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Planetside

	Author: Chris Massey Article Type: PC Game Review Publication Date: 9/25/2003 Developer: Sony Online Entertainment Publisher: Sony Online Entertainment Related Categories: Science Fiction, First Person Shooter, Tactical, Online or Multi-Player

Nice Paint Job

Planetside's graphics engine is a monster. I mean this in two different ways: it provides a beautiful fragfest of a gameplay experience, and it runs terribly. Planetside eats resources, mainly RAM. The graphics are very sharp at the highest levels of details, featuring reflective surfaces, detailed flora and fauna, gorgeous skies, bump mapping and...sluggish...framerates. Thankfully, Planetside offers a pile of options for controlling how things look on-screen, from the basic changes like screen resolution and texture detail to options like turning off bump mapping, flora and fauna, coronas, detailed skies and more. This is good, because even when I ran the game under the "recommended" settings, it ran terribly. After some tweaking I was able to find a healthy middle ground that didn't sacrifice too much graphical detail (I do love pretty games) for a decent framerate.

On the down side, the character and vehicle designs are boring, the vehicles are uninteresting, the bases are simple and uninspired, and the characters all look pretty much the same, and are pretty much...boring. This is a shame because the landscapes, dotted with grass and trees and such, are breathtaking, particularly if the player's PC can handle extending the game's visual distance beyond fifty yards.

How's it sound?

The sounds in the game are well done. I suppose there are only so many times a player can hear something explode in a game, or a gun fire or a bullet ricochet. I mean experienced players of first-person shooters have heard it all done before, right? Well, no, not really. The sound in Medal of Honor: Allied Assault was astounding. I remember my poor Allied trooper hiding behind a tree, listening to the plonk-plonk of MG42 bullets as they slapped into the other side of the tree. I could almost envision the tree quivering above me as I cowered behind that tree, waiting to storm the building on the other side. The sounds in Planetside are not quite this good, but they are convincing. The huge variety of weapons and vehicles sport an equally huge variety of interesting sounds, and though it's harder to be immersed in a hackneyed futuristic world full of fighting, the sound still manages a decent job of this.

Home away from home.	Inside a friendly base.

Driving...

Planetside's interface, while more complicated than most FPS interfaces, is still easy to use after getting used to it. Most of the interface is arranged along the bottom of the screen: life, armor and energy gauges, weapon options with matching numbers to press for selecting them, and even a hotkey area for items placed into the hotkey slots F1 through F8 (much like in Diablo II). In the upper left is the radar showing the immediate surroundings. The radar does this auto-range thing that can be annoying at times, but overall it's very useful for keeping up with party members nearby and where support might be needed in firefights, not to mention the compass along its outer boundaries being quite useful as well. Along the bottom right side is a small sliver of interface with several buttons on it allowing access to vehicle settings, character information, and more. The biggest addition to the FPS interface is, of course, the chat box. This is located in the upper right. In the top box runs the kills, local actions, and more; in the bottom box is the actual conversation going on nearby, or even private conversations or squad conversations, if desired, much like in MMORPGs like EverQuest. Planetside even offers voice chat, though it's currently in beta. There's also an exhaustive selection of canned voice macros to use, though it takes a while to get used to all of the key presses that are needed to access them.