Displaying stories with the tag "Planetside". Subscribe to this URL for an RSS feed of this tag. Want more news? Click here for the Shacknews frontpage.The light RPG elements come in the form of special abilities that players can learn as they advance in rank. Essentially as a soldier earns ranks, the respective Empire awards the soldier with Ability Points. There are different Ability Trees, including Medical, Technological, and Infiltrator (hacking), plus a couple I'm not mentioning yet. But basically as a player advances, he or she can be a 'Jack-of-all-Trades,' learning the basic abilities in all the Ability Trees, or focus on one Tree to learn it entirely. [screenshots]
They also have missions (or quests) Ok yeah, Diablo2 has that... anyone figure out what makes this worth $10 a month? Do you get to build your own virtual house and paint the couch purple? I'd pay for that.
But even if players do die, Verant is trying their best to make sure that players can get right back into the action. There will be set ups much like in Tribes so that you can purchase your favorite loadouts quickly. If you end up out of money all of the sudden, you can always fall back on setting yourself up with a standard loadout which is free. At that point you can hope to find dead bodies to loot out in the field somewhere with better stuff than you. If you do find some things that you like, you can always keep them in your private inventory for later, or sell them so that you can buy some other equipment or implants.
We demonstrated only a 2k x 2k map at E3, but I have just finished today crunching a full 8k x 8k map with 250 100,000 triangle buildings placed into it. Believe me there is plenty of real-estate here to fight over. And plenty of room for a lot of players to fit comfortably.
The 8k x 8k maps are amazingly huge. The one we demonstrated at E3 was just a taste of how large our worlds are.
Personally, I've had concerns from time to time that our maps might be 'too big' to be fun. As we are pulling things together I don't worry about that at all anymore. Waging war across such a huge battlefield, wars that will take hours upon hours of continuous game play is, as they say, 'all good'.
Using vehicles to travel overland and then attacking the interior of people's bases and buildings is going to be the norm. I get more excited about this game every day as we bring more of the elements together.
I tried to squeeze one of the guys for some information on exactly what in the hell makes this game worth paying a monthly fee for but havent figure that one out. Most likely they want to keep that stuff under wraps or at least I hope.
That said, those of you that are going to E3 will be in for a nice surprise. We're going to have a strong showing of PlanetSide at Sony Online Entertainment's booth this year and, better yet, we'll let you walk up and play it!
I can't get really go into detail about what we'll be showing at E3 (Marketing and PR would lynch me), but, fortunately, Blackbird has kept all of you in mind and is setting up media updates for our webpage to coincide with the E3 dates.
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