Played on:
Windows
When Sony announced Planetside a few years ago, people didn't know what to think. A massive multiplayer first person shooter? People were understandably pretty skeptical, but Sony has managed to put together a really fun game. The learning curve is tough compared to most action games, and there is no real lasting effect of your own accomplishments, but it's a hell of a ride while you are on it.
Planetside offers a huge battlefield where you can run around just like in a sci-fi FPS, killing enemies left and right. But there are also bases that must be captured, resources to be collected, and an army of vehicles to be driven or piloted. Think Tribes 2, but put 3 sides and a thousand players onto one server, add a bunch of vehicles and weapons, and then make it all a persistent world.
The engine used in Planetside is quite impressive; while the game is a hog, it does seamlessly go between highly detailed indoor and large outdoor areas. On top of that, each of the game's ten continents are huge, with several whole bases (complete with towers that surround installations) on each one. Combine all this with the ability to show a ton of players on the screen at once without too bad of a frame rate hit, and this game will start to dazzle you.
Much like other massive multiplayer games, Planetside's graphics aren't initially too impressive. When you get into a heated battle with a hundred other players and notice the gameplay is still running pretty smoothly - that is when you will understand just how well it was set up. Then again, you might not even think about the frame rate, because the gameplay sucks you in; you might completely forget everything but getting that capture or killing off attackers left and right.
I tested the game on the machine listed above as well as an Athlon XP 2100+ with 512MB PC2700 DDR memory and an ATI Radeon 8500LE. On the Athlon, game was only really smooth in 800x600, but that suited me fine; the first 30 seconds on a new continent were pretty difficult, as the game was still loading up data, but after that it was pretty good. On a more powerful machine, most of these hiccups are gone.
There are some major problems, though; servers will be overcome with fits of multiple-second lag. For a MMORPG, this isn't that bad of an issue, but in an action game, it's completely unacceptable. When this starts happening, I just log off - the game ceases to be any fun when it takes ten seconds to reload your gun. Every once in a while the frame rate will just dip inexplicably for me, screwing up the mouse-based controls and making the game unplayable. It's not terribly common, and this only seems to happen when I've cranked up the FSAA or the detail/resolution.
Sony has already posted a couple of patches for Planetside - for now they are just fixing bugs in both the client and server. Overall, things are mostly fairly stable so far aside from the lag mentioned above. While the servers have come down a few times and I have gotten the very occasional crash, it has been about 95% gameplay since I started playing.
Planetside is a complicated game, especially for a newbie; those who have only played a bit of Counter-Strike aren't going to know where to begin. The game includes a bunch of help and tutorials, which can get you through the interface; too bad they don't really help the player to understand how base captures and continent control really work. The manual is mostly useless in my opinion; the weapon and vehicle descriptions tell you little about how the equipment actually handles. That's what the in-game shooting ranges and vehicle practice areas, which are immensely helpful, are for.
The game includes a whole map interface that allows you to see where the action is across the whole world - it also allows you to easily locate other players in your squad. I found a few bits of the interface a bit clunky, and the HUD windows are somewhat bulky and cumbersome to use. Still, it only takes a couple of hours to get used to it all.
Planetside's controls and action are a decidedly FPS-style affair - even though you do gain experience points and "Battle Ranks" (levels), these only allow you to use certain equipment and vehicles - they do not automatically make you more effective with them. The same goes for your health and armor; while some suits or vehicles will always give you more protection than others, being a higher Battle Rank doesn't make you arbitrarily tougher to kill.
Planetside's graphics range from somewhat dull (base interiors) to absolutely brilliant (huge battles with a hundred players at once). The continents you will fight on include large bodies of water, hills, trees, and other natural phenomena. Here's one game where visibility is generally always decent at best; nighttime does make it a bit tougher to see, but it's not the pitch black that some games force upon you.
The player and weapon models are all pretty nice, although for the three sides, I find the Vanu and New Conglomerate colors to be just a bit too similar. Still, the models have a full range of motion, and actually look in place in the alien landscape. The vehicles are kind of chunky and angular, but they get the job done just fine. The game's ability to show a bunch of them at once makes up for any complaints about too-few polygons.
The human bases that scatter the terrain all use very similar textures and they all look alike. There are also only a few types of floorplans for all of the game's dozens of bases, which is one area that Sony could have put more time into. Even going across the world, the bases still all look very similar, and the smaller towers are almost identical to each other.
The special effects in Planetside are somewhat spartan, but they still look fine - this is important in a game on this kind of scale. The skies are quite pretty and animated, but there's nothing really special going on up there. Immersion is nice, but once you get into the gameplay, you might find yourself turning the eye candy like this off.
The game even looks decent at low detail settings, and these settings will help to keep a stable frame rate going. And we all know that after the ooh-ah, you're going to want a smooth game while shooting people. That's right; even on the Pentium 4 2.8Ghz, 1GB DDR, Radeon 9500 Pro machine I reviewed this game on, I turned the detail down in order to maintain 50 frames per second or more.
As mentioned before, the best way to describe Planetside is by comparing it to Tribes 2 with more of everything, thousands of players at once, and the ability to lose and gain control of bases. And the comparison is not unfounded, either - the last game that Planetside producer Dave Georgeson worked on? Tribes 2.
