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http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/10/30/planetside-2-preview/

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This article originally appeared in PC Gamer UK issue 232.

Matt Higby isn’t surprised there aren’t more massively multiplayer shooters out there. “They’re fucking hard to make.” What surprises PlanetSide 2’s creative director is the lack of attempts by other developers to emulate 2003’s ultra-ambitious PlanetSide. “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 game’s launch, seeing the same potential in the game that Higby still eulogises today. “It’s an excellent team-based 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 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 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.

Higby’s very conscious of the 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 gamers in the US. Plus, broadband adoption was low and a lot of players didn’t have hardware that could support the game.”

Going back to the 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 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.”

However, the team felt uncomfortable pushing out a carbon copy with some spruced up textures. They wanted to dig into the foundations of the 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. The technology of the era forced each of your bullets to be subject to a hidden dice-roll mechanic: on your end, it could look like you’d pinged every shot into a foe’s eyeball, but if the game’s fickle rules said you missed, you missed. That process has been stripped out.

“Someone who is familiar with Modern Warfare or Battlefield will feel very comfortable playing PlanetSide. The way the weapons work in terms of kick, aiming, recoil and iron sights feels very modern, like other current shooters.”

As in Battlefield 3, hit judgement is split between server and client-side, meaning where you shoot will be where you hit. The game has a realistic ballistics model: “When you fire a weapon it takes time to hit the location. If you fire a sniper rifle from a distance, you’ll have to aim your headshot a little above your target.”

That mental calibration won’t always be the same, dependent on the rifle variant you use. PlanetSide 2 is big on customisation. Higby describes a few potential changes players can make to their loadouts. “You can unlock anything from transmissions for your tank that allow you to go up hills faster, to squad leadership, a cool branch that lets your squad respawn directly on you in the battle.”

Each weapon and vehicle has its own skill tree, with stages along it unlocked through experience. But branches aren’t solid upgrades. Instead, they’ll be variants of the base model – weaker armour making for a faster tank, or a larger clip at the expense of stopping power. Matt uses the Cycler assault rifle as his example, explaining how the Mk. 1, 2, 3 and 4 versions vary slightly in characteristics, but that key to this concept of ‘sidegrades’ is balance. “If you’re accurate and want to be fighting people from longer range, you’ll take the Mk. 3. It’s balanced against other models – one that’s more spray and pray, for example – so you’re not getting an actual power advantage.”

Earning the experience points to unlock new toys is a matter of time. Higby describes the mechanic as being similar to EVE Online’s: players can queue skills to train while they’re not playing, but there’s a bonus for those who can spend more time on Auraxis. “The hardcore guy that’s on for 12 hours a day will train skills a bit faster. If you’re actively playing, attacking and defending objectives, you get a small bonus to that offline skill system.”

Those hardcore still won’t get a definite boost to their power. Instead, they’ll have a wider pool of vehicles and weapons to swim about in and kill people from. PlanetSide 1 only let you call up vehicles from dedicated stations and pilot them once you’d earned the certification, and that system looks likely to continue in the sequel. PlanetSide 2’s top end will be able to scoot into battle on a quadbike, hop off to climb into a tank, eviscerate enemy defences from behind and jet out in a fighter gunship.

The game’s potential customisation makes that process even more exciting. Maybe a player’s invested in a cloaking suit to let him wreak havoc behind enemy lines after he’s hopped off his quadbike. Maybe he’s outfitted his Reaver gunship with faster engines to whizz out of trouble before anti-air MAX suits – mini-mechs with men inside – lock their flak cannons on target. Or he could’ve given his Reaver extra firepower: instead of fleeing, he support his squad’s push from the air with barrages of air-to-surface rockets.

The glee of charting a Reaver gunship over scurrying humans below is one Matt Higby knows well. “We’ve been playing with a lot of the air mechanics so I’ve been playing air vehicles the most. Each of our fighters has its own skill tree that lets you customise it to be an air fighter, an air-to-ground fighter, a super fast reconnaissance craft, all from one plane.”

Matt satisfies his aerial fixation with his other favourite class: the light assault jump-jetter. “He doesn’t have a jetpack, but he can jump over walls; a counter for snipers. You can jump-jet behind them and take them out with assault rifles.

Matt leans heavily on Modern Warfare and Battlefield as combat touchstones, but there’s space on Auraxis for people who’ve never before raised a gun in anger. “We’re an FPS first, but we have a lot of support roles. The Medic and Engineer are focused on healing and support.

“Our mission system does two things really well. There’s a lot of people who want to play an FPS. They just click their high-imperative attack mission or important defend mission and pop, off they go. But these objectives are created by players. If you’re a commander, squad leader or even a guild leader, you can just place objectives in that mission system and people who aren’t interested in any of that leadership stuff will complete them.”

PlanetSiders interested in leadership progress up the ranks of their guild – the higher they rise, the higher priority missions they can create. You might spend much of your time under the command of a squad leader carving a swathe across one of Auraxis’ continents, before getting the call from your guild’s top brass, asking you to reinforce a push half a world away with 200 of your brothers.

Leadership is still important at squad level. “Different ranks can set different granularities of objectives. During the high-priority attacks, the squad leader can say, ‘We’re going to attack this turret, that gate, this generator.’”

Leaders at any level get experience for creating and completing missions, just as grunts get similar boosts for doing the legwork. If that’s not incentive enough to join up permanently with other players, Matt explains the exciting guild mechanics. “Our guilds are called Outfits and have their own progression. You could have a tank guild that’s unlocked specific tank advantages. That creates an aspirational thing where new players want to drive a tank and join this guild because they’re the best tank drivers in the game.”

Imagine calling in the rest of your outfit to roll in on an enemy-held base, and seeing a tank column as long as your draw distance rolling over the horizon. That’s potentially the kind of gaming moment you tell your grandkids about.

On top of outfits, SOE are adding a faction-based metagame to keep the endless battle interesting. Factions now earn resources from capturing bases. Hold one of these for a long time and you’ll start to see the benefit in your armoury, as Matt explains. “The Vanu Sovereignty might need Araxia – a rare resource – in order to put railguns on their Magrider tanks. You really don’t want to deal with Magriders when they’ve got railguns, so you and your leadership might think that the best tactic is to go and take over all the places on the map that have Araxia and take the bases back.”

Even eight years later, PlanetSide’s core concept is exhilarating. SOE haven’t changed too much for PlanetSide 2, but the idea of an MMOFPS is still so fresh and unexplored that the reincarnation of these mechanics is welcome.

And the future of the game looks bright. PlanetSide 1 suffered from blinkered development as designers took it underground. Matt’s adamant the sequel won’t suffer the same fate. He spoke about a ‘three-year plan’ for the game, discussing the potential for sea battles and player-built cities. But key to any future movements is community input.

“Maybe we’ll think it’s a really great idea for us to put satellite-launching into the game, right? And maybe they’ll think that that’s bullshit, but everybody really thinks it’s an awesome idea to have mountable Tyrannosaurus Rex in the game. Everyone really wants that. That’s a really cool opportunity to do what the community wants to to do with those long-term plans. There’s a calendar, but it’s not set in stone.”

Wait, how do you get a certification in Tyrannosaur riding? “I can totally see the guys on Something Awful voting that to be the top thing and then being all pissed off when we don’t put it in the game!”