Planetside

Making a Massively Multiplayer game, be it an MMORPG or just a game involving mass amounts of people online, can be tough. Not only are programmers forced to work in an environment that expects heavy amount of use and abuse, but the game has to be entertaining enough to keep gamers coming back day after day. That can be difficult- and many a MMO has failed due to the inability of the game to keep gamers reasonably entertained. Unfortunately, that is the story with Sony's latest revival attempt, Planetside.

Planetside, when it first came out, was marketed as an original, new, unique "MMOFPS"- a massively multiplayer game based around the first person shooter genre. Instead of games like Everquest with little to no actual action, Planetside promised live, fast action- Counter Strike action with World of Warcraft's ability to keep you playing for hours and hours and days and years. Three years later and only about 50,000 players ever touching the game, Sony Online Entertainment, the company that manages Planetside, decided to release trial accounts in what could only be considered a desperate attempt to revive one of the smallest MMOs of all time.

Now, first, let's do a quick comparison of "Planetside vs. Competitors". World of Warcraft, by far the most alluring and entertaining MMOs on the market, has 6.0 million players. Counter-Strike has over 19.5 million players. Everquest can have up to 3,000 players per server at any given hour of any given day of any year. Hell, Lineage II, a primarily Korean MMORPG, totes over 1.5 million players- and that was back in 2004. So, it can be reasonably understood that, compared to everyone else, Planetside is like the back alley clinic ran by the guy who can't speak English compared to the huge University hospital of any kind of MMO on the market not named "Planetside". Why am I putting down a game that is, for all intents and purposes, free? What makes this game so bad? The answer is simple:

Everything.

Playing this with a small group of Gametrash staff, I didn't expect much from Planetside. However, when we began playing it, we realized why it was free- and why Sony might as well have sent us the game CDs to just convince us to not even download it. Planetside is a MMOFPS- and being an FPS, we expected some action, thus the group of us. But, to give you the spoiler to this review early, I can say that we left the game, three hours later, by uninstalling all three gigabytes of it. It was that bad.





Of course, we didn't get to jump into this fray immediately. With a download/install time of something like five hours on my 24/7 high speed Internet and huge gaming computer with a 500 gig RAID, Planetside seems to stumble over what other games achieve painlessly. Load times sometimes can be as bad as 5 minutes for even the most powerful computers, and some of the clipping and lag occurring on even the emptiest servers will leave some bashing their keyboard over their monitor in frustration. But when this game was finally installed, we had no idea how much of an additional pain it would be.

In Planetside, the whole concept is three groups warring over a small collection of islands, littered with bases and whatnot. By capturing bases, your team can effectively overrun the island and prevent your enemies from taking over- much like the regional aspect of Final Fantasy XI. It's CTF in the basic form, except with much larger, much more stationary flags- and the whole aspect of getting these bases is the whole purpose of Planetside. By customizing a player (With one of like three faces and colors) and placing him in a group, you use him to fight this small fight over the islands, and eventually move up the ranks in the system to get bigger, badder, and better weapons and help your team achieve victory.

And that's it. Planetside is a big game of Capture the Base, and that is all there is to it. Starting out in one of the controlled bases, players can "Jump into" the fray of action by being instantly warped to where a war is occurring and simply unloading on enemies, tactics for Planetside meaning very little. By running and gunning, myself and GT Forums member Paul managed to take over something like three enemy bases with absolutely no effort, and with what the game considered "Level One" equipment.

Planetside reminded me a lot like the popular Microsoft game Halo in a lot of ways, which is really unfortunate. Set in a pseudo-space atmosphere, the game has a lot of "High tech" plasma equipment (See: Halo) with some interspersed weapons like the SMG (See: Halo) and the players all wear large bulky space armor (See: Halo), most of the landscape and uniforms being a mix of green and purple (See: Halo). In fact, this game reminded me of Halo so much, it almost made me feel like it was a blatant attempt by Sony just to cash in on the uniqueness of Halo's look. However, as I said above, this game is a train wreck, and emulates Halo just like I emulate a Pilgrim Woman when I wear a sleeveless shirt and listen to Metallica.





Much again like Halo, Planetside totes a driving engine that allows you to drive and fly something like 20 different vehicles. This is fun for two seconds, as we Gametrashers found that the vehicles were flying fortresses and allowed for insane flips in the poorly rendered environments. Sometimes, the lack of a physics engine is funner than having a realistic one- and this was one of those times. This still didn't make the game fun- but we did notice a small flaw, the fact that running over things was quite effective, and thus, 70% of our Planetside gaming session involved taking over bases by simply running over the opposition. Winning never had to be fair.

To quickly touch on a common question about this game, the graphics and sound are absolutely terrible, but about as good as Sony could get so far as the FPS is concerned. Because most FPSes are generally good looking but the arena spectrum is small, one could reasonably expect that Planetside will be a “Little” ugly, but in reality, it is “very” ugly. With uninspired weapons and levels, distance fog even on the highest graphical settings, absolutely horrific character models, and boring effects, nothing is pretty or artistic about Planetside. The music and sound is the same, but at some point, I just ended up muting my speakers. That bad.

So, with these things in mind, it just seems like a bad engine, right? Well, even the Massively Multiplayer aspects are bad. Generally created a lot like Battlefield 1942, the game's spawn points and map are made to be insanely large, so there is a lot of pointless walking/driving involved. While "Instant Action" is a good way to get from point A to point B, this never lets you pick WHICH action you wish to be part of, and many of the GT group playing this game got separated due to that unwieldy function. The death respawn system is even worse, generally picking a handful of random areas you can respawn (Along with points you can set up, if you even know that ability exists), and they never tend to be anywhere near where you would actually wish to be. Death rarely happens on Planetside, though, because the players who continue to enjoy the game are so bad at it that if you do manage to get yourself wiped out, it is generally of your own stupidity (See: Getting your friends to shoot you for fun).

In fact, Planetside was just so insanely bad, the Gametrash crew found that the only way to truly enjoy ourselves was to team kill. I'm quite serious: in this MMOFPS, you can team kill, and quite effectively, because Planetside has a very lenient punishment system. Even though it does punish you, I managed to kill my teammates approximately 20 times, blow up all of our defensive mechanisms, drive a vehicle around slamming into miscellaneous property (that my team owned), and even swear like a sailor on the chat box before I was even warned once. Of course, the ultimate punishment I received was simply locking my gun and making me a moving target- but they couldn't even stop me from taking a vehicle and running over our teammates. I ended up destroying like 50 turrets that way.

To some, the concept of a Massively Multiplayer FPS like Planetside might be a really interesting thing- but I recommend staying away from it, completely and totally. Nothing about Planetside seems right, and the game is so poorly done that even a basic gamer looking for nothing but the ability to shoot at things will go "Ugh". With insane loading times, stupid customization, and some of the most horrible gameplay I have ever seen in a game of this level, Planetside is nothing but a train wreck Sony Online Entertainment tries to prop up for no real reason. No wonder Star Wars Online is failing.

0.5 star(s) out of 5

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