Zipper Respectfully Dubs SOCOM 4 The First "Real" SOCOM Game On PS3

So they're put in a hard place with SOCOM 4. Undoubtedly the franchise's popularity has been hindered by the slightly rubbish PSN release, SOCOM: Confrontation. But that game wasn't developed by Zipper, and so the studio are clearly having to carefully state, "Hey, SOCOM 4 is the first proper SOCOM game on PS3," without sounding like idiots in front of Confrontation's developers, Slant Six. Especially seeing as Slant Six actually did an amazing job on the PSP SOCOM games.

So how do you get around that? Well Zipper's saying that SOCOM 4 is the first "fully featured" SOCOM game on PS3; boasting a full-length single-player campaign, co-op, 3D support, PlayStation Move and 32-player online.

“You know, that’s their [Slant Six's] game,” game designer Ben Jones told Destructoid. “I mean, we really have been focused on SOCOM 4 and doing our own thing. I think, for the franchise, SOCOM 4 is the real first SOCOM on the PS3.”

Jones added that Zipper's learned a lot "on the networking side" of things due to their experience developing 256-player shooter, MAG.

"We’ve perfected that technology, and we’re able to route a ton of players and get them into games super-quickly,” he said. “We learned a lot about what kind of objectives are necessary, what number, how to assign them, [and] how they [worked] with larger groups of players in MAG.

“Thank God for MAG. Because we know what SOCOM is, and we’ve done it for a long time, and I think we’ve done it really well. But in adding a lot of the new elements that we did, I think we looked to titles that we’ve developed internally … and said, ‘What are they doing that players have really latched on to, that has made the game better for them?’ And [we] looked to incorporate some of those elements as well.”