Hardly a Review: Planetside 2

Planetside 2 is one of those games that scratches an itch you didn’t even know you had. Let’s face it everything it offers has already been done before in one form or another, so why should you care? Well citizens, it’s a lot like Mac ‘n’ Cheese Pies, the result is far greater than the sum of it’s parts. Allow me to elaborate.

Planetside 2 dubs itself an MMOFPS, and whilst it is not the first game in this genre, it’s certainly the first one to truly earn the title “massive.” Each server supports up to 2000 people at any one time, and whilst that may seem like a low number for MMO’s I can assure you I have never once had a problem logging into my chosen server. It also holds true to it’s title of FPS, whilst contemporaries like Firefall try to exist within the realms of a recognisable MMORPG, Planetside 2 comes at the genre from a completely different angle. Instead, it chose games such as Battlefield 3 as it’s starting point’ and indeed it plays very much like Battlefield 3... if you force-fed the maps steroids.

The simulator, simulated.

So a few weeks back I came across this post on reddit, basically telling the tale of a game of Minecraft gone terribly terribly wrong. Like putting a bunch of kittens in charge of a tank kinda wrong. The story tells of a minecraft game between friends, where the one rule of the server is to not leave the play area, which was only a few hundred blocks long. Since the world of Minecraft is infinite, and resources (even rare ores) aren’t that hard to come across, normally this wouldn’t be a problem, but make that infinite world into a finite one, and the problems you eventually face will be very similar to those the real world faces. Needless to say, once there was a demand for scarce resources, a power struggle broke out and the group descended into factions, using open warfare, subterfuge and trading to get what they needed.

Now I’ve been on reddit long enough to question the validity of this guy’s story. I’ve also been on reddit long enough to know that crazier shit has happened. Either way it’s a nice story but regardless of the truth it raises an interesting question. Can we use video games like Minecraft to simulate real world occurrences, and predict the outcomes of potential events via such a method? This played on my mind for quite a long while, so I decided to do some digging. (excuse the pun)

Gotham City Cost Cutters

Gotham City Imposters is a great game. Honestly, it’s something I can play with the same religiosity as I play Team Fortress 2. It’s also just gone free to play this week, so you have absolutely no excuse not to play it yourselves. However, this sudden move towards the free to play model has got me thinking. What inspired the move, and are free to play games always inherently successful?

My first thought of the free to play model has to be the way it has shaped the MMORPG world. Since World of Warcraft essentially has a monopoly on the genre (you can disagree with me, but that don’t change the facts) other MMO’s with a subscription based payment model just haven’t been able to survive. Heck, the first question anyone asks when they hear an upcoming title will come with a subscription is: “How long do you think until they’re forced to make it free to play?” I should know, often those words are coming out of my mouth. A subscription based MMO going free to play, is often a sign that not enough people are playing the game to make it profitable, which as far as I’m concerned is never a good sign. It reeks of a last ditch effort to get people through the door and playing their game before they must inevitably resort to shelving it.