The Agency: future expansions and crossplatform details

More information has arrived for The Agency, Sony Online Entertainment’s exploration into the MMO arena for the PlayStation 3. In an interview with the game’s lead designer Hal Milton and Design Director Matt Wilson, we find out more about how the game will release additional content in the future, whether we’ll be able to see cross-platform play in the future, and more. Details in the full article.

The Agency is Sony Online Entertainment’s new MMO shooter that’s being developed for PCs and the PlayStation 3. In a recent interview with the game’s designers we find out more details about the game’s additional content and potential for cross-platform play.

According to the game’s lead designer Hal Milton, and Design Director Matt Wilson, the initial release of The Agency will have cities in three locations: Eastern Europe, Central America and East Asia. SOE will be adding more locations in the future.

It’s not a solid plan yet, but so far what the devs have in mind is for the game to have big updates as well as small updates. Big expansions will add new locales to the game while small updates will give the game new missions and other content.

The devs are still looking into the possibility of cross-platform play but there are a couple of hitches. For one thing, there’s the usual argument that one platform may have an advantage over the other because of controls:

If you’re having to water down the experience for one [platform], someone is going to feel cheated. We’re still evaluating it, we’re hoping we can make something happen there. It’s about gameplay first.

The biggest hitch is the certification process for updates:

They’ve never really had an MMO on the PlayStation. The update of an MMO is important; everyone who plays an MMO expects regular updates as part of their purchased products. If the server goes down or the patch is bad you need to update it immediately. The PS3 right now is not geared to do that.

Basically, updates and patches for the PS3 may come later than the PC version because of the certification process. Hopefully they can make it work; cross-platform play would be pretty sweet.

Via Joystiq