E308: Platforms and web integration for The Agency

One of the things that many people feel has been missing from the MMO genre is the presence of more console-based titles. That's why when we saw SOE move under the SCEI branch, we figured it was only a matter of time before we saw more integration between the PC and the PS3 for SOE's titles. We've come leaps and bounds from the early days of console connectivity, to where a console not being connected now seems somewhat strange. What does this growth in online console gaming mean for the upcoming game, The Agency? We sat down with Matt Wilson at E3 and found out how things are progressing for their two supported platforms.

Are you planning on a simultaneous PS3/PC release?

That is our current plan. I may regret that I ever told you that. [laughs] But yes, that's our current plan. The nice part about it is that we're using Unreal 3, which allows us to cross-develop on two platforms with a lot of support on both sides. That really helps out. At the moment, the arrow is pointing in the right direction, but if you guys have ever participated in any MMO beta, then you know everything can change. Ask me this question again when we're in beta and see what my answer is.

Are you intending to let people play together cross-platform?

Inter-office, we can do that. So, technically, it is not impossible. In fact we play cross-platform quite often. There are two or three ramifications that we're thinking about when we consider whether we will do this or not. One of them is exploitation. If you've ever played CounterStrike or TF2 or any shooter on the Internet, more than likely you saw some cheats or hacks going on. Exploitation on the PC is completely different from exploiting and hacking on the console, so putting those two together could cause some game play ramifications from just the potentials for exploitation. That said, tracking exploitation on the PC is much harder than it is on the console.

The second consideration is control. We actually went out and did focus group testing with people who played PC shooters and people who played console shooters and asked them if they thought being able to play with the other platform was important. The interesting piece of data is that PC shooters want to play against console shooters, but the console shooters don't really care. More often than not, the console players were actually saying things like "why would I want to play with the PC players?" But when we started talking to both sides about playing in tournaments, neither side wanted to play together. Console players talked about not wanting to compete against people with keyboard and mouse, and the PC players were discussing how the console players get aim assist, whereas the PC players don't. It's one of those things that gets a little strange insofar as implementation.

Then the last problem — and this is probably the most important problem — is updates. With consoles we have a certification process that we have to go through. On PC, there isn't any heavy certification processes beyond our own testing. As such, we have to be really careful about how we are keeping both sides up to date. We'd hate to get into a position where the PC version of the game would affect the console negatively, or the console would affect the PC in terms of patch speed.

We'll probably take baby steps at first when we launch, by maintaining a shared database. That way, if you're playing on the PC and you're going to see someone who has a console, you should be able to log in to your character and participate without having to buy a new disc or anything like that. Beyond that, we plan to have leader-boards, and maybe we'll take the first little step by having some PvP that's non-ranked, for bragging rights. Taking it slowly and carefully will allow us to test and perhaps move into that space. But it's a pretty big — not from the technology side, but how players game side — problem to solve.

Do you have any plans to let players see who is on which platform?

You should be able to use the leader-board system to see who is on what platform, who is playing, and what their ranks are. We haven't really gotten any further than that, so far as seeing how we are going to integrate the two. Our first thing we are working on now is solving how players from different shards or worlds can interact with each other. Once we have that down, it will extend itself over the platforms.

What other types of web interface are you looking at adding in terms of displaying player's identity, like say if I have something cool I want to show off on my MySpace?

One of the things — and I can't give away everything yet — but I will give you a hint. If you look at a lot of the Free Realms stuff, you may get some hints. They ship before us, so we'll definitely be looking into the things they are doing in the space. SOE is moving more into the Facebook type social aspect of things as opposed to keeping things separated out, and I think that's going to help players a lot.

Whatever Free Realms winds up doing, we're going to take advantage of that. It's extremely important for players to be able to show off all their accomplishments and achievements. Ideally we'd love to do it in such a way that you can show it off on whatever social networks you happen to be on. We'll also definitely support different leader-boards for players as well. It's been really exciting getting these aspects going. SOE's got a really great infrastructure in place to support these types of things.

So you're able to control your operatives in the web client?

Potentially. Right now it works, but whether or not we'll release it at launch depends on how things go. We actually use ScaleForm, which is a flash player, for our UI. With us building a lot of our UI in flash, it allows us to put it on the web as well. We still have some security and replication issues to work out, but the hope is that we'll be able to let people manage their operatives — whether on the PC or PS3 — from the web.

So are you looking at other ways for players to communicate?

We actually already have a system called YouChat in the game. Technically, if you knew how to do it, you'd be able to talk to your friends playing EverQuest II. There are a lot of really great technologies for communication that SOE has in place already. The first people who are likely to play this are likely SOE subscribers already. So we want to make sure that it works properly, even though we'll be on the console and supporting VOIP. There's no reason we won't look into adding that functionality.