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BGB talks MAG with Seth Luisi: quick-fixes and data-mining

By Jonathan Cresswell | February 10, 2010

The 256 player online game MAG shouldn’t be facing long waits for bug fixes to reach users as Sony has told British Gaming Blog about how they plan to speed up what usually is a length certification process.

Seth Luisi, director of development at Sony Computer Entertainment America said that the game has a “two tier patching system” that will allow for quicker updates to the game. As well as ones that have to go through Sony’s platform QA team as seen with most games, “the other we can test on our own and release a data patch which addresses things that aren’t really related to the executable. And a lot of the items too we can address too on the server, so we don’t even need to patch the client to make a lot of the changes and improvements to the game.”

Much of the game’s testing before release was through an open beta release. “We were always planning on having an extensive beta period. With a game that’s 256 players, we couldn’t even play it at Zipper. They have less than 150 people there at the whole company so we couldn’t even fill a single game so the beta was really key to get out there.”

As well as getting written feedback from the community, Zipper used the beta to collect a lot of details on how the game was being played though data mining: “You know, where people are running in the world, how easy it is for them to kill other people, lots of statistics on kill heat maps, movement heat maps, shot heat maps so tons of data that we can look at and adjust the level layouts, adjust the level tuning, and everything else.”

However, the more important question… is if it would be theoretically possible to get all 128 people on one team to one spot and defend that way.

“Absolutely, you can do that – you can do all 256. We’ve done it internally! The issue with that is that there’s always somebody who has to throw a grenade or shoot someone.”

“Getting everybody to stop firing long enough to get all of those people to one spot is much more challenging than you may think.”

Posted in Features | Tagged Interview, MAG | 1 Comment

Vancouver 2010

By Jonathan Cresswell | February 5, 2010

Massive sport events mean two things. One, the TV schedules are packed with coverage of events I know little or nothing about, and two, tie in video games. With the Winter Olympics coming up, Sega’s released their inevitable Vancouver 2010 game.

Vancouver 2010 boasts a whopping 14 different events in its main menu. This, quite simply, is a lie. There might be 14 different options, but there’s realistically about 3 different games. It’s the equivalent of those 500-in-one knockoff cartridges for the Gameboy where every 7th game is Pacman. Don’t be fooled by the name MAZE EATER.

One of the first things to be copied and pasted is skiing. Under the guise of Men’s Downhill, Men’s Super-G, Ladies Giant Slalom and Ladies Slalom, it’s a mildly interesting game of skiing down a slope through flagpoles. It’s mildly amusing but they’ve tried to make it more exciting by adding motion blur so extreme you’d think they just discovered the effects section of Photoshop for the first time. It’s also slightly curious how smashing in to the posts seems to have no effect on momentum which stands out a bit when the game is meant to be a realistic and serious take on the sports within.

Next off the photocopier is the trio of Bobsled, Luge and Skeleton. Featuring almost negligible differences between them, you’re using the analogue stick to move up and down the sides of the course without falling off. It’s not too bad to play as you’ve got to balance the high speed and getting a good score for the cornet with being on the sides to the risk of falling off and losing. It’s good fun, up to the point of the death corner in the Luge track. That just ain’t possible, son.

Not all the games are as successful, such as the Ladies Freestyle Aerials, an event that can only be described as a mess. This is thanks to a series of timing bars and crazy moving circles which you have to follow with the analogue sticks and keep aligned that just feel awkward.

I just can’t for the life of me figure out who the audience for this game is. People who like… the cold…? Olympics videogames are practically minigame collections, a genre which is best as a party game. Vancouver 2010 doesn’t seem to have been designed for this, something emphasised best through the achievements – where only one is for playing with other people, with the rest being made up of single player tasks. What sort of person would want to play this game solo? Besides, half the fun of multiplayer games is giving your characters rude names, which the game doesn’t allow. Don’t think you can just use a 1 instead of an I, you’ll need to be more creative than that.

Most of the games are played by taking turns, understandable considering the sports chosen, but that doesn’t make it as fun. Among the exceptions to this you have the snowboard and ski cross events, where they didn’t even bother to make different courses, which is much more lively and enjoyable as a 4 player experience.

Although it might look as though there’s been a lot of time spent working on the game due to the high level of visual polish (it’s quite a good looking game), but beyond that it pretty much feels dead. There’s a complete lack of atmosphere (to THE OLYMPICS) and there’s not much depth to the game to make you want to go back. Sure, make a serious winter sports package, but if you’re doing that then make it in depth, new courses to unlock, have skills to develop…

Vancouver really suffers from a lack of content. An already small amount of included sports is made up of mostly repetitive content, hardly pulling the range of sports you can find at the real games. You can try and hide it by sticking in ‘first person athlete view’ nonsense, but you’re not fooling anyone. The game is lifeless, empty, and contains no content that’ll really draw you back to it. The most fun you’ll have is trying to come up with creative ways of writing rude names. Say hello the newest representative from China, Qi r Buii.

Besides, it’s a sports collection that very rarely asks you to mash buttons. Forget the speed skating sliding nonsense – THAT is what these games are supposed to be about. At least we get next year off from Olympics tie-in rubbish…

Posted in Other | 2 Comments

MAG 256 Launch Event

By Jonathan Cresswell | February 2, 2010

Sony’s new PS3 game MAG, which stands for Massive Action Game, is both the laziest title in the history of gaming and a pretty accurate description of what happens. It’s certainly a game, shooting does classify as action, and it is of a considerable scale. MAG’s hook is that you can play it online with up to a massive 256 players. To celebrate this, the launch event, MAG 256, saw 128 journalists and gamers convene in one room in London. It quite literally sounds like they were half-arsing it.

Developed by Zipper Interactive, best known for the military shooter series SOCOM, MAG is what happens when you think 8 v 8 games aren’t exciting enough. Set in a modern war with three private military corporations in a ‘shadow war’, it’s a first person shooter set on a massive scale.

To match the scale of the game, the event was set around a giant structure of the numbers 256, and also featured a wall displaying tweets with the hashtag #mag256 projected larger than reason would allow. Being highly mature, I began to fill this up with tweets about my journey to the event, my desire to CONTROL the screen, and random twaddle.

“I am looking down on you all. This is because I am better than you. Also, I am on a balcony.”

Stopping me from texting were the announcements from the ‘Voice of MAG’, a man whose parents either hated him or was given a name to set him on one career path, instructing us to return to our “battlestations”, to play 2 rounds of each of the 3 game modes.

I tend not to enjoy online shooters too much as I find they’re over-competitive. Many multiplayer modes have their own game elements and rules and so the only time you get to practice at them is when you go online: and with the level of responsibility you get in your small team combined with the verbal abuse you’ll receive over the headset if you’re not good, it’s very offputting to get the practice in you need to be any good, and so I just avoid the game.

But with MAG, and this might seem like odd praise, you’re allowed to be a bit crap. This isn’t to say the game is broken, it’s not, rather that you’re one of 128, relieving the pressure, and within that you’ve got a group that’s structured and you can be given orders. You can choose to maybe focus on sniping, or do the most healing (because no-one else seemed to), or try and take people out but you can still feel that you have a role within the team. You might not have the entire war resting on your shoulders but you can still make a difference by sticking around that control tower and defending it as people from the opposite team made attempts one by one to take it. It might not be the best strategies used by both sides, but it worked and was enjoyable.

The thing that MAG is really effective at is getting the feeling of being at war. I mean that in a good way, if such thing is possible. The scale of the battles is huge and with other players running around too you really get a good sense of it. Instead of being limited to a linear path, there are huge environments to explore and fight in… although sometimes it did feel repetitive in terms of running to get to a point, dying, respawning and repeat.

The PS3 copes with the demands of the game fairly well. Visually, the characters and environment all looked good. The animation… less so, but I’m not sure whether it was the fact 128 people were on the same internet connection to the states or that the game is more jerky than beef jerky. Characters would sometimes judder around slightly making it hard to know whether your shot hit them (just wait a few frames and you’ll find out), but vehicles were the worst. The tanks would just make huge jumps around the map looking so awkward and stuttering so much that even the worst stop motion animator would tell you that you need to make that smoother.

For a game that could be a complete mess due to the sheer size of it, MAG is a great surprise. The levels feel of a great scale and if you manage to get a full game going it really does feel lively. The controls work (though having the healing gun and grenades one button press away from each other is highly dangerous) and the respawns didn’t feel too long away.

It wasn’t the most ideal situation to play the game, giving everyone headsets while standing so close with such loud TVs meant that it was easier not to talk to anyone and guess where your platoon leader goes. Despite that though, I’m really impressed with MAG. It pulls off a difficult concept really well, though how well that transfers to the real world playing of the game is another matter – hopefully Zipper will release new content and encourage people to keep playing it so you get the full experience of it.

Oh, also, MAG. Seriously, they couldn’t come up with another name? MAG? It sounds like something you might hear shouted while someone smashes the table. Sony clearly have high expectations of the target audience, walking in to the shop and just shouting MAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGGG.

Don’t mind me, just over thinking things.

Posted in Previews | Tagged MAG | Leave a comment

Games in ‘not really the problem’ sensationalist shocker!

By Jonathan Cresswell | January 22, 2010

In the latest ‘games are bad’ accusation from the UK press, the free London newspaper The Metro has claimed that video games are the cause of an increase of the bone disease rickets as people are staying inside instead of going out in the sun, leading to a deficiency of vitamin D.

The paper cites research from the British Medical Journal, but like all of these stories when you actually look in to what they found out it’s been distorted and taken out of context. Although the research really is about Vitamin D deficiency, it’s covering a range of illnesses that could be caused due to it, and bone deformity (rickets) is just one of them.

So how valid is the blame on games? It’s more of an exaggeration, it seems. The press release about the work from Professor Simon Pearce and Dr Tim Cheetham does mention games, but purely as an example, stating that the UK diet often lacks vitamin D, and changes in lifestyle “such as children staying indoors playing computer games” could be explanations why.

Nutrition seems to be the main issue here, but the second you mention games, that becomes the automatic scapegoat. The same press release also mentions how people not having cod liver oil regularly as they may have done 50 years ago is something that’s cited as a notable change, and the “changing ethnic makeup of the population”.

Although a significant source of vitamin D is sunlight, to blame games on this alone is highly reductionist and irresponsible. After all, it’s the newspapers that are telling us not to go outside as the second we do we’ll end up getting skin cancer or rabies. In fact, outside is just dangerous in general. You could get mugged by a rapist paedophile.

Gaming isn’t so much the cause of people not going outside, rather one of many things people do while inside. Other things people could potentially do inside include watching TV, reading, masturbating furiously and playing “Duck Duck Goose” with wheelie chairs. The latter of those, turns out, is quite fun. However, today’s cover of the Metro isn’t saying that BOWLING CAUSES RICKETS in a shocking turn of sensationalist bullshit, it’s that gaming is the latest in the line of things to hate. Maybe yes, people are playing games instead of going outside at times… well, encourage people to go outside. If rickets is something that’s a risk at childhood, get the parents to do something about it. Or at least, the media should be encouraging them to do so rather than just throwing everyone in to a state of panic.

Instead of running around pointing the finger at anything you can like an uninformed lunatic, you could actually be more proactive in to looking in to the solutions. Parents should encourage their kids to go outside more could be one. But when the scientists are suggesting things like supplementing vitamin D in to things by law such as milk as solutions, there’s your damn story, newspapers. It might not be as glamorous as “GAMING MAKES YOU DIE”, but you’d actually be doing a service to your audience.

Informing and educating. It’d make a nice change.

Posted in Opinion | 6 Comments

WIN: When World of Warcraft meets Coffee..

By Jonathan Cresswell | January 11, 2010

Unless, like me, you’ve spent the last week or so pretty much living in bed, it’s been hard to ignore the Snowmageddon that’s been sweeping the nation. And in a situation like that, there’s nothing better to do than sit down, with a hot drink, and play video games.

There’s probably other ways of spending the time, but it wouldn’t be useful to talk about those when we’re about to talk about the aforementioned activities, as BritishGaming has got some unique World of Warcraft Raiding Kits to give away courtesy of Starbucks.

These special packages consist of a limited edition WoW themed mug, a USB cup warmer, and samples of Starbucks’ upcoming instant coffee, VIA, which is scheduled to be released in March. There have only been 25 of these mugs made, so you’ve a chance at getting a rather unique item.

Unfortunately, until the kits arrived at BGB Towers I forgot that I don’t like coffee, making me possibly the worst choice to review it. Thankfully, scientific studies I’ve just made up state that Dads tend to like coffee, and I happen to have one of those. The reliable verdict from him is generally positive, and if you’re looking for an instant coffee that tastes more like real coffee, it certainly fulfils that criteria and does what it sets out to. More significantly, it’s got lots of caffeine, and that’s all that truly matters in life.

To be in with a chance of winning one of the two kits, simply answer this question.

The mug shows a Hearthstone from World of Warcraft on it. What does a Hearthstone do in the game?
a) Teleport you to a home place
b) Attach a thunderhand to your attack
c) Confuse editors unfamiliar with the game into thinking someone stuck an additional H in to the word but with no idea which one of the H’s they should take out

Send your answer that you probably just found on Google you cheating git in to an email with your full name and address to winstuff@britishgaming.co.uk – with the subject title “Starbucks”.

You have until 7pm GMT on January 14th 2010 to enter. 2 people with the correct answer will be chosen at random to win kits. No cash alternative. UK residents only, employees of BritishGaming.co.uk, Starbucks and Activision Blizzard are illegible from this competition. 1 entry per person.

If you’re a company that has a product you’d like us to give away with a tenuous link to the video games industry or would just like to shower our wonderful audience with goodies, email bgb @ britishgaming.co.uk.

Posted in News | 1 Comment

The Decade in Images – 2005 to 2009

By Mark Brown | January 1, 2010

Happy New Year! Time to mark more influential, innovative and absurdly popular events from the last decade. See our coverage of the first five years here.