Why is it over time this game is slowly turning into Planetside 1?

Most of the "most successful" franchises are as successful as they are because they cater to the lowest common denominator of gamers, and are so dumbed down that anyone can pick them up and do good with very little experience. This does not make them good games.

isnt the modern COD (as is post COD3) series the most successful fps game there is?
the original COD and CODUO were actually great games but i get sadface when i see what the franchise has turned into now - theres absolutly zero complexity in the new versions of it

so i agree dumbing down a game brings in the numbers but unfortunatly makes the game pretty bad

Pretty much what I was saying. The origional COD for the PC was actually one of my favorite games of all time. Had lots of great battles on Harbor.

The original cod & medal of honour were great games. I liken cod & bf to the big Hollywood blockbuster action films. It's exciting, entertaining & looks very pretty. It'll bring in a huge audience & make millions. But it's not a clever intellectual film. Same with the current fps games.

I like a lot of the ps1 festures I read about. Seems to me resource collection adds a new level of strategy to the game. I also like the idea that if I want to play but don't feel like engaging in combat I can still play & help my faction by harvesting resources.

Lastly if it is resource harvesting can we please have tiberium or naniterium sprout from the ground to be collected by a vehicle modelled on the c&c harvester.

I'm guessing the reason they are slowly reintroducing PS1 mechanics is that they were more concerned with getting a game that was at least ready to play and make money. After that first goal they can then add in all the things that worked in the past whilst making sure they didn't repeat the mistakes they made in the past.

This does mean they made new mistakes, but hey, they developed a massive game so things were bound to go wrong.

This.

There very little from PS1 I wouldn't want to see in PS2.

Planetside 1 was pretty good for its time, in those days games didn't have anything like as many players (the largest ever [at that time] Western MMO only had 650,000 players total - EQ1).

In many ways though it came years too early (in those days dial up was still not uncommon) and was ridculously ambitious.

It didn't have enough back end for $15 a month game in those days though, and had a horrible problems with its Core Combat expansion (at which point SoE seemed to pull the plug development-wise).

Most importantly though it was an MMOFPS the first an only till PS2, not a FPS with online maps. Apples and Oranges.

Really looking forward to the new resource system.

I don't know whether they already have anything like this planned, but I hope they eventually make Galaxies able to carry resources too, a la cargo planes/helicopters. They're far more mobile than Sunderers, which is a big advantage, but that can be evened out by only letting them carry half to a third of the resources at a time. It'd be a great way to revitalize the old bird, IMO.

PS1 was never a popular game--peaking about 70,000 or so while many games did better. Lineage was over 3 million. Everquest, not much later went off the charts over 10 million.

There might have been some goodness in PS1 worth following, but popularity can't be used as a justification for it.

That was a decent amount in those days, especially for a completely novel format (the MMOFPS).

Lineage wasn't a western MMO in those days, and had a completely different "subscription" model (more like todays Western F2P) so is nothing like comparable.

Everquest never had more than 650,000 (and if you look at all Western MMORPGs, even now few manage it)......... and had never had more than 450,000 by 2003.

WoW eventually broke 10,000,000 (Global - again the non-Western subscription model being different) some 3 years after it was released (and 5 years after PS1's release) probably as much because it hit the sweet spot of internet gaming take up as much as anything else.




You can't judge PS1 by 2013 standards or even 2007/8 standards because 2003 was a different online era.

hmm, because its hard to keep players p(l)aying on large maps when there is only shooting. they want to attract the shooters that just want to follow orders if they include "nuke xyz", those strategies guys that play the game on the map and of cause that support guys that can't hit a hill with a rifle but like to repair and heal those heroes with the guns.

Hmm...removal of any and all skill in favor of making the game more accessible for the masses?

Happened in beta unfortunately.

Nor can you judge game quality for 2013 based on designs from 2003. Some of the best aspect of PS1 are now some of the worse--dispite the PS1 cult following. This game needs far more blood and a larger player base than any game in 2003 and to be honest doesn't appear to have hit the right combination of old and new, nor have sparked much interest as its moving towards infantry and PS1 features. If anything the radical shifts in design have turned off a lot of players and reduced recommendations. Don't get me wrong, I still enjoy playing the game, but don't really expect to be playing a year from now--because I'll either get bored, or SOE will just cut its losses.

If you like 3 maps, no meta-game, and full power lolpod farming, then yes indeed PS2 is unlikely to remain the game for you.

So would you suggest that would have you still playing in 1 years time?

because the game sucks at being CoD/BF3

Because a sandbox type game needs depth, not KDR, S/H, or esports.

It has always been the intention for Planetside 2 to be more like Battlefield and Call of Duty to begin with, and to then slowly be changed into a game worthy of the Planetside name.

We've known this since day 1. The real test was always going to be whether fans of the original game could grit their teeth and bear the dumbed down game that PS2 was at release until it became a proper MMOFPS with a meta game and emergent strategy.

Planetside 2 is a good game. Hopefully it will soon start to become a great game to rival Planetside 1 with regard to depth and immersion.

Maybe because the continual attrition of gamers has resulted in only PS1 gamers still around to play Planetside 2?

Some of those successful franchises were mostly only successful because of the first game that not many people played.

Example Diablo. It is at the top of the list of successful franchises and D3 was one of the fastest selling game when it was released. However Diablo 3 is just a shell of a game and lost a lot of players soon after launch solely because it was crap compared to D2.

Same thing can be said about COD, Battlefield, and even CS. So when you talk about "Fell into obscurity" does not mean it was a bad thing just that, at the time, it was ahead of its time or too demanding to play. Most people probably didn't play PS1 because of the subscription. Because the shooting genre, at the time, was dominated by CS(if i have my timeline right) so people ended up playing it instead of PS1 which looking back is an MMO with RPG/FPS style gameplay.

Although they are adding weapons and equipment or whatever from PS1, it's not going to turn into PS1- there's still way too much missing from the game that PS1 had. But like the other poster said, the less Battlefield/Call of Duty it is, the better.

Yup same thing happened with SWTOR, huge first day sales but the quality of the game didn't hold well after. It sold huge early on due to the popularity of the kOTOR series (which I also loved), it's not just hype that makes a game successful, you gotta make the game quality enough to KEEP players over time and that's disappearing rapidly in the gaming industry because most of the time they know they can release a new title a year or two later (like Activision does with Call of Duty and now DICE with Battlefield).

PS1 certainly held its player base %-wise better than SWTOR (the most expensive game ever made) did.

If Core Combat had been better it may have continued to grow........ but I still think it was the $15 a month issue that did for it, it didn't have the depth (even though it had much more depth then PS2) to sustain that cost.

Not in a world where games like Everquest 1 went for $15 a month too, I said at the time they should have dropped subcription to ~$7 a month because more people would have stayed, and I still think I was right.

It also had very little advertising compared the the non-MMO FPS of the time.