With the fall of Realtime Worlds' All Points Bulletin, Hi-Rez Studios' Global Agenda is one of the last MMOFPS games standing. Is it worthy of being at the top? Senior News Editor Chris Tom decided to find out!

When I was first assigned to check out Hi-Rez Studios' Global Agenda (GA) about a year ago, I was an extremely picky gamer when it came to the MMOFPS industry (first-person shooter, although, technically speaking, Global Agenda could be called a "TPS," for third-person shooter). As a formerly competitive gamer in the FPS genre, I went to the ends of the earth to play all of the MMOFPS games I could find, hoping to one day discover that perfect marriage between the deep MMO experience and the visceral combat of a solid first-person shooter. Back then, while I did enjoy my experiences with Global Agenda, I noted that the game needed more ambition and more content across the board to really flourish. Of course, at the time, I was expecting some serious competition to come down the line in the form of Realtime Worlds' All Points Bulletin (APB) and Webzen's Huxley.

Flash forward to today and Huxley might as well be vaporware, while APB ended up folding a mere three months after its initial launch. Of course, there were many things to blame for APB's demise, but in the end it made me, and the thousands of other abandoned APB players, wonder just how far Global Agenda had come since its initial release. After all, with APB gone, and Huxley a near non-existent threat, Global Agenda stood poised to be the one and only in the industry! Of course, Hi-Rez studios, not missing a beat, decided to capitalize on that curiosity by cranking up the power on their marketing team, offering condolences to the homeless gamers, giving them a shoulder to cry on and then, gently, slipping a coupon for 30% off Global Agenda into their front pockets.

Genius.

It also helps that next week we'll be seeing a new Halloween defense-style raid map landing in Global Agenda, in addition to the upcoming launch of patch 1.38. The timing of all of this couldn't be better!

In the end, it was APB's demise that has thrust Global Agenda into the spotlight. With MMOFPS games having an incredible reputation for folding early (see Tabula Rasa (sort of), Hellgate: London and All Points Bulletin), here was one team that might be able to go the distance. The only other MMO to make it in the industry was SOE's Planetside, which was released in 2003 and saw its last legitimate content update in… 2005. You could even say that Global Agenda is the only MMOFPS currently alive in the industry, and you wouldn't really be far off the mark. But does Hi-Rez Studios really deserve this monopoly on all of the (albeit niche) MMOFPS gamers of the world? How far could they have come in a year's time? Has Hi-Rez given new depth to their game, or will there just be more armors and dyes to collect? Armed with these very questions, I decided to pick up my Ballista Sniper Rifle once more to venture into the world of Global Agenda.

If you only played Global Agenda during their open beta, then you might still be under the impression that you will need to subscribe to the game in order to gain access to endgame content, like "Conquest," which is essentially a giant game of Risk, but with each skirmish being a 10 vs. 10 "Agency vs. Agency" PvP affair. Well, about half a year back, Hi-Rez decided to nix the entire subscription system and they moved to a more sensible free-to-play model. Under their new model, players will need to purchase new expansions a la Guild Wars style, but they will also have the opportunity to buy "boosts" which give a ton of tokens (2,000) per night, in addition to gaining double EXP, double token rewards and double item rewards when active. As a very nice gesture of good will, Hi-Rez also decided that their first expansion, Sandstorm, would be included as part of the original cost of buying the game (essentially, a free expansion!).