Games are a bit like Buses....

Hello fellow GraWists and welcome back!!

I'd better start by explaining the title (it's a bit of an English phrase), basically when it looked like all there was left to look forward to was another mundane replica of Modern Warfare, the world of game development woke up and delivered a deluge of gaming porn to oggle !! This, loyal readers, is a beautiful thing.

It was fair to say we were excited about the release of the Ghost Recon games from Ubi, but being impatient and always on the look out for the next best thing, the horizon looked dim, colourless and a bit wintry. That was until we heard about a little game called Planetside 2! What's that? You already heard of it?.... Good then you will understand my excitement!

Planetside 2 is a game that we can break down into two genres: The MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online Game) and the FPS (First Person Shooter... our favourite!!). Cleverly the bods of the internet simplified things and called it an FPSMMO.... they probably should stick to game dev!
Let me explain to you why then we should all be feeling a rush of blood to the groin area. First person shooters are the favourite genre of the BacK2GraW group... we can't get enough of them so that is one thing PS2 has in its favour. Secondly there has always been that nagging sensation that the maps of certain games were never big enough or there were not enough players or.... you get the idea, something has been missing.
Well to get round the issue of maps not being big enough the Planetside guys stopped refering to them as maps and went for the slightly more ambitious name of Continents... like Africa only bigger. This means that instead of being stuck in a map full of camping little nobodies you are left in a world that allows you to actually plan and execute long term assaults and defenses, and this is where the next plus point comes in.
When they say MMO at Planetside they don't mean 50 players (BF3 and EoN), they don't mean 200 players either! They mean all out 1000+ (yes that says one thousand plus!) players on 3 different factions fighting... at the same time.... on the same map. Excuse me for a second whilst I take a deep breath and contemplate that for the millionth time. That's better, where were we?... oh yeah, 1000+ players.
If you like the idea of wars being held where you, your friends, their girlfriends and the talkitive person on Facebook that seems to know everyone.... and his friends, can strategically plan and then commence on a persistent battle then you need to check this game out!

You may have noticed a word in there that, at first, probably doesn't mean a lot. Persistent. These wars don't happen on a 15 minute timer and then everyone goes back into the lobby to hurl abuse at each others poor mothers. The war doesn't end. Period. When you are asleep, war is raging. When you are at work, war is raging. In fact even when you are sitting in your bathroom wishing you hadn't eaten the Vindaloo from the local Indian, war is raging. How incredible is that idea?

Now I know a lot of people will be saying "this is the second game in the series so its not new". Wrong! This game is being made at a time where technology can actually handle the beautifully rendered backdrops, the endless terrain and the gorgeous lighting. Not to mention the massive amount of people on a server at any one time! This game is a world away from the original and we are very excited about the upcoming beta testing, which rather unsurprisingly, we are already signed up for lol.

The year is shaping up now to be very exciting, and the challenge remains for the Activision peeps to pull their collective fingers out and see what they can really do, because this group for one has bigger fish to fry with titles like this set to be released!

Old Flads