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Even after Fortnite, there’s still something essential about the MMOFPSTake a walk on the Planetside
Take a walk on the Planetside
If you’re in need of some quiet time - and I certainly am, because the people upstairs are having their kitchen refitted, and the resulting powerdrill noise is literally shaking things off my desk - I recommend a stroll across the plains ofPlanetside 2. This might seem odd advice, given that PlanetSide 2 is ashooterin which hundreds or even thousands of players fight each other simultaneously, but the thing about planet-sized wars is that they require plenty of legroom, and the thing about crowds is that you can lose yourself within them.
PlanetSide 2 Official Trailer – Epic First Person Shooter!Watch on YouTube
PlanetSide 2 Official Trailer – Epic First Person Shooter!
The MMOFPS as I understand it swims between these two experiences. There’s something like the anatomy of a traditionalFPSat work, with base layouts that consist more obviously of sightlines, flanking routes and chokepoints, but that experience is “opt in”. Head away from the killzone and suddenly you’re playing a kind of asymmetrical walking sim, or whatever the non-pejorative version of “walking sim” is. You bump into a hostile player noodling around near their HQ and exchange guilty looks, like office colleagues who took the long way back from the snack machine - “I won’t tell your platoon CO if you don’t tell mine”.
Planetside 2’s forever-war premise is very depressing, when you place it against real-life wars that have carried on for decades. But I have to admit, I find its emphasis on being a nameless grunt among thousands calming. Over the past ten years, the rise of hero shooters and the flourishing of celebrity esports players and streamers has given the FPS a cult of personality, which flies in parallel, I guess, to how social media has taught us all to be self-promoters.
Which can be worryingly appealing. Sometimes I play PlanetSide 2 out of an active desire to be one of the poor feckless bastards rushing the breach and getting slaughtered, while the CO bellows at me from a hoverjet. I might only get to play for 30 seconds at a time, but there’s no particular pressure to play well, because I’m just here to grease the wheels of the war machine with my bodily fluids. The older I get, and the more jaded I become about online interactions generally (and the more my reflexes deteriorate), the more I like the sound of playing Lance-Corporal Seventh-From-The-Left.
Speaking of “the muffled thud of distant artillery”, they’ve started drilling upstairs again, and now somebody in another apartment has begun to sing. I’ll wind up here to stop this becoming a series of expletives. If this article piques your interest, I’llsee you in the foothills of Auraxis. Although I will probably try to pretend I haven’t. I’m just out for a stroll, after all.
