It's a wild world out there when it comes to multiplayer gaming, especially on the consoles. The PlayStation 3 exclusive MAG will bring up to 256 players together to fight in massive battles, with players leveling up and being given the ability to lead their own troops into battle. But still, won't that simply devolve into madness as everyone goes off and does their own thing?

"We wanted to ensure we took every logical step to deter player griefing," Ben Jones, a designer at Zipper Interactive, told Ars. "Features like protected spawn areas, vote-kick and auto-kick at a certain team kill threshold help to preserve the ideal gameplay experience. You'll also receive negative experience points for TKing, and in a game where XP is vital to progressing your character, we feel that's a solid deterrent."

In fact, experience points will help give the battle focus. To level up and gain the best equipment—in MAG you're given loadouts, not classes to determine what you can and can't do—you need to be a team player. "In looking at other objective-based games we knew that we couldn't just throw any goal at players and expect them to follow our guidelines," Jones explained. "That led us to take a 'carrot' approach and incentivize players to follow gameplay progression by giving them bonus XP. True, you can play the game however you want and we encourage that, but to level up quickly and get access to all the goodies, you're advised to work with your squad, follow orders, and stick together."

Those orders will be given by leaders that have also leveled up far enough to earn the ability to lead large numbers of troops, making sure no rookies take the reins and lead the team into chaos. Gamers overwhelmed by the beta will also be happy to learn that the full game will offer an easier path to get into the experience. "Unlike the public beta, the release version of the game will introduce each player to our least complex gametypes (Training and Suppression) and gradually ramp them up to the intensity of 256-player Domination matches."

Sony released some information on the one-week beta that shows the community's hunger for the game: over one million downloads of the client, with only a hardy few hitting the level cap. "Of the 619,000+ people who gained at least one point of experience, 52,846 of them qualified for Squad Leader, 10,249 people qualified for Platoon Leader, 3,181 warriors made it all the way to OIC, and a mere 143 diehard soldiers made it to the level 60 experience cap," the official stats show.

We're also promised a text-based system to communicate, so even team-members without headsets will be able to participate. While organizing large numbers of gamers has never been an easy task, it's certainly a good thing when a developer tackles the problem head-on and shoots for the stars. MAG is coming to the PlayStation 3 on January 26.