Fighting for free

PlanetSide 2 is a game that probably shouldn’t work.

I came to that conclusion shortly after getting into my first big fight in the game. The outfit I had temporarily joined up with had just captured a small base and was looking to expand deeper into enemy territory. I hopped aboard another player’s APC (armored personnel carrier), while the more skilled operators took to tanks and aircrafts. The outfit leader spotted a shortcut through a nearby valley. We would come around from the side and catch our foes unaware.

Unfortunately, the opposing force was not as idle as we had assumed and the moment we set foot in the valley all hell broke loose. Tanks traded volleys to the tune of giants’ drums. Fire poured out of alien crafts circling overhead. Hundreds of infantry swarmed on the ground, desperately seeking cover in the black of night, myself among them. All around us the jungle was lit by gunfire. Eventually the drums stopped, and we took the enemy base. To celebrate, my teammates shot multicolored flares into the ground and danced while someone played choice hip-hop music over the team chat. All the while, I thought to myself: This should be broken. Somewhere, some server should be melting because of what we just did. This shouldn’t work at all. But it did.

PlanetSide 2 is a free, first-person-shooter, massively multiplayer online game in which you align yourself with one of three factions: the New Conglomerate, the Terran Republic or the Vanu Sovereignty. From there the game becomes a massive tug-of-war struggle in which the three factions fight for territorial control across a sprawling map.

Your role on the battlefield largely depends on which class you feel most comfortable with. The full gamut of class selection is present. There’s everything from Medics to MAXs, which are basically slow-moving, terrifyingly powerful man-tanks. The shooting itself felt good, which is a heck of an achievement for a game this big and with so much happening on the screen at any given moment—there can be 2,000 players on a server at a time.

Running from one side of a map to the other in PlanetSide 2 might take you all day. Fortunately, you can spawn a vehicle at most bases. Vehicle types range from small but agile dune buggies to Galaxies, huge dropships that can transport players from place to place with ease while dishing out their fair share of firepower. A skilled player in the driver’s seat of a tank or a Galaxy can turn the tide of war. I know: I was blown up by many such skilled individuals.

PlanetSide 2 is a free-to-play game, which begs the question of just how playable it actually is. In recent years, many F2P games have come under fire as being “pay-to-win,” meaning that players who are willing to dish out money on micro-transactions hold an inherent advantage over players who cannot or choose not to pay. PlanetSide 2 does feature micro-transactions, but they seem balanced to prevent such situations.

There are two separate forms of currency in PlanetSide 2: There’s the “real money” currency, Station Cash, and the in-game currency, Cert Points. The major difference between the two is that Cash can be bought and Certs needs to be earned through battle experience. Both vanity items (like suits of armor, camouflage and decals) and weapons can be unlocked using either Cash or Certs. However, your gear can only be upgraded to higher levels of efficiency using Certs. That means it would be impossible for some crazy person to drop $500 on their first day to get all of the weapons and their respective upgrades. For those looking to dip their toes into the micro-transaction waters but not yet ready to commit, there are half-hour trials for all weapons. Weapon trials weren’t working for me when I first started playing, but I was eventually able to try out an assault rifle that I found wasn’t much better than what I was already using.

Another, more nebulous, concern about F2P games is the community. PlanetSide 2 comes with voice chat embedded into it, which, for a F2P game, sounds absolutely terrifying to me. However, this is another area in which PlanetSide 2 blew me away. The community is surprisingly pretty good. The outfit I joined was skilled and actually employed strategy. On several occasions we actually out-thought the enemy. More than once I found myself wondering what weird fluke I had fallen into. I felt like one of those characters in an overacted commercial for a multiplayer shooter, where everyone is using voice chat and being respectful (with a certain level of tongue-in-cheek trash-talk topped with a dollop of camaraderie, even in the face of a crippling loss). After my experiences in other game series like Modern Warfare and Battlefield I didn’t know interactions like that were possible and, frankly, I was impressed.

PlanetSide 2 is one of the best experiences I’ve had with a shooter in ages, which is all the more strange considering it’s free. Free-to-play games carry a stigma of punishing the players by forcing them to choose whether they want to sacrifice their time or their money in order to progress at a reasonable pace. PlanetSide 2 certainly has those hooks, but by the end I felt like that postponement of satisfaction was a feature that made the game more enjoyable. It might take a while to get anywhere, but the thrill of the Vanu Armada moving as one cohesive unit towards its collective goal is an experience I have yet to see replicated elsewhere. There’s an undeniable tension that builds between battles in PlanetSide 2, and if it takes a little longer to get there I’m fine with that.