There's mayhem on the battlefield. Zipper Interactive has just thrown another batch of green recruits into a 128-player session of their upcoming supersized first-person shooter, MAG, and all hell has broken loose. We pour in from the edge of a huge map, coming out of lightly forested hills into a dense military-industrial complex peppered with bunkers, antiaircraft guns, and 64 enemy combatants.
Our goal is ostensibly to infiltrate the enemy base, steal a pair of heavy-duty vehicle prototypes, and get the hell out of Dodge. But most of us are too busy trying to get a sense of the sheer size of the environment we're fighting in to pay much attention to mission objectives right now.
Bigger: Always Better?
These levels are big. "But they're not obnoxiously big," lead designer Andy Beaudoin tells me. "It's an infantry game, so we don't want players wandering for a long time; we want you in the action quickly. That said, building enough space that 256 players isn't a meat grinder requires that we have things on the scale of kilometers rather than meters."
Click the image above to check out all MAG screens.
Scale isn't everything here, but it's certainly the most noticeable thing. Looking out across the battlefield, I can see smoke rising from the other side of a distant hill; I see flashes of heavy fire and hear gunshots in the far distance. A drop plane trundles across the horizon, spitting out tiny paratroopers. Each one is guided by a real person. In fact, all of these displays are the result of other human players making their marks on the world.
Shockingly -- almost suspiciously -- this vast scale doesn't appear to be hurting the game's performance. Sure, the engine may sacrifice some graphical detail to support all these players; but even so, it's astonishing how smoothly the game runs with 128 human-controlled players racing through these huge environments.
Especially since a good chunk of those players are behaving so erratically. Oh, we're all supposedly taking direction from our chain of command, delivered via icons displayed on our HUD. Trouble is, our chain of command is distracted by giving us the demo, so no one's updating our objectives. We've got the basic mission goal highlighted, but on-the-fly objectives -- "fragmentary orders," or FRAGOs -- aren't being updated. It's clear this system has the potential for breakdown if people in command positions aren't taking their duties seriously.
Leadership Material
So I ask Beaudoin how Zipper plans to combat this. He explains that they're not handing out serious leadership positions to just anyone. "There is a level requirement before you can lead a squad," he says, "but it takes a very short period of time: a few gameplay sessions of a couple of hours. And we have a number of different [criteria] we can use to determine who gets put into those leadership positions. When you start moving up to platoon leader and finally to the officer-in-command, those are players that have to have proven that they can win as a squad leader before we're going to let them take on those larger reins."
Click the image above to check out all MAG screens.
And leaders need to do more than bark orders. It's essential that each team's 16 squad leaders, four platoon leaders, and one OIC all get involved in the action. "Everybody's 'boots on the ground,'" says Beaudoin. "We made a shooter; we didn't make an RTS." To encourage this, each leadership level gets its own suite of leadership abilities, special bonuses that boost the skills of infantry within a set radius of their leader. Grunts in close proximity to squad leaders, for example, reload their weapons quicker; those near a platoon leader equip or disarm explosives more quickly; and those near an OIC have higher resistance to damage.
And actually following your leaders' orders is just as important. Players are certainly welcome to just jump in and run around trying to take out enemies; in fact, Zipper's happy to encourage this kind of free-form play. But each mission has a series of specific goals, like capturing and holding defensive bunkers or demolishing antiaircraft batteries. In addition to these, leaders can issue more basic commands, like flagging specific targets of attack, or directing squad movement. And those who participate in these objectives get a particular perk: a bonus to experience points earned while performing their duties.
Moving Up In The World
That's right, experience points. Like an RPG (or, more appropriately, like recent Call of Duty games), MAG allows players to level up, gaining access to new gear and new skills. "Every time I level up I get a point that I can use to add a new skill," says Beaudoin. "That can make me better at running, give me better fitness, maybe let me react better to grenades; or it could give me that new red-dot scope for the assault rifle." And like an RPG, you have to make some "meaningful choices" between buffing different skills. "You're not going to be able to unlock everything in the game as one character," Beaudoin says. "You can go all the way down, get to the end, and then try a different path...but you're not going to have access to everything at any one time."
Click the image above to check out all MAG screens.
Considering the scale of the game, though, you might be forgiven for being skeptical that leveling up will make much difference. After all, as one of 128 players, can you really have that much impact on the course of the battle? Absolutely, says Beaudoin. "I was playing the game the other day on defense," he says, "and we were just getting our tails handed to us. So I slapped a silencer on my weapon, made my way up the flank all the way to the front line, got my little repair torch out and fixed up a bunker. I got in that bunker and started to turn the turret on the [enemy's] helicopters. Suddenly I've got eight-man squads spawning in right next to me, supporting me. As one individual I was able to push that line. One individual is all it takes."
With the game planned for release late this year, it won't be long before we all get a chance to test that theory, beginning with beta tests (both invite-only and open-enrollment) expected to start rolling out this summer. But even an extensive beta program may not be enough to calm the fears of those of us who suffered through the launch of Sony's last online-only game, SOCOM: Confrontation. Luckily we're not the only ones aware of the dangers. "Anytime you go online, you have that fear of what happens when you go out there," says Beudoin. "We're doing everything we can to avoid [launch problems]. We're testing the hell out of the game; we've been playing 256-player matches since the end of last year. I think with that much testing that you're hedging your bets pretty well."
Let's hope so. MAG seems like a promising, bold new experiment in large-scale combat. If everything goes right, it could turn into one of the more compelling warfare experiences available on consoles. But with 256 players, if things go wrong...well, best not to think about it.
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