Global Agenda Developers Blog

Just outside of Atlanta, Georgia, exquisitely talented developers have been working to create a unique and immersive MMO experience. Global Agenda is a 'Spy-Fi' Action MMO set in a dynamic world of advanced technology and player-driven conflict

Author: HiRezStudios

Global Agenda is fortunate to have a very active community around the game, including a boisterous forum base, some great fan sites (as listed on our official blog), pretty darn talented video makers, and a fantastic collection of agencies (our version of guilds) and agency leaders.

We find that our fans and beta testers often have the most insightful questions about the game. So this week, we invited one of our community fan sites, HexAgenda, to quiz Executive Producer Todd Harris on Player vs Environment (PvE) content inside Global Agenda. We hope to have future similar Q&A’s with other members of our fan community.

HexAgenda was one of the winners of our fan site contest earlier in the year. They are also technology innovators within the Global Agenda Community, launching such features as the Global Agenda Feed Aggregator, and the Global Agenda Dev Tracker. They are also leading the pack in helping us test the Global Agenda Stats API, which will allow fan sites, guild sites and other interested parties to develop custom applications from Global Agenda data.

In discussing PvE inside Global Agenda, HexAgenda focused on how PvE and PvP interplay inside Global Agenda, and how Hi-Rez intends to keep the content engaging over the long haul.

PvE Q&A with HexAgenda

1. Many MMOs are considered to focus more heavily on either PvP or PvE, with the other element being somewhat of a supplement to whichever takes center stage. What role do you see PvE playing in Global Agenda, which clearly has a strong PvP component? How extensive a role do you envision that being?

With Global Agenda, our 'center stage' focus has always been the AvA Campaign - the massive, persistent world conflict between player-driven groups over territory and resources. So, we really intend for the Campaign to provide the overall game context and then allow players to contribute to the Campaign and level up their own agent character via either PvP or PvE as they choose.

From a balance perspective we started with PvP for combat, classes, and devices. Once that felt fun and balanced we introduced PvE enemies and missions that were compatible and balanced against the core player gear and abilities. In this way we can continue to develop additional PvE enemies and content and give PvE a very rich role without watering down the PvP one bit.

2. Hi-Rez has stated that the goal for the game is to be "a minute to learn, a lifetime to master." How might this play into the design of the PvE side of the game?

One simple example is our implementation of tiered difficulty levels for PvE missions. So, when my team is playing the Rookie level difficulty we are facing NPCs that are fairly basic in their behavior and have relatively low levels of health and damage output. At the harder difficulties the bots do scale up in their stats, but we also introduce entirely new enemy types now protecting that same mission location. So, instead of just facing Commonwealth androids I might now be dealing with an Elite Assassin coming out of the shadows or a Hunter that targets and relentlessly pursues one specific member of my team.

3. How extensively do you plan to tie in a continuous storyline to the PvE (and possibly even PvP?) portion of the game? Should we expect something along the lines of Guild Wars' campaign-long story arcs, or instead something closer to the free-form universe of EVE Online?

Global Agenda definitely presents a free-form universe closer to Eve Online rather than a scripted story arc, but at the same time we plan to provide narration around key world events and happenings. So, our continuous story-line is based upon the major in-game actions of players and player groups. Basically we intend to deliver an audio newscast summarizing the major conflicts and accomplishments across the persistent world

4. A common complaint among players of PvE content in many games is that the available content inevitably becomes boring since players can experience content far faster than developers can produce more interesting content to be experienced. What plans might Hi-Rez have to tackle this issue in Global Agenda and keep the content fun and interesting in the long term?

Well there is no escaping the fact that it does take a lot longer for us to develop new content than it takes players to go thru that content!

There’s really no silver-bullet solution, but we do have plans and tools that help with this challenge. First we have developed a fairly efficient PvE production pipeline thanks to our experience with the Unreal 3 engine and some additional homegrown tools. So, we can actually produce PvE content fairly quickly.

But, ultimately we are going for quality over quantity and that involves designing our mission spaces to have a high degree of replay-ability. A single environment supports multiple difficulty levels as we discussed earlier. And, even within the same difficulty level, the missions also have a degree of randomness in terms of which enemies spawn and even the distribution of cover objects. So you can revisit the same mission location multiple times and have very different experiences.

Finally, another defense against boredom comes with the nature of our shooter oriented combat. You really cannot auto-macro your way thru our combat since you have to target the reticule on your enemies and move your character to avoid enemy fire. You will be quite active in mission regardless of what class you are playing and this tends to keep our PvE very engaging rather than feeling like a grind.

5. What would you consider one of the "coolest" aspects you've implemented so far for Global Agenda's PvE?

We have a bunch of cool new NPCs and encounters planned; but of the content currently playable in Beta I really like the Scanner. This hovering droid patrols Commonwealth areas and casts a rotating detection beam that players need to avoid or risk the Scanner calling in a wave of reinforcements. It is a cool mechanic and one that reinforces how our PvE involves managing environment aspects like cover in addition to the enemy bots themselves.

In terms of systems, we are also getting positive early feedback on the PvE auto-grouping support we recently added. Our PvE is built for 4-man squads and players can certainly pre-form their entire team, or use chat or Agent Search functionality to LFG. However, solo players and partial teams now have the option of selecting the mission type they are interested in and then be automatically matched with other PvE players. Grouping for PvE can be a hassle in some games and auto-grouping helps players find one another and quickly get into the action.

Global Agenda's very first beta testers just leveled up.

Inside the Studio, Thursdays are typically New Tester Day (OK, internally we call it 'N00b' day), when we invite new people in to the studio to test Global Agenda.

Today, our NooBs got a special treat. While Global Agenda’s Closed Beta does not officially begin until tomorrow (July 24), we allowed the tester's to login early and be the first on our Beta Servers. So, if you are one of our Closed Beta testers and you login right at the start tomorrow and see a few players already tooling around 10 levels ahead of you – you know they were probably among the group that was at Hi-Rez today.

Over the past two years, Hi-Rez hosted hundreds of internal testing sessions for Global Agenda, drawing in players from the nearby community.

Our developers, especially QA & Level Designers, receive valuable feedback from these first-time users by watching how they navigate through maps, the intuitiveness of device usage and capabilities and, above all, how much fun the testers have while they play the game.

As part of our fast-paced scrum-based development, Hi-Rez deploys and plays a new version (or build) of the game every single work day inside the study. Developers pull the latest content at the beginning of each day, create/tweak/build new content and check it in once they are ready. Around midnight each night all the new content wrangles together and by the time we're back in the studio to start the next day, a new version of Global Agenda is ready for us to test.
Usually :)

Daily developer playtests are brutal! Take it from a Medic who equips with more poisons than healing devices; those sneaky Recons and their decoys are enough to get even the most mild-tempered agents close to rage-quitting a post-lunch testing session...especially when they stealth, then stun bomb and then sneak up with a melee attack. Also when they two-shot you from across the map but, I digress.

In the spring of last year, the Studio connected with a local high school's Interactive Media Club -- a group of students who got together once a week and played games in a supervised classroom with consoles they brought from home -- and created a program for consecutive testing of Global Agenda. Basically, we offered a new, perhaps cooler venue than their chemistry classroom for their club to meet, and a chance to actually be part of a game's development.

The consecutive weekly testing slowly evolved to a twice-a-week rhythm of testing at the Studio, and the group expanded to include game design students from local universities who previously play tested at Hi-Rez as part of their course curriculum; and eventually, expanded further to external folks who learned of the in-studio testing via word of mouth or community forums. These testing sessions are a regular part of Studio life and judging by the noise level that comes out of the gaming lab on a given afternoon, I'd say they have a lot of fun!

"Noob Day" is usually quite different. The groups are generally quieter (at least for the first hour) and more attentive to the details of game mechanics because they're looking at them with a set of fresh eyes.

New testers came to the studio when Hi-Rez first announced its Tour & Play Program, an initiative geared toward Georgia-based schools, universities, technical colleges, and clubs, with the aim of exposing budding video game creators and enthusiasts to the development process to help cultivate Georgia's gaming industry. Last week we hosted a group of kids from a computer camp based at Emory University; prior to that we had folks from the State of Georgia's Economic Development office - even the Commissioner himself.

Today's 'noob group comprises individuals who live nearby and register through the Global Agenda website for today's testing session. I'm not sure when they signed up they knew they'd be the first to get onto Global Agenda's Beta, and I guess I should stop calling them 'noobs' because right now they are the highest ranks players on our beta server!

-Michal

Hi-Rez Studios' Todd Harris, Executive Producer of Global Agenda, the action MMO with no elves, received a package today complete with two elves, bound and gagged. The offering, from a like-minded Agency MONGBAT, follows a campaign highlighting Elven inferiority in a technology driven, future world. 

The box was delivered along with a note from the agency:

Attn: Hi-Rez Studios
Subject: Offering
Timestamp: 2009.7.5.1135

The Mongbat Agency has become aware of your campaign against the Elven People. Please accept this sacrificial offering as a token of our intention for a long and trusted relationship between our Agency and your new world order. Our only request would be to make the prancers suffer before enacting your final divine judgment.

We trust your new order shall be the stuff of legends, and hereby stake our own claim as part of it - just remember while we toil and labor nightly to live in your world, we are entrusting you to deliver a world that exceeds all others, a world where those with proper ambition can flourish, a world...without elves.

-MONGBAT
 

Hi-Rez Studios has accepted the sacrifice and MONGBAT members were among the first players invited to participate in the Global Agenda Closed Beta which begins July 24. 

JOIN THE No Elves! MOVEMENT at www.agentsvselves.com

Back from E3

In our last post we talked about our path toward E3 - our purpose at the show being purely to let people walk-up and actually PLAY Global Agenda. No booth babes, no scripted demos, no velvet rope waiting lines. Our booth was mainly a bunch of PCs so anyone at the show could come by and play! …OK, for the sake of full disclosure I’ll admit that we also put out a bowl of candy on day #2. (Michal’s idea). Maybe next year we’ll have a celebrity appearance but this year we had byte-sized Snickers.

And the whole hands-on thing worked out quite well for us. Our dev team certainly feels the game is fun because we’ve been playing it every day for the past 3 years. But it was still incredibly satisfying to see E3 attendees instantly enjoying Global Agenda and sharing their positive reviews. Our favorite form of marketing - friends escorting other friends to the booth to try out the game for themselves!

A BIG thank you to the folks at MMORPG.COM, who awarded us “Game of The Show” after their own E3 hands-on experience with Global Agenda! We're both thrilled and humbled by this honor, especially given the other highly anticipated games that were considered. We're doing all we can to live up to growing expectations.

OK, so Global Agenda is fun, I’ll grant you that … but is it an MMO?

We hear this question a lot.  

And it is perhaps understandable since so far we have ONLY exposed our mission-based combat. From the beginning our first priority has been to ensure that our combat – based upon shooter mechanics but also incorporating very distinct roles for each class, a large number of specialty devices, close-ranged melee, and jetpacks – all comes together to yield game play that rivals any team-based shooter.

So all our Alpha testing to date, culminating in the public showing at E3, has been primarily focused on combat mechanics. We have not yet exposed the many systems relating to character progression or end-game. But that is about to change…

Onward to Closed Beta

We plan to have two major phases of Closed Beta Testing (CBT1 and CBT2). And with each phase we will introduce significant features that MMO players have been anticipating:

During CBT1 we will introduce Character Progression. So, you will interact with vendors, mission-givers and other players within Dome City, level your character thru missions against the Commonwealth (PvE) &/or other players (PvP), earn and allocate skill-points into talent trees, acquire new high-tech gear, customize your appearance with new suits and dyes, enhance your character thru technology implants that are player-crafted and available thru the auction house, and earn personal achievements.

During CBT2 we will introduce Alliance vs. Alliance Campaigns. With this feature set, players within a major geographic region, for example ALL North American players, compete in a single integrated end-game. Unlike the typical MMO convention where you need to pick a server, for Global Agenda we do not want a server-choice to get in the way of player-driven politics and strategy on a massive scale. It is truly a massive, persistent world within which players create their own agencies, form alliances, and compete to acquire resources and capture territory.

Our Goal:

Fun, mission-based Combat + meaningful Character progression + massive Campaign for territory control

We are now working hard to launch CBT1 in July!
More on that in our next blog post…

- todd

 Who do we talk to about getting E3 rescheduled?

Seriously, it couldn’t have come at a more inconvenient time in relation to Global Agenda’s accelerating timetable, with our plans to enter beta testing very soon. We’ve been working toward this goal for almost four years now and the buzz around the studio is becoming audible, filling our studio with excited energy at all hours of the day and night. For us, constant play testing is critical. For the past three years we've been playing the game ourselves every single day, but for the past month we've stepped up the frequency of external tester visits to 3-4 times each week. So far the player feedback has been great and, if you’re fortunate enough to be attending E3, we hope you'll stop by to see and play the game for yourself.

Executive Producer Todd Harris said it best: “Global Agenda is something that’s best experienced rather than merely explained.” We’re itching to illustrate his point next week when we host the first worldwide unveiling of the project. Here’s my stab at summarizing the game: Global Agenda is an action-packed, third-person, team-oriented shooter/RPG hybrid with character advancement, visual customization, and guild-level territorial conquest set in a post-apocalyptic future Earth where rival factions of elite super agents equipped with advanced technology struggle to control and rebuild the world while simultaneously opposing an oppressive world government. OK, so maybe it IS a bit hard to explain. As the MMO Report recently quipped: Global Agenda - "FPS...RPG...MMO...WTF?"

Bottom line, if you stop by our booth you'll get a taste of exciting match-based PvP missions, co-op PvE missions, stylized graphics and visceral combat sequences. You'll see agile soldiers in power armor jetpack across battlefields scattered among various environments, from arctic wastelands to perilous mountaintops, ocean platforms to metropolis skyscrapers. We were saving most of this until Closed Beta but decided that it would be worthwhile to give the crowd in Los Angeles an early sneak peak!

So, while we’re very proud of Global Agenda and eager to share it with everyone at last, we’re still going to ask around about putting the convention off until we’re ready to drop our beta on the world. The game is ready, but we need some sleep! You can all still get your airline tickets and hotel reservations rescheduled, right? Alright, alright, so that would be a pain. I guess we’ll just have to sacrifice a little more rest in order to get everything setup for our public showing.

If you stop by the Hi Rez Studios booth in the South Hall at E3 and everyone there looks like zombie movie extras in matching t-shirts, just remember that they’re living on a diet of excitement and energy drinks to bring you a preview of their baby. We don't really have full-time marketing execs, nor suits, nor hired booth babes. We'll simply be bringing a few members of the actual development team; although admittedly some of us ARE babes. :) See you there!

- Michal

A Minute To Learn, A Lifetime To Master
Todd Harris, Executive Producer

In early 2005, when we first opened the doors of Hi-Rez Studios, we were asked to describe our team's philosophy in making games. Our answer was "a minute to learn, a lifetime to master".

Erez (our company founder & Lead Designer) and I grew up in the coin-op arcade era, where if the game did not grab your attention and give you a taste of victory within the first 5 minutes it wouldn't earn another quarter from you. Yet the best games also managed to engage & challenge the best players for hours, and sometimes on that same quarter!

Easy to learn, hard to master seems like a great, common-sense approach, yet it is not uncommon for titles to take a seemingly opposite approach - overly complicated/confusing/difficult from the start; or not remaining fun/interesting/meaningful over time. With Global Agenda our intent is to offer multiple 'tiers' of game-play such that players can engage and master each of those at their own pace. Particular players may progress at different speeds based on their prior gaming experience and player skill but the game should remain challenging and engaging for a very long time.

Specifically, the major tiers of gameplay within GA include:

1. Action/Shooter mechanics and reflexes
2. RPG/Build
3. Team Tactics and Cooperation - Per Mission Instance
4. Domination Strategy & Coordination - Per Alliance vs. Alliance Campaign

Each of these could actually be subdivided in more detail but the general point is that each tier builds upon the one before it.

1. Action/Shooter
When first starting out, a player has a limited number of devices so he/she can become familiar with the basic WASD+mouse, jumping, crouching, grappling & jetpacking involved with player control in Global Agenda. Players that come from FPS/action backgrounds will master this tier quickly; and those players that have high situational awareness and learn the specific map layouts will likely progress even faster. But for those players coming from more traditional fantasy MMOs that do not play FPS games there will be some new player skills to learn and master.

2. RPG/Build
As players accumulate new skills and devices for their character, they make a different set of decisions quite independent from their twitch skills or map-knowledge. Some of these decisions are made at skill-point allocation time, some are made at mission equip time, while others are within the middle of fast-paced combat. We have the concept of different attack types (melee, aoe, range) and different damage types (physical, fire, poison, & energy) per device. And we have various passive and active protections against those different attack types and damage types. So, this layer adds the 'stats' element to the core action element. My devices matter; but it also matters what devices my enemy has and which he is wielding at that moment. And, this is the layer of gameplay that is more familiar to traditional MMORPG players ("I designed the leet build... take a look"); but may be less familiar to some action/FPS players.

3. Team Tactics & Coordination - Per Mission Instance
Our intent is for team-work to make a huge difference within mission, and with more variety and role options than just the traditional Tank+DPS+Healer combo. Indeed, the value of teamwork is consistently demonstrated within our playtest sessions where we see coordinated teams beating a collection of high-scoring individuals. The distinct roles of our classes, map layouts, and gameplay mechanics such as the HERMES teleport beacon, are designed to reward teams that are coordinated.

4. Strategy - Per Alliance vs. Alliance Campaign
Finally, with Alliance v. Alliance conflict, we provide a territory-oriented Campaign that is winnable in the way a sports season is winnable. A more strategic set of decisions are introduced at this tier in terms of which other organizations to ally with, which to target, how to allocate resources, and how to best construct and defend your own facilities toward dominating a region or accomplishing other agency goals.

So, how are we doing with these goals?

- Well, our dev team has been playing the game every single day for three years and things haven't gotten stale yet! It is always bittersweet when we have to stop playing Global Agenda in order to keep developing Global Agenda and that is a good sign.
- Also, for months we have playing alongside our 1000ish Alpha users. We have not yet exposed the Campaign to Alpha but the community has been very enthusiastic about tiers #1, #2, and #3 based on their experience to date. Thanks to this active, passionate Alpha community we feel very good about these elements.
- For us, the next step is rolling out the Campaign and group vs. group territory control elements with a larger test community. That will happen sometime within our Closed Beta phase which we are fast approaching. We're very excited about the potential and invite interested others to join us!