Manic-Depressive First Person Shooter

Note to my non-gamer friends: The following piece is laden with gaming jargon. Mouse-over the links to view some pop-up information; click-through to view even more.

In the early days, I was merely a classic gamer; I didn’t care for the new first person shooter games. This continued for some time, but in 2001, Return to Castle Wolfenstein won me over with its great multiplayer co-operative play. Games where you shoot people “like in Doom” were more fun with fellow humans.*

Popping up around me were these newfangled persistent world games, more commonly known as MMORPG‘s. The first to develop a substantial following was Ultima Online back in 1997. A certain type of gamer flocked to it, but they’d abandon it – along with Everquest, Asheron’s Call, and Dark Age of Camelot – for a new game called World of Warcraft. You might have heard of it. Players loved its persistent world, quests, loot, story, and the crack-addicting, marriage-ending, character progression.

Figure 1. Timeline of my attempts to find the perfect FPS. Each step beyond Planetside was a search for an appropriate FPS persistent-world FPS. Key: Red = MMORPG's. Blue = FPS games. (Source: Life experience and Wikipedia)

Shooting + WoW = Planetside?

Though I played a few MMORPG’s, my interest never lasted long. Much of the game mechanics is of the click-and-wait variety. I’ve little interest in taking turns, swinging a sword, until my opponent dies. Ugh. I craved a game where weapon A, fired at range X, did Y damage, regardless of your level. By 2003, I was getting impatient for a first person shooter set in a persistent world.

In May of that year, I turned 30, and my birthday gift to myself was the new Planetside game. It held a lot of promise, and I was instantly hooked. I could now have all the same kinds of clan – sorry, outfit - experiences other MMO fans had. Over time, as the shininess dulled, our gaming group atrophied a lot. More than seven years on, though, it’s still on life support. We defibrillate every now and then, finding excuses to cohere. Most recently, Global Agenda brought some of us together.

A lot’s changed in the last seven-plus years, in the game and out, but my store of memories is as full as any WoW fan’s. For my part, I quit, re-subscribed, quit again, re-re-subscribed, got married, became a father, quit again. Last month, I re-re-re-subscribed. It was a tough decision. In the world of free to play, $15 a month feels like a lot.

When it launched, the game was wonderful, but clearly flawed. It lacked polish and the user interface was clunky. Each update felt as though Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) improved one aspect of the game only to break two other things. Clumsily, but with great hopes, SOE lumbered toward ‘better’. But, the time it took eventually killed the game’s chances of becoming the WoW of online shooters, because a game like that only succeeds with consistently high server populations. It’d have to settle for being a boutique game. The diehards stayed, but most everyone else lost interest and moved on.

Bi-Polar Action

In Planetside, I’ve been soul crushingly bored. I’ve also been in the most exciting firefights of my life. I’ve practically fallen asleep on guard duty for fifteen minutes while waiting for a base capture to finish. I’ve led a long train of robotic-troops straight through the front-line firefight and into their facility’s undefended power generator. I’ve spent a solid ten minutes deploying mines, sensors, and turrets outside a tower and then, in the next moment, learned that everyone’s abandoning the fight.

Figure 2. The extremes of Planetside. A) Preparation before an exciting and action-packed 'MAX-crash'. B) The caverns of the Core Combat expansion: An unnavigable mess of boredom and confusion.

Sometimes, I log in and find that, just by chance, I last exited the game in a location that is now where the main battle is happening. I’m immediately in the fight; there’s even a group nearby that I can join. I jump in the turret-spot of a vehicle and start blasting away. Afterward, I’ve gained a bunch of XP and finish the game with a feeling of accomplishment.

But, sometimes I log in, search for a team, join it, and spend the next ten minutes simply moving to their location. Then I spend another five minutes trying to get in the same vehicle as the rest of my teammates. Then, whoops, I die. I respawn, seek them out, and still can’t join them for a while. They’re frustrated because I’m not on their voice server, so they ignore me. The last time something like this happened, I ended a 45-minute play session without killing a single enemy. I never did get in their vehicle, died around ten times, and I think I earned 45XP. This isn’t the shooter realism I’m looking for.

If at first you don’t succeed

For years, SOE was coy about further plans for the game, but eventually revealed their intentions. They’re rebooting the game, not creating Part II. Planetside is a great idea, it just stumbled in execution. It’s not time for a sequel, it’s time for a do-over.

You see, even with its many flaws, Planetside – in its prime – delivered a massive, strategic, FPS experience found absolutely nowhere else. Even in its decayed state, if you’re patient enough, you can see the bright ember of promise held in the unique combat moments. Just don’t blink.

I re-subscribed because I want to recapture, with my few remaining outfit-mates, some of that historic fun. That, and subscribers will (allegedly) get preferential treatment in the upcoming beta. What we can expect is better graphics and sound, that’s the easy part. The hard part will be harvesting all the right stuff from the original game, adding a bit, and eliminating bugs with the passion of an OCD exterminator. Being a Planetside fan is like being in a loving relationship with a manic-depressive spouse.

The extremes are frustrating, but, like all loving enablers, I want it to help, even if that means yelling into the cold void of the internet. In the next post, I’ll look at the good and the bad, and offer my nerdy observations.