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An Hour with MAG
What have we learnt from the first hour of playing the retail version of MAG?
Written by Jon Seddon, 28 January 2010
MAG is another one of those big games from 2009 that slipped out of the line of fire of Modern Warfare 2. For purpose of quality assurance that was probably a good thing allowing the guys at Zipper to run an extended beta and get the game running silky smooth from the beginning. They certainly seemed to have done that with servers with free slots always available and none of the nightmare that SOCOM had when it was released.
MAG imagesWith the game officially launching tomorrow, today is the first time we've managed to play the game in retail form. The game immediately asks to download a patch though to take the game to version 1.01, but to be fair Zipper they announced this before launch. Thankfully, the patch is only 60MB and so takes only a few minutes to download compared to the several hours the beta files took. Other than the patch the game doesn't install any data and so you're then good to go.
To start you off, they make you play a quick offline tutorial, but don't mistake that as a version of the game with bots or a squad tactics 101. All the tutorial gives you is an assault course environment much like the training levels in Call of Duty, which means you graduate with just the bare essentials of how to shoot and run.
By that point though you will have already made your choice of which faction you will join and it's then pretty much a decision set in stone. You can only have one character on your hard drive and so if you change your mind you have to delete your save and start again. The three factions represent different Private Military Corporations that are effectively at war with one another following the fall of organized government. Your choices are S.V.E.R. that come across as partisan type fighters, Raven that supposedly field the most advanced weapons and Valor who are formed from US, British and Mexican special forces. Each faction has a compelling recruitment video to watch, which makes it hard to choose which one to join. Eventually the draw of the most up to date weaponry got our vote, although in reality each side is hopefully balanced in terms of armaments.
The fact that you can't change faction actually makes a lot of sense once you realise that the ongoing war between the factions is persistent; the ebb and flow of the global conflict is viewable when you log in. If you could change faction, what would stop people migrating to the "best" faction in a month's time?
P3Zine Issue 32
For our latest MAG coverage, click here to download P3Zine Issue 32 for free.
Currently the only game modes we've unlocked are Suppression and Sabotage, both of which are 64 player battles. Suppression is essentially a team death match mode with a kill limit and doesn't have any effect on the larger Shadow War. Sabotage is all about attacking or defending locations on the map and here your actions do effect the global situation. To unlock more modes, you need to reach higher levels of experience.
The game looks and sounds good if not fantastic and the controls feel solid, although the representation of your hand on the screen looks a little odd. The sound is nearly on par with that in SOCOM and very meaty when run through your surround system. Currently, people that have headsets connected seem to always end up broadcasting the output of their stereo, which is annoying, but you can adjust microphone sensitivity. Hopefully, more people will play with headsets though because they are the minority at the moment.
So far, with just a few levels gained and a few weapon tweaks unlocked, it's difficult to say whether the game has what it takes to succeed, but as SOCOM still has a dedicated community, expect this game to do the same. Despite the fact the game supports up to 256 players, you are always split into squads and never feel like the map is quite that busy, at least not when 64 people are running around!
In its early days the game is being played by individuals that are vaguely working towards the common cause, but without any cohesion. I am certainly not the one to turn the rag tag crews into cohesive killing machines, but for the game to succeed, people come together and figure out how to act as squads.
If any of our readers are interested in getting together to play, then please post on our MAG forum thread and we'll see if we can set up our own clan. Link on the side.
MAG coverage available in P3Zine Issue 32 - click here to download it for free!
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