All of the shooting looked smooth enough, if a little on the fluffy side (hey, it's early, and we weren't expecting bodies to react to every bullet hit or anything), but the real draw for us was in seeing how the game's form of loot would all play out. Though there are items to be dropped (or found in quests, or even built from blueprints depending on how you build up your skills), there's one very key part of one's spy career that no other MMO is attempting with the same level of depth: Operatives.

Operatives are almost like the collectable card game aspect of The Agency; customizable, independently leveling items that can be mixed and matched to carry out various tasks. Broken down into FARM -- that's Field, Administrative, Research and Manufacturing Ops roles -- operatives are key to growing your character in more passive ways than just notching headshots.

In fact, operatives can carry out set tasks that you give them, be it infiltration, crafting new bits o' tech, researching new stuff to build and so on, while you're offline, and since they all level up too in addition to your own personal growth, they're essentially a stock of actions that become better with time and use.

Initially, you'll only be able to use a few as you build up your own clan (or in Agency parlance, your Network, which eventually will let you merge with other players' Networks to form a Joint Agency, sharing resources and tools), but operatives aren't just items meant to be used and thrown away. Quite the opposite; if you send one out to fetch an item and they get into trouble, they can call for help and pull you into a special instanced event. Save them, and you get your original stuff, gain experience, and so will they. Of course, you can leave them to do their own thing, but they may fail the task you bestowed upon them -- that is, if we understand this stuff correctly.

In truth, we were so inundated with facts and idea, concept art and rapid-fire explanation that it was a bit too much to take in. An MMO is by its very nature a slow burn kind of things and even though SOE is trying to keep The Agency as entertaining from the start (you'll actually get thrown right into the middle of a massive fight or precarious situation right from the start which serves as a sort of Bond opening to the movie), it's still the kind of game that we simply need to sit down with and process over the course of a few hours. That means even the inevitable E3 showing that we're sure to be checking out in the next few weeks probably won't help us get to the bottom of everything, but then maybe that's part of the whole spy mystique.