The Agency set for release next year (2nd half)
http://www.next-gen.biz/news/the-agency-set-for-release-next-year
http://www.next-gen.biz/news/the-agency-set-for-release-next-year
Eurogamer's podcast did a preview of 2011, saying that 2010 was the year of the dancing games or whatever.
I think that if anything, 2011 will become the year of the console MMO ... it will be interesting to see how that pans out, especially as it seems to become a differentiator between PS3 and 360, as the PS3 is getting a lot of them. I personally worry about it becoming a success a little - is the audience there for it? Sure, the same once happend with FPS games, but MMO games aren't in that great a shape on PC either.
Well, we'll see. It's interesting, but having being into online MMOs at all so far, I haven't gotten excited about any of this much yet.
I think that if anything, 2011 will become the year of the console MMO ... it will be interesting to see how that pans out, especially as it seems to become a differentiator between PS3 and 360, as the PS3 is getting a lot of them. I personally worry about it becoming a success a little - is the audience there for it? Sure, the same once happend with FPS games, but MMO games aren't in that great a shape on PC either.
Well, we'll see. It's interesting, but having being into online MMOs at all so far, I haven't gotten excited about any of this much yet.
The MMO aspect is not the draw IMO. The game is designed to be 3 player coop in a team, which is exactly what I'm after in an online game!
Good point. And some of these games seem to have scaled back the MMO aspect of it a fair bit already anyway. They're more like online only games than MMO games, I feel.
Yes, which I think the genre needs. Those nutters who are spending countless hours grinding have WOW and friends. What we're looking at here, I think, is more a conventional online game experience built around a persistent world that provides structure. It's probably wrong to call it an MMO, although I don't know what the official definitions are. But then our genre definitions are taking a bashing anyway. Lots of RPGs are action games, only they get called RPGs because they have character levelling. Character levelling adds considerably to many titles, so it's becoming more widespread, meaning things like Borderlands incorporate it. No-one calls that an RPG but it's the same style as any dungeon crawler regards killing for XP, levelling, and finding loot.
Agency cancelled. What a senseless waste!!! 
RenegadeRocks
Legend
Any reasons as why exactly it got cancelled ? got too similar to APB or something?
Dunno. They just give restructuing/streamlining, and it's come with 200 job losses at SOE. But having the product nearly finished, surely the revenue from sales will vastly outweigh the cost to finish it?
"nearly finished" is not something we know anything about.....
An MMO is not a product you usually release if you don't have confidence in it doing well. Between the servers and marketing to launch that could be a big financial sink if Sony doesn't think it will do well.
Shipping a bad product can do more damage than never having shipped it at all. I'm guesing that they simply did not like the direction the game was going and decided to terminate it.
I can understand that (although SOE hasn't been shy of releasing poor games before!), but previews have been mostly positive and it was scheduled for release this year. I suppose Joshua is right, although I always saw this as MMO light. Instanced environments with only a few players and a lot of bots, no need for much persistance, it'd be something between MAG in world progress, and Uncharted 2's coop maps. Like ModNation Racers, with use lobbies and players spawning off into local races.
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