Planetside 2 War Stories

So the dev's working on Planetside 2 decided recently that their game was too damn gorgeous to be crippled by horrendously low framerates, and set out to fix just that. This update has made the game run as if it weren't running on a burnt-out 2-slot toaster but in fact running on my moderately powered ASUS laptop, and as such, it's playable for me now! So I got myself sucked in to some raging battles and it got me thinking about how much fun it is to play even though it can get more than a little crazy. You know what it boils down to? Planetside 2 is fun because each time you play you come away from it with some wild virtual-war-story to tell your friends.

Isn't it pretty?

I remember back on Indar...
Listen up, and let me tell you a tale of glory. The enemy outnumbered our brave soldiers, but we still managed to take that damn bio lab at Allatum. It was a long and hard-fought battle but in the end we drove them right out of there and they couldn't take it back. Ah, those were the days.

I could go on like that for pages with all the cool stuff that happens in this game. Because of the fact that Planetside 2 takes place between three giant armies fighting over three giant continents, there exists a level of large-scale strategy that just isn't there in other shooters. Other shooters involve fights where they pit two small teams against each other for ten minutes in a map the size of my dorm, but not so with Planetside. Here, instead of matches, where one team wins and you do it all over again, we have full-blown campaigns. The game encourages the creation of platoons, with four squads the size of a Call of Duty team or larger, and a coordinated platoon is a force to be reckoned with. It's hard to not be impressed when you're part of an armored column on a northward rampage, taking the enemies' bases as you go. The fun of it is being part of the group, and how much organized chaos you can achieve with even a minimum of leadership. There are some flaws with this game experience though which become apparent, not surprisingly, when you're on the losing side.

How to Enter a Doorway
The issue with this MMO design is that often it presents insurmountable odds for the unorganized side, whether they lack leadership or sufficient amounts of cannon fodder. The game often degenerates into each team stuck on either side of a door, usually the exit from the defenders' safe zone, while the bullet-to-oxygen ratio of the atmosphere becomes increasingly bullet-heavy. These stalemates aren't much fun for anyone, as they can go on for hours. It's like World War One except there's no trenches:

Planetside 2 101: The "Throw More Men at the Problem" strategy.

Yes, we did eventually win this battle. It makes for a great story. It was kinda amusing, in hindsight. But was it fun at the time? What about the other team? Unfortunately for Planetside 2, these moments are common. But hey, that doesn't mean it's a bad game. Any multiplayer online game like this you play is going to have moments such as these, where your experience stops being interesting and entertaining and starts becoming an exasperating slog. In my opinion, though, there are enough of the awesome moments to make all the time spent respawning worth it, if you've got the patience. And for those with patience, you might make it out alive to tell all of your crazy, exaggerated war stories to everyone!

Check out Planetside 2 here.

Pondering my Dark Souls Addiction

Hello! I'm Erik, a guy in college who seems to always be doing one of two things- gaming, or writing. I figured I'd combine the two into one totally random blog where I can write about my experiences in the crazy world that is video games. Be warned, I write whatever the hell is on my mind at the moment and I sidetrack more than a squirrel caught in a pinball machine. But enough of the introductions, let's get started right away.

Addiction of the Year: Dark Souls
Admit it. If you're a gamer, there's probably one game in particular at any given moment that you're hopelessly addicted to. Be it Call of Duty or World of Warcraft, when you decide to sit down and play some games you're probably going to play that one. For me, for the past few months, my addiction has been Dark Souls. It all started, like a lot of my gaming interests these days, from a lets-player on YouTube playing it. This particular playthrough is being done by the foofin' hilarious Heartless, and from the get-go I couldn't stop watching. Something about the combat and the world drew me in, despite the rumors that it'll melt your brain from the rage-inducing difficulty before you reach the first boss. So when the playthrough went on hiatus, I really needed another hit of Dark Souls. The best way to get my fix would be to actually play the game, so I manned up and bought it. It did not disappoint. 80 hours of gameplay later, my magical katana-wielding iron-clad warrior made it through the end of the game, but I wasn't satisfied. No, I must be some sort of masochist because after struggling to beat every boss and recover from every frustrating death, the first thought I had was "Let's do it AGAIN!". So I did.

Challenge Squared
As any Dark Souls fan who goes anywhere on YouTube does, I discovered the legendary OnlyAfro and learned that people actually do fun things with this pain-fest of a game. That's a thing? Fun? Yeah, I was surprised too. So I decided I would play the game again, only with a sort of roman soldier/ spartan build. Kind of like this guy except shirtless:

Fortunately for my character I could fight without quick-time events.

Anyways, it added more difficulty to an already brutal game. Who needs armor when you have pecs? Dying in one shot made it pretty damn hard, but there is something strangely awesome about stabbing a giant lizardman repeatedly with your spear and then fist-pumping over his scaled corpse. So I hacked, slashed, and of course, died my way through the game once more.

What's Fun About Failing All the Time?
Good question. I'll be the first to admit sometimes a game like this makes a guy want to break everything within arms reach. But why did I stick with Dark Souls to the end and back again? I'm still trying to figure out why it's so fun. It could be because of the learning curve, not only in difficulty but in the type of learning you do. Remember those old-school boss battles where it was you against a towering dumb monster who knew a grand total of, say, three attacks? Remember how you kept dying to the same ones, over and over, until you could dodge those attacks with one hand pinned behind your back? Dark Souls provides that same experience every minute. Play through the second time and you'll know what I mean.  You feel like you've become the best gamer in the world. You remember all the timings for your rolls, all the locations of your favorite items, all the patterns of the bosses. This feeling of accomplishment is every gamer's favorite drug, and Dark Souls is the purest form of it. Once you go Dark Souls, you'll never go back.

Now let's see if I can beat Volgarr.