There is something
about both PS1 and PS2 that is special - core design concepts that really made
the games unique and awesome. Without these, PS1 and PS2 would not have been
good games, or even remotely successful or unique. This list could be extremely
long, but I wanted to highlight the three I thought were most important.
Scale
Size Always Matters!
Apart from a hilarious slogan, it really is true. When almost all the shooter
games out there are small boxed-in arena shooters with a handful of players, a
scale like PlanetSide's is truly unique, often two or three orders of magnitude
larger scale than any other shooter. It's something that creates experiences
you can't get in other shooters. It opens up gameplay and social aspects that
aren't otherwise possible. The most
important of these is that in this game you can play with as many friends as
you want, and do whatever you want. Want to fly planes all day? You can! Want
to spend your afternoon with a friend running a tank crew? You can do that. Got
an gaming group of 100 players and you want to play with them all
simultaneously? In Planetside you can. Very few (if any) shooter games have
such flexibility.
Open, Persistent World
Reinforcing the
scale is the open world. Go anywhere you want. Do anything you want. And your
actions will have a (somewhat) lasting impact, visible to players for hours (or
hopefully days). The open world is what gives a sense of ownership, progress,
and lasting impact. Without this, you just have an arena shooter with a large
lobby from which to create matches. And when the match ends, everything is
reset. In planetside a "match" is typically a conquest or defense of
a one of 50-100 bases on a continent. And the outcome determines where the next
match will be, and even who might fight it.
Pure PvP
All the enemies you
see in PlanetSide are players. Real people. The Players are the content; and
the players can evolve and change the gameplay. It's fascinating to watch
tactics evolve on the servers differently. What is commonplace in Europe is not
seen in North America. Outfits and players shape the gameplay, and every battle
is one against real opponents.
These are all the
things that make Planetside great and stand out from almost every other shooter
out there. Few will ever even have one of these.
They are also the
same things that create much difficulty and challenge. The Scale and options of
players makes creating and balancing fights nearly impossible, not to mention
the hardware difficulty of network and graphic rendering performance under such
loads. The open persistent world needs to be created, often with many man hours
and uncertain of effectiveness. Putting pure PvP in an open world with player
choice makes matchmaking nearly impossible. It also makes level design a
nightmare, as the players, tactics, and tools used in a facility will be far
different from what existed at the time it was created. The large open world
means travel time and down time between fights. Player choice and open world
means finding a fight can be difficult, and fighting a sustained reasonably
fair or balanced fight is about as likely as catching a leprechaun. And perhaps
the worst - new players are playing with and against those possibly way above
their skill level. These are just a sample of what these core design decisions
have done for the game. Each of these could be a detailed topic all its own, so
I'll stop there.
There are no games
like PlanetSide 2 and PlanetSide, so there are few places upon which to draw
inspiration for solutions to these challenges. Being a dev on such a team means
you must innovate, and relying on the tried and true of other games is not always
possible. And with all new invention, failure is common (even necessary), and
failure is not well received from gamers. Often things don't work out the way
you expect, and there are few other game examples to help foresee those
outcomes and choose a reliable path. A big reason I was drawn to PlanetSide 2
as a game designer are these very challenges.
It's uncharted territory, and one where innovation can really shine, and
a place where success is bound tightly to creativity. It's the kind of game
that could actually change the industry, or unlock new game genres.
These are the things
to me that make PlanetSide special, unique, and provide the foundation of both
it's awesomeness, and it's greatest challenges.
