230th played so far
Genre: First-Person Shooter
Platform: PC
Year of Release: 2003
Developer: Sony Online Entertainment
Publisher: Sony Online Entertainment
Here’s a novelty. Rather than an MMORPG, we’ve got an MMOFPS. It’s like an MMORPG, but you run around shooters and such.
But wait, you ask, most FPS games have a multiplayer component, co-op and player versus player. What’s the different?
Well, persistence, really. It seems like there’s limited leveling and your fights are intended to change the balance of areas in the world. I’m not entirely sure how it works out, but it seems an interesting enough mix.
Our Thoughts
The basic principles of an FPS don’t differ much between games. You walk around, shoot and find your way around. In multiplayer, you try to shoot more people, maybe find a flag or do something similar… Still, despite all the differences, you pick up the basics easily and can often use them elsewhere.
It’s quite telling, then, that Planetside gives you a list of 10 tutorial missions you can play through when you want to. This isn’t to teach you the basic controls – they are straightforward and the game expects you to know and use them. No, it’s all the extra complications the game needs to explain. The inventory system is more complicated, meaning there’s some time dedicated to how to switch between items, how to acquire them and the differences between them. It takes some time to go into vehicles (actually quite a bit, as these are fairly versatile) and other concepts, such as experience and travel between planets. In terms of controls this game is pretty solid but nothing exactly groundbreaking or noteworthy.
Yeah, planets. The point of the game is that you join one of three factions and together attempt to take over the galaxy. Thanks to experience bonuses for factions that are losing, you end up with a fair balance between them, fighting back and forth over control of bases.
These worlds are large. As another move away from the cramped, frantic multiplayer maps, you instead have large continent you can travel across. These are so huge that vehicles are freely available from bases you control. Take a squad, move out together and you can quickly get to the base you invade. If you don’t have one, it gets more annoying though – a long run from an outpost back to a base can take several minutes, meaning that warping back to base is often faster, even if less realistic.
Still, more important, the game helps you get into the action easily. From any friendly location, you can warp to ‘instant action’. You respawn from a friendly base and can immediately march into battle. Once you’re in that base, it becomes a true FPS game, where you either defend your central point or try to shoot through the others to get to the control room, where if you hack it long enough, you can take over the base.
One big downside is one that is the same worry as so many other games – the player base. While not as dead as MUD, on a world this large you’d expect to be able to see many conflicts. However, we often weren’t able to go to any and didn’t have an easy way to find out where they’d be. Just as telling in that is the server selection – or lack of it. Sony is keeping one server online, but that’s all you can currently find. It’s a shame.
As for the graphics, it’s that double standard. Nowadays, it looks dated and blocky, but I can see how it was good in 2003, with some gorgeous sights. It’s nice, but no longer something I’d recommend. Even so, having just one player model per gender with just slightly different faces feels slightly lazy, which is a bit unfortunate. Considering the circumstances though, it doesn’t matter much.
During my time on this game (and I went through all the training before venturing out into the virtual world) I only came across a handful of other players. I joined their squad and flew into enemy territory… to find that there were no enemies there. They were perplexed, I was perplexed it was a bit of an anti-climax to all that training where you got to blow things up with grenades. Quite sad really.
Final Thoughts
I can see how back in the day this would have been a really fun game to play with mates online (like what Team Fortress 2 and Minecraft are at the moment) since there really is a competitive streak to it that is fairly awesome. The thing is that unless you are looking at a large number of people (since the option of Timesplitter–style bots don’t exist in this world) playing this can feel like wandering through an old ghost town.
You get to admire the architecture and the scope of a community that has begun to neglect it.