Organized War; or the joys of a Planetside outfit

Chris Morriss Blocked Unblock Follow Following Sep 2, 2015

Here’s the elevator pitch for a little game called Planetside 2 (PS2): “Three factions battle over territory spread across four disparate biome-continents in a Free-to-Play, Massively Multiplayer Online, Class-Based, First Person Shooter (or, F2PMMOFPS for short).” The battles are huge: gigantic dropships pour infantry from the skies while tanks blast away at the battlements and get decimated by aerial gunships getting harassed by nimble fighter ships while said infantry attempts to capture bases. This is the loop of PS2, and while it is incredibly impressive, it can be extremely alienating. You truly feel like a cog in a planetary war machine, and while you may occasionally accomplish heroic feats, your (innumerable) lives feel wasted, dashed against the defenses of yet another facility.

Daybreak Games recently released PS2 on Playstation 4, my console of choice, and has over the last few weeks slowly implemented the features the PC version has enjoyed for some time. With the impending launch, I looked forward to jumping back into PS2, however this time around I wanted a more structured experience. In what reading I had done about PS2, I always heard about Outfits, mysterious in-game conglomerates of players, and how Outfits change the way you play the game. So I decided to go out onto the wilds of the internet, and join one.

Now, I am very very late to this party. Joining large, online guilds/clans etc. has been a mainstay of online gaming for many years. I tended to stick with my friends, or lone wolf in most games I played. So when I settled on the 187th Terran Guard, an outfit within the Terran Republic (TR) faction in PS2, I was pretty intimidated. They have a website, and a ranking hierarchy, and “comms training” I had to go through before I could join. But I did it. I applied, became a Recruit, did my training, and became a Private.

It’s true what they said, the game suddenly opened up. This was how PS2 was meant to be played: organized, with a large group that can operate as a unit. What normally happened in a play session was: I ran/drove/flew to the marked objective with literally everyone else and threw myself at it until we won the fight. When you are in an Outfit things happen a bit differently: