Even though the graphics of MAG looked spot on and at first glance having 256 players on at the same time sounds pretty great, how will this work logistically?
MAG was announced for the Sony PS3 and is boasting 256 player online action, broken up into squads of 8 man teams. So you basically have 32 teams battling, with a leader on each squad/team based on skill and experience. Will the leader of each time have some control of the members of his team? If not it will be utter chaos. Having 256 players running and gunning will get hectic and probably dilute the experience by having a large percentage of players that are clueless or off doing their own Rambo thing.
Aside from the difficulties of coordinating any type of strategy in the game there will most definitely be problems as far as lag are concerned. Just imagine how laggy games can be when you get 20 plus players involved and now multiply that by ten times. MAG I think although interesting in concept may fail in the execution.
How large will the maps for this game be? In order to fit that many players we would be looking at some epic sized maps that could take some time to traverse. How long will an average game take? I would imagine that deathmatch would be out of the question and this would be an objective only based title.
To me having 256 players online sounds more like a headche than a fun time. There will be character development and growth for those that play more often and want to become a leader of a squad, but I just don’t see the point unless you can unlock a nuclear strike that eliminates entire squads at a time.
We will keep you posted if we get any further word on MAG.
What do you think?
22 Comments
Write a Comment»You can’t get people to work together in 8 player games, how do you expect to get a team of 128 to work together
The big number does sound confusing and less fun but I’m interested in this concept and will keep my eye on this. I think this isn’t going to be a ordinary shooter that were use to and might have some MMO elements in it. I wonder how will it be tactical if the map is so big you won’t remember certain locations such in CS you got T-spawn, C-spawn, B, catwalk, etc.. But it’s a tactical shooter so you”ll be in groups and a nuclear air strike would be helpful. I’m wondering if there will be a FFA mode, I can already picture the mass hysteria.. Again this is Zipper Interactive, the same people who brought the Socom series and may I saw FTB 1 and 2 were great and I still play it today, so MAG is a game that I’m looking forward to.
Exactly…looks like a logistic nightmare.
Have you heard of dedicated servers ?
The trailer was pre-rendered. No target release date. Much like the GoW3 trailer, it wasn’t that great a showing.
Hats of them to for attempting this
I never thought that we could get the standard of games we are getting now, so i definately will not be surprised if they can pull it off.
I think gaming is taking over my life, it is so much goddamn fun.
happy gaming
They traded this for Final Fantasy XIII? What the hell is Sony thinking? Are they insane? What a joke, I’m done with them.
Get you gear together and start supporting 3rd party developers. It’s telling that MS had a ton of multiplatform games on demonstration…they care about third party developers. Learn something from them.
This sounds interesting - I wouldn’t expect SOCOM scaled up, I’d expect something completely different - they’ve been working on it for three years, remember, which is a pretty long development time. It’s hard to see how it’d work, but then back in the day people were saying 2D was it and 3D games wouldn’t fly. As long as it takes a new approach (Using the levelling to funnel people into team/tactical behaviours perhaps? Everyone loves levelling, as COD4 showed), then there’s no reason it couldn’t work and could be a very good game online.
It all depend on how much will the game award team playing and other than that the Map size. Zipper interactive has done pretty good job so far with socom, I doubt the ammount of player will be a problem.
I find your lack of faith disturbing.
graphics looked spot on? LOL it was CG.
I think it will be hectic at first. Then people will set up teams and clans and games will get a lot more structured.
The author points at lag on 20 player games… which leads me to believe he has not played online games on the PS3. We play 32-40 player matches with no lag at all. And Resistance 2 has already been confirmed at 60 players with no lag at all… Now how exactly that will translate to a 256 player game, who knows? But in a PS3 exclusive, it’s easier to be optimistic than skeptical.
I would have to try it out, sounds like it could go both ways though. And 256 is a common computer number. It’s 2 to the 8th power.
Warhawk is great with big teams. A bigger teams generally make it more fun. It was hectic at first, but once people get comfortable in a particular role, it’s no longer a mess. This should be similar.
Ironic that the system with inferior online capabilites/features/community is pushing these types of games so hard. I can’t see how the coordination necessary for these types of games to work will be successful on a system where no one talks online (Sony really should have bundled a cheap headset with the system like MS does).
This sounds a lot like the Resistance 2 “kitchen sink”approach to FPS. More is not necessarily better, and this reeks of just hitting a marketing bullet point where the game play will actually be “instanced” into smaller battles within the context of a bigger war - you won’t actually ever be able to have all those players battling simultaneously in the same spot.
Try Warhawk. It has rather large squads, and for the most part, it works.
I am simply agog at your unbridled genius! Of course no one developing this has thought about lag or squad coordination yet, and so this will fail. Thank god for your keen insight and forethought that no one else shares! It obvious that the developers have never played online and must be clueless as to what they’re doing. How can this possibly work when everyone on the internets is using 56k dialup…
Jesus. Grow up.
@ InAwe - Wow your sarcasm was barely noticed there. Read the article @sshat, no where in the article do I attack MAG or say it will outright fail, but instead bring up quetions that a lot of gamers are thinking about. Wow no one uses 56k anymore, your a true genius as well.
The article was a chance for gamers to discuss this topic. MAG is pushing hte forefront of what can be done and I give them kudos. My main concern is logistics, size of maps can be an issue if you need to support 256 players as well as strategy, to coordinate anything with more than 10 players is difficult. If this is just an all out war scenario with no strategy it may work, but even still what will it look like, perhaps chaos, perhaps genius.
256 people shouldn’t be an issue, mmorpgs already have hundreds of people in the same locations without lag issues. It’s all down to the servers that the game will be hosted on. This game will probably be similar in style and play to Sony’s other online shooter game Planetside. This game works very well, and does not have issues with lag, or people running around not knowing what they are doing.
@ spidermaxx - mmorpgs do have a lot of players but they do not run as fast as the FPS games do. If you look at a game like WoW you will get lag dependant upon how many people you are playing with or instead they create instances where your party will port and be in an area by themselves so that all the players in the world are not in the same dungeon at the same time. This game would be a bit different.
A cool idea, but a nightmare ot impliment. Even something like AV in WoW is laggy and annoying at times.
But hey, if they could pull it off it would be crazy. I think having so many people would add to the clusterscrew of an experience its meant to be. Would leave a lot of room for unexpected things to occur.
So who knows.
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