User Rating: 9 | PlanetSide PC
If you don’t already know, Planetside is a Massively Multiplayer On-line First Person Shooter (or MMOFPS for those of you in love with acronyms). The basic premise is that you start out as a general grunt, and through kills and base captures (the meat of experience building), you earn certificates that you can use to buy new abilities (whether that be Piloting a vehicle, earning new armor classes with more room for weapons and ammo, or class changes-to s****er from grunt for example). The players are split up into three different factions of a warring society, and dropped onto the “World,” where they duke it out for continental supremacy and dominance. This is achieved by capturing and holding key points on the individual continents the world is broken into. These capture points are bases, that are governed by a control point that must be hacked (a process by which you “capture” that point, and hold it for 15 min, against all odds). Once that is completed, you are rewarded experience points based on; how long you were involved in the capture of the base, how many times you died trying to capture the base, etc. All of this takes place in a persistent world with areas (continents, are the subdivision of the world) that are so huge, they dwarf some of the biggest levels in Tribes 2. The size of these levels makes travel by foot none to desirable, as it takes forever to walk (especially if your wearing one of the heavier classes of armor) from base to base. To remedy this, there are vehicles that can be obtained for transport, offense, defense, or just plain old Sunday driving. Few things have interested my as much as the concept for Planetside. The very idea of a persistent world first person shooter is one thing, but to be able to travel throughout that world in a squad/outfit in vehicles, nonetheless, really had me excited from the get-go! I was a huge Tribes/Tribes 2 fan, and the idea that I could keep a running profile of my victories and tribulations was very appealing. The other big draw for me, was the idea of having 50 on 50 battles, with Tanks and Aircraft all doing their thing… I have to say, some of these fights can take on epic proportions and have to be seen to be believed. Lets fast forward to the (almost) official release of the game, some months ago I was asked to be part of the first public beta. So I went fourth to the internet, got the beta, downloaded it…and it was good! There were problems here and there, but overall…exactly what I expected! Over the months, things went from good to fair, occasionally skating with mediocre…but then back to good again. By the time the beta had ended, I was still relatively sure the launch would go off without a hitch. That was kind of true, I don’t think that the launch was handled badly by any means, but there were some problems (but more on that later). The game lived up to all my expectations, there really is a lot of ground to cover here, and it’s about as open ended as you can get. Want to pilot a Reaver (light armor, well equipped, air assault vehicle)? No problem, pop over to a certification terminal, and it’s as easy as clicking two buttons. Decide that you want to drive tanks now? Great, either go earn more certificates, or choose to unlearn another skill and apply those toward your tank certification. You can choose to play the whole game as a grunt the whole time and never once pilot a vehicle, or you can choose only to pilot and never fire one round with an assault rifle if you don’t want to (though, I promise as good as you may think you are…you will get shot down at some point, and it makes it much easier to get back to a vehicle re-spawn terminal with a gun.) There are a couple of downsides to the experience however. First and foremost, minimum system requirements are pretty steep. I warn you that running with a rig listed in the min sys req. on the side of the box will not get you a pretty looking game. I run a 3GHZ + processor and a Radeon 9800 and I still usually only play at 1280x1024 and keep AA/Aniso at about medium settings. To be perfectly honest, this isn’t a beautiful game. Some of the texture work is nice and all, but the draw distance is miserable, fogging is used to help cover this, but that gets annoying too. As one would expect of a game of this size, poly count was kept down on most everything in the game (to keep everything working smooth)…so don’t expect anything breathtaking out of the models/bases. Also, I’m not sure if it’s just me or not, but AA/Aniso algorithms don’t get all of the edges and I wind up with a lot of blurred gray lines, where I normally expect to see clear black lines. The game is still in its infancy though, and I expect graphics updates to appear regularly. Also, lag is a concern right now, though I will tell you that if you don’t play on the most populated servers from the start (Emerald, at the offset the only East Coast server), you will have a much better overall time with the game (I started on Emerald—what seems to be the most populated server—and built up a character…now that it’s hugely overcrowded…. I really don’t want to start over again…so I deal with the LAG). It was much touted a few weeks ago that Lag was bad, and the dev’s were not doing anything about it. I have to say for the record, the worst I have ever seen it was over Memorial Day weekend where the servers were crunched day and night-it was bad…I’ll give you that (but what do you expect, it was the first two weeks of release on a holiday weekend…hell the whole internet was slow). After that weekend, another East Coast server was put into place. I’d expect no less, as currently I’m paying $13 a month for the right to play this game…keep it smooth Sony, were paying big bucks for this. Those things considered I still feel like this is one of the best games I’ve played this year. Despite the performance problems, this game still delivers exactly what it promised…and that’s a good thing. I can’t wait for some of the newer vehicles to be put into place (a bomber is so desperately needed it’s scary), and hope to see them add new islands/bases to the existing continents. Finding a fight is never a problem, as there are literally thousands of players on each of the servers (usually and hopefully not ever all at once). I can sign on at 4AM and still expect to find the same amount of people on as I could at 8PM! It’s a fantastic feeling to be at base, get in an aerial transport vehicle (GAL or GALAXY) and be flown to the target to be “hot dropped” right into the fray, and then capture that base. I can’t quite put into words why this game is so great, so I’ll tell you to go find someone with it, and get their buddy key that lets you play a free 7-day trial. I hope that at the end of those 7 days, I’ll see you singing on to your own account….happy hunting! 
