MISSIVES FROM PLANETSIDE 2

 

The slaughter tunnels used to grind XP and kills in an endless war.

  

I’m walking through the frozen tundra of Esamir, the landscape occasionally dotted with trees, more frequently with massive spikes of crystal and rock, mountains along the terrain. It reminds me of the landscapes you’d see in older open worlds, masses of procedural landscape, generated before the tools got better and before the expectation was for each part of a world to be meticulously crafted, small wind-up boxes expanded into continent scale. No, Esamir feels rough, like terrain I’d make in Unity, playing with the tools as a middle schooler trying to learn how to make a game of some sort.

I played Planetside 2 in middle school as well, around 2015 when the game released into Open Beta on Playstation 4. I didn’t much GET it, but what I did get was the scale. I was enamored with the idea of massive battles, of walking from one place to another to continue a fight. It’s also what hooked me on the idea of Elder Scrolls Online, that also being a game I played around the same time (the exact release date of it escaping me).

As I walk through the plains, trying to make sense of where I am, I’m passed by a few different troop carriers and bikes. I’m assuming that they’re heading to the next section of the front, the game building out it’s conflict through various checkpoints and bases, all arranged on a hex grid, lines of power shooting out from substations to the various locations- supplying power for the terminals and vehicle spawns. The game’s focus is on those spaces, at least now- I wonder if it’d be different in the past, when the player counts were higher. The game apparently went through a server merge only a few months ago, the discussion I saw stating that it was to combine player counts and cut down on the demand of server hosting. I also saw the remnants of Planetside Arena, an apparent attempt to break into the Battle Royale space as far as I can tell (odd, as the developers of Planetside 2 also manage and own H1Z1 Battle Royale. The fact they also manage multiple other old MMO’s and live service games is of note).

One of the troop carriers, called a Sunderer in the game, passes me by. It’s driver is named “Wubalubadubdub”.

Eventually I just respawn at the nearest battle, the game having an Instant Action button on it’s map, allowing you to die and drop into a new combat scenario. The game justifies it’s constant deaths and respawning through an in-universe device, a “spawn matrix” - infinite deaths and rebirths. Or at least, infinite until the player gets bored and logs off for the day, or perhaps for good.

As I sit and watch the battle go on, occasionally trying to engage but finding it more interesting to just sit and watch, seeing how things develop, the fire and artillery deafening my ears - I think about the geometry of where I’m standing, the environment, the structures.

There are no settlements in Planetside 2, no towns or villages or cities, nothing to suggest a real society here. It’s all game elements, all built in the same geometric boxes, all blue and gray and neon. Nothing to suggest a culture, only the temporary banners of those who control the bases. There’s no civilians either, no non-player characters who aren’t within a faction, no one to run from artillery or to give me quests, no one to defend and no one to assault.

Something I noticed a few times was the hording around a tunnel, or some sort of choke-point. The repeated firing of grenades and rockets into it turned these places into a meat grinder. I’d die, get revived by a medic, and as soon as my model turned upright and I had a chance to move, I’d die again. Nonetheless, I’d be revived again, then die, and so on. I learned later that people farmed XP this way, the in-game leveling so hostile to standard play that it’d be easier to just sit in a corridor and shoot, die, and repeat instead of actually playing the game. XP has a cost too, you get better XP gains if you pay for a membership, the game not being pay to win but cash instead greasing the wheels of the digital military industrial complex.

There’s no choice to be a player civilian either. Every player is armed and the tendency I noticed was to shoot on sight. Even I, in my attempt at being a passive viewer, had to shoot. I messed with some of the classes, tried to get a feel for the game itself, but there’s not much to say. The scale is the appeal, watching wide open conflicts around massive bases. I could also fish, with baffled me. I don’t get it, both the obsession with fishing that multi-player games have, but especially in this one- a game where the point is combat and the players tend to shoot on sight. It’s an odd inclusion, I feel.

During a battle in Esamir, I get sniped, domed in the head as I’m sitting back, watching players swarm and move. I get revived. My savior is named Wubalubadubdub. I proceed to die again, and again.

Even if I try to play the game itself, I’m just a tourist in this world. I’m not the market for this, the eternal war a novelty for me, not a destination. I watch the orbital lasers get called down onto choke-points, blasting away those in the vicinity, but then I respawn or they respawn, and it continues until some whittling away leads to a landslide, one group getting pushed out or another.

This eternal war is a playground. The game screams for you to become a member, to pay to “support the devs”, cloying and begging messages filling the screens and UI outside of combat. This is a forever war, turned into a playground. An slowly draining stuck pig, it’s butchers trying to take what they can with diminishing returns.

The soldiers of Planetside 2 might live forever, but the virtual battlefields they fight on, the servers themselves - they are prone to death.