Introversion

Alarms ring, sounding out your best agent's failure. This is the third time he has failed to bypass an encrypted lock, that before the bloodbath five missions ago he would have had no problem with. At first, you thought he was badly shaken by those events, but now you have suspicions it could be a lot more sinister. Your cursor hovers over the command to order your other agents to liquidate him, to make sure he can't compromise your safehouse's safety. Did he sell you out to the highest bidder, perhaps a rival infiltration team? Is he now intentionally sabotaging your plans? Or is it just all in your head?

I hope that my spiel illustrate the concept of Double agents in subversion and its possibly paranoia-inducing effects.

Discuss?

this is a really nice concept just a bit hard to factor into a game like this i think Too many human elements to try and get a grip off which aint easy. Humans are like most random things around.

Interesting idea, but one that might be really annoying in practice. It would really, really suck for your best agent to turn on you, especially at a critical moment.

What might work better is if the agents you could hire come from specific companies or corporations, and those agents may be less willing to help (or openly sabotage your efforts) if you try to make them do nasty things to their company or its affiliates. It would require you to know the relationships companies have with each other and the relationships between your agents and the corporations. Of course, it may just add a layer of complexity that doesn't really add anything to the gameplay, and detract attention from things that are more fun. But that's what beta is for (or alpha, as the case may be).

Having a double agent sounds more like part of a story line than part of the gameplay, it's a cool idea though, and the human element would be interesting if executed correctly and not made to be super formulaic, maybe using some simple fuzzy logic or something.

quickdan wrote:Having a double agent sounds more like part of a story line than part of the gameplay, it's a cool idea though, and the human element would be interesting if executed correctly and not made to be super formulaic, maybe using some simple fuzzy logic or something.

According to the blog, there's already some AI stuff about the NPCs being terrified: I wonder if that could 'persuade' them to become double agents

I think having double agents would be pretty sweet. I can just imagine the conversations I'll have with my cousin discussing how he was robbing a bank with the cops closing in and then had to kill his friend (assuming you name people; he names them in all games after friends) because they were a double agent.

Hysterical laughing will be had.