A few of you who've been around RHL lately, especially late at night, have heard me occasionally mumble something about Planetside. (Amid my other Nocturnal rantings) It's been extremely frustrating, because this inevitably led to someone asking me for a URL and I haven't had one; until now, my only source of information was PC Gamer's December 2000 issue. Planetside both owns the cover and is the first to be featured in a mega-preview of upcoming massive multiplayer games. Here's a quick blurb from the article:
A big element of the game will be vehicles, which are essential for travel over rough terrain and for speedily carrying you back into the fight. The vehicle we got to see in action was an armored, gun-equipped dune buggy (which looked, I must say, like it had jumped right out of Halo). The physics of Planetside are much more action-conscious than thuddingly realistic, so the buggies handle like the vehicles from an arcade racer.
That's right, you heard me say massive multiplayer. Planetside is being done by Verant, the nuts who put out EverCrack... albeit by a totally new team, none of whose members did work on EQ. It will be a massive multiplayer FPS, set in a persistent world, and has been kept under the covers for quite some time. Until now, that is. Verant has announced the existence of Planetside, and launched its official homepage. Also, HBO was the first to post about Daily Radar's informative interview with Kevin McCann, the producer and lead designer of Planetside.
Some of you in our community have at times expressed the hope or even the expectation that Halo might be such a game, so this might be something to keep your eye on. Not quite as pretty as Halo, Planetside will support up to 30,000 gamers per server and is designed around a mercenary system of sorts. We'll have to see if it will be plagued by some of the same things which turned a number of gamers away from EQ. No word yet on whether there will be a Mac version. Perhaps if enough of you expressed an interest...? The game is slated for the Summer of 2001, according to PC Gamer.