Planetside, then. Do I have any veterans in the audience? At ease, gentlemen.
It might not have dredged up the subscribers Sony were hoping for, and you personally might have found it a disappointment, a bully, a bastard, or most unforgivably, a bore. The developers were perhaps overambitious, and in any case they managed to screw up both on paper and in practice. But their game has achieved one beautiful thing, and that’s the creation of the same invisible veterans’ club that results from a real life war. If you played Planetside you might have already encountered this phenomenon- the mutual respect that instantly exists once you find out someone’s an ex-Planetside player. Since I can’t think of a name for this whole process, I’m going to dub it “I WAS THERE, MAN” syndrome.
And you’d better believe I was there. Me and my friends fought for the Terran Republic against the Barnies and Smurfs from June to November ‘03, and I won’t hesitate to say that we made up one of the better tank squads out there. But whichever side you fought on, or, God forbid, are still fighting for, that shared experience with every other subscriber still exists. It doesn’t matter that the entire virtual war that made up the game was (and still is) about as meaningful as a non-contact armwrestling match. If anything that just gives you more to talk about.
“Planetside? Yeah, I was there. God, what a fucking mess. One of my commanders was this unbelievable dick. Ostekate, his name was.”
“No way! I fought under him too. That guy would not shut up.”
“Yeah. You know the patch that let commanders draw on everyone’s map? I remember this one time he started drawing sea monsters and compasses and stuff. What’s your name, by the way?”
“Oh, I’m Wakle Skade, candle salesman.”
“Good to meet you, Wakle. I’m Chip Lick. So, as I was saying…”
And then before you know it you’re into the awesomely masculine business of swapping war stories. I reckon this is what makes Planetside age so well in the heads of its old subscribers. You’re not going to vividly remember that time you spent forty minutes looking for a decent fight, or the time you finally scraped together a crew for your bomber only for the lot of you to get shot down and drown in a river. Or at least, if you do remember those things you sure as Hell won’t be talking about them. You’ll talk about the day you brought a tank to a huge infantry battle and scythed down 20 soldiers in under a minute, triggering a mass retreat, or the time your fighter craft got shot down behind enemy lines and you drove back home in a hacked enemy buggy, scoring some entrenched snipers as roadkill.
It’s strange from a sociological perspective because “I WAS THERE, MAN” syndrome is so rare in games. I guess it’s because in offline games or, in fact, other MMOs, everyone’s off and doing their own thing with zero guarantee of ever working directly with or against someone else. With Planetside there were only ever a few servers, they were all locked down by region, and everyone on each server was either fighting with or against everyone else on the entire server from the second they first logged on. It’s like how you always have something to say to your friends after a great twenty minute multiplayer game. Planetside was sort of like one endless, resolve-eroding multiplayer round with the frag limit set to infinity and the time limit set to MONEY!
It made fighting a little tiring, sometimes.
But I always tell the same war story when Planetside gets mentioned. I always tell the same story because it’s a really, really good one. And I totally encourage you guys to share your own tales of daring do in the comments, but just let me get this one off my chest first.
(It’s probably best if you imagine this whole thing spoken in a tone of voice that exists somewhere between a throat cancer patient and That One Fucking P.E. Teacher You Had.)
Ahem.
Now, this wasn’t some Princess Diana shit or anything. I don’t remember exactly where I was when I first heard the news.
I do remember I was with my boys, Pyrrhic and Boff, and we were in our Prowler just trying to make a difference, same as always. Prowler’s a battle tank, ‘case you’re unawares. Looks a little something like this. It takes three men to get it up to full strength, which I remember a lot of guys on our side thought was outrageous. They never understood, see, but I reckon they’d have had something of a revelation if they ever spent some time on the other end of its guns. Shit, on some days seemed all anyone on any side could do was whine like a dying dog about the weapons made available to them, but I never complained. Hell, I was grateful. It always was a lot easier to get my knife in the belly of a typin’ man.
Anyway, we were fighting on some continent or other when we started getting all these mad messages in our chat ticker. People were saying our Sanctuary had become locked and no one could get into it.
A little explanation’s probably called for here. Each of the three sides in Planetside has a Sanctuary, a home island full of shooting ranges and long distance dropships that no other side can even set foot on. A lot of players meet up there before shipping off to a fight, and most players log off there when they quit fighting for the day so when they come back they can grab a seat on an outbound ship and drop back into the action, wherever it is, via a drop pod.
The other thing you should know is that a landmass only becomes locked to a side if they don’t have a foothold in any adjoining continents. If a player logs off outside the sanctuary and then the territory they’re in gets conquered and subsequently locked, when they log on again they’re spawned back in the sanctuary. So you can see why the idea of our sanctuary ever becoming locked would make as much sense as… well, as this war. If you compare Planetside to that there Sisyphean struggle to roll a huge boulder up a hill, our sanctuary becoming locked would be like the bottom of that hill turning into a cliff edge.
Back in the tank, I took us off the road and into a ditch so we could ask a few questions and check our maps. Sure enough, we were locked out of our own God Damned HQ. Word was coming in that those dirtnibblers over in the Vanu and New Conglomerate were having no such trouble and with their own sanctuaries, and were continuing to merrily kick our ass as if nothing was wrong.
Heck of a bug, I said to my crew. Heck of a bug. Nothing else for it, I pulled us back out of the ditch and resumed our course for whatever the Hell base we were headed towards at the time, and Boff resumed swinging our chainguns around in a search for any Top Gun wannabes. The trick there if you do see a bird is to slap the guns to the front and centre of the tank, getting the enemy pilot to think you’re missing a gunner. You want to get them nice and close before you open fire.
I honestly had no idea just how fucked the TR was until the messages starting coming in from our commanders telling every single member of the Terran Republic to quit the game. Not to fix the bug or anything. We were to stop playing as a form of protest. They figured if our entire side vanished, the devs would hurry up with the fixing of this bullshit.
So already between the TR soldiers who’d done as they were told and all the soldiers on our side who couldn’t log on, our side was in a bad place. ‘/who teams’ informed us that we were in fact fighting with just 14% of the world’s population, meaning we were a couple of thousand soldiers short of a fair fight. Not only that, word of our situation was spreading through the Vanu and NC. Barny bastards and Smurf bastards were at that moment messaging their friends and telling them to log on and grab their gear, because for the first time in the history of the game here was an opportunity to wipe one side entirely off the map. Those sodsucklers figured they had a chance to fucking win! And here’s our commanders telling us to quit!
Boy, there was a lot of cursin’ going on inside our tank as we figured all this out. Then again we’d only ever treated orders from the higher ups as advice from a crusty, crumbly grandparent anyway. Our path was our own, and the decision to keep fighting despite the bug came easily. If the enemy wanted us off this cliff then they were going to have to pry our fingers up one by one. Maybe we’d be able to spit in a few deserving eyes in the process. So I kept driving along that road, and we went to war with one o’ them renewed vigors.
Funny thing is, this situation the TR was in was only ever a dumb accident that resulted from a technical snafu, right? With Planetside the devs chose to create a war no one could ever lose, and in doing so they sacrificed the chance for anyone to win. But those of us that chose to stay on that day fought harder, cared more, and had more fun than we’d ever done before. For the first time it all meant something. Course, from a monetary perspective I guess you’ve got to take into account all the thousands of subscribers who threw their toys out of the pram as ordered and did quit in protest. Guess some folks just ain’t go the stomach for war.
There’s no glory in lying, so I’ll come out and admit that under the circumstances the TR didn’t last long. In maybe half an hour we were down to 4% of the server population and a handful of bases. The good news was that one of our commanders managed to locate his penis and blow the dust off it in time to send a global message ordering our scattered soldiers to relocate to the island of Forseral for a last stand. If every one of us crammed into just a couple of bases our hilarious number problem might be diminished.
What we weren’t counting on was the enthusiasm coming from t’other sides.
And this is where my memory starts to get a little better- the defense of our very last base. It was on the flat, leafy coast of Forseral, and a sunny day to boot. We, the few, the proud, ‘The 4%.’ The base was built in the shadow of the shadow of the big ol’ warpgate there. Ordinarily, that warpgate acted as a direct path between Forseral and our sanctuary. Course, it was as useful as knock-kneed whore right about now.
Base defense in Planetside is pretty simple. The defenders get a big compound with high walls, on which sit some mean automated turrets. They also get a few respawn tubes that everyone can use, plus the vehicle pads and airpads that spawn vehicles and aircraft. It’s all done with nanotechnology, I think. Amazing what science can do these days. Anyway, those doing the assaulting have to get a hacker into the command room, who in turn has to spend a couple of minutes getting acquainted with the central terminal. Once that’s done, the base changes hands instantly.
The attackers can also starve the place of power in the event of a stalemate, but what with the sanctuary bug potentially getting fixed at any moment our opponents on that day weren’t in what you’d call a patient mood. I’d probably go as far as to call them a downright ravenous bunch’a mudlovers.
It should be pretty easy for you to understand the severity of our situation if I just tell you that it felt like we were the ones doing the damn assaulting. We were so outgunned that just trying to man the walls got you shredded by lasher and sniper fire before you’d even lined up a shot. It was wild. Those forests around us were more purple than green. I’ve got no idea how it was we lasted as long as we did, but I’d hazard that those guarding the doors ended up pulling off some real Battle of Thermopylae shit.
My own chosen course of action was to get up on the walls and crawl between the turrets with my repair gun, bringing them back online at about a half of the speed they’d get blown up again. Sometimes I’d drop an EMP grenade into the courtyard below me if whatever got through our gate was big and scary enough, but most of my time was spent with my face buried in the guts of a turret. I couldn’t even see what we under attack from, let alone whether we were holding it back. All I could do was read the mess of capital letters that filled my chat ticker.
I’ve got no idea what it was that finallly killed me. Sniper, grenade, stabbed by someone in a stealthsuit. Could have been anything. There was too much commotion and graphical effects to pinpoint what did me as the camera rotated around my corpse, repair gun still in hand.
Problem was, I couldn’t respawn in the base again. Someone must have gotten in and wrecked our spawn tubes, so from that point me and everyone else spawned (very… slowly…) in the support tower just outside it. Yeah, that’s a pretty surefire sign you’ve lost. The base changed hands and became Vanu a couple of seconds after, making this tower the last structure in possession of the Terran Republic and our last spawn point in the entire world.
‘/who teams’, I typed again.
‘Vanu Sovereignty 51%, New Conglomerate 48%, Terran Republic 1%.’
Confident that in a situation like this I could get away with showing a bit of brass without some spoilsport calling me a douchebag, I set my chat to broadcast locally. “ALRIGHT EVERYBODY”, I said. “We are officially the top ONE PERCENT of this planet. Let’s SHOW THOSE VANU C***S WHAT WE CAN DO.”
But what was heartwarming was that I wasn’t even the only person with that idea. The local broadcasts came thick and fast. We, the fifty or so soldiers defending that tower, knew exactly what we were facing, and we knew we were in this together.
[ripper]fight to the last man!!
[pyrrhic] HOO-RAH!
[mrblister] f**king vanu f**kers f**k
I managed to push my way through the crowd gathered around the equipment terminal and get myself some landmines, then went sprinting out of the front entrance to the tower. The structure was located on a curling strip of land with our base in one direction and the sea in three others, so I could at least be guaranteed that the /most/ of the Vanu force would be coming from that direction. Goddamn hovertanks.
Already I could see the eagerest soldiers of that horrible purple army pouring out of the base and running in our direction. I armed mines with a few other engineers until the first sniper potshots at us arrived, then we ducked back inside. The fighting proper started when we were down in the basement, swapping our gear for heavier armour and bigger guns. On a whim I brought up my map. If this was a movie then our sanctuary would get unlocked again right about now, the cavalry would arrive through the warp gate not a hundred meters from us, and we’d all get enough medals to break our backs.
[pyrrhic] WE NEED ANTI ARMOUR RIGHT NOW
Course, if Planetside teaches its loyal subscribers anything it’s that war is not a movie and that war really, really fucking sucks for 98% of the time. So we didn’t get medals. Instead we got multiple incoming Vanu hovertanks, spawned fresh right out of the base we just lost.
I wasn’t trained to use anything resembling anti armour weaponry, so I just loaded an armour piercing clip into my assault rifle as I ran up the stairs to the roof. On the way I passed the front door, which we hadn’t lost control of so much as we were choosing to avoid it. Every time anyone on our side passed close enough for it to open automatically a haze of that dumbass blue energy shit the Barnies use in their weapons was let into the tower like freezing air on a cold day.
The scene from the roof was absurd. It wasn’t even that there were that many guys visible from up there. I’d just never seen enemy forces moving on a target with such purpose before. Planetside, for all its scale, never really succeeded in getting everyone working together. Squads, teams, cliquey brotherhoods, sure. But never armies. But these Vanu descending on our tower were positively galvanized. From the roof you could see scattered infantry and vehicles right up to the engine’s draw distance, and every one of them was jogging, hovering or flying straight towards us.
Not that I was impressed. My blood was up, and I was just angry. I quickly emptied my pockets of EMP grenades directed at the Magrider doing laps of the tower below me then swapped to my rifle. Didn’t those bastards coming towards us know this wasn’t fair? Couldn’t they see that? What were they hoping to achieve coming over to stomp on the only brave men our side had?
With my clip now empty I moved back into the middle of the roof to reload, crouching behind an anti-air MAX who was busy dissuading enemy planes.
I mean, did this make them feel big? Couldn’t they see that they were children next to us? We were giants! And if they killed us then we always would be! Clip empty again, move back in, reload.
I remember my kill ticker popping up at that moment to show I’d got a landmine kill. It gave me a mental image of an enemy so hungry he never took his eyes off the tower to spare a glance at the ground in front of him. It was when I went back to the lip of the roof to see if anyone had even gotten past our minefield that the sniper got me. Pop, one in the head. Simple as that.
Much as I’d like to say the subsequent wait to respawn was the longest minute I’ve ever had in an MMO, it never actually came to a minute. They got a hacker in and wrestled the tower from us before I ever got the chance to come back.
And that was that. We lost. The game was over for the TR. The last 1% had been painstakingly scrubbed from the face of the planet.
An hour later our Sanctuary got unlocked again. There was apparently some kind of apology given from a GM and everyone on our side got straight back into the important business of fighting endlessly without ever being able to win. They’re still fighting to this day, you know. To my knowledge, they still haven’t won.
And here’s me, eternally grateful for just having had the opportunity to lose.
Related Stories:
Was a great game? They have reduced it to 1 server US, 1 EU. The war rages and still no one wins.
Vista isn’t compatible unless you go to the actual planetside.exe and run it in Win98 Compatible mode.
I just resubscribed for a month to shake off my WoW scales.
RZ
You’ll find Werner abandoned, sadly, wonder if they’ll merge the servers…. ever….
i would just like to say thanks for this story. i am resubbing to PS right now lol.
oh and i was part of that 1%
this is KrazeyHorse
I played from the early release for 2 years. Climbed in rank and ultimately took over an outfit of 30 serious players. We slickly operated as a quick capture specialization platoon. Running multiple synchronized low elevation GAL drops to seal the Tower and CC captures. Ah the memories… good stuff.
I think of the myriad of tales I could tell, but there are so many. Just looking at the map reminded me of our Outfits favorite strategy. Cyssor…so many hours of joy!~
http://section8server.com/maps/cyssor.jpg
I had risen in ranks of Shining Force, and ultimately took over as Outfit Commander. Being a Reaver pilot I had accustomed myself to flying low, fast, afterburner powered flights through the trees and valleys. I liked the element of surprise that this gave me over the traditional…yawn…boring plink from range that most pilots/outfits swore by. Leading an outfit while flying a reaver as described above is a bit awkward so I knew I had to do something different So I learned to fly the GAL…correctly.
For those that are newbish to our lingo, GAL is short for Galaxy. Think of your average school bus, hollow it out and put a small tank in it, strap a couple wings on it and top it all off with some J.A.T.O. rockets for that extra burst of speed and voila…you have a GAL. About as agile as a loaded oil tanker with an outboard motor, but it could take, and in the right hands give quite a beating. In desperate situations it also served to whisk away pesky infantry at vehicle terminals when you planted your nose on them.
For a freshly minted Outfit Commander looking to organize a fighting force for lighting ops it was the right tool for getting large quantities of troops in the same location at the same time. For a high-speed accustomed Reaver pilot, it served as a frequent coffin, but always getting the troops out first. Most Galaxy pilots swore to take their troops to the upper limits of ionosphere, frequently came to a full stop, and politely asked people to drop. It was safe for the Galaxy. At the time there was no real threats at those altitudes, but this strategy left your average solder in suspended state for quite a long time…10, 20 seconds? Certainly as a recipient of enemy GAL drops, I could always count on being able to run to a weapons terminal, arm the appropriate arsenal, run to the top of the tower and be ready for the hack… all before the suspended soldier landed. Simply brilliant…at filling body bags with your own soldiers.
For me, my motto was low and mean. I had custom macro’s at my finger tips to bark orders to my accompaniment of pain dealers. “GET YOUR ARSE OUT WHEN I SAY OR I DROP YOU A MILE OFF SHORE” was a favorite. Straight, to the point, and once people were accustom to it, they found themselves less than one second from the top of a hot LZ. All together, and very few missing the target. I would fly low…real low… if I didn’t have a soldier or two processed through my turbines on the way to the LZ I wasn’t low enough. I would keep my bird following the contours until right at the last moment, nose up, level off and BARK….”Lightning GO, GO, GO”…clunk as it disengaged a 100m from the front of the tower to lay a cover and cause distraction for ground defenses. Then….”OUT, OUT, oUT!”…clunk, clunk, clunk…away with the rest on top. No slowing down, no waiting for some namby panzy to get his pants on… and then AFTERBURN and DIVE to right above the surface and out to sea. If there were any hangers on, I would promptly deposit them in the depths, and respond to their hate mail all the way back to the previous base. If the tower didn’t fall, which honestly was fairly rare with a GAL full of soldiers, MAXs and lighting, then I simply would drop into the bustling courtyard or AMS shield zone, await my spawning soldiers and spam “HOT HOT HOT Drops..GET ON THE BUS!!!”. Spec’ing for CE was always handy as well, cus you were guaranteed to have a decent repair job. But Gals were tough if flown right. Rinse/Repeat.
Using these tactics my humble little company of bull dogs frequently ended multi-hour stand-offs at towers and base CCs. It was a good time, with a lot of good fellows. I remember having a new recruit gripe about our military-like operations. “It is just a game…whine, moan..” My response was pretty clear. “You ride with the best, you’re gunna operate like the best.” ….clunk….blub blub girggle girggle…
Titus, OC Shining Force, Markov
THAT SHIT IS EPICCALLY EPIC! Hell i would have JOINED the game on that day just so i could have been part of that last stand! And here i though EVE online had epic battles…
wow…….. i was never old enough to even hear about this game in its prime, but after reading all of this, i really wish i was. I tried downloading it, but it wont work, someone said it wont work on vista, except for some patch or crap like that,
any help?
and also anyone have suggestions for first-time players if i ever get this working?
Emerald: KawiRider. I Was There Man. Would be nice to find out what all my old outfitmates are up to. That game was my first dive into the MMO world – rocked it with a P3 933 and a GeForce FX 5200. PlanetSlideshow more like it. Some of the best game memories I have are from playing that game.
Markov, Zcomando, BR 25 CR 5 NC!! HURRAH, Yea i was there definitely, i ran that show nearing the end. lol boy that game was fun for the first 2-3 years i WAS the NC sniper no challenge any where, TR, VS i took them all down lol. my story is the time me and MadKat took down a entire base with 2 boltrifles and harraser full of ammo. lol god that was fun we held that base down for 30 to 40 mins air units couldnt get off. Tanks found them selves with no driver because he had died before the tank spawned. That was a great day. and i can say i was there for 4 years and i gave that game every thing i had! AND I DONT REGRET IT HURRAH! NC FOREVER
Ah, the good days of Planetside.
I never came across any MMO I had more fun playing.
Sure, it was an endless war, but the occasions were one side would actually have been able to win over another were rare and usually caused by bugs.
I quit back then when they introduced Battleframes, like most people from my outfit, I believe.
I was there man…
impact
Druckwelle Outfit
Vanu Sovereignty
Werner
I was playing NC in a huge armor outfit when the TR sanc went down. I remember that very well. We personally thought that it was incredibly unfair and we took the fight to the VS instead, stealing base after base from them trying to lure them off of you guys. We had them all the way back to Sanc on our side and we STILL couldn’t coax them to layoff.
VS always were the scum of the game.
I had a pretty memorable battle back in 2006 i think it was…anyway the battle was raging on solsar the nc were fighting to take it back from the tr. First let me give you a backdrop on the situation, the main tr defense was holed up in the uppermost tech plant on solsor i forgot the name anyways the population was in the nc favor for awhile then the tr pop just went up out of nowhere so the main nc force was attacking on the southern gate and fought there for some time about half a hour or so, my outfit m8 blasterworm and I decided to go run our bfr’s we had a few skirmishes here and there getting some kills then i see a sitrep(situationreport) pop up in my chat saying there is a large reaver squadron headed outta the west solsar gate. we went back to base to refit for AA blasterworm had a stolen invader and i was flying the eagle. After we refitted we headed west to the warpgate and low and behold we crest a large hill and count about 25-30 man reaver platoon flowing down the hilside like water to avoid visual detection most likley but it looked too cool. So we said in TS “umm we need AA” lol, anyway me and blasterW opened fire on the reaver fleet and at first they paid no heed to the flak and sparrow and i suffered major shield damage so i fell back about 200m to the next mountain side as blaster covered my retreat then i turned around and laid in to cover blasters retreat(note their objective was the base, we were the only 2 who bothered to meet the reavers in the field… i expressed my dissapointment in command chat … At this time tho i tried to contact another bfr pilot that was at the front line johnnystalk was his name, he told me he was on hes way. Needless to say we were stuck army of two… the back and forth game we and the reavers played lasted around a hour finaly pushed them back to the warp gate and played the containment game for as long as we thought that they thought that we would win agenst the reavers but in fact if the reavers would have primaried instead of hit and run they would have pwned us. Thus concluding, johnny arrived after being delayed by suicide-deci’s and the reavers finnaly disbanded their unit and we claimed victory! if it wasnt for blasterworm’s impressive bfr piloting skillz we might have been telling another story about how a bunch of reavers pwned everyone in the rear=)
The game lived and died by one gameplay mechanic that ultimately aided in its downfall.
The ability to have thousands of people battling simultaneously over numerous continents was the main draw for Planetside. When SOE raped the gameplay with a series of brutal patches, the player base that the game relied so heavily on dwindled. How I would have loved to have seen the epic 100v100 battles, wave after wave of friend and foe battling across land air and sea. I wasn’t fortunate enough to have the ability to play Planetside at its peak. Instead, I have fallen upon a faint light of what it used to be.
I started playing again recently [Gemini, US] and I have to say, while the numbers aren’t nearly what they used to be, there is never a shortage of firefights. I never found myself without a battle, and almost instantly after I would log in I would get party invites. There were plenty of battles and people to interact with. Then again, it’s easy to impress me. I never experienced what it was like at its peak so in all reality, the current populations are my personal ‘peak’.
I wonder, does anyone still play WWII Online? It looks pretty dated but I heard people still play…might be interesting.
Don’t really have many glory-filled war stories as my time with the game has been short. The game, when you take it all in, can be so breathtaking it makes the faults seem much less significant.
Rolling through the countryside with a small pack of tanks behind enemy lines…going from controlling one base to the entire continent…looking up at the sky around a contested area and seeing the mortar, AA flak, bullets, lasers, planes; it really makes one forget the faults Planetside has. It can still be a truly epic game and a hell of a lot of fun if you let it.
I played for several years, starting at the beggining where it was the best IMO. Best screen shot I have is when the TR Captured and held the world for about 30 min. Still have the Screen shot and it was just awsome. Planetside really has done something no other MMO has been able to. Out of all the MMO’s I have played, I really do miss the early days of Planetside.
I just reactivated recently and it’s a blast. The population is lower, but not so low as to ruin the fun (continents are still getting pop-locked from what I’m seeing). Overall balance seems good and all the stir caused by balancing and re-balancing and BFRs very settled down. BFRs are still around, but in my opinion they found their place in the scheme of things. I usually see 0-3 of them in a battle and a lot more tanks and other vehicles and infantry. I’ve seen them taken down by magriders, reavers, a pack of lightnings, infantry, CEs, etc.
I’ve been having an itch to play this again for years. I wanted to try and play the demo to see if it was as good as I remember but the main webpage was so jacked up whenever I tried that I couldn’t get the download to work or get a temp key ( i long ago lost my Planetside CD and cd key lol)
I may have a look at it again to see if there is a trial going on, probably not though. I quit playing just after they introduced the AA buggy (not because of that, just because my group stopped logging in and it got boring playing alone)
I’m not sure on getting a trial key (one thing I found makes it sound like in 2006 they had a trial where any station account could log on and play to level 6, maybe that is still in effect?), but if you buy the game (I think it’s $20 now and a digital download), you can simply get the Station Launcher and it will download the game for you.
There is a trial but SOE doesn’t want you to know. I haven’t tried it myself but a friend of mine gave these instructions:
“First, go to the Planetside Official Forums, then click the Join Here Button, located at the top of your screen, between “sign in” and “why join.” You have to create an entirely new Station account to get the free 14 day trial. Yes, it’s only 14 days, but you can just make a new account every couple of weeks if you want to keep playing for free. I’m not certain, but I think you can use the same email address over and over. If not, it’s no big deal to just make a few throw away email accounts on hotmail or yahoo to create a new account.
Once you’ve made the new account, download the beta launchpad and install it. Run it, then log in with the account you just made on the website. Click “Planetside Try Free/Activate Game.” Click the button to start the trial period. It will download/patch the game depending on whether you have it installed or not.”
As for war stories I have one for every other one posted here. So I’ll post a kind of story that hasn’t been posted yet.
I’m a Vanu loyalist, I just am. So when one of my friends switched back to his TR I couldn’t let this act of heresy go unanswered. Being an Infiltrator I had but one mission: Assassination. This was back in the days where /who would give you a name and location regardless of what side the person was on and I kept a close watch to see if he would log in. One day I got lucky. He was on Cyssor in a TR vs NC fight. I would be the ONLY VS on the cont. No backup, no second chances, and no respawns. The TR were at Nzame and the NC were on the back foot at Mukuru. I figured the best chance I would have of finding him would be with the zerg on the front line. I dropped far north of Nzame to avoid the random patrol. I slowly moved my way up to the cliff over looking the base. Then I realized I would be walking into the middle of a giant TR zerg. Tanks were all over and the courtyard was positively humming with activity. I was on a mission however, and I would not be daunted. Getting into the base was a nasty affair. Ground vehicles moving in and out of the mined front gate made for a game of Frogger where the frog was by necessity a snail. I made it through and found to my delight that no one had mined the front door. Never mind the heavy infantry traffic that ran in and out, that just made the job easier, as a door opening by itself would have been a dead give away. Now inside the lobby, moving slow not to open any doors that had not been kindly left open by a passing foe. I made it down the stairs and into the room next to the spawn. I couldn’t go into the spawn because of the pain field that protected it as these were the days before sensor shield. Then I waited. Slowly I came to feel that I would never find my prey in the rolling mess. I had not seen hide nor hair of my prey during the whole time of my incursion. So I figured I should get a kill or two while I was here. I planted an explosive behind a door and waited for the first sap to find it. A moment later I pushed the little red button as a foe ran through the door to the stairs. Through the dust I saw my ridicule turn red for a moment with a name. And then the doors closed. Somewhere in my mind I realized that the name that had shown for a moment was familiar. It was beyond familiar in fact. It was THE name. I hot swapped to my beloved AMP pistol and a moment later my mark ran through the door with a chain gun at the ready. I waited for a moment as he looked around the room and ran just past me. I leapt at him, my AMP making itself known with a hail of poorly aimed destruction. We spun around each other, his chain gun spewing death and seeking out my supple armorless flesh, and my AMP ripping into his armored hide. Then it was over, I was wounded by my prey was dead. (he later claimed lag was at fault) However, I was still near spawn and this encounter would not have gone unnoticed by the mass of enemies just over my head. I sprinted out to the back door where I healed myself and found a random ATV sitting outside. Oh, at that moment how I wished I had the ability to use it. Instead all I could do was to hack it and to decon it, denying its use to the previous owner. As I did this I looked up to find a convoy of tanks and buggies and aircraft escorting an LLU (flag for CTF bases) back to base. I froze. Then in my mind I said: “You idiot we need to die to get back to sanc and deny our prey of killing us back!” By this time the convoy had nearly past. However, there was one APC near the rear with gunners that had not yet entered the base. I rushed it with my AMP spraying anti-personnel rounds into it doing nothing. By the time the gunners had parsed what was going on I was already ramming my face into the side of their vehicle under their guns. The driver tried to pull away from me but ended up rammed into a door leading into a bunker. Doors will despawn any vehicles that block them after a short period. So this door caused this APC to boot everyone out and removed the vehicle. A moment later the three now wheeless TR gave me a trip back to Sanc.
I’ve got several other epic stories, like the gen hold we did on the TR and it was the NC who eventually got us out after they took the base, or using the bomber for the tail gun and fighting off 8 enemy aircraft simultaneously and making it away alive with a few kills, or driving the galaxy in a two man group trying to keep up with base drainers on multiple conts. Good times all around.
However, I’ll probably be remembered most for the video series titled “Why I Should Have Been Banned”: http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=EA7AB58A57EDAD0B
Captain1nsaneo
Johari Server, 25/5
Great story!! “I was there man!” LOL – If I remember correctly, on that fateful day, we (the honorable NC) left the TR alone once we had erradicated you from all but 1 base. Unfortunately it would seem the VS weren’t so kind.
Planetside, in my mind, still lives up to be one of only 2 games that i’ve ever had these sort of epic “memories” with. The other being Air Warrior (Damn you EA!!). Regardless I was an active subscriber in ‘04 and have been a returning subscriber to P.S. on and off since ‘06. Until recently all seemed lost about the game. The numbers were dropping, the complaints of emptiness seemed rampant, but it seems that all has recently started to change. I recently logged back in for the first time in almost a year to find continents are now population locked again! Hell, for the first time in nearly 3 years I found myself hot-dropping into the middle of a FULL scale assault. not the measly 40v40 or even 60v60 scale, im talking 100’s of troops battling one another. I figured it might just be one of those ever sporatic events that the devs still try and throw out there once in a blue moon, so i logged in a few days later. To my surpise im finding the game seems to have gotten a slight spark back now. Populations are growing, there’s “raiding” of continents again, and it almost feels like P.S from the ‘05-06 days (i dare not say its AS active as ‘03-04 yet).
That said – if ANY of you who haven’t given it a shot think the above stories sound great – id say go for it – its $20 for the potential to experience a story like the one above. If any of you DO decide to give it a go, feel free to look me up in game. (Player name: Tigue – New Conglomerate Faction – Gemini Server) and i’ll happily help you through some basics (beyond what their simple tutorial system offers).
Again – Thanks for the great story!!
Signed up for PS right when it went live. Has never played a MMO before, a total online FPS noob, and here I was in PS, 10 continents, hugs expanses of space, giant bases, and a totally confusing opera of pure absolute FPS.
Few days in I ‘got’ PS, was on Hossin, as a NC noob, distinctly rmbr it was a Friday night and the server was busssssy lol. Somehow I learned to follow the zerg and there was this bridge, NC on one side and TR on the other. The intensity of what followed, for over an hour, the noise, the mayhem, the destruction, its like it was just yesterday.
The bridge was so full of both TR and NC tanks no way could infantry get over and anything that got onto it was attracting apolyptic attentions, by now I’d gotten advice from a dude in a gold colouted suit, me in my plue pyjamas hehe and I found both the Jackhammer and the rocket launcher that you controlled with teh mouse after every launch.
After that it was obsession for several months, eventually getting a shiny gold suit of me own, nothing like it ever since!
This post reminded me of why I enjoyed the game so much.
So much that I just resubscribed to play it again.
I was there, man. Years and years, ever since Johari. I saw names like Ostekake come and go, but through the whole thing I never forgot the old days. Before the Aftershock, the Bending, the Cores, the Liberator… before everything… I was there.
You don’t forget something like Auraxis. You just can’t. It changes you.
I still love this game, doesn’t have much of a point but that’s one of the things I like about it. I think it was and still is a fantastic game. They merged the final two servers so now it’s just 1 server now, still a decent population playing the game though. Also, I got past the Vista problem by installing Linux Mint, works great.
The Vista problem is an easy fix. Just run it as Administrator and Planetside works fine.
Still some epic fights going on. My outfit, Ghosts of the Revolution, did an Ewok raid for our Sunday Night Fun Raid this past sunday. It’s where you load up a phantasm, everyone grabs AV and Jammer Grenades, and then we all fly out hunting BFR’s to drop on. Find one, drop on it, Jammer the junk out of it and pound it with AV.
I was there.
WolfLordAndy,
58th Marine Corp (The Wildcards),
member corp of the NCWA,
NC Werner.
The game has yet to be climaxed, and I look forward to the promise of Planetside 2 which SOE are finally teasing us with. So many war stories, but by far the funniest was when I flew a galaxy into a very, very hot base. I had just done a gal drop at the back door, flying in very low on the terrain as it was a VS base and a gal drop from high up is no protection from the Starfire maxs. After dropping my squad I notice my health is pretty low, so my options are to bail and die, or ram something and die. So I see an enemy AMS flickering in the far corner of the base, I deside “why not” and head straight for it, full afterburner. Now for best effect when ramming things in a gal, you want to bail at the last second so it explodes on contact, rather then just sliding and jumping around.
I bailed out perfectly as I entered the bubble, low and behold, a large number of troops had just respawned. Not just that, but some industrious little engineer had desided that they would put mines right underneath the AMS. The next few seconds were a bit of a a blur, as my fall set off many of the mines killing VS and mangling there AMS, and in a split second after, my newly free’d Galaxy touched the AMS and blew up, killing it, thus making it also explode, which killed many more VS that had just spawned in.
I never got an acurate kill count, as the mines that killed VS counted as teamkills for whoever put the mines down, and the AMS explosion counted for the AMS driver for some bizare reason. But it was a truely epic feat. Made all the sweeter when the squad I had dropped managed to get to the gen and kill it. In a single manouver we had taken out both the base and courtyard AMS spawn points, forcing them to all respawn a large distance away at the next base (we already had the tower).
Sorry for length! Got a bit carried away with the story telling!
Werner was merged recently. Just one server left, Gemini.
I remember the day you describe. I was on the opposite team, fighting for the New Conglomerate alongside my outfit. I remember making several attempts to just get in the way and steal a few kills from the Vanu, but each attempt resulted in an almost instant death as soon as we saw the TR base. NC were kind of battling on another front, on the other end of the map (or at least the group I was with was).
Since then, I have witnessed 3 more sanctuary locks on the New Conglomerate side. I have played Planetside for 6 years and continue to do so today. I still love the game, even with all its flaws.
My favourite part of Planetside? The rear entrance to the main bases. Whether assaulting or defending, that section of a base was like living the first Storm Trooper invasion of the rebel ship out of Star Wars with a bunch of your buddies.
A bud of mine and I had an awesome strategy for that tunnel – pop in a plasma grenade or two to get ‘em burning, throw in a bit of lasher spam to make ‘em run after they try to hunker down in cover, and then someone shoots ‘em in the back with a sniper rifle to finish ‘em off. Pretty brutal, but very effective.
Yeah, we were jerks. ;)
Man…..I saw the article about the new Planetside game, then read this. Now I’m going to have to go resubscribe….
Outfit: Sturmgrenadier
Server: Emerald
I played for 4 years as my one and only online (or any other) game. Sturmgrenadier ( aka SG) rolled into PS with hundreds of members. Although that one game was not the first ( or even second) for SG, it definately defined us as a guild. The “I was there” for PS is so overwhelming within SG, us PS crusties are well known for lasping in to talk of “the good ole days of PS”. Even today with just a mere suggestion that PS Next is being thought of, has caused us to create a portal location and has brought back old SG members long lost to wandering the net looking for the next game that could rekindle that glory.
My big thought is that PS was nearly two games, there was playing PS solo which probably sucked, and playing with an oufit ( guild) which made PS second to none in the experience it created.
The best team based MMO ever!
Best Game ever for a FPS/MMORPG. Battles were epic and communications key. Or if you wanted to say Fuck it and you had the skills, you could always find that obscur Tower battles were only the Elites went at it. Those were the days. Hopefully some day that will all happen again.
What an great game, but what a lame coding and support. SOE didn’t give a damn about it for years. There is no other game in the world that is able to get close to the massivness of the fighghts (up to 400 players in a single “map”). Graphics is old, but the warfare (infantry running side-by-side with armor and supported from air by planes) game provides (with full servers of course) is a feat of magnificence.
Back to the OP tho, he did forget to mention one thing – the game was well unbalanced, especially with the nerfs. I did join PS in 2005 or so and at that time, Vanu (the purple swarm in the article) did suck so heavily, that we had to really outnumber enemy in order to conquer a base. If Vanu sucked like that during the sanctuary f..k-up, then you can’t wonder every single Vanu logged.
I was there – not at the particular battle above, but at many epic other battles.
DocHoliday – TR/Markov
Played PS for many years and finally quit because I had nearly every base and every island memorized. PS is my favorite game of all time – bar none. I hope PS Next keeps all the great aspects of the original and builds in even more content. If so, I’ll happily play PS Next for years!
Those who never played can never really understand or appreciate the nail-biting tension of PS at the beginning. Man, you had to pay attention or you were dead – period. And if you left your toon unattended for 30 seconds in a hotly contested base fight, you most likely than had to choose a respawn point when you returned because you had been killed.
My favorite memories were massive bridge battles that were unbelievably chaotic and base defenses that lasted for hours even if we (the TR) had a massive population disadvantage on the continent.
I served with some great players – most more talented than me. But I did my part, and I was proud to have served. And I’ll sign up again when they offer the new Planetside.
So true. I’ve totally forgotten the clan I was with in the last days of open beta, and then finding the game again at Planetside Reserves. And then playing it through for a few, and then unsubbing in sad frustration. Kind of like coming home, and discovering it is too painful to stay for long, just long enough to remember the good old days with a mental sniffle.
So. I play for the Terran Republic (TR).
One day I was in the caverns and got a message from someone on the enemy team. He told me they’d stolen a TR tank and asked me if I could get them some ammo.
wtf? You stole one of my team’s tanks and now you want me to get you ammo for it? What do I look like?
I was in a good mood. I told him no. If I’d been in a bad mood I’d have told him yes, arranged a meeting, then shot him. Bring him some ammo… Goddamn bluebies.
So, there’s a bit of a fight down there that goes on for a while. In the end, my team has 1 spawn point left and it’s me vs 7 enemies. I don’t know where the rest of my team went. (Cowards!) Eventually they get me down to where they’re camping the last spawn spot. I die, I spawn, they immediately kill me, repeat.
One of them sends me a tell, “You should have given us the ammo.”
Let me tell you a little secret. I’m a vindictive bastard. So you ask me for ammo like I’m some kinda bootlickin traitor to my team, then you gloat. Oh hell no. Bitch.
So I tried to escape the spawn camp. Go this way, die. Respawn. Go that way, get a couple steps, die. Respawn. Repeat about 10 times. Tenacity is my other hobby. Every attempt was a 30 second wait to respawn again, but I wasn’t going to let people like that take my last spawn point for free. I could have left and gone somewhere else, but they had to open their mouth, so now I’m in Vindictive Mode, so I’m going to keep trying to kill them for as long as I can.
And the 11th time worked! The 11th time I made it. I got out of the door with a pixel of life left and did the Forrest Gump run through twists and turns and when I finally looked back, they were nowhere to be seen.
I made my way to an equipment terminal tucked away in the netherlands of the caves and got suited up. Healed up? Check. New suit of armor? Check. Machinegun? Check. Rocket launcher? Check. Extra bullets and medkits? Check.
This has to be one of my personal favorite Planetside memories. It was total Rambo: First Blood.
Thing is, most Planetside players don’t like the caves. I don’t know why, really, I guess because they’re so complex. I like them, though. A lot. I spend a lot of time down there. They’re MY caves, goddammit. Someone’s making fun of me in my caves? Spawn camping me and sending me gloaty tells in my caves? Horseshit. Get the fuck out of my cave.
So I carefully picked my way back towards the spawn point. Turns out, they’d gotten confident and had split up to look for me.
Found a guy. Killed him.
Found another guy. Killed him.
Found a guy in a MAX suit (super heavy armor, like a small tank with feet). I ran away…. he chased me. To a big mannable turret. Which I jumped into. Then killed him.
Now you gotta figure to the rest of the squad, this must be alarming. You know there’s only 1 enemy left and he just barely got out alive. There’s 7 of you, it’s not a problem, right? Then on your squad HUD you see Bob’s health meter drop to 0 and “PecosBill [picture of a gun] Bob” on your text. Then Frank’s health meter drops to 0 and “PecosBill [picture of a gun] Frank” scrolls up.
And since there’s 7 of you, you didn’t bother to bring up the portable spawn station, so your closest respawn point is half a mile away.
So this has gotta start to worry you after the 3rd or 4th death. Some guy you were making fun of just a second ago has gotten loose and is killing your whole squad one at a time and, as Rambo would say, he’s comin ta git you.
I worked my way back and managed to kill 6 of the 7 guys who were spawncamping me, 1 by 1. One more kill and I’d be able to resecure the base.
Sadly, the 7th guy got me. I guess just like all the movies, every team of villains has to have that one guy that’s actually good.
And they’d captured the last spawn spot, so I couldn’t spawn anymore. They’d won.
But I bet they’ll think real hard about asking another Terran Republic member for free ammo.
We’ll give ya ammo alright…
Probably pretty redundant, but SHIT, I WAS THERE.
Fortunately, I was on the side of the New Conglomerate, and we teamed up with those purple fags (temporarily) and wiped you guys out.
I didn’t know much about the game back then, and all i knew was that one of the really high commanders (EmoTep i believe) was really psyched that we were kicking some Terran ass.
There were lots of rumors going on about how once the terrans had nothing left, we could get into their sanc, but apparently, it was locked (which i didn’t know at the time). But yeah…
Good times.
until they kicked the reserves off, and then my game started glitching so it always loads fully to the NC sanctuary, then freezes. x.x
I love this story. I really got into it to the point where I was starting to get emotional. If I ever start playing Planetside, you’ve sold my soul to the TR.
Planetside… and infantry..
I played planetside in the beta and for about a year from the release, quitting due to school. I played again in the reserves around 2008, but something was different and i just thought it was because of less players, but this article really brought me back!! Those times were amazing! But still it’s a game that was an experience that’s still in my head, i absolutely had my best online time in this game!
Also, this game reminds me of the 2d shooter Infantry! also developed by sony online entertainment. The old CTF map, with hundreds of players on a single map, with squads capturing the flags, while defending their own in bases and filled up with turrets and cannons. And the roaming elite squads not caring the least about the flags outside the buildings, with 30+ members just shooting the unfortunate lone player to death that happend to stumble into them haha. And when just walking around youll stumbe on 5 invisible infiltrators suddenly shooting you in the back out of nowhere, then you turn around and kill all five of them cause they are noobs. Haha.. Ah, these two games were my favourite online games. those times cant be brought back, both games are different and dying. I really wish planetside 2 can do it, it could be an amazing game and i’ll buy it immidietly! For sure!
I was there man! lol!
Linus
Werner
Thinking about getting another sub to see how shits going…