I've been looking at this game for a bit, and it's been looking interesting. It's not just the idea of 256 players online that interested me, but also the idea of the command structure looked really interesting. The emphasis on team work looks pretty realistic. Question is whether or not people will go for the double XP or just go Rambo like in COD4 or MW2. Heck, I just wonder whether or not this game will work in general. What do you guys think?

FPS with command structure was done over a decade ago (and it was brilliant ;))
FPS with huge player counts has been done multiple times as well.

Hopefully they make everything work together and achieve enough popularity for it to sustain itself. Do you know if they're going to have world-wide servers, or will it just be laggy for certain countries?

I play another large-scale infanty game called Arma2, which is really geared towards team-work, command structures and large player counts. However, in public matches there's a damn lot of Rambo's... You've got to find communities of sensible people to get some good team-work happening.

I have some great memories from FOM of sitting in a briefing room with the commanders explaining the invasion plan, before forming up with my squad in the deployment area and performing our assigned sweeps through an enemy installation ;)
Also, nothing compares to when, in Arma2, someone's in-game character turns their head to look back over their shoulder at you, and shouts some flanking orders via VOIP, with the game lip-syncing their character!

I'm not sure if they have worldwide servers, but I imagine that they do. I do hope that there are less Rambos on MAG though, cause that's really gonna ruin the game experience for this game. Arma2 sounds interesting actually. What platform is Arma2 for?

Another example of a game with a forced command structure was Battlefield 2142. It had a pretty novel approach that I thought was decent. Mag looks interesting, so far its one of the very few titles that have made me want to pick up a ps3.

I haven't heard of Face of Mankind. I'll be checking that out.

bf2142 has the best blend of player count and command structure. It is also the most fun and challenging. Hard to get a game now though. Most of the players are still in BF2 as futuristic settings arn't as popular with gamers these days:(.

Battlefield 2142 had a forced command structure? I thought it was a straight FPS. Btw, MAG isn't really forced command structure, it's just that you get double the experience points for following orders.

in bf2142, you could play as a lone wolf if you wanted to.

however, most of the time, everybody was split off into 4 player squads. The player who created the squad was the squad leader. Commands issued by the squad leader would get relayed to all of the members of a squad and bonuses for completing the objective that a squad leader had assigned were awarded. Enemies identified by one of your squad mates would show up on your HUD. Also healing/reparing/resupplying a fellow squad member also were rewarded with xp bonuses. When a member of a squad, you could also choose to respawn either where-ever your team leader was in the field (or if he/she had deployed a respawn beacon).

squad leaders could request support from the team commander like supply drops, orbital strikes and radar scans. However, these requests would be deployed at the discretion of the team leader. If no-one applied to be team commander, then these would be unavailable to the entire team.

The commander could issue command directives to any team and deploy the previously mentioned team bonuses. The team commander could also use satellites to identify enemy soldiers and equipment on the entire team's HUD.

When I say forced command structure, I don't really mean forced, but matching 5 rambos against a 4 man squad with the support of a commander was a blood bath.

Oh ok, I get what you're saying. What platform was Battlefield 2142 for? Seems like it's worth trying.....

Quote: Original post by kryotech
Oh ok, I get what you're saying. What platform was Battlefield 2142 for? Seems like it's worth trying.....

PC. It's fun for a little while then gets really boring.

bf2142 is like four years old now. Not many players left over there, and the game was not without flaws. Like any squad based game, its only as fun as your team. I wouldn't really recommend it, especially not at this point. But it was an interesting try though in its heyday.

The more I see about MAG the more I want to give it a shot, but its slightly concerning that its only a week or so from release and I haven't really heard that much about it.