Alana becomes nostalgic at the thought of mass battles
Game: Planetside 2 | Developer: Rogue Planet Games (formerly Sony Online Entertainment) | Platform: PC, PlayStation | Release Date: November 20, 2012 | Model: Free2Play
Alana Friedrichs: If you squint both eyes properly, Planetside 2 is an MMORPG. After all, there’s a skill tree! And various classes! But much more importantly: In Planetside 2, at its peak, there were up to 1,800 players simultaneously shooting lasers, grenades, and full-metal rounds at each other in the open world.
For my teenage self, Planetside 2 was an enlightenment: Until 2013, I only knew single-player shooters like Half-Life 2, coop rounds in Golden Eye, and had sniffed a little multiplayer air in Battlefield 2. Gathering with dozens of players every evening on the Teamspeak of the “Indestructible Phoenix Teams” to storm the map as a platoon – that was something completely different.
The best part: Everyone could decide how they wanted to contribute to the Terran Republic (cough, cough, definitely not the bad guys) according to their own strengths: whether on foot, with or without jetpack, as a supporting engineer or medic, as a heavily armored MAX unit in a combat suit, as a tank commander, as a jet pilot, as a platoon leader, as a sniper, as …
I’m getting pretty nostalgic. My old server-Ceres and the Phoenix Team no longer exist today; player counts are significantly smaller.
But: Planetside 2 is still here. And it is still free. And I … am feeling that old tingling again and somehow really want to check back in: What has happened since then in the MMO that still means more to me than any other.
On the next page, we continue with a very unusual pick from our community lead Mary.
