WHAT THE BOX SAID
MAG is a massive action first person shooter in an ever-changing global war. Climb the ranks and gain the experience needed to own the battlefield.
It takes place 20 years in the future, and features a conflict known as the "Shadow War." Governments have squandered their money, and are no longer able to maintain a standing army overseas to secure their interests. Therefore, Private Military Corporations have stepped up to take over, and the game centres on three such corporations vying for government contracts.
WHAT I SAY
MAG was an ambitious project, 256 players on console in a detailed FPS environment. The game breaks down into different map types and sizes and only once you've ranked up high enough could you take part in the largest of the battles. You could choose from the Raven, S.V.E.R or Valour factions and then choose from 3 different classes which you could then further customize. The progress was broken up on the larger maps so that squads could take smaller objectives before meeting up with other squads at bigger objectives until finally reaching the crescendo at the end where there was 128 vs 128... it was pretty epic.
WHAT I DID
I was brought on to MAG while working on Socom 4 in order to help figure out and fix the battle progression. It was initially very scattered and unstructured. Soon we arrived at a solution to break down each map into discrete sections that separated squads of both teams with their own objectives, once completed they could move to the next objective and meet with other squads and so on. It was challenging but I think we finally found something that really worked.
I worked on 2 sections of a 256 player map (DOMINATION mode) - Absheron Refinery, designed and built all of the 64 player maps for SUPPRESSION mode, and did full redesigns of 2 more 64 player maps (SABOTAGE mode) - Copper Hills Relay and Darien Network. It was certainly interesting to work on and was a challenge to balance, but I believe we managed to do something special, despite it's lackluster performance in sales.
