I am aware of the addiction problems associated with MMORPGs - give a player reasons for advancement and they will run like rats in a very, very long-cycling wheel for you for as long as there is the perfect cheese in front of them or until they die. Planetside is not a simple addiction machine like EQ - it is addicting *ENTIRELY* because it is essentially Tribes 1 with thousands of people in battles of a scale you simply cannot easily grasp by anything I'm going to say here. It is an incredible, beautifully balanced multiplayer FPS that plays a lot like Tribes without jetpacks (although one Vanu mechanized suit does get them) and very slightly more realistic weapons. The only thing advancement gets you is the ability to play multiple roles at once, rather than having to switch characters to try out a role - since I played this with all level 10 characters, I was able to thoroughly explore the entirety of the battling experience in the game right off the bat.

Scope: Roughly 15 continents each of enormous size and with 15-20 bases apiece. The bases themselves are like a very large Tribes base each, with too-large underground tunnels and rooms (most obviously cookie-cutter templates) that are fairly easy to get lost in at first. I'm bringing this up right away because it's one of the few negative points of the game - and about the only area where the game is not immediately intuitive.

Synopsis of gameplay: You are attempting to hack the nerve center of each base on the continent. There is no permanent victory condition - the game cannot be 'won', especially not some of the more typically violent continents. While you hack a base (which consists of pointing a hacker gun at the nerve center console and waiting a time dependent on your hacking skill), be assured the base three bases back is already well in enemy hands.


What's it like? Well, I've never surfed, but probably a lot like that. You spend a lot of time 'riding a wave' or huge mob of 100 or so soldiers hopping in very loose synchronization from base to base like a rampaging plague of locusts. Both enemy sides will have their rampaging mobs going as well. While it's a lot of fun being part of an onrushing unstoppable mob, it's a LOT more fun when two - or better yet one each from the three opposing sides - run smack into each other. Fortunately this happens very, very often.

Early this morning, we had taken Gunuku, the 'cornerstone' center base of the most populated and battle-ridden continent in the game. By us I mean a few squads (each squad is usually 6-10 players, [an 'outfit' is a permament clan], and several squads can work together as a marauding warparty) totalling probably about 40 players. We were trying to cross the southern bridge to attack Itan just south of the crossing and Kaang just to the north - these two bases were the last northern holdouts on the continent of the Terran Republic. The bridge had become a sniper's nest and roadblocks of MAXs (almost directly equivalent to heavies from Tribes - you might call them 'mini mechs' or powered armor) and a few vehicles were in the way. I discovered this fact the hard way and chose to spawn (after you die, and death has no consequences in this game, you can choose where to respawn - bases, towers, and mobile spawn points are all valid places) at an AMS (mobile spawnpoint/inventory station) somebody had driven 'round the long way and parked neatly right next to Itan.

Apparently a bunch of other people had this idea as well because no less than 30 of us were pouring out of that truck's spawn tubes. Terran resistance being mostly centered on the bridge at the time, Itan was a matter of using fly-by-wire (you steer them inflight) missles called Phoenixes to take out the gun turrets from cover and snipers/counter-snipers plying their trade from whatever cover could be found at the crest of the hill we were attacking over. There only being 15 or so defenders we captured in about about half an hour's time. I then spawned an AMS at Itan's vehicle station and instead of taking the road that forked off into the bridge where the defenders were, decided to take out their main spawning supply for the region - Kaang. Most of the party from Itan had moved on north to crush the bridge defenders from a second front.

After driving around the long way through spitfire turret roadblocks I hid my AMS in the heart of a forest near Kaang's close-to-base southern tower, and went for the tower hack. After a few tries I was nowhere - there were three people defending that tower, one of them in a MAX, and I didn't stand a chance. Fortunately lots of other people started showing up through my well-hidden AMS at this time, and the fight began in earnest. A massive war of attrition at the northern edge of the forest began, Phoenix missles flying into gun turrets and incoming MAX suits, snipers on both sides going nuts.

And what saved our asses there, we had a very rare dedicated engineer show up and *FILL* the forest with an incredibly nasty network of mines (which don't explode on friendlies), spitfire turrets, and motion sensors. Finally after an hour and a half, one of our cloakers managed to slip into the tower - which at this point had become a major battle of 50 New Conglomerate attackers vs. 30 Terran Republic defenders with significant air support (who were confounded by our being in the forest, mostly), and with the Terrans unable to spawn we made very short work of them. Immediately the battle shifted from AMS->tower to tower/AMS->base (we came in on multiple vectors).

Kaang being the last northern holdout for the major continent of the game, the battle quickly escalated into 100 players versus 100 players. Tens of Phoenix missles being fired against anything and everything - some even counter-sniping, tanks from both sides showed up. MAX suits charged across the battlefield surrounded by infantry like knights with squires. Reaver aircraft hovered in the air - suicidally so because of the Phoenix cover - looking like those hovercraft from the apocalypse scenes in Terminator 2, chaingunning and firing missles on anything and everything and desperately trying to strafe the snipers and Phoenixers on the tower.


The fight lasted fully three hours until we prevailed, and despite having been in two more battles of equal or greater scale, this was by far the most violent and bitter - this was the Terran lynchpin for the region and they knew it and thus it got the kind of support that defensive actions in this game often do not.

So, again, what is this game like? It's like being in the thick of an angry raging mob fighting another angry mob, either cutting cut it to pieces and withdrawing - or winning, securing your position briefly, and then moving on. Constantly.

And it ROCKS. Even though I feel violently physically ill from hunger and sleep deprivation (despite having eaten a meal and gotten five full hours of sleep), I'm jumping back into the fray, and forgetting all about Thief, Planescape: Torment, Quake, Deus Ex - and any other game I've loved.