Joined: Jan 15, 2009
Posts: 1169
Location: Connecticut, USA
Its that time again, boys and girls! With the Holiday Season coming up, I thought I would take a look at a game that claims to be fun, and yet save the player a boatload of cash. That's right, we are talking about Free-To-Play (FTP), the game industry's answer to the cake-based conundrums posed by Portal.
FTP is not that new of an idea, it has been used for a few years with moderate success by different genres, mostly in the casual gaming industry, and slowly bleeding across genres to MMORPGs, and now FPS titles. For the uninitiated, the basic premise is that you can start playing immediately, for free. If you are tight of cash, or have a will of iron, you can go through the entire game from start to finish without paying a dime. But, if you desire, you can pay for a variety of in game items and bonuses, anything from a permanent xp bonus (i.e. +5% per action), to unlocking certain weapons or upgrades early.
Planetside 2, is an MMO-FPS, a multiplayer-only shooter that comes to us from Sony Online Entertainment. Its a futuristic class based shooter with on foot, ground vehicle, and aerial combat. So on the face of it, it looks like Battlefield 3, but in the future. But there are some differences, and boy are they amazing.
Planetside 2 is HUGE, I mean well and truly massive. First off, there are 3 teams. When you start a character, you choose your faction, then the server you wish to play in. WOW players will find this all familiar. That is because the player cap per server is somewhere around 15,000 players (there's no published numbers, but its something like that). To accommodate all these players, the map redefines large for the FPS. there are 3 continents, each with ~1600 square kilometers of landmass. This isn't a Call of Duty scale firefight, or a Battlefield scale conflict, this is a full on World War. And its a war that never ends.
Effectively, its a territory control game, each faction has a safe zone on each continent, and fights to control more territory and installations. Controlling more area gives the team bonuses (resources for building vehicles, spawn locations, turret platforms, radars...). Any time you Spawn in, you can select any conflict where your faction has a spawn beacon. So if you are tired of fighting in the city, you can move to the conflict in the jungle, or over to the desert continent to swat the enemy air force from the sky. This leads to near infinite variation to the firefights, as you may have great air support for one fight, and then be completely cut off from your lines because you pushed too far out in front.
Graphics are on par with current generation games, they are not breaking any ground with the detail, but the battles and effects intensity make up for any shortfall in model detail. Likewise, controls and Classes are fairly old hat. Heavy assault has big guns, light assault is high mobility (with a jetpack, yay!), medic can heal, engineer can repair, sniper can... snipe. Each class has its own list of weapons, attachments, and ability customizations. Every action that helps your team gains you skill points, which you can then use to buy things from the upgrade list. This being a FTP game, you can also buy points for real cash, but that will only realistically get you a bit of a boost over the competition. Currently the exchange rate is 100 points per (us) dollar, if i wanted to upgrade a class with just the weapon, attachments and abilities I wanted (only about 20% of the available options) i would be spending 17,200 points, or $172 US
. So I don't think that there will be too many cases of people buying their way into power.
Verdict: I am having quite a bit of fun with Planetside 2, the frantic, spontanieous, 300 player strong attacks on enemy territory, the MASSIVE maps, and the ever-changing battle lines of war. When I went to bed last night, the squad I was in had struck deep into enemy territory, and taken over half of one of the continents, and pushing one of our enemies back to their safe zone. I look forward, and yet dread what the morning will bring...
Planetside 2 is available now for free on Steam. If you are interested, I am playing on the server Jaeger, faction New Conglomerate, under the name Arke0type.
SFC.Braxis*BK*
FTP is not that new of an idea, it has been used for a few years with moderate success by different genres, mostly in the casual gaming industry, and slowly bleeding across genres to MMORPGs, and now FPS titles. For the uninitiated, the basic premise is that you can start playing immediately, for free. If you are tight of cash, or have a will of iron, you can go through the entire game from start to finish without paying a dime. But, if you desire, you can pay for a variety of in game items and bonuses, anything from a permanent xp bonus (i.e. +5% per action), to unlocking certain weapons or upgrades early.
Planetside 2, is an MMO-FPS, a multiplayer-only shooter that comes to us from Sony Online Entertainment. Its a futuristic class based shooter with on foot, ground vehicle, and aerial combat. So on the face of it, it looks like Battlefield 3, but in the future. But there are some differences, and boy are they amazing.
Planetside 2 is HUGE, I mean well and truly massive. First off, there are 3 teams. When you start a character, you choose your faction, then the server you wish to play in. WOW players will find this all familiar. That is because the player cap per server is somewhere around 15,000 players (there's no published numbers, but its something like that). To accommodate all these players, the map redefines large for the FPS. there are 3 continents, each with ~1600 square kilometers of landmass. This isn't a Call of Duty scale firefight, or a Battlefield scale conflict, this is a full on World War. And its a war that never ends.
Effectively, its a territory control game, each faction has a safe zone on each continent, and fights to control more territory and installations. Controlling more area gives the team bonuses (resources for building vehicles, spawn locations, turret platforms, radars...). Any time you Spawn in, you can select any conflict where your faction has a spawn beacon. So if you are tired of fighting in the city, you can move to the conflict in the jungle, or over to the desert continent to swat the enemy air force from the sky. This leads to near infinite variation to the firefights, as you may have great air support for one fight, and then be completely cut off from your lines because you pushed too far out in front.
Graphics are on par with current generation games, they are not breaking any ground with the detail, but the battles and effects intensity make up for any shortfall in model detail. Likewise, controls and Classes are fairly old hat. Heavy assault has big guns, light assault is high mobility (with a jetpack, yay!), medic can heal, engineer can repair, sniper can... snipe. Each class has its own list of weapons, attachments, and ability customizations. Every action that helps your team gains you skill points, which you can then use to buy things from the upgrade list. This being a FTP game, you can also buy points for real cash, but that will only realistically get you a bit of a boost over the competition. Currently the exchange rate is 100 points per (us) dollar, if i wanted to upgrade a class with just the weapon, attachments and abilities I wanted (only about 20% of the available options) i would be spending 17,200 points, or $172 US
. So I don't think that there will be too many cases of people buying their way into power.
Verdict: I am having quite a bit of fun with Planetside 2, the frantic, spontanieous, 300 player strong attacks on enemy territory, the MASSIVE maps, and the ever-changing battle lines of war. When I went to bed last night, the squad I was in had struck deep into enemy territory, and taken over half of one of the continents, and pushing one of our enemies back to their safe zone. I look forward, and yet dread what the morning will bring...
Planetside 2 is available now for free on Steam. If you are interested, I am playing on the server Jaeger, faction New Conglomerate, under the name Arke0type.
SFC.Braxis*BK*
