This sounds like..... PLANETSIDE!!!!!I love that game so much
Planetside was a brilliant game that lost so much due to the limits SOE put on it. Despite its flaws, the game that I played at release was, well, life-changing, almost. The concepts it presented, the way it worked, and how WELL it worked utterly ruined any future perceptions I had for FPS games. Whereas Planetside made me hunger for games that were as deep, strategic, and utterly well-rounded as it was, instead, the FPS market took a turn for the opposite.
Whereas in Planetside you could focus on a 'specialty', and had different characters to be diverse (ie: a Heavy Armor soldier, or a Support soldier...), games like Battlefield were the exact opposite - any moron could jump in a tank and smash commies. That's not what I want. I want to not only EARN my right, but I want it to be done in a way that realistically limits availability of things that should be limited.
One of my favorite concepts was the training in America's Army. Any boob can pass boot camp, but in order to get the better weapons, you have to endure a long, boring, grueling, unfair SERE course. While something that tedious is a little off, I don't think that in a game where you will have aircraft equipped with cluster bombs, that anyone should be able to jump in there. It should be designed in a way that the people who are good at flying aircraft should be the only ones doing that.
Sadly, the game Planetside was at release is not the game it is now. SOE took it in a direction that was not what Dave Georgeson wanted, focusing players into close-quarters battles by drawing action AWAY from the outdoors areas, crushing them into little cookie-cutter bases, and 'balancing' weaponry in a way that favored overly-lethal spam weapons.
Assault rifles in Planetside were 'arcadey'. In REXO armor, you could take quite a beating and keep on fighting. It was like Tribes - You can take quite a lot of damage compared to say, Counter-Strike. In Planetside, you would have frontlines drawn even in arbitrary places, trading gunfire, and it would lead to a very cinematic experience. Then you'd have Heavy Weapons, one that would kill in one shot, one that would kill in 45 shots, but do so in about one second, and one that you could just fire blindly down a hall and kill everyone in it since you couldn't dodge its projectiles.
Planetside was about slower pace, more 'thought-provoking' battles, but SOE seemed to drag it in the 'FPS NOOB' direction to just get more money (and it failed - the game population dropped dramatically), including overbalancing every side every month, putting in stupid game-ruining robots, etc.
The engine was also badly in need of optimization. It actually worked better back when I played it on 56k then it did on a cable line.
That said, Tribes 2 is my absolute most-favorite game I've ever played. It's without a doubt the BEST MPFPS game I've ever played. Dave Georgeson is one of my developer heroes. Planetside, without a doubt, was ahead of its time, but where the game could've been, and where the game ended up (Mechs? Instant Action? Capitals? Boooo....) was just way too different, and the game actually suffered for it. Everyone wanted big outdoors battles, and SOE made them just smash battles into the same bases over and over.
