Why PlanetSide is Special

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.