Medic’s First Time in Planetside 2

You ever get that feeling where you’re supposed to be doing something, like attacking the objective, but aren’t? Or are doing it in a way that totally isn’t helpful? Or are completely lost and supposed to be doing something? Well, that’s how I feel about Planetside 2.

Before we start, I joined the purple guys. Their space suits looked cooler. And I have to agree with aabicus, their butts are nicer too. Of course, I decided to play the tutorial. Which kinda made sense, I think. Aabicus, the resident person who plays Planetside 2, decided to bring me along into one of his little adventures. I was minding my own business in the VR area testing my keybindings when aabicus suggested we go not to the tutorial continent of Koltyr, but right into the battle. Kinda. We headed to Amerish, where there was the most fighting going on.

When I say fighting, I mean dying. Everyone dies. Constantly. I quickly realised that Planetside 2 isn’t so much about working together, it’s about throwing bodies at a control point in order to hold onto it. Death is temporary. Especially if you have a Sunderer, a mobile respawn machine. Medics don’t heal people, they revive people, then die and respawn. Engineers give things and fix things, then die and respawn. Everyone else shoots and dies and respawns. I mean, yeah, there’s some strategy involved, but for the most part, I just died, respawned, ran around, died, maybe revived someone, died, respawned, and so on.

We did do some stuff though. Our endless body-throwing meant we managed to capture a handful of territories. It was weird how the red team would be kicking our purple asses, but we’d slowly but surely overrun them and take over. Eventually, we reached a point where us Vanu people somehow won the entire continent. I don’t know how, when aabicus and I got on, we were getting our asses kicked and lost quite a few places.

We were given the option to redeploy to a new battle on a new continent. But I decided I wanted to stick around. This is honestly what was the most interesting to me. Two random guys on a continent with stolen cars. I picked up  ‘Lightning’ tank that someone had left behind, and aabicus had a Sunderer that he’d spawned. We drove around, came across a blue guy in a plane who panicked and ran away, and we also bumped into a purple engineer called Santa Claus, who healed up our vehicles and fired flares at me. As we traveled, the sun went down, we saw some moons, and we explored an empty, rather copy-paste landscape. We couldn’t redeploy get new weapons, our only option was to drive from place to place or press U to redeploy on a new continent.

Eventually, the sun rose and, all of a sudden, the world respawned on us. I was inside a spawning area that suddenly became allied to the red side and automatically killed me. Aabicus found himself lost in enemy territory and spent a long time just running the fuck away. He was only a few hundred meters away from the red team’s main spawn area. He finally bit the bullet some time later.

In the mean time, I accidentally wandered back into enemy territory. I captured a place on my own, a little place called the Augur. Little did I know that I’d started a heated battle. All around the Augur, territories turned red. But aabicus and I held the Augur for as long as we could, with all sorts of random people spawning in. Red people started noticing as well, and the battle turned into a siege, with tanks and aircraft zipping around outside, barricading us in. Sadly, we eventually got overrun, and the Augur, like all its surrounding territories, fell under the control of those red bastards.

The most amusing thing about it all though was that aabicus learned some stuff too. Not just what happens when a world is locked, or the day and night cycle, but actual useful things. Like how re-orientate a plane using the arrow keys. Or how to mark enemy players with Q. That was nice, it felt like I was playing with someone as shit as I was.

I need to go back to Koltyr though. I’m probably missing out on easy points I could be using to level up, and I’m already rank 7 – Koltyr kicks anyone out if they’re over level 15.

Overall, totally fun once you get over dying constantly. As a person who dislikes dying, that was a bit of a hard pill for me to swallow, but I enjoyed it. Definitely a game you can get lost in, especially with the copy-paste bases and the gigantic maps.