When I first got into first person shooters, I had battlefield 1942 and a PC with a fairly mediocre ATI card, but it ran great and saw me through some of my best and most competitive days of online gaming.

Desert Combat arrived on the scene; I became a recluse, joined a clan and turned off the tv. I was a hero in my own mind and from behind my computer screen. 

The scale and freedom of a sandbox environment I’d not experienced in a first person shooter before. It allowed for more tactical team oriented game play, matches won or lost on the positioning of you scud launchers, tanks or forward troops. A wise commander could quickly coordinate a larger number of players and use the terrain to mask movements this allowed for whole range of closely guarded strategies. The levels of team play and cooperation has led me to seek out other combat games that offer the same level of competiveness

Modern Warfare burst on to our screens a couple of years ago, it’s graphical style and attention to detail brought a sense of realism to the battlefield, although maps were smaller and clutch points more hotly contested,  battles condensed into a much tighter area, action is fast and adrenaline fuelled.

It’s captivating and addictive and even though there is still opportunity of manoeuvre squads into position and bring some order to the chaos, it lacks scale, when you strip it back to its component parts it’s the same generic shooter that is always been, fast paced arena battles with a plethora of weaponry at your disposal. It’s been the same routine since early days of IDtech and Unreal Engines.

I have looked towards online elements of games like Operation Flashpoint and Armed Assault to which I’d hoped would for fill a similar role to battlefield. Sadly nothing has compared. And stand testament to opportunities missed. We’ve got huge environments and we are not using them correctly, server sizes haven’t grown in fact with consoles they’ve actually shrunk. With the rise of higher capacity internet connections why are we not using them to allow online gaming to reach its fullest potential.

The ego engine helps produces an environments that feel vast and convincing, but one thing that I’d love to see is that island being lit up like a Christmas tree. Sporadic gun battles erupting at every crossroad, hundreds of men, their machinery and high explosives, at the moment all that space doesn’t really seem to get used for much other than eye candy.

Maybe I’m getting too far ahead of the technology? Is this conceivable at the moment or not? With MAG showing that 256 players is possible are things looking much better? How far will it progress from there? Are we beginning another long wait before capacity doubles again?

It’s conceivable to say that you could use Skira to host much larger battles taking place on land, sea and in the air? Surely it’s only a question of bandwidth and converting positional data, the rest is done by the graphics engine. If you could replace all the NPC characters in a game like Dragon Rising with user controlled elements, you’d really be onto something.

The advantages with games like ArmA and Dragon Rising is that they offer the player complete freedom to go anywhere, do anything. It sounds like an ideal world; you just need to fill it with people.