The team at Atlanta-based Hi-Rez Studios has been on the road a lot promoting their upcoming MMO FPS Global Agenda. They made an appearance at QuakeCon last month and this week they were at both DragonCon and PAX 2009. We caught up with the game at PAX as they showed off some new maps.

We managed to get some time at the very crowded Global Agenda booth at PAX to try out one of the new levels, Ice Flow. One team has to escort a device set on a rail through three objectives while the other team has to stop them. We got a glimpse of the game's extensive character customization system as we played. Four classes (the heavy Assault, the fast and stealthy Recon, the healing Medic and building Robotics) are in the game and our match played quite a lot like a high-tech version of Team Fortress 2 (our team lost by the way).

While Global Agenda has a lot of first person shooter elements, what is not evident in the PAX 2009 display is that the game is supposed to be a full-featured monthly subscription based MMO with PvE elements. The goal is for player teams to fight matches in order to control zones with the final goal of taking over all of the game's zone areas. The game already has a heads-up in the graphics department. Using Unreal Engine 3, Global Agenda's look is a mix of the one man mechs of Tribes and the brighter colors of a Tron-like environment.

Hi-Rez Studios plans to begin a new closed beta that will introduce the game's persistent campaign elements soon. You can sign up for the beta test at the game's official web site. There's still no word on when Global Agenda will be released.