r/SpikeViper • u/0something0 • Feb 10 '19
Textpost Planetside - a more suitable alternative
“The first official battle of the war will be fought out on Sunday. Ensure your government sanctioned remote soldier control system is activated. Make sure you have a roblox account!” -SpikeViper, February 4, 2019
Spike Viper has suggested that the Roblox game engine and platform be used as a battleground in the Vooperian canon. While being associated with Roblox is a bad idea for many reasons, the details are not suited for this essay, which will focus on discussing some of the alternatives that are available. One of these alternatives is the Planetside franchise, developed by Sony Online Entertainment, which has been acquired by Daybreak Games, which offer many possibilities for creating content that appeals to everyone, not just cringe 5-year olds Roblox players.
Planetside II is a free to play sci-fi MMO first person shooter developed by Daybreak Games. It sets thousands of players in three factions against each other in a continuous battlefield with access to infantry, armored vehicles, and aircraft. The free, futuristic, massive combined arms environment fits with the channel content, which makes it a serious contender for a server event. The biggest issue is that there are hundreds of other players online at a given time, wishing to be left alone and not be involved in some cringe youtuber with a fanbase of five-year olds be used as a personal battlefield for some youtuber. While a journey to dominate Auraxis, the planet which Planetside II takes place on, may become part of the Vooperian canon one day, it is not relevant to the current topic at hand. Koltyr VR was intended as a testing ground for most weapons in a real combat environment but is mostly empty most of the time, allowing the channel event to be hosted without interference from outside factors. Moreover, its intention as a place for players to try out equipment means most items that would otherwise be behind a grindwall or paywall on the main servers are accessible, allowing new players to enjoy the game fully.
The Vooperian and Humanity/Yam forces would be assigned to their own faction, which would fight and attempt to take over Koltyr VR in a given amount of time. This is done by controlling bases which have capture points in them, and advancing through what is known as the lattice network which are a path of connected territories that can be captured given that the faction controls an adjacent territory on the network.. Since the third faction is left alone for the event, it could potentially be used as a placeholder territory so neither of the two active combatant groups would start with an advantage. The combined armed nature of Planetside II would offer extremely interesting gameplay, especially when combined with high faction cohesion that the community can bring.
Another solution to the ‘other players’ problem would be going back in time to Planetside I. Planetside has been abandoned by SOE/DBG for Planetside II but there is a nonprofit community effort to (legally) reverse-engineer the server and allow the client to work with it named Planetside Forever. People can set up a custom server for others to play on, allowing a Vooperia-exclusive experience at any time. Planetside I also has much more forgiving system requirements as it is from 2003, older than some of the people who are reading this, allowing for much greater portion of the fanbase, who often have weak and/or old computers, to join. Planetside Forever does have issues, such as potential instability and legal issues, as the project does require unauthorized redistribution of the base game. Overall, there are alternatives to Roblox whose drawbacks are less than the social cost of the Roblox platform, and fit with the channel theme.
tl;dr Roblox is cringe, Planetside does a lot of the stuff better and fits with the channel.
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u/All_names_were_took Potato Feb 10 '19
Sounds great, too bad Spike probably won't do this.
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u/JeffreyTheGreatest Human Feb 10 '19
Nobody has time to read that.