Sony revealed MAG, the next Playstation 3 game from Zipper Interactive, now in pre-order phase. Although the release date has not yet been announced, this game promises a lot of great action and above all, a really massive action game. The 256 players online the developers aimed to achieve create a realistic battle scene of a futuristic war.
"If you're talking sheer chaos, in terms of, if you drop 256 players into a village square like an arena, that's going to be unmitigated," says creative director Ed Byrne. "So what we wanted to do is build that intensity and use that flow to direct players from small encounters to larger, and to basically make sure that squads link up actually more like a realistic military operation."
Orchestrating battles on this scale involves a light touch, he explains. You need to direct the fight through careful level design, but also leave players freedom to spread out. "It's through level design and through the flow from beginning to end of the map as you go through the objectives that we mitigate the chaos. The other [method] is simply allowing players to have some freedom on where to go, so if a player is basically overwhelmed by the amount of combat that he's seeing, he can not only retreat backwards but he can go laterally and join the areas that are happening on either side of him."
For more information and a preview of the game you can visit the website at www.mag.com.
