The Agency - Interview Session #1 @ HQ

The website "The Agency HQ" has a transcript of an interview with developers Hal Milton and Matt Wilson at the SOE Fan Faire:

One last thing on the PS3, at E3 you mentioned that you had episodic content every couple weeks. How’s that going to work with the PS3?

[Hal] Our version of episodic content, we’ll of course have substantial content that introduces entirely new locales, rules, etc. Our episodic content is something we’re calling ACES right now. Every two weeks there is a short 5 to 10 minute combat or non combat mission that plays out that extends the world story. It puts Paragon and Unite into competition for point scoring, etc. We haven’t announced all the details on that because we’re actually still working on some of the guts, but it should be transparent to both the PS3 and PC players. When we say episodic, there is not an extensive download associated with it.

When we go to expansion, that’s where things get more interesting in determining how you’re going to be getting content onto the PS3 through PSN. Thankfully, the PS3 has a really robust architecture for being able to download products that you can actually add on and install to existing games that are there. Siren is a really interesting episodic model that just came out that does that. That’s what were going for.

So the ACES system in general, which may or may not have it’s name changed, is all about giving that water cooler experience that every two weeks something different is happening in the world, and you can help contribute to either Unite or Paragon ability to overcome it. The other thing that I like about it, is if you don’t play the game for a year, you don’t miss those episodes. It’s kind of like a backlog of television episodes, you’ll have like, if you’ve not played for a year, 26 of these waiting for you to go through at your leisure. It’s a very interesting adjunct into the main career story of the world.