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PlanetSide's free subscription program, known as Reserves, will officially end in one month. This may spell doom for the game, which would leave many MMOFPS addicts jonesing for their fix.

That's right: MMOFPS. You may not be familiar with the term, but you can probably figure out what it stands for. It's also possible you've never heard of PlanetSide, even though nearly four years ago it was Sony Online Entertainment's next big thing after Everquest. World War II Online: Battleground Europe, the first official Massively Multiplayer Online First-person Shooter, is even more obscure at this point. The lack of major success for both of those games is probably why we haven't seen another MMOFPS yet. It's too bad, because the genre has incredible potential.

PlanetSide launched in 2003 with a respectable player base, but hemorrhaged players quickly and steadily declined ever since. A year ago, paying subscribers had dropped dangerously low, and so the Reserves program came out in March. The PlanetSide community referred to it as Fodderside, a joke based on the notion that new players drawn in by the lure of free play would be fodder for the veterans. To this day, people who play on free accounts are known as fodders. The program was a decent success and brought in fresh blood. Yet soon fodders may be left without a paddle if the free period ends soon. There is controversy over whether it will actually end, but if it does, it doesn't bode well. A game like PlanetSide, with absolutely no PvE, lives and breathes with player population. There is a breaking point at which there just aren't enough people to shoot. The main draw is the size of the battles, and if they get small enough, there's no incentive to pay for the game if you can get essentially the same experience from any other FPS. If the fodders go, paying subscribers may leave as well, and the problem will compound on itself. Every PlanetSide player has feared the day of logging on and seeing no "hotspots" on the map, which indicate where fights are happening.

Any MMOFPS player will tell you, despite whatever flaws the games may have, once you fight in battles involving 400 players on the same map, it is hard to go back to traditional FPSs with piddly 16 or even 64 player maps. So where does that leave our poor adrift massive-battle junkies?

Unfortunately, the horizon doesn't look terribly promising for those that want huge PvP action. There is Huxley, which is most definitely an FPS, but it's questionable how "MMO" it is. It's unclear how many players its PvP areas will support, but early speculation points to much smaller engagements than what PlanetSide provides, which is pretty sad considering how old the latter game is. Tabula Rasa looks like it may have no PvP at all, and it may be more RPG than FPS.

The MMOFPS is a genre just waiting to explode in popularity. It's frustrating to see the first two examples squandered so horribly, delaying the rise of what is sure to be the true next generation of FPS games. WWII Online screwed it up by having a notoriously buggy launch, and PlanetSide dropped the ball after starting strong but then making insane development decisions like releasing BFRs (mechs) in an idiotically overpowered state and driving the players away in droves. And now the only viable MMOFPS left may finally be disappearing. Someone out there, please make a PvP oriented MMOFPS that involves truly massive battles! Soon there will be PlanetSide refugees dying for an experience that games like Huxley just can't offer.

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