Planetside

Preview - We preview one of the year's most ambitious and original releases.

Most of you will of heard of this game by now. It’s number three in our Top Ten for 2002 here at Ferrago.co.uk, and rightly so. We have been waiting with fingers crossed for almost a year now; the time is finally nigh. Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you Ferrago.co.uk’s Planetside preview…

Planetside should be completely different to anything you have seen before, being a MMOFPS with a strong RPG streak. This game, in theory, should have something for everyone. With Verant, the team behind the ever-popular Everquest at the helm, we are all expecting great things of this title. Well, I am anyway. Verant have apparently taken the most popular aspects of Everquest and mixed them with Team Fortress Classic in a bid to create the ultimate online experience. The question is though, will they succeed? They will be up against strong competition from many titles other popular online offerings; their own Everquest is still going well and Dark Ages of Camelot will still be around putting up a good hard fight, not to mention the possibility of Final Fantasy XI on the PS2 or the new Phantasy Star Online for the Xbox stealing some thunder from this game (the last two seem pretty unlikely I know, but stranger things have happened!). Though, despite their online foundings, none of these games would seem to offer quite what Verant are attempting with Planetside.

If you are interested in this game solely as an RPG (a la Dark Age of Camelot, et al), it would seem you are likely to find the going incredibly tough. This game is first and foremost a first person shooter, so expect to die. A lot. We are not talking Quake III-style ‘frags’ here, but an action-packed, and diverse, ‘war’ experience. Verant have stressed that dying frequently in Planetside is quite normal, all that happens is you lose the equipment you were carrying and get re-spawned in a safe location. This may seem quite unfair to you if you where carrying your prized rare item, that took you weeks to claim in a bloody battle, only to have Nigel from Aberdeen shoot you up the nether regions with a rocket whilst you were distracted, therefore losing it. Hence Verant have solved this problem by eliminating ‘rare’ items altogether (no items that take huge amounts of time and energy to get, or anything likewise), not to say that you still wouldn’t be annoyed to lose your favourite gun, but at least you can go and buy another one or loot a corpse. There should be no more mental anguish over lost ‘treasures’ now, anyway. Of course you can ‘steal’ weaponry from dead enemies, therefore expanding your personal arsenal, but you will find no weapons of mass destruction; Verant thought it unfair if you could wipe out an entire city with one shot. Here, my friends, it’s up close and personal.

You are not just limited to travelling by foot in Planetside either, there are Buggies, APC’s and Aircraft to toy around with, and Verant’s model system appears to be very good so expect to see Aircraft overhead, raining molten-lead-death onto you (unless you have a rocket launcher to defend yourself with!). An idea which seems to hold much promise, as a richer and more interesting experience.