My favorite thing about Planetside 2 is the freedom. And I don’t mean, like, American freedom, but the way the game lets you decide what kind of game you want to play. . .
Okay, that shit made no sense. Let me explain, especially for those who never heard of the game. Planetside 2 is essentially an MMOFPS, if you’re edgy enough to call it that, where three factions full of real-life players are in a constant (and I mean that) struggle to control four massive continents on an alien planet.
Factions can gain more land on a continent by capturing the smaller territories that make them up. At the end of an ‘Alert’, which occurs multiple times a day, the faction with the most territories wins the continent for a couple hours, and they gain some temporary benefits to help them later.
If you can imagine a map, the factions are like a rolling wave, comprised of hundreds of players, swallowing up territories along their path. And what happens when those waves crash together, is that shit gets crazy. The areas where factions collide is essentially a ‘front-line’ that ebbs and flows where the fighting happens. It’s a lot like a Dudes on a Map board game.
From there, as one player out of thousands, what do we do? What can we do? Does our tiny insignificance have any purpose in this world?
It might. Or it might not, and that’s okay. Honestly, you can just do whatever you want. Everyone has their own interesting niches to fill. And that’s in part, due to ‘Certification Points’ (Cert for short).
A Cert is a currency that’s used to progress in Planetside 2: there’s a ton of new equipment to get, for both personnel and vehicles (I’m serious, I don’t know if it’s even possible to get everything in the game. Unless you play for a thousand hours. Which is fine. If you’re into that.). But the cool thing is, you earn certs by getting experience points. And you can get experience points for doing virtually anything.
I mean it. I don’t think you can wipe your ass without getting five points. Obviously, you can earn points for stuff like getting kills and capturing objectives (which is how you pick up territories). But you also get points for picking up the territories themselves. All you have to do is just be there! There are these ‘service ribbons’ that you earn by doing repeated actions like healing or using a weapon, and those give you points too. Actually, leveling up in general gives you points. It’s crazy.
There’re also more ‘specific’ ways to get points. All the classes do their own thing. As an Engineer, you can get points for repairing vehicles, terminals, turrets, and MAX suits (a super suit you can wear occasionally which absolutely lays waste to everything). Medics get a lot of points just for reviving and healing people. And no matter what class you are, you can use vehicles which do their own thing too. Take the Sunderer, which is just a big ass van. You can park it behind enemy lines so your teammates can spawn on it. Granted, you only get six points per spawn (250 points = 1 cert), but when there’s a hundred people dying and respawning on your mini-van, that shit adds up. There’s base building too, holy moly. I don’t even know what’s going on with that. I mean, the list just goes on and on.
But, notice how none of these fine professions to choose from directly involve ‘killing’ people. And that’s not to say I’m some kind of video game pacifist; I love killing people. That shit is fun. But the fact that Planetside 2, a First-Person Shooter, allows you to do well without really shooting people (even though it’s probably better if you do) says a lot about what the game has to offer. There’s a ton of play styles.
Honestly, this game feels like an MMO, which it is, but an MMO in the likeness of Final Fantasy XIV or something (y’know what I’m talking about). In those MMORPGs, there’s also a ton of different things you can do, you don’t even have to raid if you don’t want to. I had a friend that became a fat cat with millions of Gil in Final Fantasy XIV just off of cooking food and selling it! The thing about cooking, and just crafting in general with that game, is how different of an experience it is from raiding, or gathering materials, or just enjoying the story. It’s like playing multiple games at once. But you’re still in the same world, partaking the same full experience.
And that’s kind of my point with this game. If you get tired of doing the same thing, you can just do something else, but still have that Planetside 2 experience. It’s a bunch of ‘games’, but in one game.
The thing is, we’re really encouraged to play around with everything in the game because of the certs. When you’re having a lot of fun running around zipping past bullets reviving your friends, and then you’re rewarded with certs, it feels really good. Then, you can spend those certs on some super cool stuff like…revive grenades!? Yes, there is a grenade that you can get for Medic that you can throw to revive up to ten people at once. With that, you can get even more certs to get even more awesome stuff. It’s a really great feedback loop and this shit does not get old.
It’s like that with virtually any viable playstyle you can think of. Do a fun thing that you want to do, get certs for doing it well, spend it on equipment that augments that playstyle or makes it more interesting, then because of that spending, get even more certs than before and have more fun doing it too. Or start fresh and invest in a different class or vehicle or something.
As long as it ‘helps’ your faction, even in the most miniscule way, you’re rewarded with certs, and subsequently, progression. It’s a cool way to encourage diverse playstyles, but it’s also good for fostering better teamwork (which is a whole other thing to talk about on its own).
There’s a ton of freedom (not American freedom) to do what you want to do. And as an FPS, despite the game being seven years old, it’s still insanely refreshing.
Slickaria! 