So taking out those turrets is a second task, and Dan, our lead animator, is particularly good at that.

Clearing out blobs of people is another task. If the other team has a lot of momentum and is kind of clumped up around the objective, recon can stealth in and use bombs to clear those people out, since getting caught in a bomb’s radius could mean being rooted for a short period of time (which usually means death). Nick Larkin, our Technical Artist, does that quite often.

Another interesting task is just being a spoiler against other recons. One of the offhand devices a recon can take is a scanner, which will show other recons even if stealthed for a limited period of time. Andy, one of our weapon designers, will often play that role and when recons think they’re immune, he’ll go behind them with a rifle and finish them off.

Recons can also play more of a traditional scout role. They can take bionics, which gives them additional speed, agility, jumping ability, and also the ability to place a decoy of themselves and spec high in melee, basically causing a lot of chaos around the objective. So those are just a few of the recon tasks that we see people in the office taking with the recon role in addition to sniping, which of course is a valid role too.

If this gets you jazzed about the Recon class, be sure to check out this video, which was created by one of our fans (MasterSaji) as part of our Fan Video Contest earlier in the year.