With PlanetSide, Sony goes where few MMOGs have dared to tread: into a persistent world where hundreds of players duke it out first-person shooter style. The game features a remarkable variety of futuristic vehicles and weaponry, huge continents to battle over, and an innovative system that allows your character to gain experience, thereby acquiring access to better equipment. It essentially tries to blend FPS and RPG, giving players the mouse twitching combat they love, and the character advancement that makes winning a fight a little more rewarding. Balancing these elements is not easy, but it's clear that the developers put substantial thought into how this could be accomplished.

Getting Started
The story behind the sci-fi conflict setting of PlanetSide is sufficiently brief. All you need to know is that there are 3 nations, and they are at war with each other. Note that, despite the futuristic look of things, most of the weapons and vehicles are quite familiar. Among other things, you'll be using sniper rifles, shotguns, chainguns, tanks, buggies, grenades, mines, and planes that fly like helicopters only slower. Some of the armor is high-tech, making a player invisible when they're not moving, so it's curious that aircraft have a maximum altitude that won't let them traverse certain mountain peaks in the terrain.

Undoubtedly the air units have been toned down to keep them from being too overpowering, and to make them easy to operate with a mouse and keyboard. In fact, joystick support is poor to none at this point. For the most part, everything is handled with standard FPS controls and is relatively easy to adapt to. There is however, a considerable learning curve to PlanetSide. This is due to the large variety of equipment in the game, much of which performs special tasks relative to capturing and powering bases, creating mobile spawn points and resupply terminals, and so on. It can seem daunting to a beginner with only 4 certification points to spend, so if you don't want to go back and read the manual, you may find your first few hours rather trying. Fortunately, you can pick up a couple Battle Ranks just by blasting away on the shooting range for a while.

PlanetSide Screenshots

Battle and Command Rank
Your character in PlanetSide has two experience bars: one for Battle Rank and the other for Command Rank. Battle experience is gained from all combat activities such as killing the enemy and capturing their bases. As your Battle Rank increases, you get certification points, which can be exchanged for access to weapons, armor, vehicles, and other equipment. Skills can be "unlearned" in favor of other skills, but only at a rate of one per day. Command experience can only be gained by leading a squad into successful engagements, and unlocks special command abilities for your character as it increases in level.

It is a surprisingly functional system which provides acceptable flexibility while still preventing a single character from having everything. I would like to see small amounts of experience doled out for support tasks like engineer and medic. There are benefits associated with these skills, but by themselves it's difficult to say whether they are worth the certification points. On the other hand, most experience comes from being part of a successful squad, and support roles could be said to benefit a squads overall performance.

PlanetSide places a lot of emphasis on team work. You are able to accumulate a little experience on your own if you manage to frag a few enemies, but the real gravy lies in taking well defended bases, which requires a semi-organized group of players. The bulk of your experience will be earned as a member of a squad.