I have played a commercial MMORPG (World of Warcraft) heavily for six months, but when I tried this free game I was quite prepared to lower my expectations substantially.
Unfortunately, I wasn't prepared just how far my expectations would have to be lowered. I expected little, and Planeshift delivered precisely that.
It seems everyone involved in Planeshift works on what they find the most fun, not on what most urgently needs to be done. Take the OS X client for example, which lacks rudimentary features, such as full screen support. Anyone even moderately knowledgeable about 3D graphics programming on OS X knows performance totally blows when running in windowed mode. It's no flaw of the OS, it's just that a full screen game gets to monopolize the graphics card, while a windowed game has to share cycles and VRAM with the OS and other running applications. This means the most obvious 'optimization', the most urgent thing to do with the engine, is to add full screen support, pronto! Besides, windowed mode isn't very immersive, so A 3D game simply can't live without it anyway. There's no way around it, It has to be added, at an early pre-alpha stage!
And it's not very hard to do either. A couple of lines of code suffices. A reasonably competent programmer will do it in fifteen minutes tops. Exceedingly well spent time.
But here Planeshift is, FIVE YEARS in development, and no full screen support is forthcoming. Not now, not in the foreseeable future, probably never. Apparently this is not sexy enough for the volunteers to look into. Not an interesting problem to fix. It's boring to the programmers, so it's not going to happen, no matter how urgent it may be.
Perhaps this just goes to prove open source don't work?
Polish, the elusive thing which open source never achieves, is fully lacking from Planeshift. It's not just that all too many things are ugly, incomplete, bugged or lacking, it's a deeper problem. There just isn't any final 'perfected state' envisioned, which everyone coordinates their efforts to achieve, on schedule. No, In an open source project, everyone just works on the thing more or less in random. It may 'improve' a lot over time, but never achieves any predefined goals. Some parts will be fixed, some will not be fixed. Ever.
User Friendliness, the other elusive thing open source regularily fails at delivering, is fully lacking too. It's not just that the new user has no freaking idea what he/she is supposed to be doing, or that the interface is clunky and poorly thought out, it's once again a deeper problem. When someone 'complains' in even the most reasonable way about some obvious problem, this is instantly brushed aside.
"Feature X don't work? Do something else then!" is the attitude.
"Have patience!" and "Don't try to gameplay, roleplay!" and even "It's supposed to be painful!" are other little pearls of wisdom concerned people have got at this forum. Very few are actually able to lower their expectations far enough for this game to fit the bill, it seems.
When pushed against the wall about the lousy quality of their software, open source proponents usually resort to "you can't demand anything, you get what you pay for!", which is exactly the point. If you pay zero, and 'get what you pay for', you're not getting very much bang for your time spent, are you?
"Planeshift will revolutionize the gaming world over the next few years", the web site boldly claims. I seriously doubt it. The quality is far below the mark even today, and the attitude towards the new player is downright hostile. I will rather pay money for something worth my time, and so will the vast majority of players out there, I assure you.
