Another mmo from SOE that didn't live upto it's potential....
So at the time i just finished college and spent my whole summer not getting a job and playing Planetside non stop, it was THAT much fun. The battles were sooo intense and great fun with all the vehicles and weapon loadouts that you could spend all day on it. Also Planetside has levels BR (battle rank) and CR (command rank) and basically they don't make you anymore powerful in battle like giving you more health. All levels are there for is to give you you more options on what you can use, basically you get 1 SP per level to spend and you start off with a few too. CR however will give you more commanding skills like writing on the map or palcing way points or even obital strikes to kill mass people quickly with a very long cool down.
So the weapons/armor and vehicles you'll be buying with these skill points some in certs which at the time you had to buy each item on their own. Now vehicles come in little groups or upgrades so buy one item and you'll be allowed to buy the next. It really makes Planetside still lightyears ahead of everyother FPS because it has sooo many weapons and vehicles and combinations + armor too. They come in common pool (most of the equipment and vehicles are these) this means every faction can use it. Faction specific which means only your faction can use that weapon. Also Stolen so if your a adv hacker then you can hack another factions stuff even if it's not common pool and use it.
The three factions which are terran Republic, vanu sovereignty and new conglomerate. The Terran are in red and they have fast firering weapons which do lower dmg but because they fire fast your more likely to hit more often. Vanu (my fave) are in alien technology and their vehicles float above ground also their weapons can change from armor pericing to normal rounds without having to cary the seperate ammo for it. The Vanu's lasher also can do splash damage which is very effective in coriddors + lasher 2.0 ftw. NC have one shot LOTS of power but a longer cool down till next shot as they use alot of shotgun type things. Their Tank was the most powerful but the slowest too but everyone feared it.
The problem with Planetside is because the way they designed it the game was always going to get boring fast. Theres only a few types of bases and they all really look the same so your fighting in the same bases across boring continents all the time and noone ever wins. Sure you can win the island but then you all leave to fight for another island and by that time they'd be hacking it again.
What i wanted for Planetside was original bases and little cities. One of the developers i spoke to said they wanted all that too but SOE made them make a expansion from launch to be ready with little testing 3 months later. the expansion was released in Sept 03 and was callec Core Combat. Basically it added some new weapons you could only get from going down into the caves and hacking it connecting it to your bases above ground. The caverns were really poorly designed and while they gave the city type gameplay we wanted, it was in the wrong place. The world was already big enough and it just added more space, they should have put them above ground in city form and not aload of rocks underground that looked ugly.
So after that expansion many people quit because they were hoping it would get rid of their boredom. Later on in 2004 SOE decided to do "the bending" and BFR's which just totally ruined the game and most people quit to the horrible population we have today. Basically in short BFR's were some overpowered walking tank that made all other vehicles useless. Then bending got rid of Oshur island and replaced it with a horrible map and 4 smaller islands which sucked.
Now with the small population Planetside is showing it's age with most new additions to the game if it has any at all being for veterans and not new players. It's a slowly dying mmo and forever hard to find a battle specially on the Euro server so if your from there your screwed. It's such a shame because Planetside lost alot of the original developers due to SOE's ways of rushing everything. It could have been a amazing game but instead it's a slowly dying one.
However i had ALOT of fun with Planetside and was sooo amazing before it got ruined to no hope. Yes Beta 2003 till sept 2003 was the most perfect time with Planetside and thats when we saw the biggest battles and was just amazing.
So my pre Sept 2003 score: 9/10
My now score.......