LtStaley....PS1 vet since day 1

[LtStaley]

Picked up a copy of the first Planetside back when I worked at Circuit City the day of release (May 2003). I'm TR and that's all you need to know.

Anyways, PS1 finally set the tone for what I thought a FPS should have always been. Not close corridor, bird caged, cramped run-n-gun style maps where no amount of strategy is involved. Sure I can drop two scorpions in a coffee can and watch them go at it....but that gets old real quick.

Planetside offers massive environments that virtually eliminate spawn killing. You can spawn far enough from the action in most cases in order to be able to have staging areas where you could form massive vehicle columns with dozens of tanks or fleets of planes to attack from the air. You can specialize in other support roles that actually have stretgic value on the battlefield such as engineers and medics. Individual skill in Planetside doesn't carry nearly as much weight as it does in standard FPSs. Although having a modest amount of skill is still important, Planetside weighs heavily in other areas such as strength in numbers and strategy as a whole. This allows even the greenest of soldiers to get their fair share of kills on the battlefield.

If you were lucky enough to have graced the first Planetside in it's heyday, you'd know what a revolutionary genre breakthrough it was. It makes you never want to play another standard FPS again knowing that there's better stuff out there. It was well worth the wait, I'm glad the 2nd installment is finally almost here!