• Posted November 21st, 2008 at 07:37 EDT by
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In an interview with Massively, Sony Online Entertainment Seattle's Hal Milton has claimed that MMO shooter The Agency will show its face at trade events in 2009. He kept mum on likely release windows, unfortunately.

Milton (who serves as Lead Designer) claimed that SOE Seattle was in "full content creation mode", adding "we're polishing as we go while the features come in. I'm not supposed to talk about any specific dates right now but I think you're going to see some stuff at a few of those 'small' shows next summer, the ones they throw every year. That'll give you guys a good indication of where we're at."

He also threw out a fair few details on the game's development status. "The feature work continues unabated. We're concentrating on all of the little, boring stuff on one end and some really interesting stuff on the other. We're getting as many people as we can into the game, shooting it up, having a good time."

"We're trying to push our population as far as PvP and game mechanics go – making sure the guts are all really well built up for operatives, intel, storytelling, advancement, every other feature. That's all great, but that's the boring stuff.

"The exciting stuff, the reason I'm staring at my left hand even though you can't see it, has to do with getting new content in. We shook up some of our tile editor tools, we just finished the base European tileset. As a result we've just exploded on locales.

"The speed with which we're able to execute on those is great. We're building out the rest of the core locales, a bunch of stuff in Europe and Central America going up right now. We're working on a whole bunch of mission content that will be going into there. It's really busy, really exciting.

Milton cited Prague, Kiev and Warsaw as a few of those locales. "We aren't building the whole cities, of course, to say so would be a horrific lie. But it's been really exciting to see those spaces go 'boom' into place."

He was particularly proud of the team's work in Central America. "We got back this fantastic Panamanian shooting gallery, just so damned beautiful. I can't wait to be able to show it to people and let them play through it."

Milton admitted that SOE Seattle had gone "intentionally dark" following The Agency's unveiling at the Consumer Electronics Show in June 2007. The developer has apparently more than tripled its workforce in the intervening months. "When we announced the game last year we had around 30 people working on the game at that time. That was sort of a core skeleton group of folks. We've been staffing up ever since. That staffing up has really given us the density we needed to make these big leaps and bounds changes that have been occurring."

The Agency is down for release on PlayStation 3 and PC.