Last Thursday Bob twisted my arm. He wanted us all to buy and play Planetside. I’d tried the beta briefly and didn’t really get into it much. It didn’t help that the servers were crashing a lot and there is a learning curve involved in the game. I had decided I wasn’t really interested in playing Planetside, especially since I was already subscribed to one MMORPG, granted Planetside is more of a MMOFPS but still, it’s the paying a monthly fee for a game thing. But he twisted and I was curious to see what it was like in a group. I could always cancel it.
So we fired it up and jumped in. After an eternity of training we got into the game proper. First impressions? I liked it, a lot. It had the feel of Battlefield 1942 but even bigger with A LOT more people and set in a sci-fi universe. Drop ships out of Aliens, engineers building turrets, laying mines and repairing things, everything player drivable and flyable. I spent a while that first night in a battle that was just amazing. Tracer fire was flying every direction, ships where battling above us, strafing our positions and blowing up in mid-air. I think at one point I just said to myself “wow”.
I’ve made the time to play more since then. Friday night, Saturday and Sunday night. My impressions now? I still love it. It’s addicting. The ebb and flow of battle is addicting. Sometimes you loose an entire continent and sometimes you don’t. But it’s always crazy wild fun. The MAX armor powered suits are a lot of fun to run around in. They have that cool “mech” sound when you’re walking about, they SOUND heavy. My favorite niche so far is sniping. Find a nice place to hide and just snipe away. That and getting into turrets in defense of a tower or base and taking people and aircraft down at range.
Here is my first “good story” moment in Planetside so far.
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So there I am, sniping on a hill top with 3 other snipers.
We’re covering a nice arc so even when our target gets a fix on one of us the other picks ‘em off. Then I notice one of those damn invisible guys sneaking up on one of the other snipers, he’s moving slowly but enough to displace light so I can see him. I line him up carefully and wait for him to get to my crosshair. BAM! I whack ‘em! Those invisibility suits are cool, but must not offer much armor.
Later on, I’m hanging out on my hill and I see an invisible guy shimmering at range, he’s moving pretty quickly so he’s easy to see, but hard to hit. I fire but miss him. He spots me and vanishes. I see him moving slowing and coming towards me but I can’t get a good lock on him.
So I switch to my pistol. He gets close to me, I hear his knife fire up and I start shooting around me. He freezes and disappears. This goes on for awhile until I run out of pistol ammo.
About 5 minutes of cat and mouse now and I’m out of ammo. I take to running weaponless across the mounting ridge then doing a quick 180, drawing my sniper rifle and zooming in. Sure enough I see him, take a quick shot and he freezes. Repeat. This goes on for another 2-3 minutes. At this point, I figure he’s going to get me. A few times I’ve jumped just as I heard the knife fire up (head phones are great for this game) and barely miss getting carved up.
Finally I jump off a hill and take some damage, whip around and see him coming down the hill after me. But this time he knows I’ll shoot when I see him so he stops instantly. I predict where he should be, lower the rifle and BAM! DIRECT HIT! Down he goes!!! My 10 minute dance ends with me Victorious!!! WhOOHOO!
I racked up a lot of kills with the sniper rifle and almost ran out of ammo once.
Then I got invited into another squad and they said “come gaurd us at Command and Control while we hack this base”. So I did. It was higly unlikely that any enemy would get to thier Command and Control center at this point, there were at least 50-60 people guarding the approach. But my squad was doing the hacking. So I hung out and “defended” and picked up 5,000 experince points when the base fell to us. Wow! Quick trip to level 6!
I’m really like this game even though there are HUGE periods of time where I fell like I suck really bad. Never have the right weapon for the battle!
My STATS so far.