PlanetSide

PlanetSide was the first serious attempt to run a first-person shooter at MMO scale. Three empires —Terran Republic, New Conglomerate and Vanu Sovereignty— fight over the continents of Auraxis in a war that never ends, with hundreds of players in the same battle and no instancing to cut the map into pieces. It shipped on May 20, 2003, when packing that many people onto one battlefield still sounded impossible.

The structure is what holds that promise up. Bases change hands several times a night, vehicles and aircraft need a crew to be worth anything, and a certification system lets every soldier spend points on the specialities they want. A cloaked infiltrator, a medic, an engineer and a tank gunner are the same character with different choices stacked on top.

It launched on the standard MMO deal of 2003: a boxed game plus a subscription of around 13 dollars a month. Core Combat arrived in October 2003 as a separate $29.99 expansion that opened the underground caverns and the vehicles built for them. Sony Online Entertainment announced the move to free-to-play in January 2014 and completed it on April 29 of that year, dropping the subscription for good. Nothing has been sold since the shutdown.

Daybreak Game Company switched the servers off on July 1, 2016 at 4:00 PM PT, thirteen years after launch and on the same day as Legends of Norrath. The official announcement cited business needs and technical requirements, with no further detail. There were no classic servers and no offline client, even though players asked for both.

The one door left open is PSForever, a fan-built emulator of the login and world servers: free, open source and still in active development. It runs on version 3.15.84.0 of the original client, which the project itself explains how to find and install, and it holds Sunday meetups at 12 PM EST to get enough people online at once. No population figures exist for either the original game's final years or the emulator.

Playing it now is archaeology, and it helps to know that before installing anything. PSForever asks you to track down a client from 2003 and depends on other people being online: outside the Sunday meetups, an empty continent has nothing to do with what PlanetSide was. What it gives back is what no other shooter does, battles of hundreds of players with no instancing, wrapped in controls that twenty-odd years have not been kind to. Anyone who wants the same idea with active support has PlanetSide 2.