Originally posted by SonofSeth

I kinda like the almost cartoony looks. I played Crysis on high setting, watched CoD4, Assasins Creed and Uncharted on PS3... All of them look great, they realy do. Enviroment is truly beautiful and immersive, but when we come to the character you are playing, or in case of FPSs, characters you are shooting at immersion get's headshoted.

It's the thing with artificial characters, the closer they are to real world graphics the more you are aware they are in fact 3D models.

It's also one of the reasons WoW works so well, not because it's most beautiful, but because you spend very litle time watching how realistic it looks, you accept it's a game and go with the flow... true to life avatars only end up looking creepy anyway, not beautiful.

 

Nice to hear about other stuff in game, after the first trailers it looked boring and unimaginative, now it's starting to look like it could actualy be very fun to jump in occasionaly and do some  MMOing from my La-Z-Boy.

What strikes me most about The Agency is the developers appear to actually be trying to make a MMOwith different mechanics to all the others. I love the idea of gaining XP in proportion to how well I play a mission. In the example given in the story, it sounds like you get more XP, or at least cash, for saving all four pillars than for just one. So better players can actually level and grow faster than people who just have a lot of time on their hands to grind.

The idea of extending the game outside the PC environment also seems to be being developed. Some dude whose name I forget, was on Major Nelson's podcast recently talking about doing things like this. I love the idea that I could be getting emails or texts in RL from the game. Perhaps bad for careers or school grades, but surely the next step in MMO immersion. Imagine it - you stay up till 2am to complete a mission and gather a piece of top secret software. You log off for a few hours sleep before heading to work. At 10am your phone buzzes - in-game intelligence has decoded what you brought in last night and has your next target. 'Er, excuse me everyone', you say to your colleagues, 'I have to pop out for a minute'. And then you're racing off to the nearest Starbucks to get online and find out what's next at The Agency. Could be very cool, very addictive.

With all the doubts I have about any new game, I have to say that every time I see more information on The Agency, the more excited I get. I suppose I won't know until it ends up on my computer. MMOs evolve so maybe it'll just keep getting better. So excited... and really excited that I didn't have to buy a PS3 for it like I thought I would when I first heard about it.

I have to say I really like the idea of operatives. The entire game sounds like so much to do. It sounds overwhelming at first but definitely sounds like it'll have more staying power.