We tried out the Global Agenda demo at the Penny Arcade Expo and got the chance to sit down with Executive Producer Todd Harris to discuss various aspects of the game, including PvE and PvP combat.

We tried out the Global Agenda demo at the Penny Arcade Expo and got the chance to sit down with Executive Producer Todd Harris to discuss various aspects of the game, including PvE and PvP combat. Harris even gave us some details on the 'Agency vs. Agency' system that's going to be part of the next beta phase this fall. It looks like high-level teams will get to fight over territories owned by a particular agency, which adds an extra layer of strategy to the game. Global Agenda is a nominee for "Best in Show" in our first PAX Awards.

ZAM: Hey Todd! We just finished our demo and that was pretty cool; it was like a battle instance within a larger game world…

Todd Harris: Yeah, there are really three types of combat instances, in addition to social spaces. One, we do just have social city spaces; they’re pretty small hub areas, but they’ve got vendors, an auction house and a virtual reality where you can go in and shoot your friends for practice—that sort of thing. For combat, there are really the three types, all of them are instance spaces but they’re linked together in different ways. One is PvE, so we have a lot of folks that come to us from Planetside…but we do have a rich PvE, experience unlike Planetside. It’s built around four-person teams, so you go co-op. It’s a little different experience than the objective-based PvP map, [where] you go through a progressive dungeon-crawl sort of experience. But for us, it’s a mission; fighting a mini-boss in each stage and a big boss at the end.

So pretty cool, raid-like content for folks that want to go strictly PvE, or just want something as a break from PvP. And we have what you guys displayed, which is match-made, or mercenary PvP. You join a queue by level segment, so you won’t be playing with super high-level characters right out of the gate. And then on the back end, there’s a match-making system, so we just team up a match based on roughly even number of classes on each side, so one team doesn’t end up with more medics, while the other side has zero. We also look at your player skills. As you play, we’re actually tracking not just the level of your character, but you’re player skill with a true, skill-like algorithm on our side. We keep that in mind so one team is not stacked. So that’s just pick-up group play; you’ll earn experience, you’ll earn credits, you can level up either by PvE or PvP, or mixing it if you wish.

The third style is what we call AvA — 'Agency vs. Agency' — or also referred to as 'The Campaign.' We're not talking about all the details [right now], because that’s what we’re about to launch in our next beta phase — CBT2 — which will be coming in the fall. But at a high level there, rather than pick up groups — it’s all pre-made teams, fighting over a territory that’s actually owned by a particular agency. When that territory is either won or lost, there are real consequences to that. So at the highest level, you can think of a world map with different regions and different hex grid spaces, where each hex is going to be owned by a particular agency. Based on the type of territory you own, you can choose to put different facility types on that territory, and those facility types will do production for you. They might help you produce things like implants, that help you as an individual agent — just more persistent buffs — or they might do things like produce a resource that help you trap agency security devices, like a turret or a power station that can actually be put in the facility and help you in battle to defend that. So there’s really this layer of a strategy game that links all these instances together. That’s kind of the 'grand vision.'

ZAM: How does the building-facility mechanic work in AvA? Are there ranks involved?

Todd: Within an agency, which is our form of guild, there are player ranks that can be assigned, and up to each to agency, there’s some discretion around who can do what, as far as using their agency resources. Building a facility is a little bit more like a turn-based strategy game; so it’s not like someone’s going to be just sitting there online, hammering with a blacksmith sort of thing. When they have enough resources to get that facility, someone with the right rank will be saying, ‘Hey, I want to build a Level 2 Lab here,’ or ‘I want to put a Level 3 Factory here.’ Each one will produce a different resource or buff.

ZAM: How do you get resources, then? Is that tied into the regular PvE gameplay?

Todd: That’s right; without getting into too much detail, I’ll just say that we’re looking for the system to let both PvE and PvP players accumulate to the Agency gameplay.

ZAM: Aside from the facilities, what sort of abilities or equipment do you get for ranking up?

Todd: Even independent of the AVA, when you’re just starting out as a lower-level character, you guys are playing equivalent to level 40, as far as the universal devices. So just from a personal advancement standpoint, when you start at level 1, you play 1 through 5; it’s basically an extended tutorial. You’ll get a melee, a ranged, a jetpack and one specialty. As you go through level 40, you’ll gradually unlock new devices. You’ll get skill points to put into your spec and further customize your build. And then we have what we call ‘implants’ — so you basically have your equipment, you have equipment rank, new skill points and the ability to get better implants. That’s where we have a crafting system on the individual side that lets you craft better implants and put them on the auction house — so there’s some economy there as well.

After you’re rank 40, that skill gives you something to do, as far as keeping up with the latest season of tech or implants. We’re definitely not going for a very heavy item grind, but at the same time, we think it’s a fun game to play and you might as well get some new stuff for yourself while you’re playing…and that comes through implants.

ZAM: It’s obviously very skill-based MMO, a lot like Planetside was?

Todd: That’s right, yeah. We see that a new character —t hat’s an experienced FPS player — can definitely do fine over a high-level character. It’s not like a new, low-level character can literally not hit a level 40 guy, like you have in a fantasy [MMO].

ZAM: Any plans for vehicles?

Todd: There are no plans for vehicles. The maps that you guys saw are medium-sized, so it’s more between the infantry and the jetpack — [vehicles] don’t really fit. What we do have are controllable mechs. In match made PvP, we have a game style that’s called 'Capture the Mech' — or 'Capture the Robot' — so instead of capturing the flag, you’re actually getting in a robot, which is pretty cool. It means that the robot does travel differently than a player, so you can kind of define the route of the gameplay. There’s a different ability bar that they get, so you get to use the massive melee stuff, or the warm-up gun. Also, in the AvA play, we plan that some of those things — you were mentioning about players getting resources and crafting things — we plan to have some controllable mechs that come into that AvA campaign. So you potentially work up as an agency and get something fairly impressive that you could use to defend your facility, or to attack another facility. So that kind of fulfills that vehicle gap; it’s controllable mechs.

ZAM: What about stationary turrets and stuff like that?

Todd: Yeah, those are other examples. The sorts of things we’re talking about are stationary, single-deployed turrets, mechs and other persistent buff stations, like maybe a power station. As you guys know, we use power like mana; as a control device. You have the ability to put in a single location, an area that’s sending out a power burst, or a medical field buff station—those are the sorts of things we’re looking at that will let agencies modify the instance and help secure it.

ZAM: Sounds really cool. So the implants are craftable?

Todd: That’s right, implants are craftable. You get loot drops from doing PvE; we have a blueprint and a component system. [In] our current iteration, you can be lucky and get a full implant to drop sometimes when you take down a boss, and along the way, trash mobs and mini-bosses [will give you] blueprints and components that you can use to craft implants.

ZAM: What are the PvP PuG maps like? Are they built like any other FPS map?

Todd: There are probably four different game types we have right now; a ticket with outstanding points, a progressive capture/defend, an attack/defend that’s like an escort map and a rotating, ticket-style capture-the-robot. There are a couple others we’re playing with. For each one of those, we have a few different varieties, but they won’t all be active at one time. So, depending on the day that you join, you’ll be able to choose the style that you want, and we’ll decide which map is active at that time. But they are very similar to an FPS map. And in addition to all the weapon/class/balance considerations, we look at things like team maps, to see where kills are happening, where people are dying; we have to consider all that in the level design like an FPS game.

ZAM: Any sort of online leaderboard?

Todd: Yeah, we’ve actually already got that in beta; a tremendous amount. In AvA, it’s really better than a leaderboard, because you’ll be looking literally at a world map and will be able to see which agencies are controlling which territories; that are all dynamic and real-time. But also, every single match that’s played, when you pull up those end-of-mission stats where you see what you were best at and all those different points—all that stuff is saved. So you can go and look for your character for every single Global Agenda map you’ve played; how you’ve done, what your best kills were, where you’re doing your most damage by device, so you can really tweak your skills and your equipment build and see what you’re best at.

ZAM: Let’s talk about the agencies a little bit. You said they’re your form of guilds in Global Agenda?

Todd: Yeah, exactly. We’re envisioning them to be around 100 people; we don’t necessarily have a hard cap on it, but that’s kind of the ballpark that we’re playing with.

ZAM: Will they work like traditional guilds, where any player can start one, and personalize various aspects of it?

Todd: Yeah, that’s right; you just need a few to start it. We’re playing with some ideas of [a] custom agency headquarters; probably not every guild will get that, but it’s something that’s a reward out there, perhaps for winning a campaign or that sort of thing. Even if you’re not in a guild, there are all sorts of dyes that you can [use] to customize yourself, but guilds can obviously enforce that even more. Guild logos, banners and things; so in AvA, when it’s your facility, you can potentially plaster your guild banner on there. Generally, we’re just trying to have more in-game support, so you don’t have to spend a lot of time out-of-game managing in a separate website. People still will, but just to actually apply [and recruit] for a guild; we’re trying to make that pretty easy for people.

ZAM: Besides auction houses, what other MMO staples will we find in your capital cities?

Todd: Chat, auction houses, vendors, the VR arena that you can hop into, implant vendors, a few types of various stores in there…pretty standard MMO stuff.

ZAM: What happens if you have a server with tons of agencies in it? How are you going to handle server clusters?

Todd: Right now the plan for server clusters is to have one cluster per continent, basically; North America, Europe — we’re going to do that launch simultaneously. Within any server cluster — we’ve got a lot of flexibility around how much territory we make availabl e— so that’s the big thing that we’re testing in CBT2. The nice thing about them being instanced hexes is that we can kind of shrink or make it bigger, to make it bigger to make sure there’s enough conflict in the world. We want people to go after each other, we want agencies to maybe win or lose a hex or two per day — but not get completely crushed, but also not have your home property switched — those are parameters that we’re going to be tweaking a lot in closed beta 2, to make sure it feels good to folks. At the end of the day, that’s the nice thing about instances; we can scale it up or scale it down as we need to. The other nice thing is that we’re designing around multiple zones; zones like a contiguous group of hex. Some zones will have different open hours than other zones. So if we’re a small agency, we don’t want to be up all the time defending it; maybe we’re just competing in a zone that’s only open three hours a day. Whereas on the other extreme, there might be a 10-hour — or even a 24/7 if people are really crazy — and I’m sure people will play there, right? But with CBT2, we’re going to adjust some of those parameters to see exactly how many hard-core folks are playing in this zone versus that. That does let us make sure there is the right amount of hexes in the world. Finally, for each of those zones, we do want there to be a 'win condition.' As an agency, to your fragmented point, we can choose to have a formal alliance with these other agencies, and that becomes an alliance. Really, a hex is won or lost as an alliance. Even though those territories are owned by agencies, the win condition is at the alliance level. That lets a group actually win a zone, like, stamp their name in the world lore, you know…’Wow, the Alliance of the Six-Fingered Hand; they took this thing on this date, and everyone knows it…’ And then, ‘We’ll put another zone into play; maybe next time we’re not going to dig you guys so much—we want it all under our banner.’ There’s a kind of natural reset mechanic in there where people can dig alliances and shootouts themselves, or small agencies will group together. A lot of it, we’ll discover as we go, but we think the core mechanics are pretty solid and players will have fun with it.

ZAM: It seems like there’s a lot of instancing; is there a persistent world?

Todd: There’s zero of that right now. We definitely get asked about it, because when people hear ‘MMO,’ that’s what they think about. For us—until release, certainly—we don’t have any plans for that. But we think the gameplay is super fun; we want to actually keep it tight. A lot of things like the weapon distances, the travel times; they’re all based on the distances of engagement. Certain things will break if we just really open it up. What we believe is that once people see this world map and they see how these instances are linked together, they’re really going to get into that. We call it ‘persistent PvP’ instead of open-world PvP. We really think this idea that the map itself is balanced—and it’s a little bit smaller, and what we did before and after the match actually affects the next map—that’s going to be fun, different game style than most.

ZAM: What’s your ultimate goal for the game? What do you have planned for it, in the long-term?

Todd: Well, our lead designer is always into colonizing planets…a 'galactic agenda' maybe sometime in the future. For now, we like the fact that it’s just on earth, because there are not many MMOs that are set on earth. It’s future earth, but it’s set on earth…

ZAM: Future earth without zombies, no less!

Todd: Without zombies and without elves, that’s right! (Laughs) For us, it’s our first game as an independent developer. We just want a community that’s super-passionate about the game, ultimately. We started this before World of Warcraft; it wasn’t like it started with business people with big dollar signs in their eyes. We think this will be a really fun game to play; so far the beta group’s been super-supportive. For us, success with our first game is just, like, a community that’s thriving, happy and super-passionate about the game.

ZAM: Thank you so much!

Todd: Thanks!