The Agency: Covert Ops

~ the obituary ~

there is nothing here to have missed. the agency never shipped, so nobody carries a memory of playing it, only of watching it get demonstrated. through those years i was finishing university in turkey and then working, on a pc, with no playstation 3 anywhere in the room. that puts me outside even the watching.

soe announced it in july 2007 for playstation 3 and windows, out of its seattle studio. a spy mmo, third person or first person at your choice, with two agencies to pick between. UNITE stood for united network of intelligence and tactical experts and was the stealth half. ParaGON was the paramilitary global operations network and was the loud one.

the design pitch was that it would not play like an mmo. there were no classes; your role came out of what you had equipped and changed when you changed gear. one shot to the head killed anybody regardless of level, which in 2007 was a real statement to make about a persistent-character game. missions ran solo or with two other players. crossover missions took eight and pvp took thirty-two. the team named thirty frames per second as a floor rather than a target.

~ the case file ~

~ the slide ~

it kept being shown and kept not arriving. between the 2007 announcement and the end there was no public beta and no release window that held. press coverage drifted from what the game would do toward why it was taking so long, and people who played it at E3 2010 came back describing something further from finished than the year count suggested.

in may 2010 soe put out a facebook app called the agency: covert ops. missions and mini-games, achievements you could push at your friends list, all of it set in the world of a game that did not exist yet. that is a companion product with nothing to accompany. it ran for less than a year.

~ the day it died ~

on 31 march 2011 soe announced it was eliminating 205 positions and closing three studios. seattle was one of them, and seattle was the agency. the statement described a strategic decision to reduce costs and streamline its global workforce.

the reason given for the cancellation specifically was that soe wanted to focus development resources on delivering two new mmos based on its planetside and everquest properties while maintaining the portfolio it already had. that is the honest version of a cancellation notice. the money went somewhere else inside the same building.

~ what got buried with it ~

neither of the two mmos the agency was killed for turned out well. planetside 2 shipped in november 2012 and is still running, which is the good outcome. everquest next was announced in august 2013 with a lot of noise about voxel terrain and emergent ai, and was cancelled in 2016 without ever reaching a beta.

the facebook game went offline shortly after the console game it was advertising got cancelled. so the only piece of the agency that ever reached the public was a promotional mini-game for something that never existed. soe itself was sold to columbus nova in february 2015 and renamed daybreak, which is a different kind of ending for the studio that outlived the project.

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