Game.ie was invited along to an exclusive unveiling of Sony's Massive Action Game – or MAG for short – in Dublin a couple of weeks ago. Since then, we’ve also had a chance to jump into the closed Beta which has been running and we’re delighted to finally bring you our impressions of the title, with a little help from the games Creative Director.

MAG is “a top-tier, first person shooter with the added benefit of unprecedented scale, organized groups and command abilities” or so says Zipper Interactive’s Ed Byrne. We thought this was an excellent answer, we told him so. He thanked us. Our developer fawning aside, it really is a succinct explanation of a game that promises to revolutionise the online multiplayer shooter.

In MAG, the nations of the world have given up on waging war the old fashioned, public financed way (perhaps in the wake of a global recession…) with the necessary evil of international conflict falling to a number of Private Military Corporations (PMC’s). But the commerce of war leads to commerce by war – with the various PMCs vying for the best contracts in violent conflicts. Soon, only three are big enough to exist; Sver, Valor and Raven. You must choose a faction and do your part to bring the Shadow War to an end…

256 PLAYERS! You’ve read the reports, seen the trailers and everywhere the game is shouting that it will actually be able to handle 256 real human players in a single online battlefield. This numerical superiority is key to MAG’s promise of incredible scale and the developers are adamant that players really feel the it; “not just tell them they were in a world with 256 players but let them know it from gameplay”. Every action which you see in game has been accomplished by another human being, not by AI or as part of a set piece. A massive explosion, vehicular manslaughter or airstrike has been called in or controlled by a real person. it.

With the possibility of 256 players in a single map, steps had to be taken to ensure that the entire game doesn’t devolve into a chaotic deathmatch. The most important element to achieving this is the squad structure – teams of eight players, with potentially up to 16 teams on each side for that magical 256 player total. This means that each person feels like part of a unit and can accomplish goals as a group rather than part of the overwhelming whole. Squad leaders can issue orders to their team, who will gain extra points for following them and each squad can talk to each other over voice comms. Leaders can also talk to each other and receive orders from their army’s commander who has the ability to call down airstrikes and communications jamming and, at the time of writing, also has a voice of God control which allows him to talk to every player on his team – a feature which may be cut before release.