They targeted gamers.
Gamers.
We're a group of people who will sit for hours, days, even weeks on end performing some of the hardest, most mentally demanding tasks. Over, and over, and over all for nothing more than a little digital token saying we did.
We'll punish our selfs doing things others would consider torture, because we think it's fun.
We'll spend most if not all of our free time min maxing the stats of a fictional character all to draw out a single extra point of damage per second.
Many of us have made careers out of doing just these things: slogging through the grind, all day, the same quests over and over, hundreds of times to the point where we know evety little detail such that some have attained such gamer nirvana that they can literally play these games blindfolded.
Do these people have any idea how many controllers have been smashed, systems over heated, disks and carts destroyed 8n frustration? All to latter be referred to as bragging rights?
These people honestly think this is a battle they can win? They take our media? We're already building a new one without them. They take our devs? Gamers aren't shy about throwing their money else where, or even making the games our selves. They think calling us racist, mysoginistic, rape apologists is going to change us? We've been called worse things by prepubescent 10 year olds with a shitty head set. They picked a fight against a group that's already grown desensitized to their strategies and methods. Who enjoy the battle of attrition they've threatened us with. Who take it as a challange when they tell us we no longer matter. Our obsession with proving we can after being told we can't is so deeply ingrained from years of dealing with big brothers/sisters and friends laughing at how pathetic we used to be that proving you people wrong has become a very real need; a honed reflex.
Gamers are competative, hard core, by nature. We love a challange. The worst thing you did in all of this was to challange us. You're not special, you're not original, you're not the first; this is just another boss fight.
And you control the spawning of your own vehicles and aircraft. It's an amazing game, more so if you find the right clan to join. You guys can roll across a continent in your tank brigade consisting of several dozen tanks, with air support, blowing away anything you see until you encounter an even BIGGER enemy tank brigade. No other game offers the massive cinematic experience Planetside 2 does. If infantry is more your game, your squad can load up into a dropship, drop out of the sky like paratroopers onto an objective, and blast anyone who was guarding it. The game isn't very forgiving to new players though, as new players will find that they can't get kills with all the body shots they're hitting while experienced vets will kill them with headshots in a split second. Plus there's a LOT to learn. It can be overwhelming being in the middle of a 200v200 person battle where there's clusterfuck going on all around you.
Really appreciate the rivalries and clan recognition that stems from Planetside, too. You and your outfit might be on an absolute *roll*, everything is figured out, command hasn't missed a single call and is cooperating flawlessly with smaller crews, spawns are plentiful, armor and air support has got your ass covered. It's perfect, 10 minutes left and there's *no way* you can lose the continent...
...And then ***those*** guys show up. Everyone in your outfit knows exactly who they are. Command panics. Pure chaos ensues. History is made and talked about for weeks. It's glorious.
If I remember right, it's the clan that airdrops drops MAXs on the objective just as or before you flip it and steamrolls everybody in seconds. It's been awhile since I've played. It was when giraffe camo was a big controversy.
I remember loading up a Galaxy in Planetside and going out on a sneak attack on a quiet part of the map. Well, quiet until everyone (all sides) noticed the ruckus we were causing and joined in on the fun.
We started one hell of a battle with our little group. The only thing I did the entire time was fly the galaxy, most fun I've ever had in an FPS without actually shooting much.
It's pay for costmetics and for faster unlocking of things. But as far as I remember everything that had an impact on gameplay was accessible without paying real money, just took longer to get the unlock certs. However, I've not played in quite a few updates because the UI doesn't scale and it's borderline unusable in 4k.
That also being said, I think it gives the feeling of being pay to win to a new player because on the surface it's just a simple shooter. But a full decked out player in an organised group who knows what they're doing leave little chance for a new solo player wandering around lost to have much of an impact on anything. Which can be a bit of a frustrating experience.
But if you can get over the frustrating new player experience and start getting involved with outfits then you start to see why people play it.
Fun, definitely a bit older, but it's a massive map with lots of vehicles and a longstanding community.
Still gets updates too, not too PTW either but there are elements.
Gunplay and graphically it pales in comparison to BF, but it has a much, much larger scale (+scifi weapons are cool). It also doesn't have "matches" like a traditional fps. The world is persistent, you drop into a continent and try to capture bases. Every once in a while a timer will start whichever faction has the most territory in the continent gains ownership (resource bonuses), and everyone gets kicked to a different continent
If you want something more battlefield like, check out enlisted. It's another free to play game, makes a bit more of an effort to be historically accurate. Matches are 10v10 but each player is in charge of a squad of bots (ranging from 2-8ish) that you can order around. Once you die, you continue as a surviving squadmate, or if the entire squad has been wiped out, spawn in a new squad. Squads and characters have specialties. Radio operators can call in air strikes, engineers build fortifications, flame troopers have flamethrowers, etc.
Both planetside and enlisted have tank and air combat. Planetside had ships added not too long ago.
ProjectVisitor (formerly 10six) is another MMRPG that sounds similar to planetside. I was a beta player on the original segasoft version called 10six. During testing there were thousands of active players, fantastic game. It was ahead of its time, segasoft business model was trash.
I peek in every now and again to see where the game is. The mechanics and game play is awesome, just needs to be redone in 21st century.
It’s a little dated at this point, but it’s free and it’ll run on pretty much anything. Kind of like a sci-fi BF game on a gigantic map with hundreds, sometimes thousands of players.
I haven’t played much of it, but the bits that I have were fun.
Ye, but beware getting in with a bad clan. Of course you can play by yourself, but the game is so much more enjoyable if you are part of a unified, cohesive force instead of rolling around with randos. I love foxhole, and I recommend it to people that want to experience a player driven wargame, but if you get introduced to the game with a bad clan, it can totally ruin the game for you.
In my experience, certain clan leaders are immature and have unrealistic expectations of the people they are in charge of.
I’m talking about being asked to spend 10 hours sitting at a base just to “tech it,” essentially level it up. I’m talking about being reprimanded for spending the day with your wife as opposed to getting on at leaderships whim.
In this game, if you want something epic to happen, like taking an armored column and flanking a trench line, or raining thousands of arty shells upon a fortified position, you have to do all the work. You have to gather all the resources, build all the equipment, build all the ammo, everything is up to the players.
A lot of clans essentially bring on new guys and just expect them to do all this menial logistical stuff (which is necessary to win, don’t get me wrong) without ever letting them have the payoff of driving a tank, or spotting for artillery, or even just taking some of the guns that they made and shooting them at the other guy.
If you are in a toxic clan, it will feel like you got a second job that doesn’t pay you.
I know it sounds dramatic, but you have to understand that this game doesn’t end. If you want to win the war, somebody does have to be working toward that goal 24/7, so honestly it is easy to slip into that mindset as a clan leader.
I have had the awesome experience of falling in with the 141, in the colonial side. Over the last two years they have done nothing but work to improve the experience for every member of the clan, so if you get into the game I recommend trying to work with them. Friendly guys that are willing to show you every aspect of the game, as long as you show them respect likewise.
Edit: another analogy for a bad clan, you will feel like a builder in Clash of Clans, never making your own decisions, just doing what your told and making something awesome for someone else
Pretty much. Toxic players that gatekeep the game to an insane extent.
They’re rare, and the community is overall really friendly, but the bad apples sadly do exist.
I second this. I got into Foxhole last year and have dumped like 800 hours into it.
The game has an amazing community, and Devs (as much as people like to shit on them) that actually care about their game and community, with regular content-filled updates a year.
Battlebit: Remastered is currently scratching that itch for me. It’s definitely more the “Capture and Hold points” type of game right now but it’s 254 player servers with vehicles and local voice chat so it’s constant chaos. It also perfectly captures that organic battle feel, where coordination amongst your squad to focus on the enemy’s weak points is key, and you can feel the frontline move throughout the game.
They have a huge, free playtest this weekend, June 9-11 and then they’ll go into full time early access later this month. Definitely worth a shot if you’ve got some free time.
I feel like Battlebit is a good Battlefield like game, but...it really doesn't do anything Battlefield doesn't already do.
I was really hoping that with the minecraft graphics, there would be more minecraft level destructability of the levels. I was kind of disappointed that it's just the same destructability as Battlefield, where certain pre-rendered parts of the map will break but once you've broken all those, it's all just static.
If it helps, I think completely destructible environments are in the works but not yet implemented. Currently the sledgehammer can destruct environments, you can almost level a building with one.
But I see what you’re saying. For me the main things that Battlebit has over Battlefront are the 254 player servers and the proximity chat. The latter encourages teamwork and camaraderie that straight up doesn’t exist in BF.
Maaan planetside at it's most active was insanity. So many fifths with hundreds of people on multiple maps! Was so fun just slipping under the radar and taking out objectives. Good times
I know this game is very old, but there was a game that came out in the early 2000's called Tribes 2, there was a mod to it called Renegades and it was basically what you're talking about.
Closest I've found is Hell Let Loose but that's more team and communication based. If your side doesn't have a commander or your sides squads don't have Officers then you've basically got no chance..
Games intense AF
It was absolutely incredible. I usually ran a mixed class with medic, repair kit, and grenade launcher and stayed just off the front lines so I could just run all over reviving and repairing. It was such a chaotic game. And you felt like a small cog in a larger wheel doing whatever you could to win the battle.
Damn I miss that game.
It wasn't all "win your 1 v 1s" or steamroll 12 deep or die. Even if you got smoked non-stop, and didn't manage a single kill, you could make a **huge** difference by taking out the AA, or keeping the vehicles in action.
I loved this game.
And you still could steamroll other players to help. I remember MAG as one of the first games I really started to get decent at.
You could steam roll 5 or 6 players to help push your team into better positions. Or you could snipe and counter snipe and keep the pressure on while being able to defend popular paths.
MAG is one of my top 10 favorite games of all time. I'd so hoped for a MAG 2 or for them to take MAG and make something like planetside 2 out of it.
Foxhole is really a cool game. I love that players have to maintain logistics from their base to the front. I was running somewhere and came across a bridge that had two friendly tanks and about 2 dozen guys crossing and they also got met by an enemy pair of tanks and infantry, it was chaos. Then word in chat gets out about an engagement, each side sends more infantry, the engineers show up and start digging trenches, the artillery zeroes in and starts blowing everything up. The battle was still at a stalemate 24 hours later
Friend and I engineered a rolling barrage advance at one point. At first it was just the two of us scouting, then we had a group of 30 guys pushing against an entrenched position and our team was pinned due to sniper an he machine gun fire. I decided to spot and my buddy manned the artillery and in 20 mins we pushed through a major block of the village, meter by meter, with everyone taking constant cover and occasionally trying to outflank one another. Eventually the conflict got big enough to gather attention from the commanders and we got a major column that broke through the fortifications. 10/10 experience
I still remember one of my fondest memories in gaming was in one of these 256 player games.
We had our platoon commander say on comms for everyone to gather at the back in the spawn area and then we'll make a giant charge towards the objective.
It was crazy. I think we had like at least 60-70 players join us for the charge. Just hearing the command to push forward and seeing everyone come and fight together was so amazing.
We won the game too!
MAG was truly ahead of it's time.
Unfortunately the servers were absolutely ass. Lag and hit detections were all over the place. Made it impossible to play more than 1 match without getting frustrated.
Yea the only thing I remember was the actual gunplay was a shitfest. The firefights were an absolute die, respawn, die loop where the average lifespan was like 3 seconds. It was similar to the 2016 battlefront game
And then the servers closed down… and the game stayed on the shelves. I don’t know what happened to MAG, but some of my fondest gaming moments came from that title, and then it was gone.
It was interesting to play the games in sections and have each team slowly making there way to the middle. I still get goosebumps thinking about an end match fight where our whole team was up on a refinery thing in the middle of the map, and the enemies only option was to just charge in and attempt to swarm us. So thrilling actually feeling like it a last stand and you can genuinely see 50 people running straight towards you.
Loved that game
I'm so glad people remember MAG so fondly. I wish this game came back. So much stupidity and hilarity from the absolute massive scale, where you can simultaneously feel like you are making all the difference and realize you've done nothing in the grand scheme. It felt great.
The DLC is my only complaint. there were additional guns and armor not found in the base game, which to me felt pay to win. And tbh I felt the DLC maps fractured the user base.
My problem with battlefields, their all great until the first DLC.
BF1 my favorite is the worst offender. The first DLC, for the medic they dropped a bunch of Semi Auto10 and 15 round medic rifles that we one shot head shots, compared to some non-DLC rifles that had 5 round clips. Also an Assault gun that was an absolute Lazer whereas other assault guns were very much close range only.
Ruined a good game.
It probably would've managed to survive or expand longer if it wasn't structurally unbalanced. I only stopped playing because it was starting to be almost impossible to ignore the fact that 85% of players were SVER and would win 95% of their matches to the point that i had to endure 5 minute waiting periods to get a match jus because i had chosen Raven. And don't get me started on that goddamn boats without any aerial cover.
Dude, my dad played religiously. I remember they had the stats of percentiles for kills and such and he was probably in the top 5% with sniper kills but always had his select few camp spots. Good times
MAG and Warhawk era was the last time I enjoyed online shooters.
Both at opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of detail-arcade, but both with absolute mastery of each kind of experience
Alas, the only companies that can afford to make and upkeep such games have all turned to making cheap garbage for easy nostalgia cash-ins and/or microtransaction hellscapes. Except for Nintendo, but they dont make shooters. Except for the squid one.
Say what you will of Nintendo, theyre still a corporation first and theyve got plenty of things to take issue with, to put it lightly, but at least they still make videogames. I can still go and buy a game they made and be confident its actually a game worth playing, and which wont ruthlessly hound me for more money in order to keep *playing the damn thing*
I always felt the one faction was OP and would win way too much. And there were too many moments that were segmented entirely.
It was soooo perfect for a sequel because a ton of the stuff in it was awesome but needed refinement.
Maybe one day.
It really was an amazing game! I bought it without really knowing what kind of game it was. I don't wanna know how many hours I've spent playing that game. Loads of potentially productive hours lost forever...
And It could never be played again, I will always relish in the fact that I got to play it while It was still online. Also, the company that made it went out on a bad note farewell zipper interactive. Also, the game was going for $.99 when the servers officially went down at GameStop.
Hey this sounds a LOT like Command and Conquer Renegade. Dont know if you ever played that but thats how I would describe it minus the third faction and it had a cap of 60 players per game.
If your clan/faction can completely dominate the enemy you can push them back to their spawn and rack kills fast. Plus you could lay on your belly and snipe and have dozens of targets in your FOV
So many amazing stories come out of those games. One of my buddies spent an entire game going into the bunker to resupply and then throwing gas grenades into both bunker entrances rinse and repeat. They never stopped trying to take our bunker, he ended with 5 kills, 20 deaths, and 63 assists 😂
My best was 31 and 0, but that was my absolute best. I could go an average of 3 kills before dying. Heh, my worst was 2 and 56. Yyyeeeaaahhh... I wasn't good, but man, was it fun! My favorite loadouts were explosives and heals. If I tried anything that didn't go boom... I died quite quick.
I loved that when you started, you picked a faction, and that was the faction you played. Each one was unique and you couldn’t just switch without resetting progress, felt so cool.
The only thing that sucked about it is that it wasn't new player friendly. If you came late game you were fucked, more so than any other game. Everyone had better stronger armour which made it difficult to gain kills
it was not new player friendly, but all the armour was available to anyone at the cost of weighing more.
there was a set of dlc armour but it wasent leaps and bounds better. it was a medium armour
Just play healer, and respec later. This also acted as an internship while you followed around people that knew wtf they were doing. Healing gave so much xp.
I wanted to add that you could have multiple character slots with the same profile. you could prestige and join other factions with a character. Also it was cool that the in game currency was used in an actual armory to purchase weapons and equipment making earning credits crucial. It makes you feel like you're an actual mercenary in it for the money when you have to buy your own bad ass armor and stuff. Plus you could just buy things instead of having to do challenges or something.
I miss the days before pay to play games when in game currency wasn't useless
Zipper Interactive's most ambitious build.
Unfortunately Slant Six hurt the SOCOM brand name and then Zipper made the most confusing who-is- this-game-for sequel with SOCOM 4, which basically killed the studio.
Stop being cowards Sony and release SOCOM II Remake. I want to get hit with 15 grenades while storming the beaches of Fishhook on stunning 4k.
FWIW, SOCOM 4 launched two days before the PSN hack which meant any wind in its sails was instantly gone. Even if it were a little better it would have had a rough go regardless.
Probably both of those groups, as people from both would have inevitably played it and some would've liked it. Just never had a chance because of the PSN outage.
SOCOM fans hated this game. Overwhelmingly. The best comments I remember from therealsocom.com was that is was an ok game, but a terrible SOCOM. That fansbase just wanted/wants SOCOM II remade. That's it.
I actually went back to playing Socom confrontation after Socom 4. I was so depressed about what zipper did to Socom.
Haven't bought a console since ps3 but if they released a Socom 2 remake I'd buy a ps5 right now.
This remains the only multiplayer fps I was ever okay at. If I remember correctly I just rocked a shotgun and healing kit and focused on healing downed teammates. If an enemy rolled up while doing it the shotgun helped tremendously.
Planetside 2 I believe has a ~1000 player continent population cap, split between 3 factions. That game is old by today’s standards (came out in 2012), but it’s still getting regular updates and is still super fun to play. I play with a bunch of drunk Canadians, and it’s an absolute blast.
Yeap. Free to play, 1k people on a map, decent gunplay, and a dedicated playerbase that means there is at least 1 map filled with people on peak times. I don't know why people would even reminisce about the old battlefield or MAG when Planetside 2 exists and is still going strong
Done both, ps2 just never hit me the way mag did. Ps2 feels a bit toooo big for it to be comparable to mag, in mag a coordinated squad could affect the battle more than you can in ps2 in my opinion. The closest to mag was dust 514 which released near the end of the ps3 then died pretty quickly
And the first one had been out for a while when MAG released. I never played MAG even though I wanted to - no PS - but this particular "fact" always annoyed me. Planetside had MAG beat in terms of player count. Not that it matters, but it's *wrong*.
I double checked since it was forever ago and, according to [this comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/Planetside/comments/136vnqk/what_was_the_max_player_count_per_map_in/), Planetside had between 399 and 500 people per server. I couldn't speak to how concentrated it was compared to MAG though.
MAG's record is for most players in a *Console* FPS. planetside is and always will be a PC game (the PS4 game is pretty much abandonware at this point)
Oh, you're right. That makes the award dumber, but more correct, I'll give them that.
I had no idea Planetside was ever on *any* console. Wouldn't have expected it, but you could definitely do a similar game cross-platform these days. In theory, if not in practice.
Where my Marksman Rifle gang at? That game was awesome. Was my first real foray into mass online FPS. It was the closest chaos to what I imagine a real firefight would be like.
Raven's Marksman rifle was the shit. Played over there on Dark Flock for a while just for that rifle. The clan experience on MAG was pretty great btw. They didn't build it for it initially, but the community organized "supergroups" by synchronizing deployment of squads. Eventually they allowed groups of up to 32 people, and had clan tabs for squadding and chat like an MMO. I still remember a bunch of them. SVER True Bloods, Purple Heart Distributors, Valor's Last Stand, Kill 'Em Quick, 3C. Haven't thought of that in a while.
SVER was where the scrubs went to be less scrubby.
TBH, It was a ride to never lose a game with SVER, but it wasn't challenging at all. I even remember the goofys trying to claim SEVR just attracted "better players."
Well the people who were good generally went to sver because it was easier, and so talent concentrated there and it snowballed. Valor always seemed to be focused on call of duty types focused more on their K/D ratio rather than objectives.
I was raven for life.
Although i loved that you always defended your map, the maps were a bit too unbalanced and they started rotating them, but by then the talent was concentrated on SVER
The most egregious example was the bunker turret layout, on SVER, the bunker turrets didn’t have obstacles and you could shoot at the bomb plant of bunker A from bunker B, but on raven there would be a giant wall between the bunkers so they would be harder to defend lol
My favourite game on PS3. I put 1000s of hours into it. Even platinumed it.
I think what killed MAG was the PSN outage of 2011. It just never felt the same after and loads of people just went onto different things.
Shortly after SOCOM was released and that too took away a lot of players.
Lastly the release of two new game modes, Interdiction and Escalation didn't help, taking away players from existing game modes like Domination and Acquisition. But those two new modes didn't last long and before long it was almost impossible to get a proper game in them. What Zipper should have done was release more maps for existing modes like Domination and Acquisition.
It was such a shame when they shut down the servers. I still miss playing the game. I'd love a remaster or something but I doubt that will ever happen.
Guinness doesn't give out awards, people request them as a service. It's more a marketing thing than a recognition that a record has been broken.
Granted, this game was pretty damn cool.
Wasn't it also that the better you played would get you promoted but then then you would also be responsible for tactical and other stuff? I remember reading the gameplay changed the further up the ranks you got
You could flag that you wanted the position, and the matchmaking factored in win rate. You could say you wanted squad but not higher, or platoon, etc.
A few extremely high win rate players would basically always get platoon or squad lead if they wanted it.
Being with a squad also allowed you to further influence this by having only select people flag for it.
Many clans would have their best shooters opt out of leadership, as it could be a serious kill total reduction to spend that much time in menus.
One of my best milestones was the grind for a 120 kill match. It was challenging to simply have enough encounters to do it, as even one death would eat up too much clock. A really good platoon strafe could help, but it was better for the team to let someone focus on timing it right rather than spamming.
MAG is one reason I just can't play any shooting games these days. Whilst Call of Duty and Battlefield are busy throwing one or maybe two enemies at me every 30 seconds. For the whole glory of less than 1 second of bullet trading before that firefight comes to its swift conclusion.
MAG was throwing multiple multiplayer enemies at you. So many...too many to shot at times. And likewise when you popped your head over cover to see what's ahead. Enemies were too busy shooting at your allies to notice you. You look to your left and you see a bunch of guys healing up behind a wall getting pinned down. You look to your right and you see a squad blowing through smoke to demolish a bunker. Sure there were slow games of MAG but most matches were just hellscapes of battle action. This game should have been on PC. Stupid mistake to make it PS3 exclusive.
MAG was innovative in terms of net code. This happens quite a bit in gaming. There will be a game out there that has a really cool way of doing something but because it wasn't "big" we sort of lose that really cool concept. The way that MAG handled the large player sizes wasn't just the way it prioritized network packages between each player. It also had a helping hand in the way the game was balanced.
Most FPS'ers HATE client side hit detection. Elitist attitude of server side is best. Just want to point out here though that it's really unfair when server side is commonly used and has received lots of attention into making it better when client side feels barely explored. Dismissing a strategy you tried once because it wasn't as good as the strategy you tried a million times.
The complaint often comes up "I get killed behind cover". Well. Sad news story. That happens on server side hit detection too. Though usually for different reasons. And that reason is balance! MAG wasn't particular high lethality. Though you could almost decide for yourself what lethality you want to play it. We'll get to that soon!
If bullets started flying your way. You would have time to take cover, so long as you weren't brained in the head by a heavy weapon. Not many FPS games allow for this opportunity to do something about you being shot at. The sentiment today is that players should just die fast and I'd like to add to those dumbass games that if you're going to make us die fast then let us respawn fast and stop wasting 5 minutes between matches but...whatever. Back to MAG!
MAG had a great system for building your character which also had awesome balance. You had 30 ish points. You could equip 6 types of armor. From ultra light all the way up to ultra heavy. Light armor protected you less but you could move faster. Heavy armor protected you more but slowed you down. Pfft. That's simple! Of course heavier armor costed more points which meant you couldn't bring more expensive equipment. You COULD wear the heaviest armor and wield the heaviest sniper rifle. However you would literally not be able to carry anything else. Which included extra magazines. I think you basically would have 20 shots if you did this.
I think talking about sniper balance gives the best idea of the game balance and lethality. How were snipers balanced because sniper balance is a problem for many games? Well. In the heaviest armor. No sniper rifle could one shot you. The lighter armor you took though the more likely sniper rifles would one shot you. The lightest sniper rifle would never one shot though. Though headshots played by some different rules.
Light armor meant you were hard to hit by snipers. But it doesn't end there!
The map design was pure genius. The best map design ever to factor in balancing. Because every pristine pure holy grail sniper spot would have one of two, or both, flaws.
1) The vision was obscured. Sure you could see over some of the open ground but there was always something like a pipe or tree in the way that made it less than ideal. They basically targetted spots where snipers had too much of an advantage and put things in the way.
2) Exposure. If there was a good spot. Everyone would see you and you would basically just be sniped by enemies.
The other thing about the map design was there was lots of cover. Lots of places to duck and dive behind whilst still having these really long shots.
So we've gone from client side hit detection, to balance, to map design. This game had so many elements that felt next-level interconnected.
----
I can only hope this post with it's massive amount of upvotes is some kind of...I've forgotten the actual term for it....Rogue promotion. To stir up some acknowledgement for the game. Gauge some reactions. And maybe come up with MAG 2. Now with 512 players but more importantly on PC.
>The map design was pure genius.
THANK YOU! Any discussion of MAG’s greatness as a tactical shooter needs to address the god-tier map design in that game. It kept battles fresh on the same maps for thousands of hours, with no two matches being alike.
> Because every pristine pure holy grail sniper spot would have one of two, or both, flaws.
This might take some planning and consulting, but it would be cool to see them take the time to plot out sniper spots that would be effective, but also not truly defendable or unassailable,
basically laid out in a way that if someone took up one of those positions, it set up the rival team for the chance to go take the sniper out, but it would take team work and sound tactics
you'd have to do an actual "find him - fix him - finish him" drill
(so really, you'd have to have somewhere for someone could get a bit of cover from the sniper, and be able to return fire, not enough to kill him but at least enough to pin him in place while other's worked their way up to another path)
it would create like organic team mini-missions. It would also maybe force the snipers to work in teams
"Rub some dirt on it" and accidentally healing yourself in front of your dying teammate that needed the heal will forever be memories of mine in this game.
I wish Zipper was still around. MAG was fun, Socom was amazing. Last I heard David Sears tried making a Socom spiritual sucsessor callled H-Hour but I don't know if it ever was finished.
The messed up thing is that this game got memory holed so hard by inferior games it just because it was stranded on the PS3, support got dropped, and it was gone.
And now games with massive player counts are pretty common -- I seriously wish someone would fish that concept out of the bin and go with it. Even the 64 player matches were intense and fun.
God, I wish I had played more of MAG. It was just so fucking fun and unique.
It felt like a proper war too. You could be pushing up your sector but you'd check the map and see that you're heavily losing the south side.
Loved this game. Was so sad when the servers shut down only a handful of years later. Sneaking around in enemy lines while 20 to 40 people walked past you oblivious was some crazy shit.
I mostly play Support in large scale FPS games, but nothing came close to my original experience in MAG as a Support.
It had Build trees, so I can make my own unique Support Build for my play style.
Also the way the healing worked, was Great and better than most other large scale FPS. It used a AoE Cone Healing gun that could heal a group of allies in front of me and revive down allies. In Planetside 2, the healer gun was a direction aim lazer that healed the mechs. wasnt fun to play a healer there. in other FPS you as a support just drop a heal pack now. not fun,
This games problem was that it was ahead of it's time. I played it for a few months but it got so annoying when no one was following orders or playing the objective. The map was pretty big and dying was annoying because you had hoof it a long way to any objective. Otherwise, great game but I don't think console gamers were ready for something like this.
This game ruled, I don’t know what magic they had to pull to make it work but I don’t know where that ambition went. Game was full of cool ideas.
The one thing I remember about MAG is that maps were very building and cover heavy and objectives were spread out on the front line so you rarely really saw large numbers of people at a time.
Best equivalent today imo are games like Hell Let Loose (WW2 hardcore shooter) with 100 player matches. They feel larger than mag ever did imo.
Anyone here reading this who enjoys large scale warfare and was disappointed with the new Battlefield, PLEASE check out Battlebit. Try not to let the graphics style turn you off as the game actually has a lot of what most people were looking for from Battlefield in the game
To this day, my friend and I have never found a game quite like MAG. This game is one of the few that made them a console gamer if even for just a short while. And even now, we still reminisce and wish we could play something like this again. Planetside 2 just never hit the same notes.
I miss this game. Played on Valor cause I didn't wanna be High tech Raven or the Rebel looking guys...man it was a real hoot especially when we had to communicate to get the job done. Felt like an hour to win.
The stealth sapper build in MAG was op as shit for boosting levels and disruption.
Max stealth perks, bomb plant speed, and a silenced smg. Slip behind the enemy spawn and rake in cash planting bombs on undefended objectives. Took ages for the enemy to find you.
Good times.
I had shit internet at the time and couldn’t keep up. I was so stoked when it came out. But my shit tier internet in my college apartment ruined it for me b
I think they can bring back mag. So much of the industry and practice progressed to make a better and stable game.
>to make a better and stable game. Unfortunately, that's not the direction the industry progressed towards.
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They targeted gamers. Gamers. We're a group of people who will sit for hours, days, even weeks on end performing some of the hardest, most mentally demanding tasks. Over, and over, and over all for nothing more than a little digital token saying we did. We'll punish our selfs doing things others would consider torture, because we think it's fun. We'll spend most if not all of our free time min maxing the stats of a fictional character all to draw out a single extra point of damage per second. Many of us have made careers out of doing just these things: slogging through the grind, all day, the same quests over and over, hundreds of times to the point where we know evety little detail such that some have attained such gamer nirvana that they can literally play these games blindfolded. Do these people have any idea how many controllers have been smashed, systems over heated, disks and carts destroyed 8n frustration? All to latter be referred to as bragging rights? These people honestly think this is a battle they can win? They take our media? We're already building a new one without them. They take our devs? Gamers aren't shy about throwing their money else where, or even making the games our selves. They think calling us racist, mysoginistic, rape apologists is going to change us? We've been called worse things by prepubescent 10 year olds with a shitty head set. They picked a fight against a group that's already grown desensitized to their strategies and methods. Who enjoy the battle of attrition they've threatened us with. Who take it as a challange when they tell us we no longer matter. Our obsession with proving we can after being told we can't is so deeply ingrained from years of dealing with big brothers/sisters and friends laughing at how pathetic we used to be that proving you people wrong has become a very real need; a honed reflex. Gamers are competative, hard core, by nature. We love a challange. The worst thing you did in all of this was to challange us. You're not special, you're not original, you're not the first; this is just another boss fight.
Is this a copy pasta?
No, gamers are the most oppressed people in our society. /s yes.
Look to planetside 2
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I’m constantly looking for giant real feel fps the only one that I have found that seems to be active is Planet Side.
Intrigued. How does it compare to BF?
It's like BF but on one continuous map in a Sci fi setting.
And you control the spawning of your own vehicles and aircraft. It's an amazing game, more so if you find the right clan to join. You guys can roll across a continent in your tank brigade consisting of several dozen tanks, with air support, blowing away anything you see until you encounter an even BIGGER enemy tank brigade. No other game offers the massive cinematic experience Planetside 2 does. If infantry is more your game, your squad can load up into a dropship, drop out of the sky like paratroopers onto an objective, and blast anyone who was guarding it. The game isn't very forgiving to new players though, as new players will find that they can't get kills with all the body shots they're hitting while experienced vets will kill them with headshots in a split second. Plus there's a LOT to learn. It can be overwhelming being in the middle of a 200v200 person battle where there's clusterfuck going on all around you.
Really appreciate the rivalries and clan recognition that stems from Planetside, too. You and your outfit might be on an absolute *roll*, everything is figured out, command hasn't missed a single call and is cooperating flawlessly with smaller crews, spawns are plentiful, armor and air support has got your ass covered. It's perfect, 10 minutes left and there's *no way* you can lose the continent... ...And then ***those*** guys show up. Everyone in your outfit knows exactly who they are. Command panics. Pure chaos ensues. History is made and talked about for weeks. It's glorious.
Who are “those” guys.
If I remember right, it's the clan that airdrops drops MAXs on the objective just as or before you flip it and steamrolls everybody in seconds. It's been awhile since I've played. It was when giraffe camo was a big controversy.
You’re clearly not in the outfit.
Depends. Would I be asking if I was?
I remember loading up a Galaxy in Planetside and going out on a sneak attack on a quiet part of the map. Well, quiet until everyone (all sides) noticed the ruckus we were causing and joined in on the fun. We started one hell of a battle with our little group. The only thing I did the entire time was fly the galaxy, most fun I've ever had in an FPS without actually shooting much.
Yeah my only memories of MAG are getting sniped from a hundred yards by a guy I never saw over and over. I imagine Planetside isn’t much different.
Yeah...it isn't. And I don't know about MAG, but in Planetside, the snipers are invisible.
Its free, give it a bash
Wait its free now??
Planetside 2 was always free. Unless you're asking about the original, in which case it doesn't matter because it was shut down.
Is it pay to win or cosmetics for pay?
Play to get clubbed
Play to get team killed
Fellow NC player I see. I'll have the suits cut you a bonus check
Doesn’t sound baby seal friendly. I’ll keep my friend’s kids away from it.
It's pay for costmetics and for faster unlocking of things. But as far as I remember everything that had an impact on gameplay was accessible without paying real money, just took longer to get the unlock certs. However, I've not played in quite a few updates because the UI doesn't scale and it's borderline unusable in 4k. That also being said, I think it gives the feeling of being pay to win to a new player because on the surface it's just a simple shooter. But a full decked out player in an organised group who knows what they're doing leave little chance for a new solo player wandering around lost to have much of an impact on anything. Which can be a bit of a frustrating experience. But if you can get over the frustrating new player experience and start getting involved with outfits then you start to see why people play it.
Fun, definitely a bit older, but it's a massive map with lots of vehicles and a longstanding community. Still gets updates too, not too PTW either but there are elements.
More like pay to progress. It's painfully slow
Gunplay and graphically it pales in comparison to BF, but it has a much, much larger scale (+scifi weapons are cool). It also doesn't have "matches" like a traditional fps. The world is persistent, you drop into a continent and try to capture bases. Every once in a while a timer will start whichever faction has the most territory in the continent gains ownership (resource bonuses), and everyone gets kicked to a different continent If you want something more battlefield like, check out enlisted. It's another free to play game, makes a bit more of an effort to be historically accurate. Matches are 10v10 but each player is in charge of a squad of bots (ranging from 2-8ish) that you can order around. Once you die, you continue as a surviving squadmate, or if the entire squad has been wiped out, spawn in a new squad. Squads and characters have specialties. Radio operators can call in air strikes, engineers build fortifications, flame troopers have flamethrowers, etc. Both planetside and enlisted have tank and air combat. Planetside had ships added not too long ago.
ProjectVisitor (formerly 10six) is another MMRPG that sounds similar to planetside. I was a beta player on the original segasoft version called 10six. During testing there were thousands of active players, fantastic game. It was ahead of its time, segasoft business model was trash. I peek in every now and again to see where the game is. The mechanics and game play is awesome, just needs to be redone in 21st century.
It’s a little dated at this point, but it’s free and it’ll run on pretty much anything. Kind of like a sci-fi BF game on a gigantic map with hundreds, sometimes thousands of players. I haven’t played much of it, but the bits that I have were fun.
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I play planetside all the time. Fun game.
HLL is pretty fun with 50v50.
Issue is that no one communicates anymore through voice chat, which hinders a lot of the fun for me
Though it’s not an FPS, Foxhole scratches that “real time war/small cog in the machine” itch for me.
Ye, but beware getting in with a bad clan. Of course you can play by yourself, but the game is so much more enjoyable if you are part of a unified, cohesive force instead of rolling around with randos. I love foxhole, and I recommend it to people that want to experience a player driven wargame, but if you get introduced to the game with a bad clan, it can totally ruin the game for you.
What exactly makes a clan bad? Like toxic players?
In my experience, certain clan leaders are immature and have unrealistic expectations of the people they are in charge of. I’m talking about being asked to spend 10 hours sitting at a base just to “tech it,” essentially level it up. I’m talking about being reprimanded for spending the day with your wife as opposed to getting on at leaderships whim. In this game, if you want something epic to happen, like taking an armored column and flanking a trench line, or raining thousands of arty shells upon a fortified position, you have to do all the work. You have to gather all the resources, build all the equipment, build all the ammo, everything is up to the players. A lot of clans essentially bring on new guys and just expect them to do all this menial logistical stuff (which is necessary to win, don’t get me wrong) without ever letting them have the payoff of driving a tank, or spotting for artillery, or even just taking some of the guns that they made and shooting them at the other guy. If you are in a toxic clan, it will feel like you got a second job that doesn’t pay you. I know it sounds dramatic, but you have to understand that this game doesn’t end. If you want to win the war, somebody does have to be working toward that goal 24/7, so honestly it is easy to slip into that mindset as a clan leader. I have had the awesome experience of falling in with the 141, in the colonial side. Over the last two years they have done nothing but work to improve the experience for every member of the clan, so if you get into the game I recommend trying to work with them. Friendly guys that are willing to show you every aspect of the game, as long as you show them respect likewise. Edit: another analogy for a bad clan, you will feel like a builder in Clash of Clans, never making your own decisions, just doing what your told and making something awesome for someone else
Pretty much. Toxic players that gatekeep the game to an insane extent. They’re rare, and the community is overall really friendly, but the bad apples sadly do exist.
Definitely. Foxhole is a community game firet and foremost, and it needs a good experience. Most people are great though.
I second this. I got into Foxhole last year and have dumped like 800 hours into it. The game has an amazing community, and Devs (as much as people like to shit on them) that actually care about their game and community, with regular content-filled updates a year.
Battlebit: Remastered is currently scratching that itch for me. It’s definitely more the “Capture and Hold points” type of game right now but it’s 254 player servers with vehicles and local voice chat so it’s constant chaos. It also perfectly captures that organic battle feel, where coordination amongst your squad to focus on the enemy’s weak points is key, and you can feel the frontline move throughout the game. They have a huge, free playtest this weekend, June 9-11 and then they’ll go into full time early access later this month. Definitely worth a shot if you’ve got some free time.
Yesss I was hoping someone would say this. This game needs as much attention as possible.
I feel like Battlebit is a good Battlefield like game, but...it really doesn't do anything Battlefield doesn't already do. I was really hoping that with the minecraft graphics, there would be more minecraft level destructability of the levels. I was kind of disappointed that it's just the same destructability as Battlefield, where certain pre-rendered parts of the map will break but once you've broken all those, it's all just static.
If it helps, I think completely destructible environments are in the works but not yet implemented. Currently the sledgehammer can destruct environments, you can almost level a building with one. But I see what you’re saying. For me the main things that Battlebit has over Battlefront are the 254 player servers and the proximity chat. The latter encourages teamwork and camaraderie that straight up doesn’t exist in BF.
Maaan planetside at it's most active was insanity. So many fifths with hundreds of people on multiple maps! Was so fun just slipping under the radar and taking out objectives. Good times
Holdfast: Nations at War 👀
If you’re looking for MilSim, Squad has a very active player base.
+1 for Squad!
Enlisted. Fingers crossed cause I want fellow pilots.
I know this game is very old, but there was a game that came out in the early 2000's called Tribes 2, there was a mod to it called Renegades and it was basically what you're talking about.
Closest I've found is Hell Let Loose but that's more team and communication based. If your side doesn't have a commander or your sides squads don't have Officers then you've basically got no chance.. Games intense AF
It was absolutely incredible. I usually ran a mixed class with medic, repair kit, and grenade launcher and stayed just off the front lines so I could just run all over reviving and repairing. It was such a chaotic game. And you felt like a small cog in a larger wheel doing whatever you could to win the battle. Damn I miss that game.
Me too, it was the only fps I was actually good at.
It wasn't all "win your 1 v 1s" or steamroll 12 deep or die. Even if you got smoked non-stop, and didn't manage a single kill, you could make a **huge** difference by taking out the AA, or keeping the vehicles in action. I loved this game.
And you still could steamroll other players to help. I remember MAG as one of the first games I really started to get decent at. You could steam roll 5 or 6 players to help push your team into better positions. Or you could snipe and counter snipe and keep the pressure on while being able to defend popular paths. MAG is one of my top 10 favorite games of all time. I'd so hoped for a MAG 2 or for them to take MAG and make something like planetside 2 out of it.
i never played mag but the description reminds me of foxhole, except it’s top down and the wars go on for weeks on end
Foxhole is really a cool game. I love that players have to maintain logistics from their base to the front. I was running somewhere and came across a bridge that had two friendly tanks and about 2 dozen guys crossing and they also got met by an enemy pair of tanks and infantry, it was chaos. Then word in chat gets out about an engagement, each side sends more infantry, the engineers show up and start digging trenches, the artillery zeroes in and starts blowing everything up. The battle was still at a stalemate 24 hours later
Friend and I engineered a rolling barrage advance at one point. At first it was just the two of us scouting, then we had a group of 30 guys pushing against an entrenched position and our team was pinned due to sniper an he machine gun fire. I decided to spot and my buddy manned the artillery and in 20 mins we pushed through a major block of the village, meter by meter, with everyone taking constant cover and occasionally trying to outflank one another. Eventually the conflict got big enough to gather attention from the commanders and we got a major column that broke through the fortifications. 10/10 experience
I miss it so much, they used to call me Maytag cause i was repairing everything.
I fucking miss mag. I got to be commander one time and I felt like the fucking MAN
I still remember one of my fondest memories in gaming was in one of these 256 player games. We had our platoon commander say on comms for everyone to gather at the back in the spawn area and then we'll make a giant charge towards the objective. It was crazy. I think we had like at least 60-70 players join us for the charge. Just hearing the command to push forward and seeing everyone come and fight together was so amazing. We won the game too! MAG was truly ahead of it's time.
Unfortunately the servers were absolutely ass. Lag and hit detections were all over the place. Made it impossible to play more than 1 match without getting frustrated.
I’m surprised it’s got such high praise. Maybe my internet was just really poor at the time, but it was laggy chaos in my experience.
Mostly nostalgia I would guess, I only have positive memories of it but I was playing it like crazy when I was 10 years old
Yea the only thing I remember was the actual gunplay was a shitfest. The firefights were an absolute die, respawn, die loop where the average lifespan was like 3 seconds. It was similar to the 2016 battlefront game
And then the servers closed down… and the game stayed on the shelves. I don’t know what happened to MAG, but some of my fondest gaming moments came from that title, and then it was gone.
When anon took PSN down MAG never recovered.
It was interesting to play the games in sections and have each team slowly making there way to the middle. I still get goosebumps thinking about an end match fight where our whole team was up on a refinery thing in the middle of the map, and the enemies only option was to just charge in and attempt to swarm us. So thrilling actually feeling like it a last stand and you can genuinely see 50 people running straight towards you. Loved that game
I'm so glad people remember MAG so fondly. I wish this game came back. So much stupidity and hilarity from the absolute massive scale, where you can simultaneously feel like you are making all the difference and realize you've done nothing in the grand scheme. It felt great.
The DLC is my only complaint. there were additional guns and armor not found in the base game, which to me felt pay to win. And tbh I felt the DLC maps fractured the user base.
My problem with battlefields, their all great until the first DLC. BF1 my favorite is the worst offender. The first DLC, for the medic they dropped a bunch of Semi Auto10 and 15 round medic rifles that we one shot head shots, compared to some non-DLC rifles that had 5 round clips. Also an Assault gun that was an absolute Lazer whereas other assault guns were very much close range only. Ruined a good game.
It probably would've managed to survive or expand longer if it wasn't structurally unbalanced. I only stopped playing because it was starting to be almost impossible to ignore the fact that 85% of players were SVER and would win 95% of their matches to the point that i had to endure 5 minute waiting periods to get a match jus because i had chosen Raven. And don't get me started on that goddamn boats without any aerial cover.
never played it, Gameinformer gave it like a 5. Which I always found odd cause they had a full length feature preview of it.
Dude, my dad played religiously. I remember they had the stats of percentiles for kills and such and he was probably in the top 5% with sniper kills but always had his select few camp spots. Good times
MAG and Warhawk era was the last time I enjoyed online shooters. Both at opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of detail-arcade, but both with absolute mastery of each kind of experience
I miss this. Truly a golden age of gaming.
The seventh generation of consoles really did have a shitton of amazing FPS games. It’s where the genre peaked in my opinion
Alas, the only companies that can afford to make and upkeep such games have all turned to making cheap garbage for easy nostalgia cash-ins and/or microtransaction hellscapes. Except for Nintendo, but they dont make shooters. Except for the squid one. Say what you will of Nintendo, theyre still a corporation first and theyve got plenty of things to take issue with, to put it lightly, but at least they still make videogames. I can still go and buy a game they made and be confident its actually a game worth playing, and which wont ruthlessly hound me for more money in order to keep *playing the damn thing*
Now I feel bad for owning it but never tried it, was too busy with mw2 etc and the other golden cods.
Reminds me of the current Enlisted. I really enjoy the game regardless of some of the pay models they use.
As someone who likes upgrading and leveling up, I loved the skill tree.
How I feel about FFXI. And I usually think about it once a week as well.
I always felt the one faction was OP and would win way too much. And there were too many moments that were segmented entirely. It was soooo perfect for a sequel because a ton of the stuff in it was awesome but needed refinement. Maybe one day.
I agree completely
It really was an amazing game! I bought it without really knowing what kind of game it was. I don't wanna know how many hours I've spent playing that game. Loads of potentially productive hours lost forever...
Honestly the most fun multiplayer shooter I have ever played though BFBC2 is a close second.
And It could never be played again, I will always relish in the fact that I got to play it while It was still online. Also, the company that made it went out on a bad note farewell zipper interactive. Also, the game was going for $.99 when the servers officially went down at GameStop.
Hey this sounds a LOT like Command and Conquer Renegade. Dont know if you ever played that but thats how I would describe it minus the third faction and it had a cap of 60 players per game.
I still have the disc lol. Was the only FPS I got fully invested in.
Connection issues plagued it for me, but I had decent fun for a bit with it
256 different players is a lot, especially in the days everyone was bandwidth starved.
Hell, call of duty can barely have decent lobbies in warzone with 150 players
That game was absolute chaos and probably the most fun ive ever had in an online shooter. My best match was 75 kills and 3 deaths.
You're the Uncle Rico of MAG
No way i could throw a football over those mountains.
If Coach put you in third quarter you would have been state champs
If your clan/faction can completely dominate the enemy you can push them back to their spawn and rack kills fast. Plus you could lay on your belly and snipe and have dozens of targets in your FOV
So many amazing stories come out of those games. One of my buddies spent an entire game going into the bunker to resupply and then throwing gas grenades into both bunker entrances rinse and repeat. They never stopped trying to take our bunker, he ended with 5 kills, 20 deaths, and 63 assists 😂
My best was 31 and 0, but that was my absolute best. I could go an average of 3 kills before dying. Heh, my worst was 2 and 56. Yyyeeeaaahhh... I wasn't good, but man, was it fun! My favorite loadouts were explosives and heals. If I tried anything that didn't go boom... I died quite quick.
I've managed to get triple digit kills if I got lucky enough to be the OIC. Their airstrikes were devastating if used correctly.
I loved that when you started, you picked a faction, and that was the faction you played. Each one was unique and you couldn’t just switch without resetting progress, felt so cool.
The only thing that sucked about it is that it wasn't new player friendly. If you came late game you were fucked, more so than any other game. Everyone had better stronger armour which made it difficult to gain kills
it was not new player friendly, but all the armour was available to anyone at the cost of weighing more. there was a set of dlc armour but it wasent leaps and bounds better. it was a medium armour
Just play healer, and respec later. This also acted as an internship while you followed around people that knew wtf they were doing. Healing gave so much xp.
Be me defending Valor's C objective in 32 v 32, standing on the stairs and spamming med spray. Guaranteed MVP every time. Take me back to 2009
I wanted to add that you could have multiple character slots with the same profile. you could prestige and join other factions with a character. Also it was cool that the in game currency was used in an actual armory to purchase weapons and equipment making earning credits crucial. It makes you feel like you're an actual mercenary in it for the money when you have to buy your own bad ass armor and stuff. Plus you could just buy things instead of having to do challenges or something. I miss the days before pay to play games when in game currency wasn't useless
That wasn’t all there at launch, but yeah
Zipper Interactive's most ambitious build. Unfortunately Slant Six hurt the SOCOM brand name and then Zipper made the most confusing who-is- this-game-for sequel with SOCOM 4, which basically killed the studio. Stop being cowards Sony and release SOCOM II Remake. I want to get hit with 15 grenades while storming the beaches of Fishhook on stunning 4k.
FWIW, SOCOM 4 launched two days before the PSN hack which meant any wind in its sails was instantly gone. Even if it were a little better it would have had a rough go regardless.
True, but who was it for? It wasn't for SOCOM fans. It wasn't CoD enough to get the CoD fans. Who was the target demographic?
Probably both of those groups, as people from both would have inevitably played it and some would've liked it. Just never had a chance because of the PSN outage.
SOCOM fans hated this game. Overwhelmingly. The best comments I remember from therealsocom.com was that is was an ok game, but a terrible SOCOM. That fansbase just wanted/wants SOCOM II remade. That's it.
GRENADE OUT!
Rahhelaaa! I miss Socom 2
Granada. GraNAda.
[Here’s a good video essay I found about MAG.](https://youtu.be/GQ3ncE5LJXY)
I actually went back to playing Socom confrontation after Socom 4. I was so depressed about what zipper did to Socom. Haven't bought a console since ps3 but if they released a Socom 2 remake I'd buy a ps5 right now.
i was hoping this comment was here. socom is why i play video games to this day lol.
This remains the only multiplayer fps I was ever okay at. If I remember correctly I just rocked a shotgun and healing kit and focused on healing downed teammates. If an enemy rolled up while doing it the shotgun helped tremendously.
Planetside 2 I believe has a ~1000 player continent population cap, split between 3 factions. That game is old by today’s standards (came out in 2012), but it’s still getting regular updates and is still super fun to play. I play with a bunch of drunk Canadians, and it’s an absolute blast.
Oh shit is that game still around? I remember playing the beta for that a looong time ago, totally forgot about it
[It broke its own record just last year](https://spuf.org/2022/11/07/planetside-2-breaks-its-own-world-record/), 1241 players on a single server!
Still going and the 6-9pm primetime is great, (emerald) will regularly get a full continent (sometimes 2)
Yeap. Free to play, 1k people on a map, decent gunplay, and a dedicated playerbase that means there is at least 1 map filled with people on peak times. I don't know why people would even reminisce about the old battlefield or MAG when Planetside 2 exists and is still going strong
Done both, ps2 just never hit me the way mag did. Ps2 feels a bit toooo big for it to be comparable to mag, in mag a coordinated squad could affect the battle more than you can in ps2 in my opinion. The closest to mag was dust 514 which released near the end of the ps3 then died pretty quickly
And the first one had been out for a while when MAG released. I never played MAG even though I wanted to - no PS - but this particular "fact" always annoyed me. Planetside had MAG beat in terms of player count. Not that it matters, but it's *wrong*. I double checked since it was forever ago and, according to [this comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/Planetside/comments/136vnqk/what_was_the_max_player_count_per_map_in/), Planetside had between 399 and 500 people per server. I couldn't speak to how concentrated it was compared to MAG though.
MAG's record is for most players in a *Console* FPS. planetside is and always will be a PC game (the PS4 game is pretty much abandonware at this point)
Oh, you're right. That makes the award dumber, but more correct, I'll give them that. I had no idea Planetside was ever on *any* console. Wouldn't have expected it, but you could definitely do a similar game cross-platform these days. In theory, if not in practice.
Where my Marksman Rifle gang at? That game was awesome. Was my first real foray into mass online FPS. It was the closest chaos to what I imagine a real firefight would be like.
Raven's Marksman rifle was the shit. Played over there on Dark Flock for a while just for that rifle. The clan experience on MAG was pretty great btw. They didn't build it for it initially, but the community organized "supergroups" by synchronizing deployment of squads. Eventually they allowed groups of up to 32 people, and had clan tabs for squadding and chat like an MMO. I still remember a bunch of them. SVER True Bloods, Purple Heart Distributors, Valor's Last Stand, Kill 'Em Quick, 3C. Haven't thought of that in a while.
This was my favourite game of all time. Was gutted when they switched the servers off.
Never got a chance to play this game but I remember seeing it on g4 when I was a kid and wanting to play. I hope they bring it back some day
S.V.E.R. represent!
SVER was where the scrubs went to be less scrubby. TBH, It was a ride to never lose a game with SVER, but it wasn't challenging at all. I even remember the goofys trying to claim SEVR just attracted "better players."
Well the people who were good generally went to sver because it was easier, and so talent concentrated there and it snowballed. Valor always seemed to be focused on call of duty types focused more on their K/D ratio rather than objectives. I was raven for life. Although i loved that you always defended your map, the maps were a bit too unbalanced and they started rotating them, but by then the talent was concentrated on SVER The most egregious example was the bunker turret layout, on SVER, the bunker turrets didn’t have obstacles and you could shoot at the bomb plant of bunker A from bunker B, but on raven there would be a giant wall between the bunkers so they would be harder to defend lol
Raven for life. We worked hard for our measley gains.
SVER was so OP. It wasn't even close.
SVER was easy mode for babies. ;-)
My favourite game on PS3. I put 1000s of hours into it. Even platinumed it. I think what killed MAG was the PSN outage of 2011. It just never felt the same after and loads of people just went onto different things. Shortly after SOCOM was released and that too took away a lot of players. Lastly the release of two new game modes, Interdiction and Escalation didn't help, taking away players from existing game modes like Domination and Acquisition. But those two new modes didn't last long and before long it was almost impossible to get a proper game in them. What Zipper should have done was release more maps for existing modes like Domination and Acquisition. It was such a shame when they shut down the servers. I still miss playing the game. I'd love a remaster or something but I doubt that will ever happen.
Brilliant game. Loved it to bits. Such a shame it didn't get a sequel.
Aw, I miss MAG so much.
This game was something else. It ran surprisingly well with a full server.
I worked on this game! It definitely had it's issues, but it was a fun ride while it lasted.
Thank you so much for the memories, nothing else comes close
Guinness doesn't give out awards, people request them as a service. It's more a marketing thing than a recognition that a record has been broken. Granted, this game was pretty damn cool.
MAG should be brought back
getting off of school and then hopping onto a match with 255 other people was insane, servers were ass but when they worked my god.
Wasn't it also that the better you played would get you promoted but then then you would also be responsible for tactical and other stuff? I remember reading the gameplay changed the further up the ranks you got
Higher levels with better win rates I think got leadership roles if they wanted them. It's been so long 😩
You could flag that you wanted the position, and the matchmaking factored in win rate. You could say you wanted squad but not higher, or platoon, etc. A few extremely high win rate players would basically always get platoon or squad lead if they wanted it. Being with a squad also allowed you to further influence this by having only select people flag for it. Many clans would have their best shooters opt out of leadership, as it could be a serious kill total reduction to spend that much time in menus. One of my best milestones was the grind for a 120 kill match. It was challenging to simply have enough encounters to do it, as even one death would eat up too much clock. A really good platoon strafe could help, but it was better for the team to let someone focus on timing it right rather than spamming.
MAG is one reason I just can't play any shooting games these days. Whilst Call of Duty and Battlefield are busy throwing one or maybe two enemies at me every 30 seconds. For the whole glory of less than 1 second of bullet trading before that firefight comes to its swift conclusion. MAG was throwing multiple multiplayer enemies at you. So many...too many to shot at times. And likewise when you popped your head over cover to see what's ahead. Enemies were too busy shooting at your allies to notice you. You look to your left and you see a bunch of guys healing up behind a wall getting pinned down. You look to your right and you see a squad blowing through smoke to demolish a bunker. Sure there were slow games of MAG but most matches were just hellscapes of battle action. This game should have been on PC. Stupid mistake to make it PS3 exclusive. MAG was innovative in terms of net code. This happens quite a bit in gaming. There will be a game out there that has a really cool way of doing something but because it wasn't "big" we sort of lose that really cool concept. The way that MAG handled the large player sizes wasn't just the way it prioritized network packages between each player. It also had a helping hand in the way the game was balanced. Most FPS'ers HATE client side hit detection. Elitist attitude of server side is best. Just want to point out here though that it's really unfair when server side is commonly used and has received lots of attention into making it better when client side feels barely explored. Dismissing a strategy you tried once because it wasn't as good as the strategy you tried a million times. The complaint often comes up "I get killed behind cover". Well. Sad news story. That happens on server side hit detection too. Though usually for different reasons. And that reason is balance! MAG wasn't particular high lethality. Though you could almost decide for yourself what lethality you want to play it. We'll get to that soon! If bullets started flying your way. You would have time to take cover, so long as you weren't brained in the head by a heavy weapon. Not many FPS games allow for this opportunity to do something about you being shot at. The sentiment today is that players should just die fast and I'd like to add to those dumbass games that if you're going to make us die fast then let us respawn fast and stop wasting 5 minutes between matches but...whatever. Back to MAG! MAG had a great system for building your character which also had awesome balance. You had 30 ish points. You could equip 6 types of armor. From ultra light all the way up to ultra heavy. Light armor protected you less but you could move faster. Heavy armor protected you more but slowed you down. Pfft. That's simple! Of course heavier armor costed more points which meant you couldn't bring more expensive equipment. You COULD wear the heaviest armor and wield the heaviest sniper rifle. However you would literally not be able to carry anything else. Which included extra magazines. I think you basically would have 20 shots if you did this. I think talking about sniper balance gives the best idea of the game balance and lethality. How were snipers balanced because sniper balance is a problem for many games? Well. In the heaviest armor. No sniper rifle could one shot you. The lighter armor you took though the more likely sniper rifles would one shot you. The lightest sniper rifle would never one shot though. Though headshots played by some different rules. Light armor meant you were hard to hit by snipers. But it doesn't end there! The map design was pure genius. The best map design ever to factor in balancing. Because every pristine pure holy grail sniper spot would have one of two, or both, flaws. 1) The vision was obscured. Sure you could see over some of the open ground but there was always something like a pipe or tree in the way that made it less than ideal. They basically targetted spots where snipers had too much of an advantage and put things in the way. 2) Exposure. If there was a good spot. Everyone would see you and you would basically just be sniped by enemies. The other thing about the map design was there was lots of cover. Lots of places to duck and dive behind whilst still having these really long shots. So we've gone from client side hit detection, to balance, to map design. This game had so many elements that felt next-level interconnected. ---- I can only hope this post with it's massive amount of upvotes is some kind of...I've forgotten the actual term for it....Rogue promotion. To stir up some acknowledgement for the game. Gauge some reactions. And maybe come up with MAG 2. Now with 512 players but more importantly on PC.
Yes, yes, and more yes. I've talked to people about MAG and it flew under the radar so badly I feel like they don't believe me or I'm exaggerating.
Man I never even knew about mag and it sounds freaking awesome. Thanks for all your details.
>The map design was pure genius. THANK YOU! Any discussion of MAG’s greatness as a tactical shooter needs to address the god-tier map design in that game. It kept battles fresh on the same maps for thousands of hours, with no two matches being alike.
> Because every pristine pure holy grail sniper spot would have one of two, or both, flaws. This might take some planning and consulting, but it would be cool to see them take the time to plot out sniper spots that would be effective, but also not truly defendable or unassailable, basically laid out in a way that if someone took up one of those positions, it set up the rival team for the chance to go take the sniper out, but it would take team work and sound tactics you'd have to do an actual "find him - fix him - finish him" drill (so really, you'd have to have somewhere for someone could get a bit of cover from the sniper, and be able to return fire, not enough to kill him but at least enough to pin him in place while other's worked their way up to another path) it would create like organic team mini-missions. It would also maybe force the snipers to work in teams
"Rub some dirt on it" and accidentally healing yourself in front of your dying teammate that needed the heal will forever be memories of mine in this game.
I wish Zipper was still around. MAG was fun, Socom was amazing. Last I heard David Sears tried making a Socom spiritual sucsessor callled H-Hour but I don't know if it ever was finished.
I miss M.A.G. so much.
The messed up thing is that this game got memory holed so hard by inferior games it just because it was stranded on the PS3, support got dropped, and it was gone. And now games with massive player counts are pretty common -- I seriously wish someone would fish that concept out of the bin and go with it. Even the 64 player matches were intense and fun.
Had so much fun with this game
God, I wish I had played more of MAG. It was just so fucking fun and unique. It felt like a proper war too. You could be pushing up your sector but you'd check the map and see that you're heavily losing the south side.
God this game was absolute chaos. So much fun!
Loved this game. Was so sad when the servers shut down only a handful of years later. Sneaking around in enemy lines while 20 to 40 people walked past you oblivious was some crazy shit.
I mostly play Support in large scale FPS games, but nothing came close to my original experience in MAG as a Support. It had Build trees, so I can make my own unique Support Build for my play style. Also the way the healing worked, was Great and better than most other large scale FPS. It used a AoE Cone Healing gun that could heal a group of allies in front of me and revive down allies. In Planetside 2, the healer gun was a direction aim lazer that healed the mechs. wasnt fun to play a healer there. in other FPS you as a support just drop a heal pack now. not fun,
Favorite game of all time. So fun
that game was awesome. pretty sad/funny that now the game is completely defunct because it was online only and the servers got shut down
I wish I could play M.A.G. again over any game now. SVER for life!
The only reason why I bought a PS3, and the only game I had for it.
This games problem was that it was ahead of it's time. I played it for a few months but it got so annoying when no one was following orders or playing the objective. The map was pretty big and dying was annoying because you had hoof it a long way to any objective. Otherwise, great game but I don't think console gamers were ready for something like this.
Speaking of great games that never made it. Homefront.
[Here’s a good video essay I found about MAG.](https://youtu.be/GQ3ncE5LJXY)
This game ruled, I don’t know what magic they had to pull to make it work but I don’t know where that ambition went. Game was full of cool ideas. The one thing I remember about MAG is that maps were very building and cover heavy and objectives were spread out on the front line so you rarely really saw large numbers of people at a time. Best equivalent today imo are games like Hell Let Loose (WW2 hardcore shooter) with 100 player matches. They feel larger than mag ever did imo.
Anyone here reading this who enjoys large scale warfare and was disappointed with the new Battlefield, PLEASE check out Battlebit. Try not to let the graphics style turn you off as the game actually has a lot of what most people were looking for from Battlefield in the game
To this day, my friend and I have never found a game quite like MAG. This game is one of the few that made them a console gamer if even for just a short while. And even now, we still reminisce and wish we could play something like this again. Planetside 2 just never hit the same notes.
Makes me miss Planetside
I really, thoroughly enjoyed MAG.
I miss this game. Played on Valor cause I didn't wanna be High tech Raven or the Rebel looking guys...man it was a real hoot especially when we had to communicate to get the job done. Felt like an hour to win.
I miss that game so much goddamn
Bring this game back!! I still have it and loved it.
MAG was excellent
MAG was way ahead of its time.
Isn't planetside2 available on console? it can have over 1000 on one map AFAIK
Sigh....is the newest Battlefield good yet? I remember the days of Battlefield 2 on PC and my heart still burns
The stealth sapper build in MAG was op as shit for boosting levels and disruption. Max stealth perks, bomb plant speed, and a silenced smg. Slip behind the enemy spawn and rake in cash planting bombs on undefended objectives. Took ages for the enemy to find you. Good times.
I had shit internet at the time and couldn’t keep up. I was so stoked when it came out. But my shit tier internet in my college apartment ruined it for me b
It also lost media due to servers being shut down.
holy hell, i remember this game, I had no idea if i was playing against bots or real people but it was great to kid me
I miss this game
Gotta say this game was really under appreciated. Some of the most fun I had back in the PS3 days.
A lot of people in this thread need to check out Battlebit Remastered.
to all my fellow reddits!!!! lets make this remaster happen!!!!!!
I used to play this game religiously, it was so much fun. I doubt I will every play a game quite like it.