Thursday, February 21, 2019

Worth a thousand worlds

Once upon a 2003 there was a multiplayer game called Planetside. Being as it launched before World of Warcraft dumbed down the MMO concept to an unrecognizable farce worthy of the lowest common denominator, Planetside still aspired to MMOs' rightful convergence of genres, mixing hundred-player strategy with first-person pugnacity in a single reasonably persistent virtual world. (With admittedly mixed success.) This largely meant embracing what I'd later call the #1 rule in my Massively Multiplayer Manifesto: The world is the game.

It played up its nominally futuristic setting by making a big deal out of dropping out of the stratosphere onto each new continent or manually flying your vehicle through gigantic glowing warp gates. Teleportation was limited to your nearest spawn point or a single point you yourself bookmarked, making organizing transport with other players a crucial skill for all involved. Bases had to be supplied to remain functional. Thanks to the stringent practical limits on how many objects could be rendered in an online game at the time, they were also massive, monolithic structures with relatively few rooms and defensible choke points. The emphasis was on locations, not players.

Planetside 2 chose to reverse that. Bases no longer have any passive defenses. Calculated, premeditated long-range carpet-bombings and artillery shelling was replaced with overpowered invisible snipers, insta-kill dogfights, an overpowered "harasser" light vehicle capable of ignoring battle lines and worst of all, massive amounts of terrain clutter. Almost every room and courtyard has at least three entrances and is utterly stuffed with boxes piled upon boxes blocking line of sight, with the overall result randomizing player movements to make it impossible to predict one's enemy. Base capture times were trivialized and base-flipping made a constant occurrence and teleportation was made so ubiquitous that there are now fewer passenger vehicles without built-teleporters than with them. The result is a clusterfuck. Planetside 2 was re-tooled from the first installment's emphasis on epic battles for terrain to a Call of Duty clone, team deathmatch heavily favoring opportunism over planning. Players no longer have to specialize every day for a particular role, vehicles are paper-fragile (especially the aircraft) and it's impossible to advance in any battlefield without getting flanked, because with such permeable battle-lines, there simply are no flanks. Only a roiling melee of fast-fingered, slow-brained twitch gamers taking potshots at each other. Sheer population numbers count for more than they ever did.

Planetside 2 traded in the persistence of its virtual world for mindless twitch and kill-counting, traded in the concepts of territory control and conquering a world for petty sadism and narcissism.

Aesthetically, the game pushed its dumbed-down reinterpretation by downplaying SF elements in favor of military jargon, tanks and assault rifles. Even the constant teleportation takes place without any bells and whistles, by players simply appearing in their respective vehicles. The somewhat airy, exploration themed music from the first game became more martial. Most interestingly though, four years ago the game acquired new loading screens. If memory serves, this came about as the result of a fan-art contest. Each and every one of them featured a group of soldiers of one faction killing one single specimen of one of the others. Running him over with a tank, executing him at point-blank range, etc. There's an obvious link between the mentality and the product. The hyperactive degenerates with no attention span who love PS2's focus on unfocused opportunism, zerging and constant reversals are also primitive enough to swallow the idiotic message of those loading screens, to want to see themselves as only ever beating down an outnumbered opponent.

Yet a virtual world has little to offer if it doesn't focus on the world itself. If you're just into machine-gunning down random schmucks, then Call of Duty just does Call of Duty better. Though PS2 had a decent run, it rapidly lost the interest of the right customers and as a result also the wrong ones (the ones you draw in with splash screens of unopposed victories; bullies) who depend on better minds for leadership. Somewhat unsurprisingly, PS2 is now being re-tooled as... even more of a standard "khakis and Kalashnikovs" team deathmatch game. With a touch of Fortnite clone via a battle royale mode. Because copycatting a competitor who's already kicking your ass in popularity can't fail, right?

I find amusement in one discrepancy.
They apparently held another fan art contest in the past year, and the new loading screens do indeed try to showcase Auraxis as an alien planet, new worlds and new civilizations, the romantic feel of exploration. They show lone players or groups with their weapons holstered trudging among luxuriant otherworldly vegetation, misty craters and unspoilt wilderness stretching to vast horizons. Wow. Very nice, but it's too little too late. It took you six years to realize you've been catering to the wrong audience?

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P.S.:
Players have collected most of the loading screens in question at this link. It should be easy enough to discern the first and second wave.

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