The big news was Reaper Actual being unveiled as the game many of us were expecting to be PlanetSide 3. I don't think it's PlanetSide 3 and I'll explain why in this post. First, some links to the uninformed, go ahead and sign up to be part of the testing. It'll probably need it. https://reaperactual.firstlook.gg/
Here's the gameplay trailer.
https://youtu.be/ov4MEWs2BzE?si=B-__0kAa_Uu-gMjV
The ElephaNFT in the Room
Lets talk about the most controversial thing first. I'm going to give you my raw first impression of this. I was very disappointed. It's an incredibly bad sign and extremely stupid for a game to do this. The NFT fad burned out years ago, and since then most games won't touch it after it's been generally viewed as a scam. Steam has outright banned it, which is why they had to split the game into "two games" one which is the actual reaper actual actually game, and the other "game" which is basically an NFT marketplace. Epic game store may allow it, but there's a lot of restrictions. The NFT marketplace can't exist on the Steam store and they have to be very careful with how it interacts with the game or the game itself might get banned from Steam. This makes the game a rather large liability from the get-go. To make matters worse, NFTs instantly sour the game in the minds of many, many gamers, before they learn anything else about the game. They're going to hear "NFT" and roach out faster than a California insurance company.
You may be asking "why are they doing something so risky and dumb?" This was my first question, and the answer I think is "they have to." Back in March when Smed first teased the studio and the game, some of us ravenous Planetside fanbois went scouring the internets for any information we could find about Distinct Possibility studios and their game, and one of the things we came across is what we suspected was the Series A funding for Distinct Possibility studios. The 30 million they claim to have raised matches roughly what we found and a good Series A. There was something that stood out - several cryptocurrency related investors. At the time we didn't think much of this...now it's starting to make a lot of sense. I don't know if this actually was their Series A, but if it is this would explain the NFT push for the game. I suspect the reason they are pushing it is because that's what they sold the investors on and the reason they invested in the game in the first place. Back in late 2022 and early 2023 which is when we believe DPS started (I love the abbreviation btw), the NFT fad was still going strong in some places even though Steam had already banned the practice.
So it's conceivable to me that Smed had the idea of utilizing NFTs which were all the hype in 2022 and sold that idea of a game to some investors and that's how they got funding to make the game. Now here we are in 2025 when the NFT disaster is largely in the rearview and here comes DPS with NFTs again. Why? because they started before it was a complete disaster and their funding was predicated on them doing this. This is all pure speculation on my part. I can't confirm any of it and nobody from DPS has told me anything about this publicly or privately.
Where does that leave us? It leaves us with a game that may have an obligation to push NFTs and have an NFT marketplace, in an ecosystem where such practices are highly restricted or outright banned. Their solution is two games, an NFT "game" and the real game, which utilizes NFTs (which could violate Steam's policy if they aren't very, very careful).
The fact that they're pushing NFTs and their discord is filled with NFT fluffers (just look at the discord names of a few active people there, you'll see many are from outside the USA and are interested in crypto, not games)....that is not a good sign. The interest in the NFTs seems much higher than the intrest in the actual game itself, which means there may be more people in the discord who want to exploit the game and its players than actually play the game.
The "upside" to this, if you could call it that, is that I trust Smed, Higby, and Tramell would not be working on a game that was a total scam. I don't think they are out to scam anyone, I think they are stuck with a bad idea which they have to carefully navigate so as to not utterly destroy their game before it even hatches. I believe that the core creative team wants to make a good game and they might publicly say how great this NFT thing is, but privately probably hate it like absolutely everyone I've talked to about this game. Seriously, everyone - every planetside fan I have known hates this, and some are compelled to not support the game out of principle of NFTs being atrociously bad for gaming. This is a really big stigma to overcome, and to be honest with you, I'm not sure I want them to overcome it myself. I personally struggle with the ethics of this and what it means for gaming if its wildly successful. But on the other hand, if it is wildly successful, the chances of PlanetSide 3 go way up. So I'm torn.
On the other side of it, maybe they did what they had to do in order to get funding and will do the bare minimum that they need to do in order to meet those obligations while still being legal in the Epic and Steam stores. That's my hope, if I want to be as optimistic as possible.
OK, enough about that topic, lets move on to the game itself.
What sort of game is this?
Here's how Smed described it in a Decrypt article.
From my impressions of the trailer and other information, the main gameplay seems based around raiding other people's bases (which is sort of the tarkov + R6Siege angle), with COD style gameplay. Fundamentally this is what PlanetSide was about - capturing facilities. In this case, raiding facilities. This could cool, and has interesting implications for an MMOFPS.
However, IMO, it is not an MMOFPS. For starters, it seems like it is a squad-based or party-based approach where you make a base and your friends/outfit go on missions together to defend it or attack other bases. They boast 200 players per server. PS2 had a record almost 6x that, so 200 is big, but in 2025 it really isn't and doesn't hold a candle to PS2. They also mention 5 AI-controlled factions, and if you do some basic math, that means about 40 players per AI faction assuming random even distribution, and if you assume each faction is probably fighting one of the other factions at any given time in one or more missions, it look like it's broken down into 10 vs 10 fights, which may be instanced partially for the actual combat. It is unclear, but that sort of fits the trailer expectations showing a squad of 4. So the world may be somewhat persistent, and the battles may have combined arms, but they weren't selling the size of the battles like they did PlanetSide 2.
That is probably the biggest tell. Smed didn't try to sell us on the scale of the game, he said it's twice as big as Warzone but the trailer showed small scale combat, and at no point did they really emphasize size - at least not at all compared to "Size Always Matters" slogan of PlanetSide 2. So to me its about what they didn't say that tells me this isn't really a MMO game. It may have MMOFPS elements, like large outfits, a persistent world, and the potential for larger battles, but I think for performance considerations and gameplay (making a balanced MMOFPS is hard), they aren't leaning into that on this game. This is the key reason I don't think this is truly a PlanetSide 3.
The final indication that this isn't an MMO in the PlanetSide sense is that the tidbits we have indicate that it will be instanced. From Smed's Decrypt article: "finding a game won’t be an issue despite sharing the same base location with several other users." This rings to me of something like Fallout 76 where you could have a home built and if someone else built there you'd end up on a different server. In order for that to work out for raiding and such, you'd have to instance the combat to some extent or have some clever phasing tech.
What I Like
This could be a good game if they can stick to "keeping crypto completely optional" (from the Decrypt article). I think in many ways they must do that, because otherwise they cannot be in the Steam or Epic stores, and a PC game not in those stores is doomed. So the store restrictions may be the saving grace for the game by forcing them to not integrate the NFT garbage too deeply into the game.
Unreal Engine 5 is a great decision. This is instant greatness to the game, the visuals, and lowering dev time. Using a custom engine like PlanetSide 2 did had a lot of issues. UE5 is showing they learned a lesson. The visuals look great, trialer looks great, and that's because it's UE5.
The focus on raiding bases, that's cool. That's fundamentally what you do in PlanetSide, and games like Rainbow Six Siege and the classic Counter-Strike revolve around this gameplay. So if that game loop is fun, this game will be fun.
It seems like players are not assigned a faction permanently. This is good, because it learns from some of the PlanetSide 2 challenges of faction balance. The game can assign players to different missions for various factions and keep things from getting too lopsided. That said, I want to know more about these factions and how they play into driving the player interactions. I'm optimistic about this, and I can see the potential for some really good designs coming out of this that can benefit future games.
This probably goes without saying, but I like the people working on the game. I know several of them and worked with them on PlanetSide 2. They're good people, and I know they want to make a good game. That probably gives me more hope in the game than most people.
What I Don't Like
I don't like the word "Tarkov" appearing anywhere around this game. Tarkov is full of degenerates, degenerate gameplay, and is a very niche game (you don't want a niche game if you want to make money unless nobody is in that niche and it is sufficiently large).
Part of the "Tarkov" appeal is this idea that there's permanent risk/reward to the game. I strongly believe that in order to encourage players to engage and fight and to maximize fun, you have to make losing fun. Every battle will have a winner and a loser (ok maybe also a tie where you kind of have two losers and two winners, I guess). If the game has good matchmaking, you're going to lose half of the battles you engage in, and if the game doesn't have good matchmaking, or none at all - then you could lose a lot more often than that. And if in every lose you're actually losing something you worked hard to obtain - that makes it sour. It also strongly encourages cheating in the game (something that plagues many games, including Tarkov and PlanetSide 2). Losing hard earned things sucks. Losing it to cheating will probably make you want to quit the game. This is why I strongly believe that you should never *lose* anything if you lose. Losing naturally feels bad. Nobody wants to lose, it doesn't feel good. Losing something you worked hard for in addition to the feeling of loss feels even worse. And for what? To make the winner feel even better because they got to take your stuff?
This is fundamental problem full or partial loot pvp games. It leads to degenerate gameplay and risk-averse behavior. People pick fights they think they can win and will use every advantage they have to ensure they win so they can take someone else's stuff and protect their own stuff. I think it's perfectly fine to give a victor something for winning, but permanent loss for a loser feels unnecessarily bad. To prevent exploitation, I think losses should be temporary - like you get your base raided, you might temporarily lose something cool, which prevents more people from raiding you and taking it, or perhaps you have to be successful in a raid yourself on anyone to get it back. There's many ideas here, but I think it's vital that the game make losing fun and avoids permanent loss. You'll get plenty of permanent sinks from people quitting the game or playing other games for a while. Gear degrading is another way to get sinks if those are really needed.
Free To Play is back again. I've hated free to play for well over a decade now and written about why F2P is bad. The business model for this game appears to be once again, Free To Play after an initial offering.
Free To Play + Tarkov-Like permanent loss and griefing potential = Cheater Infested Game
This game should never be free to play. It's not worth it. Force every player to put money into the game and they will appreciate the game more and you will have less cheating. (I said 'less', not 'zero')
Conclusion
So do I think this is Planetside 3? No, because this game strays too far from what PlanetSide is to be PlanetSide 3. This isn't the dream game of combined arms MMOFPS, however, it may be an important stepping stone to creating that game. The tech they develop and the designs they make for this game might help figure out the future of MMOFPS games, and if this game is successful, it may provide the funding to create a real PlanetSide 3 (or Tanarus 4, which is probably how Smed sees it).
The Tarkov inspiration is concerning as is this obsession with loss being punishing to players. Older game devs seem attached to this idea that loss and death must be extremely punishing. It doesn't have to be. And I'll go waaaay back to a Smed classic - EverQuest. If you played EverQuest as I did, do you remember how dying caused you to lose xp? Yeah, that was dogshit wasn't it? Large successful MMORPGs since that time have not done that. That idea of losing xp is the exact same idea as having some permanent extra consequence to losing, as if losing itself or the time loss of death wasn't enough. That idea needs to die. It's simply not fun and leads to very degenerate gameplay as people try to maximize gains and minimize losses. Instead of playing for fun and enjoyment and challenge, they work to minimize the challenge so they can maximize the enjoyment of not losing. They play cagey, and the incentive to play dirty, grief, or cheat is extremely high.
We shall see how it goes, but I do not have high expectations for this game and the NFT angle alone may be enough to sink it before it has a chance to swim, simply by poisoning the game in the minds of many gamers who will not give the game a chance.
No comments:
Post a Comment