Planetside 2, and why aren't you playing it

Overheal

So evidently, this game is not getting the press it deserves. And people are starting to whine about being bored with COD and BF so this will be a wonderful refresher for all of you I am sure.

I can only describe Planetside 2 in one succinct way: Battlefield and Star Wars had sex, named the baby Planetside, and made it free to play.

..Yeah.

PS2 launched live about a month ago. It's a free to play, Massively Multiplayer Online First Person Shooter. When I say massively, I mean each of the 3 game Continents is 64 square kilometers (browse the maps here: http://ps2maps.com/), each loaded with substations, major and minor bases, some of which grant global bonuses when owned and required multiple layers of security and shielding to be breached before they are conquerable. By Multiplayer, I mean that I've seen and been able to count roughly 200+ allies in my immediate vicinity before, blobbing together on foot, in tanks, in aircraft, etc. while weapons fire is exchanged everywhere. And the rest you can figure out yourself: OFPS. You've played enough of "those".

The first time you enter PS2, You will choose which of 3 factions to play (they all have minor pros and cons, currently, it's not exactly Zerg-Terran-Protoss style. Yet..) and you'll be dropping in to a flashpoint: the server usually picks up where there is a healthy amount of violence and bloodshed going on, and it will create drop-points on the map to help you get to where the action is. So you'll be screaming in from orbit in a drop pod, NBD, and landing in the middle of a firefight. Expect to be shot

Taking a base is probably the most interesting part of the game. To start with, the outter walls are usually lined with howitzer and flak turrets. If you're lucky, nobody is bothering to man them, or repair them (yep, it requires real players to go and wrench these destructible objects back to health, and you earn XP for doing so of course), and the base's forward shields usually restrict weapons fire and vehicles from passing through them. So, infantry have to hop in (either charging down the big, wide open front gate, or jump-jet in or sneak in with cloaks) and take out the shield generator by setting them to overload. At this point you really want to get a Sunderer transport inside the base walls and deploy it as a spawn point. The inner shields are even a little tougher and require usually a couple generators to be blown before they will fail. Finally, you'll reach the enemy's Spawn Unit (SCU) which will prevent them from spawning from inside the facility anymore and before long you've captured the base and everyone is happy. Oh, except now you are the owner of this completely crippled base that you just helped decimate, so you better hurry and repair it before the enemy faction decides they want to rally and take it back from you. The map is persistent as well, there is no "30 minutes is up time for a new map" garbage. A base you helped capture last night still has influence on the events in-game the next day.

Some of the best fun I've had is from piloting a transport ship and ferrying people to and from the front lines. Proximity chat makes it easy to communicate with those around you, including your nearby escort craft. Many a spectacular crash has been had, though barrel-rolling a Galaxy is especially nerve wracking for your passengers.

Don't know what else to say, except that again, it's Free. You never have to pay a dime. If you want to, you can, and you can get quicker access to sidegrade and upgrade weapons (like trading your dumbfire rocket launcher for one that can lock on to Anti-Tank, or Anti-Air). These are handy but not requisite. Some of the better upgrades you can't buy into anyway, like Infrared scopes (oh btw the world is dynamic day and night) and forearm grips that help you take steadier shots. Those can only be got with "Cert points" which is currency-based experience. You earn these when you kill, cap (everyone in the zone gets XP for a zone cap), are playing the game, and even a little when you are offline.

SOE's President has taken to the interwebs of late and had this to say about the future of F2P:

I’ll give you a good statistic: roughly 10% of the people on Planetside 2 actually spend money. It’s very interesting to watch that balance. We designed the game from the start almost completely ignoring the F2P business model – we just wanted it to be fun. And the way we see it is that the 90% of players who don’t pay are making the game fun for the 10% that do. So we look at the world in terms of how many people are playing the game, and not in terms of how many are paying. The players are content for one another, so the free players are just as important as the ones who are paying. You do have to design the game to ensure there’s enough stuff to monetise – and we’ve done that – but you also need to make sure it isn’t ‘pay to win’. And we’ve done that too; I think we’ve found the right balance.

http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/12/14/soe-president-john-smedley-on-planetside-2s-future-free-to-play-and-everquest-next/?ns_campaign=article-feed&ns_mchannel=ref&ns_source=steam&ns_linkname=0&ns_fee=0

Plus as it stands, the game just launched, and can only grow organically from here. Like any MMO before it it's not 'perfect' in that you will see funny things happen, especially when vehicles get flipped (lolz); but kind of like being an early adopter of WoW or Eve or something you'll be there to watch it all happen. Players on the forums are already talking about Naval combat and SOE has already hinted they want to make the entire planet playable territory, not just separated continents. Extremely ambitious project that will have to happen over the course of years. I also imagine you'll see more options for strategy and tactics, like top-down commander views, the ability to call in air strikes and orbital bombardments, whereas right now you can already place squad beacons that allow your squad members to redeploy via drop pod near your location.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfwd3U709dc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcuOn7FMbwI

Oh and playing as a MAX is fun. Burn up some empire resource points and equip one of these suits sometime:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMdNnJfk_WA

Plus the game is just beautiful. People with slower boxes might feel better on Esamir which is the least demanding on your GPU, but even that, I mean, I have been stopped in my tracks watching an in-game aurora before. They have put the right amount of detail into this game. Even on the lowest settings the game will harken you back to an old school shooter; on the highest settings, everything around you just 'pops'.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-KFAhD1r2g

Why aren't you downloading this yet?

cherryghost

There's already a large thread, and yes, most of us are already playing it

Overheal

cherryghost wrote: »

There's already a large thread, and yes, most of us are already playing it

This was for the hold outs or the people who didn't get the memo

KilOit

Game doesn't have sticking power like the first one had, i played Planetside 1 for about 2 years straight when it was released.

I don't think this game was ready for release, i think they should of held of till early in the new year, get a really good tutorial and meta game going.

I think SOE lost a lot of new players in their first hour of play, it's a very hard to learn the basics of the game, in beta it took me a good 5+ hours to get a feel of it and 20+ hours to be a competent player and that's someone who played the first game and had a understanding of base captures, vehicle combat and squad/platoons and outfits.
Put yourself in the boots of a player who never played the original and not overly good at a fps game, so many would be so overwhelmed and frustrated that they'll just log out to never return.

I myself have stopped playing most evening and can't really be bothered to log in now, i got battle rank 20 in the first few days of playing and i'm at BR39 now so i spent many hours on it.
There's little point in capturing bases! They're taken in minutes when the zerg moves on to the next base.

BUT! i feel SOE are onto something big here, when this game is really fleshed out i can see it being something amazing.
The ground work is laid they just need to iron out a few kinks and put an incentive to team up and capture a base and hold your ground other than xp.

MitchKoobski

Controller support.

For years I've never been able to adjust to using a keyboard and mouse with ease, and I would want to be pretty quick for an FPS.

KilOit

I posted this vid in the other thread but deserves a link here.
Planetside 2 is a lovely looking game and scale that is unmatched, just needs a few more minutes in the oven and it should be done

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VaYNzn8PTl8

KilOit

MitchKoobski wrote: »

Controller support.

For years I've never been able to adjust to using a keyboard and mouse with ease, and I would want to be pretty quick for an FPS.

Controller on a twitch based PC only FPS game?

Sarky

I love this game. There really is nothing else like hopping into your friend's gunship and raining death down on hundreds of troops below while a bunch of tanks pint them to one side of the map and interceptors try to take you down with other fighters on your side trying to take THEM down. The room-to-room fighting when you assault a biolab is incredibly brutal stuff.

It's well worth playing, and well worth throwing them a few bob for the privilege. Loads of weapons, loads of upgrades, loads of customisation options. It's pretty epic. Can't wait to see what new options they bring to the factions. I'm quite interested in this thing they're doing where each faction will have a celebrity commander (eg TotalBiscuit will head the Terran Republic) for a while, and there'll actually be someone in charge directing things (in theory, anyway) on a global scale.

Overheal

KilOit wrote: »

Controller on a twitch based PC only FPS game?

for vehicles at least

KilOit wrote: »

just needs a few more minutes in the oven and it should be done

Frankly I like my games al dente

think SOE lost a lot of new players in their first hour of play, it's a very hard to learn the basics of the game, in beta it took me a good 5+ hours to get a feel of it and 20+ hours to be a competent player and that's someone who played the first game and had a understanding of base captures, vehicle combat and squad/platoons and outfits.
Put yourself in the boots of a player who never played the original and not overly good at a fps game, so many would be so overwhelmed and frustrated that they'll just log out to never return.

My first hour or two was a little frustrating also, but I disagree: when you are aware of what the game can offer, it's worth the extra 10 minutes to go back to youtube and get to grips on the basics of capture mechanics and the like. Did anyone ever stick around to play WoW because your first 6 hours were just so "gripping" when you had to kill 8 sheep and gather 5 copper ore for old man fizzlesprocket? I'm pretty sure they did it to reach the end-game content, majorly.

Magill

Any groups or anything that play organised games ? I tried it for a few hours the other day. Thinking it would be more fun on a big teamspeak server or something.

Icyseanfitz

this is the kind of game where you need to join an outfit, or have friends playing it, is there a boards outfit yet?

Sarky

Outfit isn't exactly necessary, but a couple of pals forming your own squad is fun. Handy to know where your friends are, to make sure someone's got your back, or just to man the weapons on your Liberator. Or fly the thing if you're not a fan of piloting. And get one of them to buy the squad spawn beacon and you're never far away from them.

Dcully

Your just a bit late to the party Overheal, some of us are playing it for months
Awesome game though.

dreamers75

The word free in game just puts me off.

Played it for a while a few months ago and just couldnt get into it, spawned to things that were under attack. Shot at people with other people....was never quite sure what was going on. We won......move to the next thing thats under attack.

Its like Battlefield but played in slow mo across the biggest map in gaming history.

Looks poop too but will try it again some day.

cherryghost

KilOit wrote: »

Controller on a twitch based PC only FPS game?

I personally don't think it's twitch based, maybe in some more intense battles, but for the large part I've had no problem using a controller whilst playing.

MajesticDonkey

dreamers75 wrote: »

Looks poop too but will try it again some day.

Ah here, leave i' ou'.

Fnz

I hear they're pretty stingy with the unlocks. Takes a long time to save up certification points, and accessories (such as scopes) must be unlocked on a per-weapon basis rather than it being unlocked for that weapon type. Is that accurate because it sounds a bit 'grindy'.

How do the ground-based vehicles handle? I didn't see any footage that made them look particularly appealing.

I hear the way to succeed in this game by being part of the largest battalion and just swarming capture points with a numbers advantage. That doesn't sound inspiring. Is it true... and is it fun?

Overheal

Dcully wrote: »

Your just a bit late to the party Overheal, some of us are playing it for months
Awesome game though.

well I didn't get a beta notification so pfft.

Overheal

Fnz wrote: »

I hear they're pretty stingy with the unlocks. Takes a long time to save up certification points, and accessories (such as scopes) must be unlocked on a per-weapon basis rather than it being unlocked for that weapon type. Is that accurate because it sounds a bit 'grindy'.

With new weapons it takes a lot of points to unlock them, but you can save 100 or so points within a few hours. It is the F2P model.. new guns can be purchased. The scopes and everything are just unlocks but they have relatively low cost. The game has to be at least somewhat profitable or else it will fall flat on it's face. I've spent my $40 real money in the game already, bought 2 pretty new cannons for my Galaxy and a couple toys for my Heavy and MAX loadouts.

How do the ground-based vehicles handle? I didn't see any footage that made them look particularly appealing.

They don't turn on a dime. The flash (little quad) handles nicely and it's something you can spawn cheaply to get around. If you want a tank with really good handling you can go Vanu Sovereignty and use their Hovertank, which is a great strafer.

I hear the way to succeed in this game by being part of the largest battalion and just swarming capture points with a numbers advantage. That doesn't sound inspiring. Is it true... and is it fun?

tl;dr version: it's not true, and being part of a big force can be a lot of fun; but you will end up fighting big (200+) and small (2-4) battles at different points.

If all you do is blob with the biggest platoon it gets quite boring. Depending on your playstyle you will probably, naturally, end up finding your own space. Personally I spend little time blobbing and more time doing solo things, I try to skirt the front lines a lot and pick off people trying to do sneak attacks. This morning I spent a good 45 minutes as a MAX just sitting on a landing platform as a mobile flak cannon, tearing apart the light scouting vehicles that were trying to fly my way, I was in a lovely blind spot for them.

But as for the battalion bit, you'll find it is fun, you end up communicating and coordinating. You can have a big blob of people trying to capture a base but invariably you all need to do your own things to pull it off, air support, ground support, people to bust the front door down, etc. Most of the time you're met with an equally large force and the battles can get very tight; it's not like you're a useless strawman in the mob, everyone ends up having to contribute to the effort and if they don't it doesn't get done, and you get overrun.

Of course, other people just like to be dicks, and they're called Snipers. :pac: Sniping is not OP but if thats your thing and you're good at it, it's going to be fun. Enemies actually have to come find you; it's not like other games where a sniper gets offed by some guy with a machine gun 200 yards off from a lucky bullet: the game mechanics are balanced such that a sniper isn't going to be easily offed by one lucky shot or two.

Whatever roles you fancy though you're sure to find something appealing to you. I haven't even really messed with Light Infantry, Medic, or Infiltrator that much, but they are very useful classes in their own way. I mainly stick with Engineer and Heavy, and MAX.

Monty - the one and only

A nice simple warning at the very start of the game when you first play could very well sort out alot of discouragement...


You will die ALOT in your first few hours of play. Dont be discouraged, this is normal.

Varik

You also get certs(points to buy stuff) when you're not playing and don't even have the game on.

Play for an hour get some points and when you come back you'll have even more.

TheDoc

keep hearing about it, might give it a look, although the new CS;GO matchmaking system is giving me a pretty healthy FPS fix if im honest

Canis Lupus

It's fun but I can only play bursts. For me it's lacking an overall purpose. I need something more than xp to want to capture and defend. I think I would have also preferred a more restricted choice of class/vehicle, sorta like start with nothing and work up xp to use a tank etc.

Not The Real Scarecrow

Big fan of BF3 et al but just couldn't get into Planet Side 2 at all. Gave it a chance and admittedly I was lost for the majority of games I played,but it really did nothing for me. I know there's a tonne of tutorial vids out there but any of them that I watched were fairly poor and didn't hold my interest.Think they could improve it by having a training area for noobs or something like that. If I had the time to put into learning the finer points of it , I'd probably appreciate the game more but at the moment I think I'll stick with smaller games that don't require as much brain power to master.
Even though its not for me at the moment,I have to admit that the amount of players and the customization options in game are fairly impressive.Hopefully will get back into it cause it has the potential to be a great game.

Sarky

Overheal wrote: »

Of course, other people just like to be dicks, and they're called Snipers. :pac: Sniping is not OP but if thats your thing and you're good at it, it's going to be fun. Enemies actually have to come find you; it's not like other games where a sniper gets offed by some guy with a machine gun 200 yards off from a lucky bullet: the game mechanics are balanced such that a sniper isn't going to be easily offed by one lucky shot or two.

I found that the contrast nightvision scope works very well for my heavy when looking for snipers. It makes them stand out quite nicely on a hilltop or hiding in bushes if they're not being careful where they uncloak. They bleed way easier than real soldiers :pac:

I am freaking loving the Piston auto-shotgun. Had a wonderful moment last night where a bunch of Vanu scumbags had got into a control point, they were well set up in there and were picking off all the light assaults and engineers trying to dislodge them. I flick on my nanoweave shield and rush the place, unloading an RPG point blank into the first guy I see, mow through another two with the shotty and down the stairs on the other side out of sight, but not before leaving a grenade in the room for the one guy I'd missed. Kaboom. Point retaken. Still even had some shields left!

Of course then I was hit by a tank and died, but ignoble death aside they can't take that moment from me!

jumbobreakfast

once we found some more experienced players to show us the ropes it got interesting (A bunch of us play different games together on TS) . With everyone on Teamspeak, the logisitics of moving an entire army across the map from base to base was great fun. We were unlocking all the squad friendly items such as spawn beacons and sunderer deployment modules and were able to really make a difference.

But...quite a few of us kept getting that flickering screen bug where the ground would dissapear and then you'd either get shot or the game would crash. We all have high powered machines capable of running BF3 on high-Ultra and we use a mix of AMD and Nvidia cards so it's a bug in the game. We just got fed up then because mid-attack you'd end up losing an important position after fighting for it for a long time. That's why I dont play it anymore and I see from the forums that Sony barely acknowledged it as a problem. If they fix that then I'd play it again but other games are filling the void now.

Canis Lupus

That flickering bug drives me nuts, I wouldn't mind so much if it didn't take so long to restart the game. Oh and often when I start the game it kills my internet connection unless I take out my wireless card during the splash screen and reinsert it!!

The game is also heavily CPU focused atm, needs a LOT more optimisation.

danthefan

Will download and give it a shot. In general I'm not into multiplayer (played a lot of COD4 online but got fed up, never went back to anything else really), but for free you can't really argue.

omerin

I've viewed most of the vids here and this is no battlefield. Looks okay, but only okay.

Dcully

omerin wrote: »

I've viewed most of the vids here and this is no battlefield. Looks okay, but only okay.

Never mind watching videos,play the game to make up your mind.
When you get involved in a battle of about 600+ people you will understand what its all about.
6,000 people per server,it can get insane at times.
My main beef with the game is at times when a battle ends you have to search for another battle, be it via getting to a hotpoint or using the instant action feature but that has a longish cooldown.

Sephiroth_dude

Why aren't I playing?I know nothing about the game :eek:

Varik

You can now get 3x the seven cash (the real money EU on planetside) from 1am tonight.

going to throw 10-20 on it, going to look thought store first.

Overheal

The game is also heavily CPU focused atm, needs a LOT more optimisation.

I noticed this also. I regularly run F@h and the game runs noticeably better without it, but my framerates are still relatively poor. I am however accustom to gaming on low FPS, just something I did for so many years it doesn't bother me too much in general.

I think the game might be properly multithreaded however. All 6 of my cores run at a healthy stride when running the game; or it's just the 1055t doing it's own microprocessor gymnastics.

Overheal

And they announced a 1-day sale: 3x Station Cash on all SC purchases for 12/21. Whoot.

aN.Droid

Overheal wrote: »

And they announced a 1-day sale: 3x Station Cash on all SC purchases for 12/21. Whoot.

got 5k. should last me awhile

Zillah

The reasons that I am not playing Planetside 2:

1 - The engine is horribly optimised. I can't seem to get more than 25fps out of it despite getting much better than that from much better looking games.
2 - The free-to-play format makes advancement really slow and frustrating. I'd really just rather pay up front and have a less incremental MMO attitude.
3 - Game play has no staying power whatsoever. Take a base, lose a base, take a base, lose a base. No actual impact or consequences (as if we notice any changes in resources). No rounds, no score count, no point.
4 - Vehicles are no fun. This might just be me but I find the vehicles competely unenjoyable.
5 - Time to fun ratio: I seem to spend a hell of a lot more time going from place to place and standing around waiting for points to capture than actually having fun.

I've been playing since early beta so this isn't a knee-jerk reaction either.

Monty - the one and only

the double xp from today until the 2nd of jan will also be nice.

super_furry

Tried it but it runs like a dog on my laptop sadly. Back to Tribes and TF2 for me for now.

Varik

Anyone playing NC on ceres?

SeantheMan

Is there a boards group or TS or clan that everyone here uses when playing this ?

(don't say the boards.ie TS, noone uses that)

Varik

SeantheMan wrote: »

Is there a boards group or TS or clan that everyone here uses when playing this ?

(don't say the boards.ie TS, noone uses that)

Might be some small groups but as no one can decide yet on server or faction it's not likely to happen soon.

What are you playing now

MagicSean

Won't let me log in. Seems to have a ridiculous registration set up. Loaded up the first time and it asked me for login. Ok, clicked on Create Account. Told me i couldnt create account on American server do i want Euro one. Sure, created account. Tried to login, Station name not recognised. WTF is a station name? Click on forgot station name. Email addrress not recognised. Try the whole thing again. Click on Forgot station name, you have already done this in the previous 24hours. Play TF2

EDIT: Apparently the US launcher was distributed on Steam in EU. For those who want to fix it I made a fixit video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_Xq_D9nvfY&feature=youtu.be

Monty - the one and only

FYI the station name is the us server name, for those with old soe accounts or those who did beta testing for ps2

Varik

Getting pissed off at liberators, a single aa max or sky guard is not enough to kill anyone who's not an idiot and most fighter pilots ignore them as there likely to be kill if the turret gunner is even just ok.

flyingsnail

Varik wrote: »

Getting pissed off at liberators, a single aa max or sky guard is not enough to kill anyone who's not an idiot and most fighter pilots ignore them as there likely to be kill if the turret gunner is even just ok.

I know most fighters seem to ignore them but I find that seven times out of 10 there is no rear gunner and it makes them easy picking.

Sarky

If they're good, they're also usually cowards that leg it as soon as they hear someone getting a lock on them. As a heavy assault i don't get many airborne kills aside from the occasional Scythe or a near-dead liberator, but I can sure as hell keep them from wandering into my yard. Half the time I don't even have to fire at them.

Nody

Varik wrote: »

Getting pissed off at liberators, a single aa max or sky guard is not enough to kill anyone who's not an idiot and most fighter pilots ignore them as there likely to be kill if the turret gunner is even just ok.

But get a friend or two and that Lib is toast; a good Lib pilot is going to start going away the moment they take damage. If not I'll unload 2x 48 shots into them taking them down a significant chuck of health and kill them shortly after.

I'm not overly happy with Libs in all situations but over all I got more of an axe to grind with ESFs (go in, do solo rocket run, zoom out at 20 to 50% health or crash if unsure you can make it to avoid giving kill credits of ESF and pilot) then Libs at this stage of the game.

Overheal

Nody wrote: »

I'm not overly happy with Libs in all situations but over all I got more of an axe to grind with ESFs (go in, do solo rocket run, zoom out at 20 to 50% health or crash if unsure you can make it to avoid giving kill credits of ESF and pilot) then Libs at this stage of the game.

I don't mind the ESFs. I had fun on the south canyon ridge of Indar the other day. We were convoying in tanks and sunderers and these NC fighters thought they could get by with divebombing us. So I tell the driver to park the sundy, load up my burster MAX, and wait... just as the feckers came to the point where I could see their cockpit and they were ready to unload their rockets, BADOOMBADOOMBADOOMBADOOM - 'splode! ESFs are extremely fragile to 2x bursters.

Varik

All the servers I have anyone on are down for the next hour

So vanu on miller it is.

Nody

Varik wrote: »

All the servers I have anyone on are down for the next hour

So vanu on miller it is.

Vanu on Miller is da **** We've not lost Indar benefits since day 1 I think (10% cheaper 'nades, mines, C4 etc.).

Br4tPr1nc3

I was thinking about giving this a download, but I've heard that its pay to win.
can ya tell if its true?