Wherefore art thou Planetside?

Or more importantly, "Why did they bastardise thou Planetside".

Just recently, I decided to check out the Planetside universe again, for old time kicks, nostalgia and all that parp. I've played thousands of games, wasted countless hours, some not so wasted. Games come and go like bad lovers, and like bad lovers, are forgotten pretty quickly. But just like in life, there's always one you never forget, long to go back to and re-live the experience, one you compare current experiences too but is never beaten. Yes.. I fell in love once, with a game called Planetside.



For those of you who went through a stage of delinquency and have no idea what this game was all about, I'll briefly, and with a biased point of view, explain.

Planetside was an MMOFPS, you levelled up, and unlocked new toys, but when you killed someone, it was your personal skill that did a lot of it. No WOW stat bashing top trumps going on here. It was a universe at war, with tanks, planes, dropships, power-suits, nimble backstabbers, snipers, cars, bases shotguns... etc. Three sides fought for war over different continents of a planet, there were no winning conditions, and continents changed hands daily with a flood of people fighting at all hours. basically, Planetside was the balls...



This story doesn't have a happy ending though. Just when Planetside was losing a few players, Sony decided to spread the battlefields out even more with a shitty cave fighting environment. This turned major conflicts into smaller skirmishes spreading an already thinning populace out even further. Not the end of the world, us players still found fun ways to fight, and then. When just players started coming back, Sony dropped the final hammer blow... MANGA ROBOTZ. Giant shitty unbalanced Noob raping robots, stomped around the battlefields with shitty ainmations. Fueled with rage that Sony had defaced and raped my beautiful lover, I hopped on the band wagon... and quit.



The history of the game aside, I've been thinking a lot recently about the character and vehicle design of planetside, and how, at the time I thought everything looked amazing.

Of course, like any old game, when looking back, everything look pretty pants. But rather than pointing out flaws and handing out negative criticism, which does no one any good, wouldn't it be fun to re-design some of the characters and spaces? I'm finding motivation hard at the moment, so I'm going to combine this new angle with my work. Lets see what I can come up with.