Why is business so intense? Why do companies in industries such as the videogame industry have to flaunt their product and plaster all the positives across their promotional interface to make more sales? This is what Sony and Zipper have done with their console MMO. They’ve taken the absolute best situation, squeezed out all of the positives from this situation and left a mashed up piece of shrivelled matter behind which acts as the negatives. Never has a piece of matter such as this been so important.
Remember those early previews, how 256 players would battle it out, and they’d take orders from the team leaders, making strategic plans to outperform the other team? Having a rock solid game plan to ruffle the opposing players? How organised matches would be one of the best experiences known to gaming? Well if you manage to get a game like that, count yourself lucky.
So why aren’t we suing Zipper and Sony for this blatant slander? Because quite frankly, it isn’t slander. On the other hand, the chances of finding your way into a game such as this is simply ludicrous, trying to get 256 players all playing together in a tactical form to create an intense match is like trying to get 256 children to go to school on Saturday – it isn’t going to happen.
So, is that the one and only positive depleted? The whole “strength in numbers” game has been thwarted, to leave a not-so-good shooter behind? No, there is some amazingly distinctive positives about the game, but unfortunately it’s overshadowed by the, as much as I have to use the word again, negatives.
It takes everything your household FPS does, and does it badly. The shooting is bad and irritating, the grenade system is like a lottery and the respawn locations are way too far from the action. Yeah, that’s a snippet of the negatives. You can read more about them later on, but let’s look at the positives! Don’t worry; you won’t be waiting that long, this’ll only take a second.
We’ll take graphics to start. The lighting in this game is amazing, and it executed it so well in battles that you fail to not notice it on every game you’ll play. Texturally beautiful would describe everything from the terrain to the bullet battered walls best.
The thing this game does best is taking the basics of the first person shooter genre, utilises them, and then adds new elements to expand the series. The camera is very good and works excellently, the gametypes are well paced and the weapons are top notch and well suited.
One thing that I adore in this game is the bleedout system. Every developer of an FPS game should release an update to include this, as it’s so useful and effective. For those of you who don’t know what this bleedout system is, it is basically a feature where when you are shot down, you’re not dead – but severely injured for a short period of time. During this time, you have the option to press X, give up and respawn or else you can wait, and one of your teammates are able to revive you, and you continue where you left off, and it doesn’t count as a death. It’s perfectly executed as your teammates will also be busy killing and it makes the revive/die balance perfect.
In reality, Zipper has a great idea with MAG, and in a perfect world it would be a perfect game but unfortunately it isn’t. It’s like Call of Duty in the lobby. There are lots of kids shouting their ass off about how great they are. I even heard a squeaky voice shout, “Whoo got a kill. Haha Noob!” – on launch day. Chances are the guy who was killed was caught off guard and has been playing FPS games while the squeaky voice was in nappies. Yeah, these things to annoy me and one thing I was hoping for was a mature experience which would indirectly lead to a game that is valuable due to a close battle.
If these are the opinions of the general gaming community, then how will this game survive? This game has absolutely no offline mode to back it up if the community diminish. Zipper says it’s all down to the factions. By factions, I mean three classes that a gamer must choose from. Each have their own different pros and cons, and each will participate in a leaderboard – this leaderboard is the tool to keeping an active community.
Once you choose your faction, there’s no going back. Unless you create a new character, so you should choose wisely. These three factions will be competing against each other all the time, which means you’ll never be fighting someone within your faction. Each time a faction wins a battle, it adds to the factions score, and the faction with the most score is top of the leaderboard, and so on.
Zipper say that players will be fighting for their faction and if they check their PS3 and see their faction has fallen into second place, then they’re want to play to help their faction regain glory. But again, this is where MAG is too ambitious. The chances of the factions being neck-in-neck is very slim, and at the time of writing S.V.E.R have ran away with first place and there’s a lot of reports of players losing heart already. So is this doing the opposite? Players in second and third and no way of rising to first losing heart and leaving MAG, and then our beloved S.V.E.R bored of having no competition and also leaving the game to return to something else?
By no means am I purposely hating this game, I actually really wanted to like it, and maybe I fell into the trap of believing what was being said, but it’s only now that I realize how silly I was into thinking we’d all be organised armies fighting it out in a tightly fought battle, trying desperately to help our faction raise in the ranks.
This game has unlimited potential to be amazing, it really does. If and when Call of Duty fanboys disperse and leave the small minority of sensible and mature gamers that are left alone, this game can multiply in quality tenfold. That’s a big if though. I won’t pretend I’m disappointed, but it does the basics so well, and has some superb features such as the bleedout system but it when Zipper warranted both 256 player matches and organised, communication battles they shot themselves in the foot.
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