Posted on
January 21, 2010 by
jeremyazevedo
Can MAG’s ass cash the checks that Sony’s been writing with their mouths?
By Jeremy Azevedo |
Modern Warfare junkies are going to balk at this, but having played MAG (Massive Action Game) for myself at CES last week, I think I can safely say that it’s the closest thing to actually being in a war that anyone’s ever experienced in a video game. |
The one problem with this, is that being in an actual war most likely isn’t half as fun as the stylized gameplay of Modern Warfare 2 and Killzone 2 would lead you to believe.
Obviously the big selling point for MAG is it’s 256 player games. I can’t really comment on how the servers will keep up or how difficult it will be to populate matches, but in my limited experience everything ran smoothly enough. There was one point in which I got stuck in the lobby fiddling around with my loadouts for a couple of minutes, but the matches themselves are pretty long so it’s not too big of a hindrance.
In order to keep 256 players from running around like a bunch or disorganized assholes, individual soldiers are broken up into teams of 8. There are, in turn, 8 such squads in each platoon, so that’s 4 platoons of 8 squads of 8 soldiers per side. Each army has designated squad and platoon leaders for each group, with an “Officer in Charge” calling the shots and setting objectives for the entire group. Just like in real life, if your OIC is some kind of yahoo then you’re all pretty much f**ked. I believe there’s probably some sort of hierarchy as to who can be a leader and why, so you better make sure your shit is together if you want to rise through the ranks.
In addition to all this organizational crap and objective based squad combat, you’ve also got multiple character classes and weapon load outs to choose from, all of which are pretty fluid. So far as I can tell, if you want to be a sniper/bomber/medic/janitor, then nobody’s stopping you. There’re plenty of skills, vehicles and airstrikes to call upon as well, so things keep pretty interesting, if nothing else. There’s almost too much stuff going on, to be honest. In one game, some dick called an airstrike on my ass every time I left my stupid base, which isn’t exactly my idea of a good time.
The control setup is where things really started slipping for me. Hopefully the controller is customizable, because mine was programmed to shoot and aim with the inner bumpers instead of the outer triggers like every other shooter in the known universe. The first few times I tried to shoot somebody point-blank with a shotgun, I instead found myself brandishing a goddamn medical syringe or some such bullshit at them. Very frustrating. Also, when you’re sniping, there is an assfull of kick every time you shoot, no lock on and no real visual reference when you score a hit. Worst of all, you have to click in the left stick to run, but half the time your guy just stops running all of the sudden for no reason. This is something I don’t understand about modern video games: I always want to run. Make that the default. In older games, you used to have to click the thumbstick to walk, not to run. Stop making me walk everywhere, assholes, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but people are f**king shooting at me.
Not to put to fine a point on it, because I think there’s enormous potential to MAG, but at the end of the day, it’s like playing the free online shooter Combat Arms, only you have to pay for this and some jackoff is yelling at you telling you to do stuff all the time when you just want to get out there in the shit and pwn some n00bs. As a tech demo, it’s great. If they make it work, maybe we can repurpose the technology for Left For Dead 3 and have 200 player-controlled zombies running around or something awesome like that. But MAG is just overly complicated and unpolished IMHO. I’ll take my shooters with wisecracking protagonists and alien laser beams and shit like that. F**k teamwork, I like to be the star of my own pre-adolescent power-fantasies, thank you very much.
