Members of the Official PlayStation Forums have been a huge help in submitting some questions for the MAG developers. Answers have been provided by the Game’s Producer Alan Van Slyke, the Designer Jason Olander, Designer and the Senior Community Manager Jeremy Dunham. Did your question get asked?

1.) How the whole MAG idea was created? It’s the final product what you had in mind from the beginning or it has changed?

Alan Van Slyke, Producer: The initial idea for MAG was “battles on a scale never seen before.” To have huge air insertions, mortar barrages, and platoons of players fighting for common goals. In this sense the core of the project never changed. Every feature in the game had to pass our filter of, “does this contribute to the sense of scale”, and add to the core pillars of what MAG is.

The final product is very much what we had in mind from the beginning. We did strip away a little complexity to provide an experience that’s approachable even to casual gamers, but were keenly aware that we needed to retain certain designs (command structure, squad cohesion, squad communication) in place to ensure that a game of this scale wouldn’t devolve into complete chaos.

2.) Which one was the biggest difficulty you had to face while developing a game like this?

Alan Van Slyke: Testing! We had to beg, borrow, and steal participation from other Sony studios to assist in testing the game throughout the development window… both to shakeout design ideas/ maps, as well as to ensure stability at scale. Later in the development cycle, our internal and public Beta phases were invaluable at ensuring that we had a smooth launch – thanks all who participated!

3.) How did you come up with the 3 Factions’ idea? Why those Factions?

Alan Van Slyke: The factions initially started as aggregations of existing international Special Forces and evolved into their current (completely fictional) manifestation over a long period of time. SVER/ Valor/ Raven faction identifications gave players the ability to differentiate (visual aesthetic, weapons, vehicles, skills…), resulting in more choice and replayability. It also leaves the door wide open for us to add new weapons, skills, and gametypes in the future… there’s nothing preventing us from adding the ability to load all 3 factions into the same battle, for instance.

4.) There have been rumors that there will be a 4th fraction. Is that true? An African or Asian faction would be amazing.

Alan Van Slyke: While I won’t comment directly, I will say that one of the things we’re happiest with about MAG is that we’ve built a capable platform. Adding gametypes, factions, weapon types, vehicle types, expanding command structure… the opportunities are limitless, and we’ve only scratched the surface of what we can do with our engine and networking capabilities.

(more…)

Score:

• 25 Comments
• Share on Twitter
• Share on Facebook

We’ve listened to your feedback and watched you play our game for weeks to create what is, without a doubt, our biggest and most important patch yet.

Our amendments are dramatic and they are many and we’re confident that they make the game even better than it already was. Not only have we revamped the effectiveness of every weapon in the arsenal and tuned our ranged firing to be more realistic, but we’ve also sped up the weapon and gear swapping process, closed off exploits that gave some teams unfair advantages on certain maps, and have made it more obvious when it’s too late to stop a charge from blowing up.

But those changes aren’t even the half of it, as you’ll see by checking our patch notes below. The best news, though, is that you’ll be able to download this patch starting today at 1am Pacific/ 4am Eastern/ 9am GMT, 25th February. Simply log-on to MAG when the time is right and the update will be ready for download.

We hope you enjoy the new changes – have fun and see you on the battlefield!

Patch v1.03 Available Now

Gameplay

• Overhauled tuning of multiple weapons of all types (see “Weapon” section below)
• Improved speed of weapon and gear swapping by approximately 500 milliseconds.
• Fixed bug in SVER’s Aralkum Mechanical Acquisition map and Absheron Refinery Domination map that allowed players to defuse a charge planted on a repaired gate or door.
• Added a “solid tone” sound effect near the end of a charge’s beeping detonation timer so that players know when the charge can no longer be defused and that they should vacate the area.
• “Medium Improved” Armor now works as intended with the speed properties of Medium Armor and a defensive value greater than Medium, but less than Heavy Armor.
• Changed resuscitated player’s camera orientation to match the last camera direction used while incapacitated instead of the pre-harm camera.
• Players no longer lose XP if a teammate is killed by an objective explosion caused by a charge they planted.
• Respec Point requirements in Barracks have been changed from 3K, 5K, 10K, 17K, 26K, and 26K-Repeat to 1K, 2K, 3K, and 3K-Repeat.
• Lowered the amount of damage necessary to kill an incapacitated enemy.
• All fired projectiles (RPGs, Turret Rockets) have been given a steadier aim.
• Mines that haven’t been triggered are no longer removed from the map when the dead player that deploys them respawns unless that player changes their Loadout (note: The maximum number of mines you can plant cannot exceed the number you initially spawn with).
• Fixed bug that prevented “fully-resuscitated” players with more than 100 health points from receiving their full HP.
• Fixed bug that caused players to take unnecessary damage from both friendly and enemy vehicles when touching them.
• Players no longer lose leadership points after entering “Veteran Mode.”

Weapons

• “From the hip” firing for Light and Medium machine guns have stronger recoil and are less accurate when moving.
• Tuned weapon damage for all three factions.
• Modified all short-ranged weapons (pistols, PDWs, shotguns, SMGs) so that they’re less effective at long distances.
• Made Battle Rifles more effective.
• Reduced accuracy bonus for using iron sights and reflex sights so that players can no longer snipe with weapons that aren’t intended to do so.
• Increased damage values for all rockets to make them more effective (ex: three rockets can now destroy a DE turret).
• Shooting through thin materials (fences, tents, etc.) will be more consistent.
• Increased spread on shotguns.
• Improved animations for rocket launchers.

Graphics

• Fixed bug that caused the recoil animation to end early or stop animating if a player was firing their weapon for a long period of time.
• Changed detonation time on smoke and poison gas grenades to prevent them from exploding in mid-air to eliminate unintended FX issues.
• Added realistic fogging effects to sky-domes.

Technical

• Fixed most conditions that caused players to be caught in a “respawn loop” which kept restarting the respawn queue when the countdown clock reached 0.
• Changed in-game conditions to make it less likely to experience in-game freezes.
• Improved client-side stability.

Score:

• 23 Comments
• Share on Twitter
• Share on Facebook

As you may have witnessed our MAG256 review event last week was a resounding success. If you were among the one hundred and twenty eight players who fought so valiantly against each other — and the developers in the US — then I wanted to personally thank you all very much for coming. We hope you had a great time and look forward to hearing all your thoughts of the experience in the comments below.

For those of you who weren’t able to make it, however, we’ve put together a little video and some photos to give you a feel of what it was like to attend. Extra points are awarded for those who manage to spot themselves in the video.

As you can see, the main attraction of the event was the 256 structure, which housed the 128 PS3s equipped with retail copies of MAG. Even when empty this was a pretty impressive set up, but it really gained a sense of gravitas when fully manned. Especially with the Voice Of MAG (who wasn’t lacking a sense of gravitas himself!) making some very loud announcements over the tannoy.

While I personally didn’t take part in the game (they probably wouldn’t have won if I had), I did spend a lot of time in the Blogger’s Lounge, which overlooked the combat arena, and took full advantage of the Twitter wall. This pulled in tweets tagged with the #MAG256 hashtag and displayed them on the wall, next to the spectator cam feed, above the combat arena. Your tweets from the event (from both attendees and non-attendees) were definitely one of the highlights of the day, and you can find some of our favourites below.

Speaking as an ex-games journalist, I can definitely say that this event had one of the buzziest vibes I’ve felt from a group of industry vets outside of E3, gamescom or TGS. It also helped that people seemed to really enjoy the game itself and we’re already seeing some healthy review scores popping up around the net. The nature of the game means it’s been a hard one to review before launch, but it looks like several outlets found our review event up to task.

Score:

• 22 Comments 4 Replies
• Share on Twitter
• Share on Facebook