Archive for the ‘Media Coverage’ Category

By Susan Arendt, The Escapist Magazine

Global Agenda is kind of hard to describe. Part Call of Duty, part Eve Online, its creators promise that it will deliver a satisfying experience not just for shooter aficionados, but also for MMOG junkies. You can buy it once, or you can choose to subscribe. You can hop online for a quick match with strangers, or your can put the time and effort to creating an Agency with your friends. Trying to mesh two distinctly different types of gameplay seems like a herculean undertaking, but according to the game’s executive producer, Todd Harris, it just makes sense.

"We wanted to remove subscription as a barrier for people to try the game," he explains. Players who might find Global Agenda’s shooter-style gameplay appealing might not want to dive headfirst into an MMOG experience, especially if they’re more used to deathmatches than raids. But Hi-Rez is confident in what their game has to offer. "We thought that we could carve out enough from the Global Agenda gameplay that it would stack up very well as a multiplayer shooter," Harris continues.

He’s quick to stress that Global Agenda isn’t some sort of MMOG-ized shooter, where you click on an enemy and wait for the fight to sort itself out. "You freely aim your reticule, in our case when you do a melee attack, you actually have to land it on your opponent. [There's] a lot of player skill involved. It plays like a multiplayer shooter would, whether that’sTF2 or Battlefield." Or maybe even a little bit like Tribes - each player has a jetpack, but you can’t fire while jetting around, so it’s more for transport than aerial combat. (Still…jetpack.)

Playing the game in its non-subscription form gets you access to "match-made PVP, or also PVE content so you can level up your character that way." You’ll also get loot drops, there’s a social area, you can visit vendors, customize character with new suits and dyes, and make use of the built-in voice chat. And if that’s all you ever do, you’ll have a very satisfying shooter experience comparable to other online shooters, but as Harris puts it "We also say come for the action gameplay, then stay for the game of territory control."

Can a single game please both Shooter and MMOG fans?

Weigh in on the comment thread!

Read the entire article http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/editorials/interviews/6763-Global-Agenda-You-Got-Shooter-in-my-MMO

As part of their continuing series on the Global Agenda Character Classes, TenTonHammer has published a Q&A with Executive Producer Todd Harris on the Assault class. Read the full article here. Excerpts below.

Ten Ton Hammer: It seems like the assault class fills the gaps between the classes - assaults can anchor an attack, they can draw fire away from more fragile teammates,and  they have the ammo capacity, firepower, and durability to pin down enemies and hold objectives on defense. Is that an accurate assessment?

Todd Harris, Executive Producer: I would say it’s accurate that he’s flexible and can cover the gaps. But I’d also categorize the assault class as being all about damage - whether dishing it out or soaking it up. Recon really excels at concentrated offense (against a single target or location, typically using surprise). But the assault class is typically the class that is doing the most damage overall, and over a broad area using a lot of area of effect weapons. They’re all about damage.

Ten Ton Hammer: We’ve seen assaults carrying rocket launchers, grenade launchers, miniguns, and various melee weapons as well. In other games, this class packs a punch but burns through ammo quickly. What kind of ammo considerations does an assault class have in Global Agenda?

Todd: All the weapons in Global Agenda draw off of the common power pool mechanic rather than using ammunition. Being that assaults are all about damage, they really do have to carefully manage their power pool to make sure they’re not caught in the wrong spot at the wrong time with low power. That’s something that players can spec (using the talent trees) to have either higher maximum power or faster recharge or have particular weapons draw less power. All of those are popular  choices for assault players.

Ten Ton Hammer: What options does an assault class have at melee?

They wield basically a futuristic battle axe that also has the ability to set opponents on fire. So as compared to Recon, which has the more precision instrument of the katana, Assaults are definitely more brute force.

Ten Ton Hammer: Is there chaining with the fire damage in melee?

Todd:  No, not at this time, it’s strictly single damage. There’s no contagion or chaining of the fire right now. But in general, as far as characterizing the class, Assault is always very much in the middle of the action. Not many characters can survive long under direct fire, but the Assault players typically thrive on being in the middle of everything.

Ten Ton Hammer: Another popular motif with big guys wielding big weapons is the ability to catch several enemies with one swing. Is that something that’s a part of the class as well?

Todd: Not as much with melee, but with the primary and off-hand weapons they’re able to deal out damage to more than one player at a time, moreso than any other class.

Global Agenda’s Assault class in action.

Ten Ton Hammer: At first look, the Assault class seems pretty straightforward. How were you able to mix up the talent tree options of this class?

Todd: At the highest level, you’re basically going for a tank build to soak up the damage versus an explosive build to deal out damage. Those are the two names of the class-specific trees, and then there’s a balanced tree as well. You can go extreme down either of those trees or go more hybrid. The talents combined with devices really do let you spec a number of different ways. For those familiar with Team Fortress 2, you could basically spec our assault class similar to a demoman (using grenades and sticky grenades), or a soldier (using a rocket launcher), or a Heavy (using a minigun). But you could even go more exaggerated - our tank would be much more of a tank than a heavy, and you could also come up with hybrid builds.

Finish the article on TenTonHammer.

Phill Cameron at RockPaperShotgun spent time playing Global Agenda PvE while at the Eurogamer Expo in Leeds, UK, last week.

Read the full article from his experience here. Below are some excerpts.

Global Agenda is a game straddling two worlds. It has two different payment schemes, and two different games within itself, almost. It’s a multiplayer third person shooter, with a class based system and jetpacks. But it’s also a huge sprawling PvE/PvP MMO, with the PvP driven by player Agencies that can form and break alliances on the fly in a bitter battle for territorial zones that grant bonuses and benefits.

By providing a far more engrossing experience in the persistent side of the game, Global Agenda seems to be moving well on the way to becoming the first truly hybrid MMO. It’s a big show of confidence that they consider the actual mechanics of their game solid enough to support a multiplayer shooter, especially considering the competition they face on the PC, most of whom they cite as influences. The impression of having such a thriving world just a subscription away could sway people to taking the plunge, and having them interact with the subscribers is a similarly clever move.

The writers at Massively.com were busy during Global Agenda’s recent visit to GameX in Philadelphia. They published a video interview with Hi-Rez’s Michal Adam, as well as a two-part look at the game – one focusing on PvP in Global Agenda and one focusing on the game’s PvE system.

See the full write-up on the PvE and PvP gameplay here.

For the video interview with Michal, visit this link.

Below are some key quotes and messages pulled from the article.

Global Agenda was easily the game of the show at GameX, hands down. Its polished gameplay (even in beta) combined with a great sense of fast-paced fun kept a constant stream of people sitting down and learning the ropes. Some people even came back for second or third matches, eager to try out a new class or just play the game more.

I spy a fun game. This deeper look into Global Agenda makes me more excited to see exactly what the game has to offer at launch. Both PvP and PvE are lots of fun, easy to get into, and simultaneously connected and unique experiences. If you’re a Guild Wars junkie, a TF2 trooper, aBorderlands resident, a Tribes soldier, or a PlanetSide refugee, you’re going to find things to love.

The transition from PvP to PvE is close to seamless. PvE encounters teach you the fundamentals of your class while still being loads of fun and a great team building exercise. The PvE’s focus on team play is a great counterpart and learning experience to the focus on teams in PvP situations, letting new players learn the ropes without being humiliated by more experienced troops and still gaining bouses for their characters.

These modes play very much like Team Fortress 2 crossed with Tribes. Jetpacks are very, very useful, as well as setting ambushes, traps, and other sorts of insanity. Robotics players and recon players can set the stage for ambushes using the Robotics turret and the Recon’s mines, as well as the Recon’s decoy ability to distract enemies.

The gameplay is also very fast paced. Don’t expect downtime or waiting around for something to happen — something is always happening. The matches are very tight, very chaotic, and very fun. I wasn’t expecting the game to be so easy to pick up, with its toolbar of imposing, nameless abilities, but after playing around with the items for a minute or two you get the hang of them.

Here is the interview with Michal Adam.

While this all makes it sound like purely player skill-based combat, part of the results are also governed by your character’s skills. There is an underlying skill tree which allows you to allocate a total of 13 points into specific areas of specialization. For example, as an assault trooper, you can choose to be a pure tank and put your points into strengthening your defense, or you can specialize in explosives, increasing the range and damage they do. Alternatively, you can choose a balanced spec which allows you to be a little bit of both.

See the full article on IGN at this link.

by Tom Bramwell  (read the article at http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/global-agenda-hands-on)

You can’t launch a rocket in a first-person shooter these days without clipping an MMO influence - whether it’s Call of Duty 4’s world-conquering perks and persistent stats, the elaborate intra-team relationships within Team Fortress 2, or Battlefield Heroes’ reliance on microtransactions - but developers heading in the other direction are fewer and further between.

Hi-Rez Studios, with its mixed background in shooters, strategy games and MMOs, is an exception. In fact, on the surface of it Global Agenda resembles an MMO with its feet merely dangling in an action pond. You level up your character by grinding player-versus-environment missions for resources that can be crafted into stat-boosting implants, and combat delivers experience points that go toward improved skills, all of which benefits your Agency (guild) in a hex-based metagame that sees you fighting for territory in "seasons" of gameplay that last just over a month. It floats along on Unreal Engine 3, leaving Tribes-shaped ripples in its wake, but it’s treading water on the shoulders of goblins and will charge a monthly subscription.

Except a brief hands-on at Penny Arcade Expo last month suggests it’s a lot closer to games like Team Fortress 2 when it comes to player-versus-player combat. Thrown into a "ticket game", where two teams of eight compete for ownership of three control points, it’s very much a team-based shooter, albeit a third-person one rather than first.

The Assault class works well either as a Tank or a Destroyer, stomping around doing lots of area-of-effect damage to people defending control points, and had I not been thrown in at the deep end while simultaneously trying to interview game designer Andy Harmon, I’m told I would have been striking up good relationships with a nearby Medic, whose speciality is a healing gun, or perhaps Recon players, whose stealth speciality allows them to infiltrate objectives while my bruising Assault character draws the enemy’s attention.

"There’s an interplay of rock-paper-scissors to it," says Harmon, sporting an impressive moustache, "but it’s not class-based, because sometimes we’ve done some so that just as often as there’s a counter to another class, there’s a counter within your class - so a Robotics can be one of the most effective Robotics-killers, and Assault Tank and Assault Destroyer face off against each other very well."

[…]Global Agenda is currently in closed beta, with a couple of thousand people feeding war and bug stories back to the developer, but an open beta isn’t far away according to Harmon. Anyone heading to the Eurogamer Expo in late October can play it there too. My advice would be to do so; not unlike APB, it’s a game that sounds like an MMO but stretches the definition considerably, and in considered fashion.

Read on at http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/global-agenda-hands-on

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.

"Team Fortress on Speed!" was how my compatriot described his hands-on play session with Global Agenda. I do not do well with FPS games being that most of them give me vertigo. I had seen Global Agenda and played through the tutorial at E3 and thusly hauled a gamer bud with me to PAX to play the game while I took notes. This was his first look at Global Agenda and he was still talking about it through the next weekend when I saw him again at a house warming party.

Although I spent all of my in-game time at E3 indoors, most of the maps were outdoors although some had some in-door bits, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that it did NOT give me vertigo. Although the bits of maneuvering inside a building did make me a little queasy, it was nowhere as bad as games such as the aforementioned TF2. The game Fury came to mind when I first saw Global Agenda. It was a game that MMORPG.com had given a graphics award to one E3 which subsequently crashed and burned due to unnecessarily complicated leveling through complex fantasy skills and builds. Global Agenda has much of the same game play mechanic behind it; Match-made, team based PvP on several different maps. That is where the similarity ends as Global Agenda is a futuristic sci-fi game with PvE as well as PvP components to it. With much simpler weapon systems and skill trees as compared to Fury, it was easy to get into and did not lack depth in the classes I had seen thus far - Mechanic and now Assault.

At E3, I saw was an earlier build and I was running about indoors in the city as well as indoors in the newbie tutorial which contributed to the vertigo. This new build looks much better, with better frame-rates which helps to ease the issues for the vertigo sensitive such as I.

As with my first hands-on session, my compatriot found the controls extremely intuitive. We (or he) played all three maps that were shown, starting with Ice Flow which was an Escort mission where we actually had to "Push the Object" - a huge piece of machinery. Set outside of a Siberian facility, I had time to admire the architecture and scenery. The second map was known as Seaside and is a three-point Ticket map set upon a massive drilling platform suspended above a storming Northern Atlantic Ocean where we had to win two of three objectives. The third was named Climate Control and is an Attack/Defend map set within the mountains of East Asia complete with trees swaying in the wind.

The play characters were all level 50 and fully tricked out. With 15 points to distribute among the devices one could bring into the game, we made our choices of weapons and devices, figured out how to switch weapons on the fly and the game was on. Fast and furious, eight versus eight matches with a good mix of Recon, Assault, Medic and Mechanic on the team, the first was totally a firepower, brute-force match before players began to explore the nuances of their characters and by the third match, healing stations, bombs, force-shields and turrets were being laid and we were protecting our Medic! Poor medics… they may as well have targets super-imposed over their armor. We also figured out re-spawn beacons (which can be destroyed) for more strategic re-spawn points closer to the objective, and tried out close combat, managed to block and back-stabbed the opposing team’s Medic as he turned tail and ran.

To read the rest of this preview please visit http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm?page=1&feature=3522&game=339&bhcp=1

After talking with Executive Producer Todd Harris from the floor of PAX 2009, TenTonHammer compiled a detailed, twelve-minute video that interweaves brand new gameplay footage with Q&A.

Watch it all here.

The editors at ZAM surveyed the full landscape at PAX 2009, and came away nominating Global Agenda for Best in Show honors.

Read the full article here.

Global Agenda is a fast paced, action packed adrenaline rush that plays differently than any other game in the MMO space. Hi-Rez Studios has spent a great deal of time creating a skill based game that feels like a shooter but plays like something more. Persistent elements and an abundance of customization will keep players engaged and thirsty for another match.