I recently got an e-mail from Sony Online letting me know that in an attempt to get people to subscribe to the game they are allowing old players to log in and play for free until August 26, 2009. I have always loved this game, as it offers an experience that you just cannot get with any other first person shooter out there. The massive battles over huge continents are still extremely fun, and they have added a lot of new content over the years to keep the game interesting. According to Xfire I have put spent over 250 hours in Planetside, so you can imagine how glad I was to hear that they reactivated accounts. In fact, I had been considering subscribing again for a while now.
Thank god that I did not. Planetside is a horrible, broken, buggy mess for anyone running the game on Windows Vista, and I can’t imagine it is any better for those running Windows 7 RC. The Tech Support for the game is non-existent in their support forums despite pages upon pages of people with issues. Considering that Windows Vista came out in Jan 07 and that the game is still not fixed years later, I think its safe to say that SOE has no plans on fixing their game or offering any real support of any kind.
The biggest problem with Planetside is that in order to get it to run you have to run the game in Windows 98 Compatibility mode. This is the only solution offered by their tech support on the forums, and doing so causes terrible performance in the game. This is probably because it limits multi-core processors to a single core, reduces your maximum memory, and runs the game via Windows 98 emulation, slowing things down to a crawl. On my new PC with a quad core processor, 4gb of ram, and a Nvidia 9800GTX+ graphics card the game runs worse then it did years ago on my old pc with a P4 2.5GHZ processor, 512mb of ram, and a 64mb GeForce 4. In large firefights I often get performance as poor as 10 frames per second.
As if poor performance wasn’t enough, the game is also subject to constant crashes. Unlike the performance issues, these crashes are common on Windows XP as well as Vista. The game commonly has problems when game textures or map elements suddenly become corrupted and appear completely white. This is followed shortly by the game locking up. This issue appears to be pretty common based on the number of threads that exist about it in the support forums, and I have personally experienced these issues many times on both my Vista PC and my XP Laptop.
It really is shocking that a company like SOE would take a customer’s money for a game that flat out is broken on modern PCs, and make no attempt whatsoever at patching the game. They also do not provide any warnings that Vista is not supported before buying/subscribing to the game. It pains me to say it, because I really do love this game, but I highly recommend that everyone avoid Planetside given its current state. I would love to be able to recommend it once again, but it doesn’t appear that it will ever be fixed.
*Update*: It looks like these issues will be fixed, see PlanetSide Sequel in the Works, Vista Patch Incoming
Isn’t SoE known for their terribly supported MMOs? I still harbor negative feelings for the closing of Earth and Beyond. Yeah, I might have joined up and been one of a hundred players on a server, but they ran Matrix Online for a hell of a lot longer than E&B, despite it’s sad following. It’s all sad, very sad.
Is it safe to say: RIP Planetside?
I’m in exactly the same boat as you Neutral. Been thinking about getting back in now I have a nice Core i7 PC, but doesn’t even load a map without crashing. Real shame as I’ve always wanted to play it with all settings up high. I’ll always have the memories
I have actually managed to get the game running without crashing.
First, the game is running in Windows 98 compatibility mode which fixed the crash upon loading maps.
Next, I fixed the issues with the corrupt textures by turning “Preloading” to “OFF”, and “Memory Reserved for Textures” to “64MB” in the advanced video options. This fixed the issue completely for me, however I am told some with also need to edit their engine3d_options.ini in the Planetside directory. To do so, open the file with notepad and set the managed_VBS line to false.
But as a result of these two fixes, the game runs extremely poorly at times. In intense firefights I will get as low as 10 FPS, although on average I will get around 25-40 FPS. This is pretty ridiculous considering my PC specs. For comparison, on an older PC (AMD 3700+, Nvidia 7800GT, 2GB of RAM) running windows XP I was getting around 300FPS.
Still, I find myself playing the game for hours a day. I do really enjoy Planetside, and I just wish SOE would fix these issues.
Hopefully those suggestions will be useful to you. Thanks for reading and thanks for the comment.
Thought i’d share my experiences. With Windows 7 64-bit RC, Planetside runs absolutely beautiful, just as good as in XP. The ONLY thing I had to do was right click the planetside.exe, click on the Compatibility tab, and check the “Run this program in compatibility mode for: Windows XP (Service Pack 3)” option.
Prior to me changing the compatibilty mode, the game would crash when trying to load a continent map upon logging into the game. Changing the compatibility fixed this.
I’ve verified this fix for both an Intel and AMD cpu system. I’ve only been able to test with an ATI 4850 video card though, but I don’t think Nvidia folks would have any issues.
I have had one strange problem though (and it is quite odd..). When i’m in using a MAX suit, and running around, whenever the sky is NOT being drawn on the screen (ie, when completely indoors) the sensitivity of the mouse is turned way down. However, this problem goes away as soon as i’m outside and any part of the sky is being drawn on screen. It’s really quite an odd problem and i’m still troubleshooting it. I’ve only noticed it while wearing MAX suits, but it may affect other armors and vehs as well.
Also, the blog poster mentions Planetside is only using 1 of his CPU cores because of the compatibility setting. I’m afraid to say that it’s a limitation of the game, not because of the compatibility mode. Even when running in Windows XP, the game only used 1 CPU. That’s not that uncommon for older apps tho, as many are not optimized to use more than 1 thread. So don’t neccesarily think your multicore CPU will run Planetside a lot better than your old single core did. I’ve been playing the game for over 6 years now and despite having a really good CPU and GFX card, the FPS still gets as low as mid-30s during intense fights. However, at least now I can run with max GFX settings and AA/AF turned on without it hurting performance.
Even when apps are written for one core, Windows will do a decent job of load balancing across multiple CPUs. Turning on compatibility mode disables this.
Anyway, this is good to hear that Planetside runs well on Win 7. I plan on upgrading upon its release. Thanks for the comment!
my brother runs planetside flawlessly on vista, as do i.
just set it to 98, and BAM! no crashes.
It looks like these issues will be fixed, see PlanetSide Sequel in the Works, Vista Patch Incoming