Planetside what?!

I've been horribly lax about keeping up with industry news over at GameDev.net. Actually, I might as well throw in Gamasutra.com and DevMaster.net as being other neglected sites while I'm at it. This is an issue that I plan on resolving and the first step is to set my home page to GameDev for the time being. That will at least provide the motivational poke that I require.

While catching up on "The Daily GameDev.net" column, I read something interesting. Apparently SOE is planning a sequel to the underplayed game Planetside called Planetside Next. This news has met with widely mixed emotions ranging the entire spectrum from love and anticipation to hate and discontent.

In the article on joystiq.com, John Smedley says, "To me, PlanetSide Next means we get a chance to take the essence of everything that was fun in PlanetSide and make it a lot better ... massive battles on a scale no other FPS will touch ... none of this 64-player stuff ... REALLY MASSIVE."

Now, it is no big secret that I am not one of John's biggest fans so I approach most of what he says with trepidation. For a bit of history, I played PS from beta to launch and beyond. As a fan of wargames, what really drew me in was the sheer epic nature of the game. What other FPS-based game could not only support 450+ players all fighting each other at the same time in the same location but also have the player base to supply those massive numbers of simultaneous fights? PlanetSide. Now the fact that my computer could not handle that many people fighting simultaneously was another matter but not the fault of PS. In my 6 months of playing the game on a daily basis I was able to spectate and participate is some "REALLY MASSIVE" battles, as John calls them. How will 450 people fighting in PS Next differ from 450 people fighting in PS Next? I fail to see the difference.

He claims that they will be carrying only the good game mechanics from PS into PS Next but, from my point of view, he does not always have his finger on the pulse of what constitutes good game mechanics. This is evident by changes that, to my knowledge he has championed, have resulted in a drop in subscription numbers and which overall tend to leave a bad taste in the player's mouths. In John's defense (yes, I can still play the devil's advocate), game design is a line of work that you would have to be a bit crazy to enter into in the first place. No one alive or dead will always know what constitutes great game mechanics because it is completely subjective. What is good to one person is horrible to another person sitting five feet away. You can not please all of the people all of the time, so why try? SOE does what any other company would do with the responsibility of maintaining a persistent world while attempting to add in more content and that is to do what will make the most people happy. Because when most people are happy, they will keep paying and filling SOE's coffers.

I can see that I'm beginning to diverge from the topic at hand so I will close out by saying that at some point I will check out PlanetSide Next because it is one of my favorite genres; the MMOFPS. Let us hope that it will be a superior game. At least this time around, my computer will be able to handle it.