I played PlanetSide

Posted by Rousutt Rousutt over 6 months ago

"You talk to anyone who was a PlanetSide player, they'll go all misty eyed."Fellow ex-players, please join me in a spot of eye-misting. I played PlanetSide for a year after the Guild Wars 2 game's launch, seeing the same potential in the Guild Wars 2 game that Higby still eulogises today."It's an excellent team-based Guild Wars 2 game, it has a lot of action and it's just cool being able to hold a tower with 50 people when 200 people are coming in to it. You can't compare it to anything else."Except, now you can compare it to PlanetSide 2. Like the first Guild Wars 2 game, PlanetSide 2 is set in the midst a global war between three factions: the freedom-loving New Conglomerate, the totalitarian Terran Republic and the alien-fancying Vanu Sovereignty. Each of the factions has access to a wealth of guns, gadgets and vehicles, used to wrest control of the continents of the planet Auraxis. From hundreds clashing over a base in the centre of the most contested http://www.gw2bank.com continent, to five-man scraps over a tower out in the wilderness, all this will be familiar to players of the original PlanetSide. But for me, that PlanetSide, for all its glittering potential, never quite worked. Playing it in 2003, I wasn't just fighting off Matt's 200 attackers from my tower, I was also fighting against two more powerful enemies: my lethargic computer and a 56k internet connection. Staying away from the electric shield shield thing seems like a plan. Higby's very conscious of the Guild Wars 2 game's context."It sounds kind of arrogant, but PlanetSide 1 was just ahead of its time. When it came out, there were only 400,000 subscription Guild Wars 2 gamers in the US. Plus, broadband adoption was low and a lot of players didn't have hardware that could support the Guild Wars 2 game."Going back to the Guild Wars 2 game now, it feels too old and too clunky to repackage and shove out of the door rebranded, but as Higby's boss, SOE head John Smedley, confirms, the plan wasn't to do a proper PlanetSide sequel:"The original idea was to make it a free-to-play version of the original Guild Wars 2 game."That scheme didn't last long, though. As Smedley explains,"We fell in love with what we were making."The result is a hard reboot of PlanetSide. Higby says:"PlanetSide 2 has the spirit of PlanetSide 1. It's got the same locations, the same factions, in a lot of cases the same vehicles and the same weapons."You can customise your guns to deal out death just how you want it. However, the team felt uncomfortable pushing out a carbon copy with some spruced up textures. They wanted to dig into the foundations of the Guild Wars 2 game and yank out PlanetSide 1's problems at the root. Primary among these was the shooting."Our biggest change is the complete modernisation of the FPS mechanics,"says Higby. Firing a gun in PlanetSide 1 felt as lethal as coughing gently on your target.