It’s been a long-running mystery why Rockstar’s PlayStation-exclusive spy game Agent never materialised. It was announced with much fanfare in 2007, then proceeded to never show up again. But Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser has finally provided an adequate answer. Simply put, he and Rockstar couldn’t find a way to make an open-world spy game work.
“We worked a lot on multiple iterations of an open-world spy game and it never came together,” Houser told Lex Fridman in a rare and revealing podcast interview. Houser said there were roughly five different iterations of Agent, including one set in the 1970s Cold War era and another set in the modern day.
But wherever and whenever Rockstar tried setting Agent, it couldn’t make the idea of an open-world spy game work. “I don’t think it works,” Houser said. “I concluded – and I keep thinking about it; sometimes I lie in bed thinking about it – that what makes them really good as film stories makes them not work as video games.
“Those films, they’re very frenetic and they go beat to beat to beat,” he went on. “You’ve got to go here to save the world, you’ve got to go there and stop that person being killed and then save the world… And an open-world game does have moments like that when the story comes together, but for large portions it’s a lot looser and you’re just hanging out and doing what you want.”
What makes the Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption games work so well as open worlds is their in-between time – the time you have to cruise around, either on a horseback or in a car, listening to the radio or watching the world go by. In those games, you do your own thing. “That’s why it works well being a criminal: because you fundamentally don’t have anyone telling you what to do,” Houser said.
The minute you put that into a spy game, however, you slacken the line of tension you need running through the spy framework to give missions jeopardy. “As a spy that doesn’t really work because you have to be against the clock,” Houser said. It’s a fundamental issue – one Rockstar couldn’t overcome. “For me, I question whether you can make a good open-world spy game,” he said.
It’s a question I’m sure Hitman developer IO Interactive has had to reckon with while plotting blockbuster James Bond game 007: First Light, though IOI’s expertise is not in open worlds but sandbox mission approaches.
Agent apparently began life as a demo for the Grand Theft Auto 4 engine, a Rockstar developer revealed a couple of years ago, and it showcased a hang glider and a car that turned into a submarine. A fuller, more linear game was then apparently green-lit, which would take us to classic spy movie locations such as the French Riviera, a Swiss ski resort, and Cairo. And the story would culminate with a big shootout with lasers in space. That idea was apparently in development for a year and a downhill skiing section was developed, but the game didn’t get much further. Rockstar eventually abandoned its trademark for Agent in 2018.
Source link
