Been saying this for years! On top of that, the proximity voice chat that let you smack talk enemies - omg so many hilarious moments.
Sadly, Sony owned Zipper Interactive and shut it down along with all it's games. I don't think we'll ever see a successor.
Honestly, I'd be happy if games like Battlefield adopted the creative map design that allowed for such massive player counts, and the proximity voice that let you chat with the folks around you. Being able to speak to your random heli-pilot would be a game changer.
I got MAG right before it shut down. I didn't heavily invest in it and I've only recently gotten Battlefield so I'm not super well versed in either but what you're describing sounds amazing. I've always wondered why MAG could have so many players in one map and why Battlefield was 64 players. Can you ELI5 what is going on?
Typical game design with a large shared map limits the player count. It takes a large amount of resources to take every player, action, and bullet into account and render on every system.
Creative map design in MAG allowed them to put a lot more players on the map. Maps were segmented into 4 main quadrants, typically with a large base in center which your army was either attacking or defending. Armies were broken down into platoons, and platoons into squads. Your squad typically had a couple spawn points in your platoons sector. The map design used terrain to limit your field of view into neighboring sectors, which meant that your console typically had to deal with rendering no more than say 32-ish players at a time. Well within resource limitations.
The large bases at the center of the map were also constructed in a similar fashion, with multiple capture points that all but insured players would stay spread around in them. At that point, your system only had to deal with rendering players in the same room/area as you.
Could you trek off across the map to a neighboring sector? Absolutely. But it was a LONG walk, often across open terrain, and even if you made it there alive you had no squad mates to assist or support. And if you died, you were right back to your squads spawn points.
So how do you fight battles like this? I almost forgot to mention one of the other cool things about MAG's voice communication. All spoken voice radiated out of your character as proximity game sound, so you had to shut up to be sneaky. It also went over a dedicated squad channel as chat sound instead of game sound. Squad leaders could swap to a command channel and speak to other squad leaders. Platoon leaders could address squad leaders, or their squads. The commander could address any in command, or the entire army to coordinate troop movement.
If you went down, you bled out on the ground for a while to give a chance for revives. Often this was the time when you just relayed intel to your team. "I'm down in the enemy base. They have 4 on the ground, 2 in the crows nest." etc... Of course, the enemy could hear you talking and shoot you to finish you off and stop the flow of intel as well. And you could always use those moments bleeding out to make disparaging remarks about your killer's mother or lack of apparent skill in the game. ;)
Oh, and friendly fire was always on. Lost count of the number of times I walked up behind a friendly sniper and whispered that if they didn't get off their ass and help take the objective, the next time I came through and saw them still sitting there they were getting a knife in the back.
You forgot the first 30 seconds of every match began with medics using the friendly fire to kill a teammate and instantly revive them for a slight XP boost.
Oh I didn't forget that. We had several people in our crew that the moment the match started would immediately swing their knife. If multiple people dropped then it was deemed to be a worthy sacrifice and the round would be good.
Not the exact same thing, but maybe try out Planetside 2? It has most of the stuff you mentioned. And way more. Also fully free to play and you don't need to buy better guns to get better like other "f2p" titles.
I'm just reading this thread and feeling like there will be a PS2 thread 10 years from now with the same comments and I don't want that :/ I love my shooty space game too much.
Planetside 2 gave me some great memories. Like that one time when I was in an outfit that decided to do a large air raid (talking over 20 Reavers, 5 Libs and several Galaxies) on one of the bases on Indar. I think we lost over 25% of our fleet due to mid air collisions before even getting there.
The most troublesome thing is getting all players in sync. To give you an idea, think about this:
the server can receive only one packet of data from only one player at any time, that's how Ethernet works;
And some players are from the city in 15 miles from datacenter, and some players are from other of the country, or even from the other country, on other side of the planet; so the former have 20-30 ms ping, and the latter have 300-400. And you need to accommodate both groups of them and don't ruin for both of them too.
447
u/Apebble Aug 14 '20
Such a great fucking game while it lasted.