I hope that "maps" is just a term chosen for familiarity, and doesn't indicate that PS2 will stray from its wide open world roots. Four kilometres is two minutes at 120 kph (which was roughly Mosquito cruise speed iirc). That indicates that it's on the same scale as Planetside 1.
Well, PSN was hardly a better choice in these times...
Anyway, for you PS1 veterans, is it the case that you can kick people out of your vehicle even after the point where the bailing mechanism fails? Cuz I just rescued a vital ANT by kicking it out of my Lodestar scant seconds before being shot down by a mosq.
<!--quoteo(post=1848430:date=May 25 2011, 10:07 PM:name=Sops)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Sops @ May 25 2011, 10:07 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1848430"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Yeah and now anytime you reference the game as PS2 no one will know what you are talking about.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I cannot imagine the paroxysms of joy that would have convulsed through your body after reading my post and clicking play. The anticipation would've overridden your disbelief at the suspiciously non-planetsidian grassy glade, maybe even for a few milliseconds of badly animated tank. The confusion, mingled with crushing disappointment would've come to a head when the unicorn decloaked.
Such a rollercoaster of emotion, you should be thanking me.
<!--quoteo(post=1852954:date=Jun 15 2011, 08:02 AM:name=Scythe)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Scythe @ Jun 15 2011, 08:02 AM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1852954"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->I cannot imagine the paroxysms of joy that would have convulsed through your body after reading my post and clicking play. The anticipation would've overridden your disbelief at the suspiciously non-planetsidian grassy glade, maybe even for a few milliseconds of badly animated tank. The confusion, mingled with crushing disappointment would've come to a head when the unicorn decloaked.
Such a rollercoaster of emotion, you should be thanking me.
Your paroxysms of joy must have belonged to one far less world-weary and jaded than I. You give your own abilities of deception more credit than they deserve, upside-down man.
X_StickmanNot good enough for a custom title.Join Date: 2003-04-15Member: 15533Members, Constellation
<!--quoteo(post=1852954:date=Jun 15 2011, 01:02 PM:name=Scythe)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Scythe @ Jun 15 2011, 01:02 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1852954"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->I cannot imagine the paroxysms of joy that would have convulsed through your body after reading my post and clicking play. The anticipation would've overridden your disbelief at the suspiciously non-planetsidian grassy glade, maybe even for a few milliseconds of badly animated tank. The confusion, mingled with crushing disappointment would've come to a head when the unicorn decloaked.
Such a rollercoaster of emotion, you should be thanking me.
--Scythe--<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Personally, I just noticed that the pre-loading still frame on the video is a shopped image of an NC tank on a real photo and immediately realised you were taking the piss. No rollercoaster of emotion here.
Quick thoughts: Kind of meh for a trailer. Where are the MAX units? Where are the infiltrators? More vehicles please!
Also, uniforms look kinda drab and grey. Empire colours should be used boldly and plentifully, to give soldiers visual distinctiveness. In particular the VS look wrong without their distinctive iridescent cyan and purple.
Edit: Dumping a quick URL here before I have to run: <a href="http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/planetside-2/1181222p1.html" target="_blank">http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/planetside-2/1181222p1.html</a>
Check out the "mechs," which I presume to be MAX units. Looks more like it. TR and NC could still use some more colour, but at least the VS one looks spot on.
<3 VN<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd--> Seriously man this is even less realistic than Scythe's video. Please at least put SOME effort in before you try to troll us. :)
<center><object width="450" height="356"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/uqzK9X_WAGU"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/uqzK9X_WAGU" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="450" height="356"></embed></object></center> Not sure I like the sound of classes and EVE-style offline advancement.
<a href="http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/07/08/the-return-to-auraxis-planetside-2/" target="_blank">http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/07/08...s-planetside-2/</a> <!--quoteo--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Finally, most importantly, there’s a new mission system which automatically generates missions to focus players and balance populations, as well as allowing veteran players to insert their own missions. This allows players to specify in some detail what troops they need, for example a mission requiring engineers to set up minefields or repair turrets at a base. The default missions, when no player-created mission is available, focus players on nearby territory that can be conquered, or needs defending.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd--> Neato <!--quoteo--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->One large change followed on what Higby describes as Planetside’s number one lesson; “get people into the action quicker.†Because of this each factions’ sanctuaries are gone, and with them the Hart shuttle. Instead, each continent has an uncapturable foothold for each faction.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd--> Uh... weren't people complaining about the <i>lack</i> of lasting effect the sanctuaries caused?
SOE will ruin Planetside. If you played it and vaguely followed its history, you know that in spite of the overwhelmingly popular idea of where the game should've gone, SOE ###### it up completely with countless changes, ###### balance with no attempt to fix it, and doing the total opposite of what players wanted.
Things SOE needs to get right:
- Third person camera. Remove it. Seriously, dumbest ###### thing to have in an FPS. The entire game ended up just being people corner-camping, waiting to leap out and yell SURPRISE before filling your face with Lasher Spam.
- On that note, remove all the spam weapons. All of them. No weapon should reward inaccuracy, and very few weapons should do area-effect damage. If you want to blow things up, you should have to work for it with a well-aimed hand grenade. By the time Planetside was on the downward slope, SOE had: Thumper grenade launcher, Rocklet rifle, the Lasher, the Radiator (the worst of them all, damaged through walls, and the area-effect would linger), the Scorpion, Dragon, the Maelstrom, and the hand grenades themselves. All of these are area-effect explosive splash-damage weapons. The game ended up literally being you running around wildly like an idiot, dodging explosions like an angry wizard was hurling meteors from above at you. Base assaults ended up being spastic, devastating affairs since they were full of chokepoints and encouraged immense concentration of area-effect weapons into tiny access points.
- On <i>that</i> note, base zerging needs to go away, and the concept of bases needs to be trashed. Focusing fighting into the same copy-pasta structures and towers wasn't what anyone wanted. If you ask, nobody's going to say that their favorite moments was the time they hacked the backdoor and ate a face full of Lasher spam for 45 minutes. All base fighting ended up being was you footzerging from the tower until the base inevitably flipped to neutral.
- Remove almost all the cert points. Another death-blow for Planetside was marginalization of your team. Once upon a time, Planetside needed a variety of players to accomplish things. Armor commanders would spearhead an assault while pilots provided air cover. A Galaxy pilot would carry his team into battle and drop them off. If they came across armor, they'd shelter and have the guy with the AV weaponry wipe it out. A sniper on a hillside would force the enemy to keep their heads down, and the AI MAX would bust in the doors. They'd push for the control room, secure it, and wait for the hacker to show up. That doesn't happen anymore. SOE gave people so many cert points and people played for so long that everyone's BR9000 and CR5, so everyone runs around in Rexo, nobody uses Galaxies since they can just get in their Reavers and fly there on their own (and rape everything on the ground along the way). Once they're at the base, they all just carry Decimators (the ubiquitous AV weapon) and Heavy Assault, can heal themselves, and are master hackers. So they've completely removed the need to work as a team, and instead you just sort of 'go with the flow' and kill all the barneys, elmos, and smurfs you see.
- Remove instant-action. SOE is wrong, they don't need to have a way to get people to the action faster. As player numbers dropped and their atrocious design came crashing down on them, they struggled to keep people entertained, so they refined the 'instant action' system. What this meant is that people would warp to a random planet/continent, and start capturing totally empty bases. If and when the enemy ever showed up, a 'hotspot' would appear on the map, and everyone would hit the Instant Action button and would all warp to the fight. This had three consequences - the first was that it made small fights into big epic battles with as many players as possible - that's good right? Well, not really. The second thing it did was to effectively remove small-scale battles. See, when you had to rely on the HART to drop, you had to pick a drop location and you had no idea what to expect. With Instant Action you knew you were going to go where everyone else was. While PS is an MMOFPS, the giant Mongol horde of enemies wasn't always the best thing for the game. Rather than a series of small skirmishes on multiple fronts, the game was just everyone crashing into one base at a time, in a row, until the continent was captured. The third thing that this did was concentrate all fighting around bases. The best moments in the game weren't spent slogging into bases, it was getting to the next base. What you were supposed to do was lose a base, and then stage defenders at the next vulnerable ones, and slow down the enemy advance along the way. With Instant Action, everyone just spawned at the nearest tower, so as soon as you captured the tower a tidal wave of bodies would pour out, and fighting was relegated to the same ###### footzerg within 100 feet of the base walls.
- Hire someone that knows a ###### thing about balancing a game, or anyone for that matter. Planetside was one of the most poorly balanced games ever devised. Due to atrocious balance and gameplay decisions, you ended up with, for example, the Decimator - vehicles were powerful, and would crush infantry to bits. So in order to give infantry a chance, they put in a heavy-hitting anti-vehicle weapon. The result is that you're either told to be raped by vehicles, or carry the Deci with everyone else, and rape every MAX within sight. Balance between factions was worse, for example the Vanu AA MAX had jumpjets meaning it could jump over Reaver missile spam while firing passive-seeking homing bolts. Meanwhile the TR MAX was stuck in place and could only aim in one direction, and the NC MAX's homing missiles told aircraft they were about to get attacked, giving them plenty of time for defensive maneuvers. Everything was completely ######. People give the BFRs a lot of flak, but the BFRs were the least of Planetside's problems. Like everything else, they were broken and badly balanced, but in principle they could've been made to work. But they weren't.
- Focus fighting away from bases, outdoors. The problem with base fighting is, besides being a giant cluster-######, it is stale and repetitive. Everyone drops on the roof of the Tech Center and blows the gen. Or you just wait for it to flip to neutral. ######. Yawn. The best fighting was outdoor bridge battles, or running gunfights between forests. Provide ample areas for outdoor ambushes, such as saying that vehicles traveling offroad only travel at most at 75% speed, while they're faster on paved routes, to focus armor movements on vulnerable roads. Marginalize the ability for single players to have huge effects on the battle by, for example, flying around in a Reaver killing everything they see. Don't even get me started on the cloaked combat engineers.
- Rip off Battlefield. As Planetside matured, its tactical demands became fewer and fewer. Rexo meant everyone could survive copious amounts of damage, so there was little threat to standing in front of an MCG, while at the same time, all the area-effect spam weapons meant you didn't even have to aim to whittle the enemy down. All fighting was focused on taking a tower, and then zerging the base from the tower, so there really wasn't much to do. By making the game more lethal, less frenetic, and slower-paced, it should be far, far easier to deal with balance issues, and would definitely make players care more about the actions of their teams.
- Listen to your god damn players. Most players suggestions are total ######. 90% of balance complaints are 'nerf everyone but me'. So I can understand why SOE didn't really listen too much. However, SOE was wrong in that they didn't listen to <i>anyone</i>. Throuhout PS's life, even before any of the expansions, people were making great "things" to describe how to refine the gameplay a bit more. Introduce these sorts of things to capture between bases, remove some bases here and there... SOE ignored it all, and instead gave us... caverns. Caverns. ###### caverns. Nobody wanted the caverns. Nobody cared about the stupid slingshot Tron rope things. Nobody wanted to screw around in some sort of crazy Quake-esque fantasy land arena, and nobody did, the caverns were empty because it was the total opposite of what anyone wanted. When they introduced BFRs, the only way people could get them was to get kills... in the caverns, effectively FORCING players to fight in their stupid little caves. SOE had no idea what their players wanted, and they simply refused to even try to interact with the community. As a matter of fact, the original producer, DaveG and a community manager named Sporkfire were the only two who ever really talked to the community, and both of them got fired.
- Pull your head out of your ass. When Planetside was new, the promise was that newbies wouldn't be disadvantaged to vets. For a while, this was true (see earlier, the 'golden days' of Planetside where most people weren't BR20). However, when they introduced the insipid ###### caverns, they had to motivate players, so they introduced new, overpowered weaponry that forced you to fight in the caverns to earn as well as, of course, buying the expansion. As SOE let you get more and more certs, you let vets stomp around as if they were the god damn Ironman while newbies were getting raped by the endless AOE spam and single-seated airborne cowboy killmobiles. As the vets played longer and SOE introduced another expansion with even more toys, the newbies were stuck with dumb-ass things like the Punisher assault rifle (oh lordy), while Vets ran around invisible and had pistols that could one-shot kill you. Every new weapon they introduced was like it was in a race to be even more powerful and outrageous than the last. When I finally quit Planetside for good, it was when they started to introduce new toys, but the kicker was they were only for players with certain 'ribbons', like 'Played the game for over two years' and 'Has 800 kills in aircraft'. So these new things that my subscription fee is funding development for were completely out of my reach in every practical sense. The result was that I had to wait to buy special certs for them, while the vets got all the advantages. ###### you Sony.
TL;DR version: SOE will ruin this game. Planetside was a great game, but it was a deeply flawed, broken game that slowly collapsed as they made it suck more and more. The coolness of Planetside was enough to overcome the multitude of ###### design and balance decisions, but that slowly wore off until nobody but the biggest fanboys could tolerate it anymore. Planetside 2 isn't anything new or exciting, and I highly doubt it'll be able to hold up the giant triple-layer ###### sandwich SOE is already preparing to drop on it.
Looks like it could be good to me. I don't think I'll be a big fan of the iron sights or the class system, but the rest sounds like it will be pretty fresh. I'm pretty disappointed that the trailer lacked the massive game play they were talking about.
X_StickmanNot good enough for a custom title.Join Date: 2003-04-15Member: 15533Members, Constellation
I wish I could be more optimistic, but after what happened with Planetside 1 and Star Wars: Galaxies, I simply don't trust SOE to make a decent game. They're like a bad choice making machine.
<!--quoteo(post=1858830:date=Jul 8 2011, 05:21 PM:name=Temphage)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Temphage @ Jul 8 2011, 05:21 PM) <a href="index.php?act=findpost&pid=1858830"><{POST_SNAPBACK}></a></div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->SOE will ruin Planetside. If you played it and vaguely followed its history, you know that in spite of the overwhelmingly popular idea of where the game should've gone, SOE ###### it up completely with countless changes, ###### balance with no attempt to fix it, and doing the total opposite of what players wanted.
Deep down I know it will be awful and even from the trailer you get the vibe that its just a re-hash of the same old recipe which shiny graphics and I seriously doubt it will stray far from the standard MMO template so there wont be a shred of balance.
I stopped my subscription a few times over the years and gave up completely after the second add-on came out because truthfully it became a boring routine of being raped in your own base or being blown up on your way to one by a single reaver or if your unlucky a pack of them.
It was far too easy to obtain a reaver cert and you could amass enough cert points for it by simply going into the training rooms and gaining XP by getting into all the vehicles and getting out again and doing the same in the firing range with all the guns. As a result it also ruined bombers <b>=[</b>
I wonder if the subcription price will be the same.
The problem with the Reaver wasn't that it was too easy to obtain. If it had been harder to obtain fewer people would've had it, but that wouldn't have solved the inherent imbalance to it.
Stickman is going to tell you that the Reaver wasn't imbalanced at all because he is in denial about it and likes to troll me with it, but it was. It wasn't that it was insanely powerful in one category, but it was <u>at least average</u> at anything, and great at many things. It was a great personal transport, a good air-to-air dogfighter, excellent at anti-armour, good at anti-personnel, and it was a huge threat to the NC and TR anti-air MAXes (which, at least on paper, should be able to defend the airspace against them) as well.
The Reaver was the single most versatile vehicle in the game while still excelling in a specialised role - a jack of trades but master of one. Combine that with its crew requirement of one player and it was the soloer's dream and weapon of choice, and its abundance reflected that.
Comments
Now officially named PS2. Also, concept images.
<img src="http://img2.mmo.mmo4arab.com/news/2011/05/23/planetside/planetside2_info.jpg" border="0" class="linked-image" />
<img src="http://img4.mmo.mmo4arab.com/news/2011/05/23/planetside/planetside2_warfare.jpg" border="0" class="linked-image" />
<img src="http://i55.tinypic.com/wkh25i.jpg" border="0" class="linked-image" />
Anyway, for you PS1 veterans, is it the case that you can kick people out of your vehicle even after the point where the bailing mechanism fails? Cuz I just rescued a vital ANT by kicking it out of my Lodestar scant seconds before being shot down by a mosq.
<a href="http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41FT4GM635L._SL500_AA300_.jpg" target="_blank">MW2</a>.
<center><object width="450" height="356"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/EO1XtBq8GQk"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/EO1XtBq8GQk" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="450" height="356"></embed></object></center>
--Scythe--
Seriously this is the most pointless thing. Why did you post that.
Such a rollercoaster of emotion, you should be thanking me.
--Scythe--
Such a rollercoaster of emotion, you should be thanking me.
--Scythe--<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
*slow clap*
Such a rollercoaster of emotion, you should be thanking me.
--Scythe--<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Personally, I just noticed that the pre-loading still frame on the video is a shopped image of an NC tank on a real photo and immediately realised you were taking the piss. No rollercoaster of emotion here.
<center><object width="450" height="356"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/XBCp_rgAkfc"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/XBCp_rgAkfc" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="450" height="356"></embed></object></center>
<3 VN
Also, uniforms look kinda drab and grey. Empire colours should be used boldly and plentifully, to give soldiers visual distinctiveness. In particular the VS look wrong without their distinctive iridescent cyan and purple.
Edit: Dumping a quick URL here before I have to run: <a href="http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/planetside-2/1181222p1.html" target="_blank">http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/planetside-2/1181222p1.html</a>
Check out the "mechs," which I presume to be MAX units. Looks more like it. TR and NC could still use some more colour, but at least the VS one looks spot on.
<center><object width="450" height="356"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/XBCp_rgAkfc"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/XBCp_rgAkfc" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="450" height="356"></embed></object></center>
<3 VN<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Seriously man this is even less realistic than Scythe's video. Please at least put SOME effort in before you try to troll us. :)
Not sure I like the sound of classes and EVE-style offline advancement.
<!--quoteo--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Finally, most importantly, there’s a new mission system which automatically generates missions to focus players and balance populations, as well as allowing veteran players to insert their own missions. This allows players to specify in some detail what troops they need, for example a mission requiring engineers to set up minefields or repair turrets at a base. The default missions, when no player-created mission is available, focus players on nearby territory that can be conquered, or needs defending.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Neato
<!--quoteo--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->One large change followed on what Higby describes as Planetside’s number one lesson; “get people into the action quicker.†Because of this each factions’ sanctuaries are gone, and with them the Hart shuttle. Instead, each continent has an uncapturable foothold for each faction.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Uh... weren't people complaining about the <i>lack</i> of lasting effect the sanctuaries caused?
Things SOE needs to get right:
- Third person camera. Remove it. Seriously, dumbest ###### thing to have in an FPS. The entire game ended up just being people corner-camping, waiting to leap out and yell SURPRISE before filling your face with Lasher Spam.
- On that note, remove all the spam weapons. All of them. No weapon should reward inaccuracy, and very few weapons should do area-effect damage. If you want to blow things up, you should have to work for it with a well-aimed hand grenade. By the time Planetside was on the downward slope, SOE had: Thumper grenade launcher, Rocklet rifle, the Lasher, the Radiator (the worst of them all, damaged through walls, and the area-effect would linger), the Scorpion, Dragon, the Maelstrom, and the hand grenades themselves. All of these are area-effect explosive splash-damage weapons. The game ended up literally being you running around wildly like an idiot, dodging explosions like an angry wizard was hurling meteors from above at you. Base assaults ended up being spastic, devastating affairs since they were full of chokepoints and encouraged immense concentration of area-effect weapons into tiny access points.
- On <i>that</i> note, base zerging needs to go away, and the concept of bases needs to be trashed. Focusing fighting into the same copy-pasta structures and towers wasn't what anyone wanted. If you ask, nobody's going to say that their favorite moments was the time they hacked the backdoor and ate a face full of Lasher spam for 45 minutes. All base fighting ended up being was you footzerging from the tower until the base inevitably flipped to neutral.
- Remove almost all the cert points. Another death-blow for Planetside was marginalization of your team. Once upon a time, Planetside needed a variety of players to accomplish things. Armor commanders would spearhead an assault while pilots provided air cover. A Galaxy pilot would carry his team into battle and drop them off. If they came across armor, they'd shelter and have the guy with the AV weaponry wipe it out. A sniper on a hillside would force the enemy to keep their heads down, and the AI MAX would bust in the doors. They'd push for the control room, secure it, and wait for the hacker to show up. That doesn't happen anymore. SOE gave people so many cert points and people played for so long that everyone's BR9000 and CR5, so everyone runs around in Rexo, nobody uses Galaxies since they can just get in their Reavers and fly there on their own (and rape everything on the ground along the way). Once they're at the base, they all just carry Decimators (the ubiquitous AV weapon) and Heavy Assault, can heal themselves, and are master hackers. So they've completely removed the need to work as a team, and instead you just sort of 'go with the flow' and kill all the barneys, elmos, and smurfs you see.
- Remove instant-action. SOE is wrong, they don't need to have a way to get people to the action faster. As player numbers dropped and their atrocious design came crashing down on them, they struggled to keep people entertained, so they refined the 'instant action' system. What this meant is that people would warp to a random planet/continent, and start capturing totally empty bases. If and when the enemy ever showed up, a 'hotspot' would appear on the map, and everyone would hit the Instant Action button and would all warp to the fight. This had three consequences - the first was that it made small fights into big epic battles with as many players as possible - that's good right? Well, not really. The second thing it did was to effectively remove small-scale battles. See, when you had to rely on the HART to drop, you had to pick a drop location and you had no idea what to expect. With Instant Action you knew you were going to go where everyone else was. While PS is an MMOFPS, the giant Mongol horde of enemies wasn't always the best thing for the game. Rather than a series of small skirmishes on multiple fronts, the game was just everyone crashing into one base at a time, in a row, until the continent was captured. The third thing that this did was concentrate all fighting around bases. The best moments in the game weren't spent slogging into bases, it was getting to the next base. What you were supposed to do was lose a base, and then stage defenders at the next vulnerable ones, and slow down the enemy advance along the way. With Instant Action, everyone just spawned at the nearest tower, so as soon as you captured the tower a tidal wave of bodies would pour out, and fighting was relegated to the same ###### footzerg within 100 feet of the base walls.
- Hire someone that knows a ###### thing about balancing a game, or anyone for that matter. Planetside was one of the most poorly balanced games ever devised. Due to atrocious balance and gameplay decisions, you ended up with, for example, the Decimator - vehicles were powerful, and would crush infantry to bits. So in order to give infantry a chance, they put in a heavy-hitting anti-vehicle weapon. The result is that you're either told to be raped by vehicles, or carry the Deci with everyone else, and rape every MAX within sight. Balance between factions was worse, for example the Vanu AA MAX had jumpjets meaning it could jump over Reaver missile spam while firing passive-seeking homing bolts. Meanwhile the TR MAX was stuck in place and could only aim in one direction, and the NC MAX's homing missiles told aircraft they were about to get attacked, giving them plenty of time for defensive maneuvers. Everything was completely ######. People give the BFRs a lot of flak, but the BFRs were the least of Planetside's problems. Like everything else, they were broken and badly balanced, but in principle they could've been made to work. But they weren't.
- Focus fighting away from bases, outdoors. The problem with base fighting is, besides being a giant cluster-######, it is stale and repetitive. Everyone drops on the roof of the Tech Center and blows the gen. Or you just wait for it to flip to neutral. ######. Yawn. The best fighting was outdoor bridge battles, or running gunfights between forests. Provide ample areas for outdoor ambushes, such as saying that vehicles traveling offroad only travel at most at 75% speed, while they're faster on paved routes, to focus armor movements on vulnerable roads. Marginalize the ability for single players to have huge effects on the battle by, for example, flying around in a Reaver killing everything they see. Don't even get me started on the cloaked combat engineers.
- Rip off Battlefield. As Planetside matured, its tactical demands became fewer and fewer. Rexo meant everyone could survive copious amounts of damage, so there was little threat to standing in front of an MCG, while at the same time, all the area-effect spam weapons meant you didn't even have to aim to whittle the enemy down. All fighting was focused on taking a tower, and then zerging the base from the tower, so there really wasn't much to do. By making the game more lethal, less frenetic, and slower-paced, it should be far, far easier to deal with balance issues, and would definitely make players care more about the actions of their teams.
- Listen to your god damn players. Most players suggestions are total ######. 90% of balance complaints are 'nerf everyone but me'. So I can understand why SOE didn't really listen too much. However, SOE was wrong in that they didn't listen to <i>anyone</i>. Throuhout PS's life, even before any of the expansions, people were making great "things" to describe how to refine the gameplay a bit more. Introduce these sorts of things to capture between bases, remove some bases here and there... SOE ignored it all, and instead gave us... caverns. Caverns. ###### caverns. Nobody wanted the caverns. Nobody cared about the stupid slingshot Tron rope things. Nobody wanted to screw around in some sort of crazy Quake-esque fantasy land arena, and nobody did, the caverns were empty because it was the total opposite of what anyone wanted. When they introduced BFRs, the only way people could get them was to get kills... in the caverns, effectively FORCING players to fight in their stupid little caves. SOE had no idea what their players wanted, and they simply refused to even try to interact with the community. As a matter of fact, the original producer, DaveG and a community manager named Sporkfire were the only two who ever really talked to the community, and both of them got fired.
- Pull your head out of your ass. When Planetside was new, the promise was that newbies wouldn't be disadvantaged to vets. For a while, this was true (see earlier, the 'golden days' of Planetside where most people weren't BR20). However, when they introduced the insipid ###### caverns, they had to motivate players, so they introduced new, overpowered weaponry that forced you to fight in the caverns to earn as well as, of course, buying the expansion. As SOE let you get more and more certs, you let vets stomp around as if they were the god damn Ironman while newbies were getting raped by the endless AOE spam and single-seated airborne cowboy killmobiles. As the vets played longer and SOE introduced another expansion with even more toys, the newbies were stuck with dumb-ass things like the Punisher assault rifle (oh lordy), while Vets ran around invisible and had pistols that could one-shot kill you. Every new weapon they introduced was like it was in a race to be even more powerful and outrageous than the last. When I finally quit Planetside for good, it was when they started to introduce new toys, but the kicker was they were only for players with certain 'ribbons', like 'Played the game for over two years' and 'Has 800 kills in aircraft'. So these new things that my subscription fee is funding development for were completely out of my reach in every practical sense. The result was that I had to wait to buy special certs for them, while the vets got all the advantages. ###### you Sony.
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TL;DR version: SOE will ruin this game. Planetside was a great game, but it was a deeply flawed, broken game that slowly collapsed as they made it suck more and more. The coolness of Planetside was enough to overcome the multitude of ###### design and balance decisions, but that slowly wore off until nobody but the biggest fanboys could tolerate it anymore. Planetside 2 isn't anything new or exciting, and I highly doubt it'll be able to hold up the giant triple-layer ###### sandwich SOE is already preparing to drop on it.
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Deep down I know it will be awful and even from the trailer you get the vibe that its just a re-hash of the same old recipe which shiny graphics and I seriously doubt it will stray far from the standard MMO template so there wont be a shred of balance.
I stopped my subscription a few times over the years and gave up completely after the second add-on came out because truthfully it became a boring routine of being raped in your own base or being blown up on your way to one by a single reaver or if your unlucky a pack of them.
It was far too easy to obtain a reaver cert and you could amass enough cert points for it by simply going into the training rooms and gaining XP by getting into all the vehicles and getting out again and doing the same in the firing range with all the guns. As a result it also ruined bombers <b>=[</b>
I wonder if the subcription price will be the same.
Stickman is going to tell you that the Reaver wasn't imbalanced at all because he is in denial about it and likes to troll me with it, but it was. It wasn't that it was insanely powerful in one category, but it was <u>at least average</u> at anything, and great at many things. It was a great personal transport, a good air-to-air dogfighter, excellent at anti-armour, good at anti-personnel, and it was a huge threat to the NC and TR anti-air MAXes (which, at least on paper, should be able to defend the airspace against them) as well.
The Reaver was the single most versatile vehicle in the game while still excelling in a specialised role - a jack of trades but master of one. Combine that with its crew requirement of one player and it was the soloer's dream and weapon of choice, and its abundance reflected that.
These games are rare. New Ideas never done before. Be happy someone is trying something new in a FPS
Wait and see ...