Happy Grinding!

The publisher famous for Final Fantasy (of course) and recently released Dragon Quest will be partnering up with Japanese publisher Gamepot for the release.

Courtesy of CasualGaming.biz, Senior Director of Business and Marketing Thomas Lee (phew) briefly described the game:

“Imagine a world of perpetual warfare, legions of unique classes, and a Hyper-Active Battle System. Think the best scenes in Gladiator or Braveheart, with the action ratcheted up to 20. It’s quite unlike any MMORPG available. Our 50 vs. 50 PvP system is pure, pulse-pounding excitement. And now, for the first time ever, North American players can step into a world from the creators of so many high-quality RPGs, completely for free.”

Mass PVP,meh… however it could be interesting! In typical fashion, news of BETA has only been made for North America.

However, keep your eyes peeled and your fingers crossed for news of a European BETA.  Here’s hoping!

IPO’s don’t usually get any bigger than this so we were really excited to get our hands on it and will be posting our impressions and a Q&A interview with the Star Trek Online development team later on today.

Before that however Cryptic have kindly given us 500 Beta keys to give away on Loadscreen.net

Update: Over 450 400 350 300 250 69 32 ***13*** NO KEYS LEFT (as of 24th Jan 2010 @ 16:50 GMT)

To get your hands on a key simply head over to our forums, register, and post in the Star Trek Online Beta key thread here requesting a key along with your favourite Star Trek quote, character or reference AND how you found out about this giveaway. The keys will then be mailed out to you in batches at 2 hourly intervals. Hurry as they are sure to disappear quickly!

Attention: If you do not REGISTER in the forums, your email will not be included in the list, please do not just comment on this post but REGISTER in the forums. This puts your email address in the correct database.

Update: Keys are being sent out in batches of 50. Please be patient, if you post before the 500th post you WILL get a key.

Don’t forget to check back later as well for our interview with the STO Dev team along with our personal impressions of the beta.

I can’t understand the bad press this game is getting from the community. As two of my squad mates asked each other in a recent game of Domination, ‘Why does everyone hate on MAG.  It’s amazing.’  It’s like no other shooter available on a console.

Here at loadscreen.net, I’m in the middle of putting together an in-depth preview of the beta (with a screenshot gallery), Part One of which is currently available from the main page.  But I feel I need to step in with a bit of opinion before everyone gets the wrong idea.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with MAG’s gameplay.  It’s just not the same gameplay you get in many other online shooters.  It’s different.  It’s a tactical, wide-spread, play-at-your-own-pace, shooter.  It requires leadership to a greater degree that any other shooter I’ve played.  You’re not led by the hand.  You can make choices.  You can, in other words, Role-Play.

Best palms since Crysis?

MAG sells itself as a MMO shooter.  And this is how it should be approached.  You don’t play an MMO without preparation, coordination, and, importantly, grinding.

Okay, it’s not for everyone.  But there’s a lot to like in MAG, more than it’s being credit for.

The gameplay is extremely well balanced, whether you’re playing 256 or 64 player battles, the locations are varied and interesting, with excellent strategic options, including high-points, tunnels, multiple routes, destructible objectives and doors.  The better team will always have the advantage (using medics and engineers to revive and repair their structures), but there are plenty of opportunities to turn the game around as the battle moves further into the map, where more diverse combat options reveal themselves.

Hit-detection is tight and fair.  The hit-reaction is a little slow, compared to MW2, but that doesn’t mean your hits aren’t being registered and there is a loud ‘impact’, sound effect, blood, and a red flash on your crosshair to let you know if you’ve made contact.  Once you get used to the fact that characters collapse slower than other shooters, it becomes a natural part of the game.

I hate to point it out but...

Visually, if you read my preview, you will see that MAG sports graphics that make it competitive in today’s market.  The textures are comparable to MW2, I kid you not, and there are some decent shader effects at work.  I’m impressed with the lighting and shadows, and the character models are detailed and customisable.  Let’s not forget that there are potentially 14x the number of players wreaking havoc all over the screen than in the largest game of MW2.  So what if the explosion and smoke effects aren’t the best you’ve seen?  And remember, it’s only a beta.  Uncharted 2 sharpened up considerably from its beta incarnation.  It is possible that the Blu-Ray disc of the final game will hold bigger, better textures, which have yet to be seen.

On the lag issue: yes, I’ve encountered it, but in a 30 minute game the lag has only ever interrupted about 1 minute of that play session.  That’s not bad for a game still in beta.

Finally, some people have complained that you never get to see all 256 players on screen at once.  Well, do you really want that experience?  It would be chaos.  It wouldn’t be fun.  And what’s wrong with charging into battle with 16 (a large number) squad-mates knowing that just over the next hill, 16 other players from your platoon are doing the same?  When you die and the camera takes you back to a spawn screen, you are in fact treated to a very wide view of the battle, where hundreds of players are visible.  Moreover, you are constantly reminded of the progress of your team through radio updates and, if you have a decent squad-leader, through their communications with the other squads.  MAT, Massive Action Teamplay is 100% possible.  And if that’s not good enough, you can wander about lonewolf style and get involved in the wider battle.

So there you have it, I’ve tried to dispel the main complaints about MAG.  Of course, it’s not a perfect game.  And many will not agree with my assessment.  Nevertheless, I urge you, reader, to put some time and energy into MAG when it comes out.  Like all MMOs, it will reward your efforts.

See you on the battlefield.

[Show as slideshow]

[View with PicLens]

VISUAL PRESENTATION:

Art direction:

The world of MAG is built around threes: three factions (Valour, Raven and S.V.E.R) fighting across three continents (North America, South America and Europe), with a different look and feel for each.

The factions had to be separated somehow, and the developers have gone for the three military classics: high-tech Scandinavian supermen, low-tech guerrilla warriors from the Czech Republic, and, of course, the balanced, rugged, US military grunts with real-world tech.

Loosely, this means you’ve got Raven, dressed in – guess what – black, spec-ops armour, S.V.E.R, in rusty, piecemeal, fatigues, and Valour in the earthy greens and blues of bog-standard military uniforms.  On the whole, this works very well.  It’s meant to be a realistic scenario and not Enemy Territory: Quake Wars (2007), after all.  Even though I’ve only seen things from Valour perspective, I’ve been able to scavenge enemy weapons and it seems that each faction has been given just enough ‘character’, to make you feel like part of a group (or Guild, as this attempts to be an MMO) with an individual set of ideals and their own cultural identity.  The self-customisation of your own player-character has a lot to do with this feeling of belonging – and I’ll come back to it.

The main area of difference between the factions, and the one your most likely to see – given they’re always right in front of you – is the weapons.  Now, I’ve only seen a fraction of Valour’s arsenal, but I can tell you that it’s your typical Assault Rifle (M4A1, and SCAR-type), submachine guns (MP5), machine guns, shotguns, sniper rifles and pistols.  In some ways, it might actually be more interesting to join Raven or S.V.E.R as they have a slightly more unique set of weapons, instead of the Tom Clancy special collector’s set, which has been the norm since Counter-Strike 1.6 (2003).

As each faction has an HQ in a different part of the world, each landscape naturally has its own characteristics.  VALOUR, the faction I joined (being proud of the British armed forces, rah, rah) has its base in the Alaskan wilderness, and so it’s no surprise that the beta map for this location is an abandoned logging complex in the middle of the mountains.  Pine trees, patchy grass, dry mud, and dilapidated wooden buildings create a varied and convincing environment.

Then there’s Raven’s South American base (pictured in the gallery), where you fight in the ruins of ancient Incan pyramids, surrounded by thick vegetation, a river, and palm trees (perhaps the best palms since Crysis (2007)).  My only complaint here is that the colour scheme seems a bit too muddy in this environment, making it very hard to see.

Game engine:

I’m disappointed by most game engines.  But then, it’s not the fault of most developers.  They have to cut corners for the sake of fps, or scale, or time.  And yet, I still find myself wishing that most developers had gone just a little bit out of their way to make their games what I will call a cohesive graphical experience.  By that I mean, all of the models, textures, shader-effects and geometry are of a consistent quality – there is no weak link that brings you out of the gameplay experience.  Recently, games such as Uncharted 2: Among Thieves
(2009), and Assassin’s Creed II (2009), have excelled in this area.  However, it has to be said that popular titles such as Modern Warfare 2 (2009) can get away without this level of overall detail because they are fast moving, action games that put an emphasis on competitive play, rather than immersion.

So then, how does Sony Exclusive MAG fare?  It faces tough competition from other Sony exclusives such as Killzone 2
(2009), and Resistance 2 (2008), and, unlike both of these examples, attempts to put an unprecedented number (256-128-64) of players into huge gameplay environments.  Is it a case of, great scale, poor graphics?

Thankfully, no.  The MAG team, no doubt with the help of a significant amount of optimisation time, have managed to create a decent, while not exceptional, graphical experience.  There is a good amount of variation in the textures and the up-close detail (on wooden and metallic surfaces) is supported by a number of shader-effects like those seen in the Unreal 3 engine.  In fact, I’d say the overall look falls somewhere between Resistance 2 and Modern Warfare 2.  I must also praise the lighting, as it offers dynamic shadowing, diffused fog, and HDR effects that really help bring out the atmosphere and texture work in the levels, never making anything look bland or flat.  Character and gun models are also highly detailed and benefit from specular maps (body lighting), and detailed normal mapping.

Interface:

The menu system can make or break a smooth gaming experience, especially when that game includes RPG elements or an online mode.  MAG does both, and luckily its menu system is not broken.  It’s not good looking, but the design is a straight forward system of windows with options that can be navigated by L1 and R2 as well as the stick.  If there’s a frustration, it’s that there are, as always, too many ‘log-on’ screens.  You go through about five before you can get in a game.  Also, you have to bring up several windows and navigate onto a game-type, just to start queuing for a match.  Having said this, they are quick steps, and it doesn’t take long to wiz through them.  Moreover, the war-room menu – or game lobby – is a large map of the world with all the current locations that can be fought over displayed.  This screen has all the information you could ever want about MAG on it, from the number of players, to your friends and, of course, who’s winning the war.  I don’t really care, at this point, about how many contracts my team has secured.  I don’t even know why I should.  But it’s a nice persistent element, which is the main reason the game can be compared to an MMO, other than the character creation system.

The menus for updating and maintaining your character are similarly filled with options and information, however, it’s all intuitive if you’ve ever played an RPG before, and I’m sure even players from Modern Warfare won’t spend too long scratching their primordially sloped brows, before they figure out how to equip all their items, change the colour of their camouflage, and add the aviator sunglasses to make their character look hardcore.  To be honest, you can spend too long trying to make a pretend solider look hardcore or even badass.  When there’s 100s of players on screen all throwing grenades at you, it doesn’t matter what you look like, you will run like a Teletubby at tubby-toast time.

And so to the HUD, which is nothing new.  The radar can show you enemies that have been spotted as red dots, and where you are on the map in relation to your team-mates (blue dots) – wow.  Your health is displayed as a numerical value, which makes the process of using your health-injector-thingy, simpler I suppose, as it is less vague and frustrating than a fade to black and white, which has become something of a fad these days, or health-bar.  Bullets and other useless information are also given as numbers in true MMO fashion, unforgiving to those who have a Magic Maths Shield.  The crosshair is actually a white cross – retro – with a dot in the middle and everything.  Indeed, the whole thing has a real PC vibe; made me think of CS and Battlefield 2 and older games, if there are any.  It expands and contracts to show your recoil, and turns red when you have hit an enemy (though there is a small amount of blood, it’s not easily seen).

So, it’s not a casual interface.  It encourages thought and strategy.  Although, in a slight nod to the non staff-wielding players among us, there is an ‘enemy fire sensor’, taking the form of little white semi-circles that tell you the direction of close by enemy gunfire, similar to the way red semi-circles tell you where you are being shot from.  Given the scale of the maps and the number of players, this ensures you never actually miss the battle.

Options:

There are various settings available in the MAG menu system, from clan-tags to volume and gamma settings.  As this is a beta, suffice to say there appear to be no noticeable absences.

Check back soon for some gameplay videos showing MAG in action, and hopefully not too much of me noobing it up.

Meanwhile, enjoy the gallery.