PlanetSide

"It's more of a FPS than a MMORPG"

Planetside is is one of a growing trend of online games that tries to combine two genres and tries to pull it off successfully. In this case, the two parts are the First Person Shooter (FPS) and the Massive Multiplayer Online RPG (MMORPG). The sum of these two parts are not as great as the individual parts, and I think that, and a real lack of creativity is why this game fails to impress me.

In Planetside, you play apart of one of three factions, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. As you gain experience by doing things (repair ships and mechs, heal fellow players, kill enemies, etc.) your faction must take over a world, and all of the military building complexes in each of the world's continent. Every time you advance a level, you can do a few more things, assuming you have the prerequisites out of the way. So, naturally, the RPG portion of this game is gaining experience. The FPS part is how you gain experience. The servers are set up so that this ''war'' goes on all-day, all-night, non stop.

The ''eye candy'' of this game, the graphics and sound, is a bit mixed. The music is okay, I like the sound effects. The graphics remind me too much of Everquest (which the two games share the same designers and distributing company, Sony) and it seems really blocky. There are a lot of server lagging problems that crop up from time to time. Hey, they did claim it was going to be thousands of people fighting each other at the same time. You'd think they'd have server issues completely checked out before releasing the game. I also found it rather odd and annoying that when you create your creator, you can customize how your character's body and facial features will look like even through the character will be so booted with gear and equipment, you'll never see the head. And they don't look very good either.

Even through you could play several different types of military people and you can really customize what kinds of equipment you want so that you could save the configuration, the game really boils down to the First Person Shooter mentality: move and shoot. Shoot, and hack. Protect and shoot. Granted, everyone's is in a war, you can only do so much. However, I wish you could do more with the skills you could earn. Hacking, for example, seems to be nothing more than a sophisticated way of breaking and entering. It would have been really cool if you could use it to, say, determine an enemies present position.

The other problem is that there is no real incentive to try to maintain what you've captured. There's a storyline, supposedly, but it never really materializes. It seems that everyone is capturing a lot of materials in a kind of a strange musical chairs game. I'm guessing the premise was, if there were enough people playing in a 24-hour daily period, the strength of each faction should be relatively stable enough to have a prolonged war where gaining territory would be fairly difficult to do. My experience has been the acquisition of enemy territory varies, but often is a piece of cake.

So, in a nutshell, the Planetside had a real problem maintaining my interest. It's more of a massive-FPS than a RPG, and the skills are underutilized. I also wish there was more of an incentive to have factions keep what they conquered and it would have been nice to see some aspect of creativity in the game.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 06/09/03, Updated 06/09/03