BGB talks MAG with Seth Luisi: quick-fixes and data-mining

by SOHAIB: The 256 player online game MAG shouldn’t be facing long waits for bug fixes to reach users as Sony has told British Gaming Blog about how they plan to speed up what usually is a length certification process.

Seth Luisi, director of development at Sony Computer Entertainment America said that the game has a “two tier patching system” that will allow for quicker updates to the game. As well as ones that have to go through Sony’s platform QA team as seen with most games, “the other we can test on our own and release a data patch which addresses things that aren’t really related to the executable. And a lot of the items too we can address too on the server, so we don’t even need to patch the client to make a lot of the changes and improvements to the game.”

Much of the game’s testing before release was through an open beta release. “We were always planning on having an extensive beta period. With a game that’s 256 players, we couldn’t even play it at Zipper. They have less than 150 people there at the whole company so we couldn’t even fill a single game so the beta was really key to get out there.”

As well as getting written feedback from the community, Zipper used the beta to collect a lot of details on how the game was being played though data mining: “You know, where people are running in the world, how easy it is for them to kill other people, lots of statistics on kill heat maps, movement heat maps, shot heat maps so tons of data that we can look at and adjust the level layouts, adjust the level tuning, and everything else.”

However, the more important question… is if it would be theoretically possible to get all 128 people on one team to one spot and defend that way.

“Absolutely, you can do that – you can do all 256. We’ve done it internally! The issue with that is that there’s always somebody who has to throw a grenade or shoot someone.”

“Getting everybody to stop firing long enough to get all of those people to one spot is much more challenging than you may think.”