"On February 28th, 2011 MAG officially died . . . in my heart. The game that revolutionized big scale battles and introduced the MMO-ish leveling system to the FPS genre finally took its own life. Zipper Interactive had high hopes for MAG when it previewed it at E3 2009. With 256 player battles, it did something that had never been seen before, but sometimes new and interesting can’t usurp the plain and dumb of Call of Duty.
116 hours lived in MAG. Best 116 hours of my life.
Zipper attempted to breathe life into the dying game with various changes and improvements. First was the free DLC weapons and armor for all players and factions. That lead to additional game modes and maps for pay. Then, . . . they changed everything. MAG 2.0 was released to great fanfare. It wasn’t just fixes and modifications, but a fundamental change in the way the game was played. From allowing new and revolutionary controls (Move) to a new economy system and unlocking tree. They also introduced the Happy Hour 100% XP bonus in hopes that players would keep playing MAG and leveling up their characters. It was blazing new trails on top of the trails it had already blazed. Sony, trying to defy the odds, released MAG digitally and graciously gave PlayStation Plus owners an unlimited demo with a level cap of 8. Yet still, with an unprecedented support, the likes console FPSs had never seen, still they left. I guess if you make it they will come, and then they will leave.
But sometimes revolutionaries are ahead of their time. Sometimes your ideas aren’t right for the time in which you lived. That is what happened to MAG. They were so far ahead of the curve they were considered crazy. Zipper, with the jaws of life continued to try to pry open the hearts of gamers to no avail. They attempted to use +256% XP during MAG’s birthday week, hoping that they could bring the game back to life. For a few short moments it looked like it might work. Gamers that had overlooked it flocked to the servers. Those that had left came back for another bite of the forbidden fruit. But as fast as they came, they were gone.
The saddest picture on the Internet.
I was shocked to hear this news and choose to not believe it. I had to see it for my own eyes. It wasn’t true, it couldn’t be true, but alas the words being whispered in the wind were. MAG had been turned into a baron wasteland of its former self. A skeleton of a former beauty. Modes once filled with players were populated by two souls. Souls waiting in the queue for a game that would not start. Souls lost in the desolation of loneliness.
The multi-queue, where you can queue up multiple game types and let the game place you, takes 10 minutes for a game to fill up and launch, you know something is wrong. The Domination mode, with its ballyhooed 256 players per match is now populated with enough players to create two maybe three games. It’s a shame really. With a totally population of 2000 minus, and half of them in the biggest game mode, it’s like looking at grandma while she’s on life support. Is something alive if it cannot live on it’s own? Looking at this corpse of a game I ponder these questions. MAG had a great life, but it’s time to move on.
Zipper Interactive cannot and should not support this game any longer. They need to move on. SOCOM 4 is right around the corner and is set to bring the franchise back its old glory. MAG was a good idea that was never really a great idea. Hopefully they have learned a lot and placed those learning’s from MAG into SOCOM, because we all know we deserve it. It’s time to ride off into the sunset my friend."
http://theplaystationshow.com/feature/mag-is-dead/
