GameSpy Preview of MAG

MAG is Zipper Interactive's most ambitious project to date. While Zipper is no stranger to online gaming, having introduced it to the PS2 with its popular SOCOM franchise, even Zipper has its work cut out for it because of the scale of this project. You see, MAG will features battles of up to 256 players simultaneously, in theory creating battles unlike anything seen before.





A clear evolution of Zipper's past experience, the team behind the game clearly wants it to be more than just chaos on the field. After all, MAG isn't just about throwing people together in a room and seeing what happens; it's been designed around three tenets that the team hopes will make it unlike anything you've ever played before. I'll take a look at those tenets, and describe how they felt in my hands-on time with MAG.





Tenet One, Scale: Big Battles, Big Moments





Having huge battles is paramount to the success of MAG. There are plenty of other multiplayer games in existence, but none have ever done fights with 256 players. Still, while having a horde of enemies and friendly soldiers on a field would be interesting, it would get old if it was just waves of enemies bashing into each another. Thankfully MAG's levels are supposed to be designed in such a way that players are funneled into huge action-movie moments. Whether its players engaging in large-scale firefights at a facility's gate or watching as explosions rain in from air support, MAG is designed with the hope that stunning moments will be commonplace.










In Practice: Unfortunately my hands-on time with the game was with a limited amount of players. While I certainly got to see the scope of the environments, and I saw some big moments as large-scale explosions occurred, I have yet to really get a feeling for what "big battles" will ultimately be like.





Tenet Two, Command: Organizing the Action





The goal of MAG is produce huge battles, but they definitely don't want it to devolve into chaos. To solve this, MAG breaks the teams up into armies, platoons and squads. Armies will encompass an entire team, platoons will be composed of 32 players, and squads will be the base of the army, as units of eight players working together.





Through playing matches, players earn the right to command armies. A battle commander will be able to issue orders to the overall army, and will be able to encourage them with "Leadership Abilities" that can give buffs to the squads or provide tactical support like airstrikes. On a smaller scale, squad commanders will be able to issue orders to take out certain parts of the map. And to encourage players to follow orders, double experience will be given for kills that take place in the area of an assigned objective.



















In Practice: Having constant objectives did keep the action focused. If you care about leveling -- and chances are you will if this is a game you play a lot -- then you'll want to stick close to your squad to gain the experience benefits. Our commander also helped us out considerably, dropping airstrikes at key times during the fight. My one point of skepticism stems from the fact that we still fought on a much smaller scale than what was intended for the map, so I'm curious to see how far cohesion goes when a couple hundred people are engaging one another.










Tenet Three, Persistence: Every Battle Matters





How do you make every battle matter? Zipper's decided that having players choose a faction, and having an ongoing tournament between the factions, is the best solution. Players choose a faction, and then work with this faction to fight in battles that affect the overall structure of the game world. Fighting and winning key battles throughout the world is said to provide in-game benefits to the victorious factions, so players will be encouraged to actively participate and care about their faction's overall standing.





In Practice: Persistence is not something that can be demonstrated in a 10-minute demo, unfortunately. It sounds great during a presentation, but exactly how players' participation in battles that affect the game world will work remains to be seen. It also makes me wonder how they'll balance out the times when there are clearly factions that players overwhelmingly support, and others that are floundering because the audience finds them boring.










I left the MAG demo feeling cautiously optimistic. Zipper has a pretty outstanding pedigree for online games, so that makes me hopeful that it can achieve its ultimate goal of getting 256 players together on a battlefield. Once that happens, well, then we'll see how well MAG's design tenets hold up amongst a crowd of strangers on the Internet.

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