Rock, Paper, Shotgun

05/09/2008 at 11:15 Quinns says:

Dude it’s cool. Do you have any idea how smart I felt reading your post.

05/09/2008 at 11:43 MacBeth says:

I could never play a war-based MMO where there’s no way to lose. For my shame I went to a few LARP events that had a similar problem – to keep everyone happy, the consequences of any victory had to be neutered. It works in the endless conflict of TF2 etc. when the battle between RED and BLU is never meant to mean anything, but in a larger scale game I’d really need to feel I was making a difference to the eventual outcome of the war.

Sure, there’d be balance issues (winning-team-joining, for one) but I would think there could be workable systems to encourage people to join and fight for weaker sides (greater rewards, cheaper subscriptions even?)

Just saying I’d love to play an MMO where the war was going to be won (eventually) by one side or the other. WH40K would seem to be ideal for such a scenario… we can dream…

05/09/2008 at 11:57 schizoslayer says:

My best ever day in Planetside provided the material for this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5k-7kYs6PX0

05/09/2008 at 12:12 Kelduum says:

This echos the fun I had too – somehow I ended up on the US server, Emerald, with a group named ‘Terran High Command’, who were mainly military and police officers.

There were only a handful of us, but we would consistently take and hold some base in the middle of enemy territory, while wave after wave of hostiles were mown down, and other TR members used out foot in the door to

I spent so many hours, flying around solo, taking bases offline and hacking towers, just to redirect the zerg, and make the enemy commanders think there was a larger force there than there was.

I eventually worked it out, and could swap a base over from hostile to friendly control in 15-30 minutes, which was great, as I could then take down two bases at once, which got loads of attention from the enemies.

The standard thing would be to start a small incursion, get their attention, then fall back while we take the bases behind them as they are busy with the other TR on the front lines, restiling in us taking the whole continent.

I was there man… I was there.

The only thing to beat than buzz is Eve.

Oh and Jim, I can’t wait – sounds promising. (And I dunno if that Navy Augoror setup in the EG Eve Politics thread is any good in practice, but it should do a half decent job.)

05/09/2008 at 12:28 Surgeon says:

The Planetside news certainly sounds intriguing.
I wonder if this has anything to do with the roadmap announcements from the Fan Faire?

If any old vets are thinking of coming back, here’s what they want to do/add/change in the future :

http://forums.station.sony.com/ps/posts/list.m?topic_id=88000020046

Whether or not any or all of it will happen is questionable, considering past announcements of this sort. (Redesigned bases anyone?)
But fingers crossed.

05/09/2008 at 12:30 Kommissar Nicko says:

Brilliant story.

To me this is just proof that the only time an MMO can be fun is when there’s some real oh-fucking-god-severe consequences to really losing.

That’s why EVE is pretty fun, just so long as you don’t get blown up.

05/09/2008 at 12:56 Fashigady says:

Epic, truly epic.

05/09/2008 at 13:06 Nilocy says:

Very well written. I myself am a Planetside Veteran, under the name Nilocy (shockhorror). I used to be an expert Gal Pilot for the TR i might add, man i loved those babies. Flying in, kicking everyone out when they weren’t ready, getting assist kills. It was magical. I do remember a time when the TR sucessfully held the entire world by themselves. It was a sight i’ll never forget. Everything, and everyone Red, not just from the blood on the walls, but the maps, every single cont’ gone red, apart from ofc the sanc’s. It was the most defining online experiance in my online life. It was probably the best MMOFPS there will ever be, shame it died and they never made a second one.

One of my favourite memories was the instance of the Cyssor battles, with the massive bridge epics that took hours to conquer. The Vanu were held up in their shield capital, the timer going down. The NC were pouring in from the north, us assaulting the south. Me and a few outfit friends manned a Raider (The TR varient of the APC). That day we took down 7 BFR’s, countless tanks, and a hellovalot of infantry. It was a day to be sorely missed. I loved that game. And its true, no-one who hasn’t played the game can truely know what its like. I was there man, I was there.

Elite Terran C.A.L.S for ever.

05/09/2008 at 13:23 MetalCircus says:

I remember playing reserves a while back and it was great. The feeling of “oh shit” you get when you’re sat in a bunker with someone you don’t know, but you look at them and know they’re ready too, and then you look to the horizon and watch swathes of tanks and those massive walking robot things stomp over the horizon… well, it’s a special feeling. You really do feel like “Bring it on” even if you are staring defeat in the face.

05/09/2008 at 13:26 MisterBritish says:

Haha, brilliant! Got a Firefly feeling reading that, like I was listening to a Browncoat reeling off war stories :P

05/09/2008 at 13:27 Cope says:

Planetside was an epic game for the first year of its release. Tons of fun. Maybe the most fun I’ve ever had in an online game. Then they introduced that expansion pack and everything went downhill from there.

Still sometimes I wish I could climb back in the cockpit of a Reaver and do some strafing runs on enemy armor columns, or maybe play the silent cloaker and hack peoples vehicles out from under them when they stop to reload. Or even just sit on a base wall lobbing plasma grenades at the enemies main AMS in the area. Good times.

Hell I think I might have been there as one of the barneys in that battle :D

05/09/2008 at 13:44 Surgeon says:

Ging says :
Isn’t there an asian company that’s bought the rights to PS and are remaking it?

Hey Ging, apparently a Chinese team are using the same engine that was used for PS. It is in Beta at the moment and is called Welkin 4591.
There is a good FAQ about it on the Azure Twilight site :
http://azuretwilight.org/index.php?welkin

05/09/2008 at 13:52 Grey_Ghost says:

“exciting Planetside news”? You certain your not suffering from head trauma?

05/09/2008 at 13:58 Torgen says:

If you’re looking for massive battles like this, with the same sort of gritty war experiences, BUT one side actually does get to push the other off the map, check out WWII Online.

Yeah, yeah, I was there since before the beginning, and remember all the trouble it had too, but you’d never recognize it as the same game now. Many new vehicles and infantry “classes”, each in-game division has it’s own shoulder patch/vehicle badge, mortars, anti-tank guns, armored cars, light tanks, heavy tanks, fighters, bombers, STUKAS!

No more riding 20 minutes to a battle, if your side gets a truck close to the enemy town. Now, a truck can “deploy” into a mobile spawn point that infantry can use.

Damn, I got myself so worked up that I’m going to have to make time to snipe some Krauts tonight. :)

05/09/2008 at 14:41 aquazombie says:

My god, a WH 40k mmo? That would probably be the greatest thing every (exaggeration). Seriously, I would be preorder it the day it was announced and play it in my dreams until release. As long as you can win, I’m fine then. Although the 40k universe is well suited to an endless conflict, imo, something like temporary victories would be great.

05/09/2008 at 16:02 Quine says:

Man, I was there too. I must have spent a couple of years solidly shooting people up and listening to ragga. Wonder what my neighbours thought?

So many good memories- like the tower assault that took half a day to conclude, my first guided-missile experience during a base defence, and the awesome time all three sides converged on the base we were defending- never has a grenade launcher been so much fun.

The fact that the world was huge and the overall winning conditions so vague (or nonexistant) that made you make up your own objectives- so much more satifying than something spme quest NPC dishes out. When your squad decided to take and hold a base virtually by themselves to move a front forward, and you ended up in closely fought battles with identifiable enemy squads before more guys from your faction arrived and a strong ad-hoc outfit bonded over their little victories.

Still the #1 game experience for me, all these years later.

05/09/2008 at 16:40 elias says:

Great story! : ) I really enjoyed it.

05/09/2008 at 16:57 OnyxRaven says:

Our outfit was Pirate Ninjas on the TR side… though I can’t remember what the server name we were originally on was – Markov?

In any case, most of us quit not long after the first major patch – most thought it changed too much of the game to continue playing the way we were, and it wasn’t going to be fun anymore.

I played unoutfitted for a while, mostly mosquito-sniping+hacking but it wasn’t near the same as it was with a big group of folks all on voice chat, timing the flight in of full galaxies with the ground support for maximum effect, calling in sat strikes or galaxy-kamikazi on enemy APS, and just plain being in a badass outfit that could storm a base and turn the tide of a battle.

I’ve still got my SOE all access pass, but haven’t installed planetside since I tried it out last. Thinking about it again makes me want to get a big group of people and rush some bitches.

05/09/2008 at 17:20 Schtee says:

I haven’t read your article yet…I got a few paragraphs in. But yeah, Ostekake? BMC? I was there man…literally in that outfit. True story. BigFreak [BMC]. Started on day 1 but I was lazy. Here’s me all hitting BR 20 from blowing up a thing: http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v146/BigFreak/Planetside/?action=view&current=br20.jpg

Word.

05/09/2008 at 17:23 JackFlash says:

Last time I got that feeling from a game was in SubSpace. And that was, oh … 1997. Anyone else remember that one?

05/09/2008 at 17:41 Schtee says:

Absolutely. It was one of a kind and very special to me. I was literally thinking this morning if it was worth signing up to WW2 online (which apparently, like, people still play) to sate my hunger. But I doubt it’ll be the same.

05/09/2008 at 17:43 Losty says:

Good old days on Planetside were indeed very good, thing that keeps popping back to me is the first time i played it. The impression it left, making me play the game for a good 4+ years, the longest game I’ve ever played non-stop.

Shame they killed it multiple times over when the game seemed to pick back up players, good memories and allot of good friends left from it, nothing more.

Technoligy = Might,
Vanu Sovereignty,
Lostsoul, Werner

05/09/2008 at 18:01 Arnulf says:

New Conglomerate here. Sir.

Terran scum.

05/09/2008 at 18:18 Homunculus says:

Jim’s PC gamer review of Planetside stated that one measure of a game is the strength of anecdotes that it engenders. In all the games I’ve played, this one remains the most fondestly regarded, and the most vividly remembered. Nothing has yet managed to match the scale of multiple full Galaxy dropships co-ordinating troop deployment over a heavily defended base.

I’m one of the fortunate few to have shared slightly smelly squashed space within a Terran Prowler tank with Quinns (and Boff). It got trashed by a Reaver, the hateful cheese gunship, but not before its erstwhile crew OF HEROES had managed to bail. I promptly finished our avian tormentor off with the Terran’s cheese rocket launcher; this was back when you could fire its entire payload willy-nilly, then turn the tracking on and have all the in-flight rockets converge on whatever vehicle you pointed it at, in a highly amusing alpha-strike. “Nice shooting,” someone remarked, before realising we were now stranded in a desert wasteland miles from anywhere and no one had brought any boomer explosives to suicide with.

Planetside got an awful lot right, such as character progression resulting in broader options rather than a straight increase in power, affording those at the bottom of the progression curve more than a fighting chance against grizzled veterans. It also got much wrong. It’s a bit of a travesty that no one has seen fit to use the lessons therein to produce a refined version, opting instead to pursue the me-too whack-a-mole mechanic in an effort to grasp a handful from the perceived money-tree. Which is probably why I’ve not bothered with mmos since.

I still entertain the slim hope that the forthcoming Starcraft mmo will be to Planetside what World of Warcraft was to Everquest.

05/09/2008 at 19:07 The Shed says:

Absolutely fantastic stuff. I even started telling my Dad the story as I was reading it- and even him; a non-gamer extraordinaire, found it truly exciting. Such a well written article, I even genuinely lol’d once or twice, even though I only played Planetside very briefly.

*Applause*

05/09/2008 at 19:54 YonmaN says:

Oh, I was there – On werner, playing for the VS. Full five years, with a few breaks here and there. I haven’t found a replacement or anything even remotely relevant to step in for planetside … which really is sad, since PS ain’t all that much in the way of a game …

I guess the community is just awesome – the little brotherhoods formed in the outfits (mine has just celebrated it’s 5th birthday, we meet in person every year for that) and the intense rivalry and utter hatred for the other sides.

I was there when a platoon of my outfit’s heavy infantry coordinated the destruction of all NC spawn points in their fortified Azeban beach head (2 tower, 1 generator, 3 AMSes). That maneuver pushed out 50-60% of their population off of the continent in the first 15 seconds and ended a 6 hour stalemate that would have cost the VS most of their world.

I was there when Enrico led the VS armored column bearing the monolith through a continent completely dominated with TR and NC to the only base VS had left in it’s center.

I was there when the outfit cleaned out a red alert base courtyard (Akkan, on ishundar) and anted it in it’s last few seconds. This shock completely stalled the TR attack on the continent and the following rout gave us the continent.

I was there when 12 of my outfit held the Marduk generator for an hour and a half in the southern edge of ishundar denying the NC defenders of the continent cave benefits and then tech benefits as they lost their northern tech plants to the VS assault. We ran out of ammo in the first half an hour, had to scavenge from corpses and raid local towers. We fought with knives and spit. We lost the gen twice, but had just one guy left to finish the job and pick up the dead.

I was also there when we dropped a BangBus on Azk’s head….

There’s nothing quite like planetside. I was there. I know.

05/09/2008 at 20:53 Larington says:

Mmmmm, yeah, the memories of leading a 13 unit strong tank group in Planetsides early days (And gradually smaller size tank groups as the years progressed) accross old Oshur on the way to the front line.

The resecures in the last 10 seconds of the enemies base capture attempt.

The hot drops from the Galaxy troop transport onto heavily defended enemy bases – knocking out generators and effectively breaking the defence in the process.

The countless times myself and my comrades on the VS, kicked Terran & New Conglomerate scum back out of our home continents.

There were so many things the developers got right with Planetside… But in the subsequent development of the game, so many things they got wrong.

To date, it is the ONLY game, BAR NONE, that has ever given me a true sense of camraderie.

And Jim Rossignol is a big tease. ;-)

It’s funny how, during its early years, PC Gamer UK was basically a marketting arm for SOE, what with their regular mentions of PS somewhere in several issues of the mag.

Damn game effectively stole 3 years of my life, and I’m glad for at least half of that time (The double teaming and occasional crappy player attitude didn’t always help though).

05/09/2008 at 21:09 Losty says:

Actually dug an old outfit movie up:

http://www.lost-online.nl/Pie/ISK.wmv

Magmower deluxe, bless me for using crap music :)

05/09/2008 at 21:20 Larington says:

The biggest mistake SOE made was to not realise that planetside had as much flagship product potential as everquest, and didn’t get a suitably large marketting budget as well. It says something about a companies faith in its own products if it isn’t willing to spend money to make people aware the product exists, it says even more when the games community then gets so fed up of this that it starts its own guerilla marketting campaign.

05/09/2008 at 21:54 Noc says:

Rather frequently when reading RPS, the subject of “some older game that was really quite good comes up,” and it’s often something I haven’t played. Usually a little looking will lead me to the game, and I can catch up. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s not (I still haven’t gotten very far in Deus Ex; it hasn’t aged well at all), but I can usually go see what all the fuss is about.

With Planetside, though, I feel like I’ve just missed out. A shame, that.

05/09/2008 at 23:19 Diminish3d says:

I’m still playing PlanetSide more than 5 years since it got going.Sure,now I’m playing VS on Gemini (Werner,the European Server is alas a virtual ghost-town),but I’m playing with people I’ve known as long as I’ve been playing,and some I’ve only known a few days.

PlanetSide,at its most popular,was a majestic sight I’ve yet to see even hinted at in other games.100+ players on each side (3) assaulting the same base,in Tanks,Buggies,on foot,in Mech Suits,in Aircraft……Yeah,the gfx are now very old,the server is a bit laggy,but there’s still nothing like it.

The feeling you get from being in an established outfit,and logging into your regular squad of players,knowing more than likely what they will do next in a game situation where you’re all working together….this makes it still worth the sub.

PS is cursed however.Every move the Dev team makes seems to cause players to leave.Having said that,a lot of ex-players return sporadically for just one more fix.I left once myself….I made 23 days,but the voices in my head…..

The game is currently suffering from a massive lack of players,which is a shame,as its one of those games that is so much better when more people play,and I’m hoping this ‘new news’ might be a return of the ‘Reserves’ program Sony ran for the game a couple of years ago,which let anyone create an account for free and play up to a low Rank.

But for anyone who ever thought about playing it,and enjoyed the stories they’ve seen typed up here,yeah,you can still sorta see that kind of stuff happening in the game.

Every night I play is like being in my own war-movie for me.Some nights its not so good,some nights its good,and sometimes…just sometimes…you will be the guy in the tank who tears into the flank of the enemy footzerg and cracks off 20 kills in a minute.

Every game I’ve ever played since I started playing PS (there hasnt been that many,Pirates of the Burning Sea,Eve-Online,Dungeon Runners,Trackmania..few more maybe),I always seem to run into ex-PlanetSiders tho.We nod to each other,we exchange pleasantries,and go our seperate ways,but we know…we know what its like to Galdrop a heavily CE’d Interlink BD.Hope you brought your EMP.

05/09/2008 at 23:58 Thingus says:

If these were mentioned, I missed it, but does anyone remember the ANT runs? They were how you refueled the base to stop it from ‘starving’, and I found driving what amounted to an unarmed fuel truck much more tense than a hovering (VS :D ) armored behemoth with an oversized pulse rifle glued to the top. There was something really scary about never being sure that you would make it to a base when everyone was counting on you.

Mind you, I always had trouble finding the silos…

06/09/2008 at 00:09 Cope says:

@Diminish3d: Sadly I don’t think getting players to come back will do anything but tarnish the good memories the game has. It sucks royally, but SOE simply screwed the pooch with the later years of ‘development’. There’s no going back now, not without rolling everything back to 1 year after release.

I think instead we should be pushing other game studios to develop something new. Let them know there’s a market for this type of game, even if SOE fumbled their product.

A man can dream anyway. Markov VS represent :D

06/09/2008 at 00:23 Thingus says:

@Diminish3d: Oooh, I remember tankdodging! One time, the only thing that got me to the base was a friendly Galaxy.

06/09/2008 at 00:31 marks says:

I remember Planetside.
I remember defending a Tech Plant in the Outfit Wars event, spotting a 25man Mosquito drop on radar, surging down to the spawn room and pulling an anti-infantry MAX whilst hearing them hacking the door lock – and then mopping up with 4 teammates.
I remember holding the backdoor corridor of a Dropship Centre with 3 other squadmates for over 20mins against a force of 25+ TR pouring in from an AMS outside the backdoor.
I remember the 30-man Galaxy drops to resecure a base that command had deemed lost, where you didn’t even have time to reload – you either made the resecure or you died.
I remember the tension of dropping an Orbital Strike marker on an enemy Galaxy drop, hoping like hell that you timed it right. And the satisfaction of seeing that you did.
I remember defending a Tech Plant CC with RAS in Agile/Lasher whilst another Vanu was resecuring the base, cutting down maybe 10-15 NC Rexos between us before being taken down by a MAX unit. And then seeing the resecure go through fractions of a second before the hacker we were defending is killed.
I remember the boundless joy, I remember the harrowing frustration, I remember the heroics.
I remember Planetside, I was there.

Demographer, Vanu Corp, VS Werner

06/09/2008 at 00:42 I don't understand this comment system says:

“as useful as knock-kneed whore” … What the hell does that even mean?

06/09/2008 at 02:18 Derek K. says:

“Do NOT fucking tease about a Planetside sequel, JR.”

NO FUCKING KIDDING.

Don’t. Just don’t. I will find you.

I still love PS to this day. It’s only been 2 months since I played.

My best story ever involves my outfit, who kick ass.

TR have Hossin all but locked down – we’ve maybe got one air tower somewhere in the middle of nowhere. Load up two Gals to the brim, and fly in. Drop on the first base in full force, nothing but turrets. They die, we take it. A couple guys from TrX start showing up, get wiped out. Our gals come back, load up, rinse, repeat. We took 3 bases before the TR really started showing up to pay attention. And it didn’t matter. Our outfit runs takedown drills, etc. And usually, it kinda works. But this time, it was amazing. Drop from above, *everyone* lands where they’re supposed to. Orange squad hits the tubes. Yellow squad hits the CC, wipes out the defense, and sets up our own. TR throw themselves at us, and we’re all 10 health 0 armor for most o the game, but our medics keep us up. A max crash comes in and gets *demolished* by a handful of guys hot swapping Decis.

By the time the full TR got there, people were shouting in Global chat things like “Hell yeah! Here they come again!” And not our people – other NC.

Our zerg finally came in, TR started up, and it was all normal PS again, but man, I had flight of the valkyries running through my head the whole time (one of our guys would play it when we boarded the gals). Boo yah!

Clockwork Soldier, NC-Emerald.

I was there, man!

06/09/2008 at 04:23 Eschatos says:

I only played the free trials for Planetside, but I loved them. Sadly at that time I did not have the money to play a subscription based game. If there was a sequel I’d gladly join.

06/09/2008 at 07:07 gfoce says:

Damn… Brings up a lotta memories ;) Anyone know what this “exciting news” is? I’m not currently playing but I will sub up eventually.

Here are the pro-tips for anyone who is thinking about trying planetside:
1.) Find a group and roll with them so you’re not stuck without a buddy.
2.) Unless you just like validating your e-ego, don’t drop generators like a festering turd (it ruins fights for everyone).
3.) Never foot-zerg i.e. CERT A VEHICLE. The official forums are full of enough retards… while we find them semi hilarious, their bickering is tiresome. Just remember, in planetside, the tell tale sign of a noob is when a person gets farmed by a mosquito/tank/reaver and then asks for a lasher buff. You don’t want to be this person.

P.S. IDK if it was included in another comment, but here is a link to official forums for anyone who needs it:

http://forums.station.sony.com/ps/forums/list.m

06/09/2008 at 07:41 deadasdillinger says:

Just had to leave a comment.

I plyed Ps from just after release to just after they launched the BFR’s. They destroyed the team ethic for me. Everyone just wanted to get in BFR’s.

My stories are many and varied. That was the great thing about PS you could play it differently by swapping your certs around. Air support, infantry hot drop, ground support, anti vehicle, anti air and my favourite stealth. Stealth hacking bases behind the frontline just never got old.

My most fond memory though was one of those 4 hour battles over one of the bridges, i think was it Cyssor, it was just intense.

I even wrote a guide to flying the mossie and the reaper on the official forums. So I must have really liked the game.

I was VS. Lasher spam FTW. Funny I thought the jackhammer and minigun were overpowered :)

PS was the best online experience for me bar none, nothing comes close. I have been waiting for the next step for a while, trying each MMO in the vain hope it will be PS2. I had hopes for Huxley initially but now it just looks like UT.

I was there and want to go back.

06/09/2008 at 09:29 Mark Stephenson says:

I mention it at any possible opportunity but I was RPS’s Galaxy Pilot. And Jim wrote me up in Dispatches so I got to show my mum, PC Gamer and prove that I was making something of my life. I got the typical “That’s nice dear” reply.

Also I accidently bumped into a Guild/Squad drink up once. I was having a boozy drink up with my comic chums when someone noticed a large man with a DR & Quinch tattoo on his leg so I went over to say Hi (as I was drunk)

It turned out he was the leader of the Immortal Serial Killers and half the squad were set up in residence on the other side of the pub.

It was nerd heaven that day!

06/09/2008 at 09:46 Rive says:

Wow this brings back so much memories. I have never again played a game that i loved as much as Planetside. The Community, the fights the action, the scale of this game was so good that i forgave it all its flaws (balancing, downtimes which were not even nearly as bad as in every other mmo, THE DAMN 100 BFR Kills to get the advanced one).

This is the one Game that is truly and absolutely unique. It has no peers. There are no games like Planetside. Not one. And if there ever will be i fear for my life. It took me 6 months to leave this game. Even with dwindling online numbers, the outfit defunct, no support at all from SOE and every other guy hacking the hell out of the game.

So many stories come to mind but one of the best is the one of me and my bud capturing a vanguard at Igaluk/Cheryshen at 12am and keeping this one tank in the War until 10pm. My bud was a phenomenal driver and i racked up some 800ish kills that day. At the end of that ride we took a tower by ourselves that turned a hopeless threeway into an offensive for at least 300 fellow soldiers.

We were so sad when we deconstructed that Vanguard. I still pull up the screenshots of that day from time to time like a war vet getting out his album.

Rive
BR23 CR5
Werner
E.E. [Etheral Enforcers]

“I dont mind if i die soon. I return to the silence of the spawn tube.”

06/09/2008 at 12:44 ISKNemesis says:

Waves @ Mark, I remember that night well :) was a great laugh

06/09/2008 at 12:45 Mark Stephenson says:

@Nemesis

Captain, My Captain!

06/09/2008 at 16:52 Duoae says:

I was there at the start of the game as Vanu (Werner of course :) ) – though i played as a medic and never used the lasher…

I played through the ‘nerf wars’ (my name for them) when ALL the energy damage of the Vanu energy weapons was reduced giving the NC and TR a big advantage and many players migrated (this was before the Jackhammer nerf – personally i thought that at their peaks the three ‘assault’ weapons were pretty balanced towards each other… just not the rest of the weapons/classes in the game ;) )…. I remember having to empty a whole clip from the battle rifle (whatever it was called) into a medium armoured Terran and still not killing them! :)

Then after everything had calmed down (with respect to nerfing the three races) i quit. The game ended up being too repetitive.

A year and a half later i rejoined – this time as New Conglomerate (to try something different). We had great times and it was long enough after the first expansion with the underground crap that people had settled into mostly ignoring all that content :D. I’d like to dispute the above video of the ‘largest’ galaxy assault ever. I’m not sure who had the biggest but all three had their moments of ‘air supremacy’ or tank assaults etc.

One of my favourite stories was of my managing to weave a reaver between some fossilised trees and losing a couple of pursuing pilots: i was a crap pilot but a good bomber and so i liked the Liberators and the associated two man AA vehicles.

I still have a few pictures of one NC gal + reaver event. Was a lot of fun to see so many people hot-dropping at once over a target. :) There was also one time in sanc when i somehow flew up into the air when i reached the waypoint set by the squad leader and then fell back down through the floor…. i have a couple of pictures too!

I would LOVE a Planetside 2…. PS was/is the only MMO i’ve played that i’ve payed for. Amusingly i bought Asheron’s Call back in the day but this was the period of 56K modems and stuff and i didn’t realise that you had to download a lot of crap to be able to play the game…. so i ended up paying £15 to not play anything :D Other MMOs i’ve played have only been until the end of beta when i’ve decided that it just wasn’t worth the money to grind so much. That’s the thing i liked about PS. There was very little grinding and you could respec very easily.

06/09/2008 at 22:13 Belo says:

Yah Planetside was always good for a couple weekends a few times during the year.

Always loved the huge vehicle/infantry convoys. The base sieges. The battles on the bridges.

I was there before the battlemechs were brought in and the GMs were running around in them to freak everybody out. Good stuff.

I thought the cavern fighting was interesting but the levels themselves confused the hell out of me so I rarely ever went.

My fondest memory was playing on the NC, defending a base from a Vanu siege. Sniping people off the nearby hills, repairing MAX armor. Usual stuff. Then like 30 Vanu MAX suits jumpjet over the wall all at once! Total HOLY SHIT moment.

Amazingly enough we fought them off.

Would love to see Planetside 2, with a better engine of course. The run-and-gun gameplay, for the most part didn’t feel very solid to me.

06/09/2008 at 22:40 Batolemaeus says:

*shameless plug*

Man, this so totally reminds me of the war stories in eve..a few vets meet and talk about wars years ago, sometimes even on different sides of the conflict. This is why i play mmos..

*/shameless plug*

07/09/2008 at 00:02 EvilMonkee says:

I love PS with all my heart I miss Werner and Spec Ops with the Corp. I miss whinging about what a bunch of hacking cheating scum the enemy were when deep down you just got owned and you knew it. I gave 5 years to that game and it still sends shivers down my back….anyone here rich enough to buy the IP from Sony?

Quick question as well? When did it go wrong? For me it was BFRs which were uneeded….

EvilMonkee
VS Cr5 Werner
Vanu Corp

07/09/2008 at 00:38 Mark says:

I didn’t even start playing until after BFRs were introduced. I just had a free account and focused on things that you didn’t need reflexes to do. I had a blast until I realized just how hopelessly outclassed cooperating infantrymen were by the giant robots. Then I noticed the population dwindling, and then I found other things to do.

But I was there, at least. Maybe I’ll be there again, someday.

07/09/2008 at 06:06 Dreamthief says:

Stop talking about it and go play it! :)

BFRs got nerfed BIG time…they need a lot of support now…and are easy meat to infantry when solo.

Hacking was bad but is now very rare.

Werner is painfully quiet but the other server, Gemini still has decent battles.

So if you all give it a go again and bring a few friends……well, happy days :)

07/09/2008 at 12:40 ISKNemesis says:

Yeah SOE have a lot to answer for, From day 1 they had no idea how to push the game forward, there was no EU marketing, It took them over a year to admit that the weps where not balanced and they tried to do an RPG model of an expansion pack every year for more cash, But as they completly fucked up core combat which was nothing like what they said it would be and then taken away the best cont. Oshur and never bringing back its just one huge list of complete fuck ups that have ruined the game and whats worse is they only ever listen to the US kiddies whingers and we got BFR’s :( , Hell SOE still does not admit that there is any other countries outside there borders

07/09/2008 at 20:28 Patrick Rossetti says:

i have had similar war stories with people i run into who played star wars galaxies… and while i cant speak for planetside because i never got a chance to play it, but with star wars galaxies you had the same problem with the pvp. you would form your group, get buffed, then go out looking for pvp across the 9 or so different planets for 40 mins and when you actually find it the excitement kinda makes you forget about all the things you had to do to get to that point. I look back at SWG (Pre-CU :P) and that was probably my favorite MMO experience, so many good memories, but when i really think back i remember logging on every day and saying “im going to quit this game today.”

08/09/2008 at 08:14 Bollox says:

Two words.

WWII Online (aka Battleground Europe)

Same pointless war. Same endless traveling from your base to the front. We on ze german side also had the same kind of comraderie because we felt that the devs blatantly favoured the allies side, while giving us tanks made of tinfoil. Oh those poor silly french who never had stomach for fighting and the ugly brits with their Matilda-tanks and Spitfires. How we despised them!

I guess they are still fighting somewhere in Aarschot, Groppendonk and other places I’ve never heard of before. I miss my 88mm flak and I try to forget the memory of truck driver always too busy to tow my beloved gun away from the advancing horde.

My 88mm was a fearsome sight towering on the hill and cutting through british steel. I can still hear the sound of cannon shells dropping at my feet. BAM…clang…another burning matilda.

One difference to the Planetside was that you could actually win the war. It just took lot of time and it didn’t happen very often, but just the idea of a total victory being possible was enough. Hell, even conquering one small village was an accomplisment, because most of the time you spent being lost. Fighting always seemed to happen somewhere else.

08/09/2008 at 14:30 KBKarma says:

I played a Planetside free trial. Never had the income to subscribe fully. My character is a Werner TR, who specialised in MAX armour (never got enough certs to get anything else). I always tell the same two war stories to anyone nearby.

The first: I touched down in a base somewhere in the middle of a contested island. Only two or three other people in there. I look over the side, and see some Vanu scum cloaking. I fire off a few grenade rounds, and think I got him. I look up and see some birds coming towards us. My last thought was “Wonder where they’re going?”

At which point, all four bombers tried to kill me.

I dived for cover, opened a planet-wide channel, and started screaming that the Purple Peril were trying to take the base. And then I got bombed.

Respawned, ran out, saw a cloaked Vanu, chased after him, blowing grenade rounds everywhere. Ran outside, got bombed. Got the damn cloaker, though.

Respawned, and saw five Vanu standing in front of my tube. Got shot. And then the base hack started. And they’d blown the tubes.

Story the second: On my last day, I snuck into a base, carrying a hacking tool that I wasn’t certified to use. I snuck past the Vanu, crept upstairs, got into their undefended control room, and hacked the panel.

A few minutes later, I logged back in. I found that my hack was still holding, and that a tonne of my fellow TRs were camping the panel. Considering that the room contained eight anti-personnel MAXes, I left, knowing that the base was ours, and proud that, on my last day fighting this war, I had made such a difference.

That base may have been marked as Terran, but, in reality, for just a small amount of time, it was actually mine.

08/09/2008 at 22:03 Pyrrhic says:

HOO-RAH.

The 1% shall live on, forever.

09/09/2008 at 10:53 Jayme says:

Wow, I never comment on an article, but I just had to say how touched I was by this one. Reminds me of my old g(l)ory days as an FPS vet.

Great article. Stumbled Up, and sent to everyone I know.

09/09/2008 at 17:00 Yago says:

Hehe , I see some of the old names here *waves*
This was the best game ever , such a rush , played for years until Werner was done over :(
See you all again someday , was great fun while it lasted .

Yago , Vanu Werner , Long Forgotten Soldiers

09/09/2008 at 21:20 Elltee says:

Here’s -my- PlanetSide war story….

I guess I shouldn’t have been so surprized at my latest Planetside experience, since I have had similiar ones in WarBirds before. After all, it was “flying” as a member of the 100th Bomb Group Heavy that I would spend 3 hours or more, staring at a computer monitor, at the graphically rendered portion of a B-17 windscreen, trying to keep 2″ of windscreen adjusted to little frikken dots out ahead of me, formation flying for hours at time producing some of the worse neck and backaches I have ever had.

So, the other night, I saw some guys MISusing a weapon called The Flail. The Flail is the closest thing PlanetSide (PS) has to an artillery weapon, in that it is extremely powerful, slow rate of fire……but has the only capability to fire beyond your line of sight. From one side of the “map” to the other. These guys were using like I have seen it used for nearly ALL of my PS career…rolling it up to the doors of an enemy base like a plasma battering ram, getting one or two shots off and then getting killed (they are fragile machines).

I decided that it was time to change. I re-certified for the Flail, and then rolled it out the door of the motor pool. I stayed within the walls of the base, right next to the re-arm and re-load depot, so that every time I fired a shot, I would automatically reload.

Then I started looking for customers. Asking players to be my “spotters”; people who could call the “shots” and tell me to adjust. It was very hard, because most of the kids online don’t know anything about artillery spotting. But finally I got a couple willing to try.

In the game every player has the ability to put a marker down on the map, which displays as a giant white column. So I would zoom in on the map, place a marker down on an enemy motor pool (I’m using different terminology than the game, to help with WW2 grognards understanding), and then start firing. This would give my my bearing; I just needed help with the range.

After three shots or so, I would start making hits. At first I was simply taking out enemy vehicles and crew who had rolled out, paused to add more gunners, or load different kinds of ammo. I racked up impressive numbers of kills just by saturating the courtyard. Then my spotter moved my rounds in on the “vehicle pad” itself, a place where players went to select their armor/aircraft/etc. One hit is enough to take it out until someone repairs it. This would deny the enemy, even briefly, the ability to roll aircraft and armor. Then me and my spotter would learn to stop firing, wait until several engineers came out to repair it, and players stood in line to use the VecPad…then call in another shot right on target. VERY impressive number of kills, and it took them several iterations to realize what we were doing.

So now the enemy is pissed. And my side (outnumbered that night) is starting to realize that we are getting an advantage with the VecPad out of action. Enemy aircraft are now trying to get through to my base, and successfully launching missiles at me, but the auto-guns of the base are taking them out as they come one at a time because the my position next to the repair pod is fixing me up faster than their rockets are damaging me. Some of the AA Max units (powered suits with AA guns) notice that I am “attracting” these aircraft, so by the time they start coming at me in groups of 2-3-4 the AA units are in place, and wipe them from the skies.

Spotters report a column of armor is heading towards my base (taken from another enemy base, not the one I am hammering). I rebroadcast the report, and armor guys from my side roll out to intercept them. Even better, engineers lay down mines outside of the sector of the base I am in. The few light and fast enemy units that are not taken out by friendly armor and aircraft, are blown up by mines as they attempt to charge through the gates to destroy me.

Now as our side assaults the base I had been hitting, I have four more spotters willing to work with me by sending private messages. The commo alone is getting complicated. I am hitting the nearest bases to the main attack, trying to take out their VecPads. I can usually do it with 3-4 shots if the spotter is good. And the spotters, usually “cloakers” hiding inside the base, or airscout pilots at high alt, are learning to swoop in an kill the engineers who run out to repair the VecPads. We are systematically denying the enemy access to aircraft and armor.

From my position back in the base, a nearby Motion Sensor Alarm starts going nutz. Then, explosions start going off around me….its a cloaker trying to place mines/boomers to take me out. The repair pod is rebuilding, but not fast enough. I send out a call for help ,and 10 people respond, hunting down the cloakers. By now, my kill-death ratio is something like 62-4 (normally, I have something like 4-28)

Finally, the enemy resorts to Total War. In a previous post, I described how players of Command Rank would jump out of aircraft, triggering an Orbital Strike on a position before they died (think of a nuclear-armed suicide bomber). Airscout planes started overflying the base, most getting shot out of the sky by the AA. A few guys jumped out in time, and the giant-turbine sound of the OS would start…..but my “guards” on the ground would kill them before the OS hit, cancelling the strike. I went on another 5 minutes, before one Command Rank managed to sneak through, and trigger an OS on his own position. After hours of play, I was finally dead.

Teamwork, and layers of operations. Man, that was fun. The amazing thing was….I received LOTS of private messages from guys on the other side, congratulating me on the “new” tactics. Most of them I didn’t start; the AA guys, air guys and armor guys all took it upon themselves to “protect” this asset.

I envision a squad of Flail drivers in the coming weeks, with supporting spotters and maybe an AA platform or two. Lets see how the “Zerg” deals with this.

10/09/2008 at 02:46 Het says:

I’m still in PlanetSide after over 5-1/2 years, since closed beta….
It’s a lot smaller than it once was, but there’s still to this day nothing remotely like it…Large-scale combined arms warfare….
It’s most like a huge MMO Tribes, which is what I’ve always wanted in a game…
And thank God no one can “win” the war….How much fun would THAT be?!?

10/09/2008 at 22:08 tjvm says:

I too have fond memories of Planetside during the months following its release. The remarkable thing is that I’m not a big FPS player, and not very good at them. But the PS gameplay was deep enough, with enough varied roles to play, that you could contribute even if your “twitch skills” weren’t very good.

And the huge battles were great — swarms of vehicles clashing with each other, or assaulting a base. Sometimes it would get so intense that you could hardly move 10 feet without being blindsided by something, but I loved the feel of something big happening.

11/09/2008 at 04:38 Nathantin says:

I must admit, despite not having played Planetside in the longest time on account of being otherwise pre-occupied, I recall so many instances so clearly, and how to appraise the flow of a fight so vividly. I very much miss the Thresher, the Lancer, the Pulsar, the Galaxys. But, most of all, the scale.

Oft-times I’ve considered returning, and I’m not sure I could name or explain what has been stopping me. It might sound silly, but I wonder if it’s not a strange kind of trepidation, of anxiety perhaps. What has changed since last I trod on Aurraxian soil? For better, worse, or change of a nature more indeterminable?

While how the system, Planetside itself, has changed statistically or technically understandably is important, I would place that as secondary in importance to how perhaps the player-base has changed. Not having an inside perspective at the moment, I couldn’t say. Perhaps soon enough I shall endeavour to find out.

After all, someone needs to tend to the Threshers.

13/09/2008 at 09:31 Matt says:

Planetside had some potential, but lost it all when you had to spend an hour at a time wandering around looking for a battle… only to have it end about the time you get there. And have to start hunting all over again.

Sounds a lot like Eve…

14/09/2008 at 06:06 SquidDNA says:

I was flying a Terran Republic reaver on the outskirts of a base that the TR had all but taken, looking to get a feel for how the NC was responding, when below me I saw an NC tank chasing a TR APC across a clearing in the forest. I swooped down and unloaded a rack of rockets into the tank, so low when it exploded that I could hear the grateful cheers from the fully loaded APC in local chat.

14/09/2008 at 14:17 Lovemoose says:

“We should have some exciting Planetside news coming up in the next couple of weeks.”
Tread softly Jim, for you tread on my dreams.

14/09/2008 at 18:05 Scy says:

Man, this article really makes me want to play Planetside!

15/09/2008 at 01:45 Jurapjer says:

Back in ’05, I used to play this like a religion. I remember, for whatever reason, the idea was to take Hossin from the VS. When my friend had me log on, it was our one freshly taken bio-lab (We were TR) versus the entire continent. We had one damn base, and it was like 75% VS, 10% NC, and 15% TR. We held our one base for HOURS. My friend hopped in a Liberator, I hopped in the gunner seat, and we single-handedly stopped an entire armor column from getting to the base. (I love the bridges there)

This article is so completely true… You constantly talk about the amazing times like that, but you force out the times spent spawning under a bridge while snipers and BFRs were picking you out before you got geared up.

16/09/2008 at 20:50 Pizdets says:

I used to play TR.

Sometime during my 3rd year of playing, the game began to get a little stale. My outfit was getting burned out on the game so OPs nights were coming less and less, so the time I spent in the game began turning into the same thing every night. Log in, run with the zerg, get nothing accomplished, log off unsatisfied. It was at this point that I tried to do something different.

One night, I had the idea to try to drain an entire base by myself. Mind you this wasn’t a completely original idea, but for a single man to do it was somewhat revolutionary. The first outing was unsuccessful, with many deaths due to CE and other empires zeroing in on the hotspots created, subsequently coming in in squads of 5-10 to find and kill me.

This didn’t stop me however as I took the next few nights to experiment. In the end it was a simple matter of speccing Anti-Vehicle, Advanced Hacking, get Surge implanted, plan a specific route, and be sure to avoid any mines/turret fire. The biggest trick was not to cause any hotspots, which would get caused if two targets fired at each other. In other words, I could fire at anything I wanted, but as long as I didn’t get hit back no hotspot was created.

And so it was that I came up with a plan that would allow any person to singlehandedly drain a base in no more than 10 minutes. I thought to myself, if one person can do it this fast, imagine what can happen if a squad or an entire platoon does a coordinated drain like this.

One night, on a particularly slow night, I described my experiences to my outfit buddies and some of them decided to come and join me on my next outing. The TR and VS were off at Ishundar fighting a stalemate, and the NC were on Hossin fighting a three-way. We looked for a nice clean target, and Solsar happened to be nice and clear of any enemy. We didn’t like the Smurfs all that much, plus they had the biggest pop at the time, being able to fight two stalemates on different continents, so we figured messing with them would at least advance our forces on ONE continent.

And so it was that I took 6 of my outfit mates and painstakingly described the plan of attack. It was executed sloppily, some people made hotspots, some people moved too slowly, and we didnt field enough to do a full drain at the same time, so we had to take a base and move on. Besides that, we were able to drain most of Solsar in under 25 minutes.

Needless to say the NC got a little pissed and a few squads decided to come in to attempt a rescue. Things looked grim for our group of 7 going up against 30+ pissed off blue collared gimps, especially since it looked like the TR were in no hurry to lend any assistance (even though we asked for it.)

But then, the dirty dirty VS noticed what we were doing and decided to throw another wrench into the mix. They flew to Solsar in force and began to take and repair the drained bases. I got in touch with their commander (the one and ONLY time I have **ever** worked together with another empire to accomplish my goals) and we made a deal to not shoot each other just to stick it to the NC. Screw them and their noobhammers.

The fight quickly escalated and the NC on Ishundar got recalled to protect Solsar. TR forces took Ishundar as a result and the NC were pushed back to their main base on Hossin.

At one point, Solsar looked something like this.

I screencapped that after we got kicked off the continent, and went to sleep happy. The next day I tried to tell the rest of the outfit what I had done and mentioned that this could be a viable tactic. My suggestions went unheard however as most people didn’t see it as any kind of fun destroying equipment.

Meh, to each his own.

The game quickly became too stale for the rest of us and we moved on to other games. A year and a half later a bunch of us decided to come back for a month to relive some nostalgia. We played for a bit and noticed an interesting development. For every battle that was raging on a continent, you could see at least 2-4 base drains going on and the current CR5s shouting orders to special ops groups to “make sure noone is draining x continent”.

Seems like my strategy finally caught on a year and a half later. ;)

-Pizdets – Emerald TR

Oh and, you cannot talk about Planetside, let alone the TR, without mentioning KAAOS. ;)

17/09/2008 at 07:36 Mezorin says:

I remember this game, and this article almost brought a tear to my eye. And I’ve been through so many crazy fights in this game, that I have a war story for just about almost every major rock, hill, or landmark you can think of. There are a few that stand out; one where I was with Black Widow Company on Emerald, and between 18 of us we held the basement of a base for litterally an hour against first an NC zerg, then a VS zerg, to finally die to our MAX suits running out of ammunition. Another was when I was fighting for the New Conglomerate during the event that General Pheonix was piloting a shiney new BFR, and I was leading the charge in my lightning tank.

Speaking of the Lightning, god damn I loved my “Bonaparte” minitank, always tempting just to sneak back into the game for another spin…

But anyways, one of the craziest moments I recall in that game was on the test server, where the objective of the day was to take and hold a tower, king of the hill style. 3 Empires all cramed around one lil tower and all hell breaking loose. The name of the game was a testing exercise for the new Vulture varient of the liberator bomber. For those of you who don’t know, the Vulture is a mean assed anti tank strafing bomber that is built more for direct, percision strike runs as opposed to regular anti infrantry “bomb spam”. Needless to say, it sucked nuts to be a tank that day.

I was playing TR at the time, with a rexo load out with a cycler medium assault rifle in my hands. Say what you will about the fancy pants pulsar, or the hard hitting guass rifle that outdo the cycler on an excell spreadsheet, but I always found the cycler could get results just because you could fire that rifle as fast as you could pull the trigger in semi auto mode, and you’d *never* lose control of it, unlike the gauss rifle which would buck like a mule. Well anyways, I was fighting off the branies and smurfs tooth and nail from just outside the tower barrier, gunfire going everywhere like a damn war movie. Tanks were exploding everywhere around this tower, and any BFR that was stupid enough to get close to this meat grinder got pasted within 30 seconds.

One perticular bastard from the NC was really giving me the gears, and we were fighting back and forth neither one of us able to get the advantage. I was pecking away at him *ratatatata* with my cycler, and he was trying to do the same with the gauss, grenades going off left and right around us then all of a sudden…

“The Schedualed Play Test is now over, please cease fire and head to the base for the EXP fountain”

And what do you know? It was like a war movie, the shoot was over. Just like that, everything was dead quiet as everyone stopped shooting. I shruged, got up and walked by the guy I was just fighting and said “Heya” and hiked over to the base to end the testing session.

17/09/2008 at 08:12 Larington says:

One of my favourite complaints towards the end was about how the magriders direct line of fire beam weapon had had its accuracy nerfed so it was hellish to land a good shot… Only to give the NC gunner BFR a magrider like rail beam with tighter accuracy and much more damage.

After which, fighting an NC BFR with magrider became pointless, after that happened the magrider events I used to run also stopped as there just wasn’t much point anymore.

19/09/2008 at 20:21 LionFireOKV says:

Yes the Werner Server is completely dead. It’s amazing, has everyone in europe really just boycotted the game? My friend is locked out of the US Server because of some bug and we were running around on the Europe server. It was us 2 (NC) and 1 (TR) and that was it. Really sad to see.

25/09/2008 at 14:22 NC says:

I believe the cr5 was called Ostekake, not Ostekate.

29/09/2008 at 13:57 warhawk says:

i had a thing like this happen in BF 2142 except that our commander was smart and all the aussie players kicked ass the 4-5 12 year old americans pissed us off but we managed to use them as cannon fodder anyway we were hiding in some bunkers and having a massive firefight with PAC troops when a transport full of PAC troops just explode’s we actualy stopped fighting for 5 minutes trying to figure out what happend

30/10/2008 at 15:00 LazyGun, hero of the republic says:

THIS! IS! DAGDA!

24/11/2008 at 19:20 2coolforu says:

Oh, i don’t understand why people say it’s bad that you don’t win anything when thats farcical.

In, lets say, Halo 3 you play a match which, at MOST has 16 players. The 15 other players you are probably never going to fight with again and very rarely will you make friends with. There are probably no more than 10-15 unique maps each with about 4 *Conflict points* (areas that 90% of the battles actually occur) and each map is no more than a hectare, you fight your own personal battle for 15 minutes and take no notice of anything else, after the 15 minutes you either win or lose with no real change to the scheme of things and no real reward, except perhaps a little ’1′ on the EXP marker or a 1 is added to your matches won score.

Lets check Planetside.

You go into a world were a fight has been going on overnight, the frontlines change and the battlelines alter and battles with tank armadas and fighter wings, there are dropships taking troops to the battlefield and minefields being set up. At most there are thousands, if not tens of thousands at the games height playing on the world map with entire continents that was hundreds of square kilometers in size to battle over with hundreds of bases on the map and thousands of towers. You can have a seige of Tore one day, or a skirmish over a small canyon near a tower another. Ive fought over thousands of different towers and tens of thousands of locations. Islands off the mainland, swamps in Hossin. Now i’ve had a fight over a base that has lasted 6 hours, 6 hours!!, the base was refuelled twice and the generator was destroyed three times, my kills were over 300 and at the end the sense of comraderie was incredible, everyone was each others friend. We cheered as if we had won a real war, this happens for every time you push the enemy back or make a successful counterattack. When you won you got your teammates congratulations and the feeling that you were part of an army that knew each other and cared, now in Halo 3 you probably don’t give a crap about the anonymous teammates but Planetside isn’t just about the killing or the victories, it’s about the men or women standing alongside you.

A victory meant a visible change happened, a base turned red and the Terran Republics flag flew from the walls, the people and the feeling you were fighting for a real army meant so much more than an EXP point or a stat, it means so much more than griding that next level on World Of Warcraft or mining that lump of ore on EVE. It was so gritty and personal that it had an effect on everyone taking part. At the end of it you would feel as if you had been running around that battlefield, that’s what made this game special.

25/11/2008 at 07:49 RedKnight says:

The Moral of the story is that the Vanu are unstoppable…? cool.

26/11/2008 at 13:28 LazyGun says:

Vanu girlyman.

27/11/2008 at 16:13 7of9 says:

Been a while since I played but after reading this I really want to dust off the lasher.

Played with ICE, ISK and VanuCorp. All excellent outfits. There is little else like it when 30 of your colleagues are online in 3 GAL’s (large troop carrier aircraft) and dropping on a base to resecure.

As you charge down the backdoor to the GEN area all single file on the mini map, surging your ass off to get there in one piece. The maxes and heavy grunts cover the GEN area while it’s repaired and you battle your way to the spawns.

Or quite possibly one of the funniest moments when 3 TR gals drop on Leza tech plant (the only base we had) and Bombastic drops an orbital strike on there head.

Massive killstrike in one hit and screaming over TS with joy.

I was there from early 2004 onwards to mid this year (on and off).

Great times, great memories and strange how I miss the “Scottish” accent of Kosh shouting, nae dicking aboot, lets rock and roll. :)

Happy days.

7of9 Werner CR5 ~ Vanu Corp

28/11/2008 at 20:13 SMOOS3 says:

I still miss this game a lot and am hoping for news of the next mmoFPS every day. I played a couple of years and made really good friends because of this game!

02/12/2008 at 00:38 Nodrog says:

I miss PlanetSide. I was a VS sniper on the Werner server. Good times. Still wish they had headshots though. That was kind of annoying.

Anyone remember Hossin? That was a friggin’ bloodbath. I still have fond memories of three to four hour battles on that continent/planet.

I hope another MMOFPS in a similar vein to PlanetSide comes along some day. For now, I guess I’ll just have to distract myself with Fallout 3. :)

07/12/2008 at 04:22 Rentago says:

Well, to let you know, I am one of those veterans that played this game since the beta.

I also remember that day that you guys just suddenly disappeared. It was more or less of a race to gain whatever territory that was “Free” at the time before the New Conglomerate got it.

I still play it however, though as dead as it may be, because there is no other game that delivers the same experience that it does. I just want to let you know that I am a Vanu player and always have been. I like how we have the weakest side in the game due to everything being nerfed even when it already had been nerfed 5 times before.

None the less one day, just one day, we won the game. A pretty impossible task for a rinse and repeat game. WE WON THE GAME!

We ended up controlling 99% of the map, since we technically can’t control sanctuaries. We had everything, all the towers and bases. Good times on the Markov server. They took it down and fused it with Emerald to make Gemini.

None the less, the game has been going through massive balancing changes making all empire guns almost equal. Not entirely, but enough to make it a more fair fight. Lash is still crap though.

Anyways, it happened on all servers and people said it was suppose to be fixing problems or glitches that allow terminals in sanctuary to be damaged or destroyed.

20/12/2008 at 20:39 Domenic says:

Wow, such nostalgia for me, as most veterans would say.
I was A VS on Marcov, My name was Doomenic.

I remember early mornings, scouting around waiting for a fight. Was just a clear air feeling, such peace.
Was a jack of all trades. Mostly Heavy Infantry/AMS driver. I always felt AMS was the best thing I could do for the Vanu, and I’m damn proud of it.

I was there, man!

21/12/2008 at 06:53 Krupo says:

Congrats for your best-of!

http://www.chewingpixels.com/?p=1479

:)

22/12/2008 at 07:33 Grandstone says:

I wasn’t there, but I wish I had been. I just read the piece and all the comments. Someone make a good successor, please.

26/12/2008 at 22:05 Francko says:

Great article, and yes, Planetside is an amazing game. Even today. We’ve been playing since beta and have enjoyed the epic battles, debating global strategies with the CR5s and getting large teams together to kick some blue and red a$$! Good times!

We’re also beginning to play a new MMOFPS that is in open beta, called Welkin4591. We’ve built a site at http://welkin4591.com for english speakers who want to play. You can download all the game files and patches, translations and use our tutorial to set up your account.

So far we really like what we see in Welkin4591 and are eager to take have input in this very early stage. We’re looking for more MMOFPS lovers to join us, so head on over and hop on Teamspeak with us and we’ll get you all set up.
–
Francko
http://welkin4591.com
http://azuretwilight.org

13/01/2009 at 03:01 Dragoon_Jett says:

I see what your saying, but sony just messed up your game, they rolled SWG around in shit, then ate it, then shit it, then polished it.

14/01/2009 at 15:38 Carajolina says:

I was there too I was a Vanu (Barnie) Pilot And I can remember when first got the message. At first it was confusing because there were fears of individuals scattered in the woods waiting for the server to be fixed to start hacking back towers and bases. But then it came all clear when we where directed to your last stand point. I moved to the Galaxy even that I wanted to fight but I figured I could better serve the Vanu by creating purple rain over your base. There is nothing better than been able to drop hackers and assualt people right on top an enemy base.

I currently am a general in Battlefield 2142 I still go by Carajolina and people do hate me there, but it is a totally different gameplay. you can win or loose. If anyone of you want a piece of me look for me I ussually play at the doorman is god server.

Cheers that was a historic day to me.

16/01/2009 at 18:09 DragonJTS says:

I played for three years before finally quiting, after aking half a continent with a platoon cause no one felt like showing up. And yet I still go the forumnside monthly in the hopes of finding out it’s suddenly become wildly popular again.

I hated the Biffer nerf with a passion. They’re giant bloody robots, of course they’re overpowered, that giant robots are all about.

Loyalty until death!

31/01/2009 at 04:19 MasterChiefs4thChar says:

Man…. brings back so many memories… almost teared me up.

This is MasterChiefs4thChar NC Emerald (or Gemini now)… All planetside vets feel free to email me at finalfantasy10_3@msn.com if you ever feel like it.. I’m so sad now that the game is in the shape its in.

02/02/2009 at 14:10 Prankstar says:

*Chief ! :P

03/03/2009 at 19:27 Larington says:

You’ll find Werner abandoned, sadly, wonder if they’ll merge the servers…. ever….

09/04/2009 at 00:01 Titus says:

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

11/04/2009 at 20:25 deepseesquid says:

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?

14/04/2009 at 06:24 Zcomando says:

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

22/04/2009 at 19:01 FlakAttack says:

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.

08/06/2009 at 03:10 Pembo says:

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.

17/06/2009 at 21:18 Archibald says:

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.

24/06/2009 at 19:47 Serondal says:

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)

01/07/2009 at 13:11 Dash Jay says:

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

16/09/2009 at 16:09 Cherry666 says:

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!

29/09/2009 at 03:51 FenixStryk says:

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.

09/10/2009 at 20:16 TomTheSecond says:

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.

10/10/2009 at 01:59 PatG1 says:

Werner was merged recently. Just one server left, Gemini.

11/10/2009 at 21:59 Grif says:

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. ;)

13/10/2009 at 14:22 Pine says:

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.

13/10/2009 at 18:07 ZaiTh says:

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.

17/10/2009 at 06:59 Flatman says:

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.

22/10/2009 at 04:22 PecosBill says:

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…

02/11/2009 at 02:30 Lucky Strikes says:

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.

20/11/2009 at 15:22 Yeeeeeeaaaah says:

I was there man! lol!

Linus
Werner

Thinking about getting another sub to see how shits going…

05/01/2010 at 18:13 Car3FuL says:

I was there, BR 20 CR5……..What a game……just what a game….

21/01/2010 at 04:28 Anthony says:

God I miss that game, but I won’t resub, it’s too old now, I tried that once like a year ago and it wasn’t the same.

23/03/2010 at 23:53 tony2times says:

It wasn’t about winning. It was just about beating the other guy! Over and over and over…

Especially in the caverns. That’s where the real man on man fighting happened :D

Good time.

04/05/2010 at 01:04 Nero905 says:

PS was the greatest game ever! Just started playing again yesterday after hearing the news about PS Next. Im so thrilled for the sequel. By the way, the sturmgrenadiere video is epic.

I was there to guys.

26/05/2010 at 00:10 Chaosgabe says:

I WAS IN NAUM, MAN! There, indeed.
Still the best bloody game i´ve ever played. EvE is a close second, and there are similaritys in the broadness of the increase in power, how you create bonds with your mates in fights and the way groups/armies work. Everything is a bit bigger in EvE, but on the other hand there is no first person shooty, so thats a big downfall. I´ll have a look at the current state of the servers tomorrow because now i have to research this Planetside Next you guys are talking about. ^^

Chaosgabe NC Werner.

14/06/2010 at 20:00 Zachg56 says:

I WAS THERE, MAN!

Well, not for the epic battle you were in….
I was a Gal pilot for the New Conglomerate for a while when it first came before my computer decided it hated the game and wouldn’t let me on anymore…

Hell, I even tried installing it onto my laptop just to play it again rather recently…(it hated the game even more, kept crashing everytime I booted it up)

Alas, I can’t wait for a PlanetSide 2 or W40k MMO FPS

09/12/2010 at 00:02 GenTech4 says:

Well, according to John Smedley, we could be looking at Planetside Next in March 2011.

I look forward to fighting for the new incarnation of the NC, assuming there is one…