“Excuse me, sir? We’ve landed, you need to exit the plane now.” I snap out of my trance of making machinegun noises with my mouth and shaking my fists at the window like I was manning heavy artillery. I thank the stewardess kindly, but also inform her that next time she should salute an officer of the Terran Republic or face a heavy increase in Grief points! She just smiles and looks at me funny…

Last weekend, I had the pleasure of getting a hands-on experience of Sony Online Entertainment’s, formerly Verant Interactive, upcoming massively multiplayer online first person shooter (MMOFPS for short), PlanetSide. PlanetSide, the first MMOFPS to date, combines elements of a team oriented first person shooter like Battlefield 1942 with the background story and character development of an RPG like EverQuest. Needless to say, I was pretty excited about finally being able to play PlanetSide, since only last May I had the pleasure of watching the developers play it for us. Like most people that first hear about PlanetSide, I had my doubts and skepticism. I had seen an early build of the game a year ago, but now I was going to get to play it? How was the network code going to be? How would the graphics look? Were the vehicles going to be fun to pilot and would they prove useful? How were they going to balance such epic gameplay over huge continents? Would there be enough diversity with the distribution of these “certification” points that players could form their own unique online personas? Well, thankfully the majority of my questions were answered, so read on and check out what I was able to uncover about the first MMOFPS, PlanetSide.

Terran Republic: The oldest faction and the most experienced when it comes to war. Their beliefs are built on scare tactics and oppressing its people. The people don’t know what they want, we do! Their specialty is being able to unload large amounts of ammo very quickly.

Vanu Sovereignty: This is the technology-heavy faction. After discovering Vanu artifacts and implementing them into their very existence, hence the name, they claim themselves as an evolved species and fight for their right to rule. Quite a few developers poke fun at the Vanu. Unfortunately for me, every time I saw one I usually died shortly thereafter.

New Conglomerate: This is the rebel faction that believes the other two factions are truly evil and thus they fight for the freedom of the people. They also figure the only way to do this is to carry big guns and blow large holes in anything that isn’t wearing blue and gold.

I was assigned to the Terran Republic under the command of Dave Georgeson, the producer of PlanetSide. After we, the Terran Republic, were at our computer stations located in a soundproof room (maybe so others couldn’t hear our screams?), our fearless leader started telling us about PlanetSide and what we were about to experience.

The first thing we were going to do was make our character. For now, the only thing you can customize is your character’s face; perhaps more options will present themselves in the future. Of course, if you’re wearing anything other than light armor, your face is covered with a helmet and visor, which look pretty damn cool. A possible answer to this is that as you progress in rank, your armor will show badges, etc. This is still under development, so we’ll have to wait and see.

After you’ve played with everything, you will need to distribute your starting “certification points”. These points are what will mold your character into the super solider you have envisioned in your dreams. Thankfully, victory in PlanetSide won’t be based solely on stats, but rather on a player’s skill. These “certification points”, which you earn via your various combat experiences, will simply unlock more abilities as well as increase other abilities you might have already learned, such as beneficial skills like healing, which allows you to heal wounded squad mates, and advanced healing, which allows you to revive a fallen comrade, more weapons to use, different armor types to wear, and vehicles to pilot, as opposed to normal RPG elements which would just increase abilities that affect a player’s stats like weapon accuracy or damage, upping your armor class or your hit points. Fear not, the developers know that molding your character won’t be an easy task so they have given us the option of unlearning these points and retraining them if you find you aren’t enjoying your current configuration.

Let’s discuss the skills a little more that will be available to players. What skills you pick all depends on what type of character you want to create. For myself, I concentrated on the skills required to be a sniper class while others chose to focus on creating a medic style character or a hardcore pilot. Now since this was a press event, SOE gave us the max amount of certification points that are available to players. When you normally start your first character in PlanetSide, you get about two. Having the max number of points allowed all of us to create pretty beefy characters so we could check out a bunch of the different ability combinations in one sitting. I started by spending a few points on the “Snipping” ability and then spent some points on the basic assault rifle ability, which then allowed me to train the necessary skill to use the Bolt-Driver, the sniper rifle of PlanetSide. After I had my sniper rifle, I then dropped some points for the medium armor type, which would give me some protection against those hard things, aka bullets.

Now that character creation is over and done with, we are teleported to our factions; the Terran Republic for me, sanctuary. This is a safe haven where no combat will ever occur and is off limits to other factions. While at the sanctuary, we were able to outfit ourselves with the weapons, armor and items that we had trained to use. You can also pick up a vehicle in the sanctuary and take it with you through the warp gate to another continent. Warp gates allow humans and vehicles to teleport to the 10 different and gigantic continents on the planet of Auraxis.

Also available at the Sanctuary, as well as on the other bases located through out the different continents, are stations where players can acquire various implants. These implants, which can be swapped out, provide enhanced abilities to the player. One of the implants that I chose, being a sniper, allows me to zoom in with my rifle up to 12x magnification as opposed to the normal 8x. Another implant allows you to slowly drain your stamina for a boost in your run speed. Others include a personal shield, better accuracy with melee weapons, and better damage with projectiles weapons.

Since I had medium armor, I could only carry my sniper riffle, a pistol, some normal and armor-piercing ammunition, one or two medical kits and a hacking device. The difference between normal and armor-piercing ammo is that normal ammo is good against troops wearing up to medium armor while armor-piercing is good against vehicles and soldiers that are wearing the MAX armor type. Before you ask, if you fire normal ammo rounds at MAX armor or a vehicle, your damage will be halved, and vice versa if you were to fire armor-piercing ammo at lightly armored troops. The hacking device I took has several functions, all of which involve hacking computer terminals. One use is to hack the locked doors of an enemy-controlled base. Once the door is hacked and you’re inside, you can choose to go straight for the command terminal, hack it (which takes 15 minutes of real time), and this will convert the entire base over to your faction.

After we were all equipped, we formed up into a squad or group, but unlike groups in EverQuest, PlanetSide allows 10 people to form one cohesive unit. You gain more certification points by grouping with fellow soldiers. Players that are able to lead squads will not only get certification points but also the ability to rise in rank.