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Why Are We Fighting Again?

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 2 / 3
Date: May 24, 2003
Author: Amazon User

I'll admit it, when I first started playing this game in open beta, I thought it was pretty fun. If you ever played or enjoyed Tribes 2, this game is very much like it, which was my main draw to the game. Planetside is essentially a squad-based game in which your empire battles two opposing empires in a persistent online world. Sound fun? It is, but Planetside quickly begins to lose its charm.

There are three empires that you can choose to be a part of. All of the empires are basically the same, with the following exceptions: they each have a different main battle tank, their MAX units are all different, and they all have a different heavy and anti-vehicle weapon. All of the other weapons, armors, tools, and vehicles are all shared between the empires. This lack of diversity between each empire is very disappointing, and after fighting against one empire for a while, you've basically fought against each one.

An interesting aspect of Planetside is that as you participate in different battles and capture enemy bases, your character will go up in rank. As you go up in rank, you earn certification points that you can use to learn different skills, which in turn lets you use different armors, equipment, and vehicles. Four certification points are given to you in order to get started, and each empire has the same set of skills. There are no classes, so anybody can learn anything. This has its benefits, and its shortcomings. By not having different classes, every character is somewhat unique, and is defined by the skills they have learned. However, since there are only so many "useful" skills and vehicles, everybody chooses the same certifications.

But as long as the game has good gameplay, who cares about diversity right? Well, prepare for another disappointment. In Planetside, I haven't seen one battle that was won due to skill. Instead, whoever has the most players in an area will capture that area. Also, capturing an area consists of fighting into the enemy base, and then hacking into their control console. Some fights are exciting, which result in the satisfaction of just barely capturing a base against impossible odds. Most fights are very boring, which consist of about one hundred or so members from your empire walking around the base while it's being captured so they can earn experience. Since hacking into a control console takes fifteen minutes to do, be prepared to be standing around doing nothing for most of these fifteen minutes, as there are usually so many people waiting around to get experience from the capture that the enemy has no chance to defend the base.

What promised to be the ultimate online first person shooter turned out to be rather disappointing. At the moment, the game is plagued by lag, uninteresting gameplay, and a nonexistent story line. And with a $... monthly fee you may be forced you to ask yourself "Is this really worth my money?" Unfortunately for me, it wasn't.

It's about time

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 4 / 11
Date: January 12, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Planetside is a welcome addition to the already long list of massively-multiplayer online games. It's refreshing to see an FPS game of this kind, and I can't wait to see how it will turn out without the often frustrating dynamics of an MMORPG.

What can I say? This game is being developed by the same producer of Tribes 2 - and it does follow a similar theme. The fact that it's an MMO, and not the traditional *user* server based game, sealed the deal for me.

I do look forward to seeing how they will combat lag issues, however. If this game is a *laggy* game, considered the amount of PvP involved, I won't pay a cent.

Save it

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 3 / 7
Date: June 09, 2003
Author: Amazon User

The game was never ready for release,so many bugs and server side issues. Sony pushed the dev's and the damn dead lines, because of marketing BS. The bottom line here, NO ONE FROM SONY, reads what there customers write them about the game, they never respond, they have 0 and I mean 0 customer service.

John

Buy Tribes2 and have more fun

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 3 / 8
Date: July 03, 2003
Author: Amazon User

SOE released Planetside a couple months before it was ready for prime time. The game has a lot of unrealized potential and will probably continue to be just that.

There are a number of bugs in the game that make play frustrating. Doors will stick, vehicles that can't be mounted, holes in the map that will drop you character out of play, etc.

The character levelling and gained items are initially incentive, but how spectacular is it to receive cr3 and be able to scribble on the map? Or how about peaking at cr5 or br20 and everything you do gains you nothing?

If you happen to make enemies in the game and have them reporting you to the customer service representatives, you will be harassed and threatened, but not given any detail or information regarding your supposed transgressions. So try not to make anyone mad. If you run an outfit, you will be held responsible for the actions of every person in that group with the same lack of information.

If you enjoyed playing diablo over and over again this game might be interesting. Otherwise spend your entertainment dollar on something else.

Under pain of lag and inexplainably high ping time.

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 2 / 4
Date: July 22, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Most people know that mass multiplayer onlines are for only those who possess high speed internet and have high end computers. What you don't know is: I have cable internet and this game is still laggy enough to make me scream.
Lag is especially painfull for a first person shooter. Imagine you are fighting one on one with a dangerous opponent, when all of the sudden you character freezes for seconds at a time in a substance known only as 'lag'. Your opponent, however, is not, and proceeds to blow your frozen character to smithereens. Not only that but the game suffers from a pluthera of unbearably long load times and a multitude of crashes in between. If its not bad enough to have a frame rate of one every five minutes, you also have to stand a loading time of another ten minutes, and then the game just loves to crash right about then. Don't get me wrong, this game probably works on supercomputers connected to the internet with high speed cables as thick as trees, but I wouldn't know, I'm not made of money. If your computer and internet combined cost you more than someones house, then you probably have a high end enough computer for this game. Otherwise, it will leave you pulling your hair out in frustration.

In Open Beta Right Now ... Game Looks Great

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: April 25, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Hey Everyone,

Snappy here, as I am known in the gaming world ;-)

Like many of the other reviewers here I have been following this game for some time now. I was lucky enough to get into the open beta and have played the game several times now.

The action can be real fun, and considering this is still beta I am getting the feeling that this game will succeed where others have failed (ww2 online ....).

Being able to create a player that grows with battle experiance ... being able to do so much with the game world... being able to play on a very stratigic level... all of these things should make for one hella great game...

Cant Get Enough!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: August 06, 2003
Author: Amazon User

This game is awsome, one of the best i've ever played. Theres so much to do and so much you can be. A pilot, a tank driver, sniper, infintry, it goes on and on. I've had this game for three months now and I have not once became bored. Get in an outfit, make some friends, and your never bored. For those that complained it was boring, they werent moving around enough. last week i was blowing things up in a tank, this week im raining bullets from the sky. I will admit, however, that when i started to play this game, my computer sucked. DONT EVEN THINK ABOUT BUYING THIS GAME IF YOU HAVE ANYTHING LESS THAN 256mb of ram. I started with 256mb of ram and a 56k and the lag was horrible. That didnt chase me away, bought cable, worth the money,got 512mb of ram and installed it myself and the lag is gone. So to say that i stuck through the game through all the lag i used to have, it has to be a great game. But why are u listing to me, go read up on it, DL a movie or 2. if u cant afford the game, dont even DL a trial version, u will be addicted immediatly and spend every last cent u have on this game.

Player vs Player at it's finest

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: August 20, 2003
Author: Amazon User

First and formost, this is a player vs player game with "level gains" (called Battle ranks). It's set in the future and the fighting occurs on several continents that offer differing terrain and look.

Most games of this type HUGELY favor the high level characters. In Planetside, an BR 3 can kill a BR 20 just as easily as the BR 20 can kill the BR 3. You have a ton more options in weapons, vehicle and skills as a BR 20 but it's just that... more choices.

Fortunately, if you go through the virtual training you start out with a very decent BR of 3 which means that you can use lots of things starting out. Two vehicles, 2 Maxes, Any weapon combo, etc.

Having played many player vs player games I can attest that this is the best.

Pros:
3 way fights, balanced sides, static bases, fun fights, instant action, outfit support (guilds), benefits to grouping, many, many aspects to master (Infiltration, vehicle combat, air combat, infantry combat, etc)

Cons:
low populations at offhours (always play on the most populated), a game expansion which should have be a patch

They have a free 7 day trial offer. Worth checking it out.

Buggy. Poor player guide. Having to rely on others a minus.

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: October 19, 2003
Author: Amazon User

I've been playing this game for about 3 weeks at the time of this review, so I've got a good feel for the game.

I run a rock solid stable, self-built, Windows 2000 Pro machine. It has crashed more in the last 3 weeks than it has in the last 2 years. The game constantly locks up, or crashes straight to the desktop. Nothing, I mean NOTHING, is more frustrating than working for hours to capture a base, only to have the game crash (or server crash) minutes before the capture, resulting in 0 experience points for hours of work (5000 point captures are not uncommon for hours worth of work). There are bugs everywhere in the game play. Sounds play when they aren't supposed to. Doors don't open. Players spontaneously disappear. Some game features work in some circumstance but not others. For example, when you normally use the map, you can zoom in and out with the 'Z' key. When the same map is displayed to choose your respawn location you cannot use the 'Z' key to zoom, but you can use the mouse wheel (if you have one) to zoom in and out.

The game has an extremely poor player guide. A lot of information is left out of the booklet that comes with the game. Some more information on game play can be found on the website, but most of the info you will just have to learn during game play. Oh...and the off line in game tutorials don't work at all. I spent a good hour trying to go through the first mission, only to find out that you can't complete the first mission because of a bug! And you can't play any other missions without completing the first mission! Sony knows all about it and promises to fix the bug in a coming patch. The game was released 5 months ago; I wouldn't hold my breath for a fix.

The game requires you to rely heavily on other players to advance in rank. I don't find this a problem because I'm not a team player, it's a problem because there is no easy way to communicate with large numbers of players unless you have a command rank, allowing you to communicate to many many players. There are often not many players with the required command rank to give orders and organize attacks. So organizing people that you have to rely on is very very difficult. Another point, partly due to a poor players guide, is many people don't know some of the stuff the need to know. For example, many times I have been fighting for a facility wondering why it's not being hacked (hacking is required to cap a facility). Come to find out nobody has the equipment to hack it, even though any player can acquire the equipment, and any player can use it. You can form squads and outfits of players which helps organize attacks and what not, but there is only so much 10 players can do against an enemy force of 100 or so.

Over all the game feels rushed to release. It feels like Sony one day said "Planetside has been in development for years, and we think it's close enough. Ship it now and we'll fix the big bugs in patches". A lot of the in game logistics seem over thought out and the bugs are quite frankly, unforgivable. There is absolutely no excuse for ever releasing something this buggy.

This game is OK for being the first massively multiplayer first person shooter, that's why it gets 3 stars. I'd give it 2.5 if I could. The game could have been so much more

Not Perfect, But At Least It Has Created The MMOFPS Genre

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: May 20, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Planetside is not perfect, but hopefully the developers will continue to add to the game in the months after release. The two things I like most about it are the size of the maps (huge) and the fact that you don't have to search among thousands of public servers to find your friends or fellow clan members.

PLANETSIDE HAS SOME PROBLEMS:

As a First Person Shooter, there are problems. There are balance problems with weapons, and the way aiming works is unusual and not very satisfying with some weapons. Joystick support for aircraft has an "added at the last minute feel". The shooter aspect of the game is still fun, but there are some things that many players may not like.

Lag is a problem. I have read that having 1Gb of RAM helps, so I may buy another 512Mb stick... But lag seems to happen at the most critical times, like when you walk into a room with enemy in it! lol

The world of Planetside does not really grow and evolve the way I have been told the worlds of Everquest and Asheron's Call do. I would like to see some enhancements made to the game in this area, but it's my opinion that the people who want to "role-play" in Planetside and are unhappy with the game in it's current state are probably not big FPS players. If you are a hardcore Everquest or other MMORPG player, you may not find Planetside to have the kind of environment you expect.

The game, the online and paper documentation were not finished when the game was shipped. There are numerous interface problems. The popup windows for locating friends in game are clumsy. Things like that: they don't ruin the game, but are a source of occasional irritation.

The griefing system doesn't seem to do what it is intended to do. You could easily TK 5 or 10 people a day and suffer no consequences, although there have been rumors that Sony will cancel accounts of people who chronically grief in this way. I believe you have to TK about 70 people before you suffer any penalty in game, as the griefing system currently works. Gamecards currently cost almost as much as the game itself, but if cheaper one month cards become available, you can bet that there will be griefers who buy them just to TK until their account gets cancelled.

Planetside takes an approach to shot placement called "cone of fire" which means that your shots do not always go where you want them to at long ranges. For some weapons, even the first shot or two do not hit the crosshair. It's frustrating to take the time to kneel and carefully aim a weapon at a distant target, fire a burst and have the first two rounds miss completely.

THERE ARE GOOD THINGS ABOUT THE GAME, THOUGH: if you like shooter type games and particularly if you like working in a clan with other people, and are interested in developing your ability to communicate and cooperate with a group of 10 players to achieve tactical objectives, Planetside will offer hours of fun, at least initially. Whether there will still be large numbers of people playing it 6 months from now is another question.

Voice-over-IP communication is built into the game, so you don't need to run Roger Wilco, but the person who hosts the voice server must have broadband or the sound is garbled, and even if the voice server has broadband, it still doesn't always work well, so most people don't use it! But when it works, it's fantastic.

A squad mechanism is built into the game, and support for clans (called "Outfits" in Planetside) are also supported, with clan ranking. It's nice to finally see a game provide native support for clans.

The maps are much, much larger than any other maps I've played in other games, including Battlefield 1942, and to me, this alone made the game worth buying. This was the first game where I felt it could be difficult to know where the front line is. You can spend minutes on end crossing terrain, and knowing when to stop and look for the enemy becomes an important skill--being able to locate the battle without running into the middle of it and getting killed right away is an important skill in Planetside. Every single other FPS game I have ever played had a limited number of hiding spots, which every good player knows about, making them worthless. The terrain is so big, the problem is not finding hiding spots, but choosing the best one!

The game is supposed to have a "commander role" but in my opinion this feature has not been completely fleshed out, and how Sony implements this is going to be important to the longterm success of the game. If they do it right, it will be the thing that saves Planetside and makes up for all the games' other shortcomings. As the game currently stands, there is little to no leadership most of the time, even in the better squads. The few squads with good leadership and communication are acheiving that *despite* the user interface and game commander features, not because of them.

Planetside is the first persistent-world shooter game, and two or three years from now I think there will be more of this type of game. If you prefer to "roll dice" to see the outcome of combat and don't enjoy moving, aiming, and trying to understand what is happening in the battlespace, you may not enjoy Planetside.

But if you like to cooperate with teammates to capture a base, hold a bridge, plant boobytraps and discover and invent ways to cause headaches for the enemy, Planetside may be what you are looking for!

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