Atmospheric Effects (make PS2 ALIVE!)

Okay okay. Now I know there is a million billion other things people are demanding higby do. "Give us more weapons" say some. "Nerf x, z, y, or q," say others.

What do I say?

I say I want some freaking beautiful weather in this game. I want this world to feel alive. I want to fight in esamir or indar and have snowstorms or sandstorms to obscure my vision and make my outfit have to think and plan on how to avoid it.

This video is a little spotty, but it is a perfect example of snowstorms in an fps.



As you will see what the video will show, the snow obscures the vision beyond maybe a dozen yards and makes sniping impossible. Long range fights become difficult, and sneaking becomes easier due to the constant background noise and the extra distortion on your vision. The fight becomes more tactical and radars more important. Shots fired can be a possible death sentence as they reveal your position to enemies who wouldn't normally have spotted you. These are things that make gaming tense and generally make for memorable experiences. This would be perfect for the snowfields of Esamir because the vast open fields normally allow for vast open warfare. Suddenly a snowstorm would render the whole world CQB for a few minutes, allowing squads to sneak up on enemy bases and making it harder for aircraft to tag and take down sunderers and tanks. This would also make the esamir snow camo more useful.

Now lets move on to Amerish. Since it is a forest continent, i figure it'll be more like this:



Now as you can see here its just a simple thunderstorm. This won't obscure your vision, but it will play absolute havoc with your ability to spot movement. Foliage everywhere is moving, the wind is blowing in your ears making it hard to listen for the telltale sound of enemy gunfire. The rain on your visor is making it hard to catch a glimpse of that elusive engineer who has been dropping mines around your base. Weapon sway would be increased because of the wind, making you compensate and take shots more carefully. All of this in conjunction forces you to be better as a player and play to both the strengths and weaknesses of your environment.

Now that isn't to say, it wouldn't be without flaws. But I'll get into that later.

For the moment, lets look at an Indar
Now this video isn't of gameplay of any game, but I think it REALLY gets how crazy sandstorms can get in a desert environment. Its from just outside a military base in Kuwait.



Now take a look at how those big clouds roll in. In PS2 you'd get plenty of time as a player to prepare for the weather. As it slowly creeps across the landscape you'd have to gauge how much time you had left to be effective in that esf, or how much longer you'll be able to be useful laying down suppressing fire on that squad moving up south of the crown.

And then, the sandstorm would hit.

Visibility would be reduced. Sounds would be dampened allowing you to be louder and do more without anyone hearing. Being indoors would be important because visibility in and around buildings would be markedly improved, and lights on weapons/vehicles would have a purpose. Obviously SOE would not let it get as dark as that video, but darklights would be something more than just looking for infiltrators. Now, in bad weather it'd be used to find pretty much anyone. Everyone would want to have a darklight on a sidearm or CQB weapon because it'd be absolutely necessary in bad weather situations.

Alright alright. Time to look at those nasty nasty cons.

FPS:

I'm sure some of you are going to state the obvious. "Won't FPS take a hit? Won't our framerates go down during these events?"
Yes and no. See just like anything else on PS2, it will be subject to your graphical settings. People with mid to ultra settings would be able to see the weather in its full beautiful glory. People with low will just see the fog and possibly the distance clouds. In the instance of rain, they would just see dark skies and some rain. (foliage doesn't move on low anyways) While this might seem like an unfair advantage due to the fact that it will limit the effect negative weather will have on lower end computers, it also will not be conducive to helping them. See they will still have rain and fog and all the essentials that will reduce everyone's visibility. So in the end the effect will be the same.

Uselessness:

How does this help the game? How does this help me?

Okay okay. So this isn't a major gameplay change. This isn't a new vehicle or a shiny new gun. How does this make this better? Well allow my rebuttal. It makes EVERYTHING better.
Whoa. Big statement there right? But think about it for a minute. If a tank zerg is rolling across Indar without stopping and a sudden sandstorm crops up and blinds everybody, now they are sitting ducks. These guys just zerged mindlessly and didn't stop to check the skies for that big looming cloud overhead. Now on their way to the next base to cap they are caught in a sandstorm and are very, very vulnerable. Engi's and LA's can sneak up and C4 the heck out of them. Mines can be places without them ever spotting them. Rockets can be fired from hidden positions and if you run far enough they'll never know where you went. That tank zerg that was rolling across your bases killing everything has now hit a major hiccup and it can turn the tides right around. Zerging in bad weather becomes a very very bad idea. It'll reduce a lot of the major headaches we all have with this game (spawncamping, Liberator daltoncamping, ect.)

So as you can see, its got some merit.

Isn't there more important things for Higby to do?

Guys...I hate to be the jerk to say this but it has to be said. Soooooo many people go to I&S to bomb down threads with that statement and it is a total copout in the extreme. Let me be blunt.

There is ALWAYS more important things for Higby to do.

The game isn't perfect in its current state. The game probably won't be perfect a year from now and a year from that point this game probably still won't be perfect. What is important is to make updates that make the game dynamically better and make it more fun. To strive towards perfection, that utter unattainable goal. No one's ideas are above the other, and a good idea is a good idea no matter how important it is on the scale of things. This idea is no different.

*ahem* Sorry, I'll get off my soapbox now.

How will this make money?

The most important question of all. To answer it, let me tell you a story.

When I was younger I was playing airsoft with a large amount of players at a field in south Florida. It was in the fall, so it wasn't too hot and it wasn't too muggy either. The weather was calm and moderate but the fighting was intense. I'd had only a moderately good gun, (a knockoff M4) but I've been raised on guns since I was a child and I had a good experience with them. My squad was hiding in the woods near a captured point that we couldn't take back and we didn't have the more powerful weapons that would allow us to approach the enemy base given as that they'd tag us from way further than we could fire back. We were forced to watch helplessly as the game went on and the enemy team racked up more and more on their scoreboard as our allies futilely crashed upon the enemy point only to be taken out before they could even fire back.

And then it started raining.

At first just a few drops, but then more and more until the whole sky was a waterfall covering the field in a blanket of cold moisture.

Thinking quickly, I stripped off my shirt, rolled in the mud and dropped my primary gun and went forward only with a semi-automatic pistol and my wits. With the rain and mud as my concealment, I moved through the bushes pausing only to dab more mud on myself to keep a nice brown coating as my camo. When I finally had snuck up to the base, I slid through a hole in the wall quietly and crept up to the ten man team that was manning the ramparts.

Needless to say, I took out more than half of them before anyone could even think to fire back. I was outgunned and outmanned but I took out almost an entire platoon of experienced marines with just my wits and superior tactics.

What does this have to do with PS2?

Well think about it. A weather effect can equalize combat immensely. OP sniper ruling a hillside? A snowstorm will make him blind and allow you to approach. Tank Zerg coming up on your six? The wind and rain will conceal your moving up to blindside them. Enemy ESF's bombing your spawn? Well they can't shoot what they can't see, and a sandstorm will definitely make them too blind to do A2G.

You see, equal fights are both memorable and fun. Equalizing combat is what everyone calls for, why people call for nerfs or buffs, why people want one faction or another to be upgraded or downgraded. Equal battles leave you smarter, exhilarated, and full of energy even though you may have lost!
When you cap a base by sneaking in and killing the sniper team on the roof with your squad, aided by the wind and rain that is just beautiful. It makes for memorable moments.

And if nothing else, there is a savage beauty in weather. I mean come on, we all play games for you know, gameplay itself, but there is something nice about good graphics and good atmospheric effects. Its immersive. It makes games like Silent Hill great and is used to great effect in everything from movies to video games. The horror genre relies on it. Drama uses it to increase tension. The best kind of games are the ones you forget you are playing. That steal hours from your life because you were having such a blast you just went "whoa, its six already?!" when you finally looked at the clock.

Put yourself on Esamir in a snowstorm while you are fighting the cold wind trying to find that guy you've been exchanging blind shots with across a gorge. Suddenly he looms out of the fog, his red TR armor standing out like an angry thumb in the middle of the winter fury. You both whip up your guns and exchange fire and you manage to take him down after a brief struggle. The sudden scare has woken your adrenaline and your near escape with your life has made your wits on a razors edge.

These are the moments that make games great. That really draw you in.

So...consider my long winded proposal. This game is devoid of atmosphere and tension. Its always the same sunny day and the same clear night. Clouds change occasionally but for the most part, its all the same stuff.
Bring some life into this game. Make it really live and breathe and you'll see a lot more people enjoying their time here.

Yes! Brilliant! Bump! Bump! BUMP!

"but but won't somebody think of the poor 'lil FrameRates!"

Seriously though - WANT. SO. MUCH!

I'm glad you all approve! Didn't expect the vehemence of the support XD

Auraxis does have some weather, we get different depths of fog at different times (never sure whether it's intentional or a bug but sometimes it cuts visibility to 50-100m).

But yes, varied and functionally different weather would be awesome, both for giving the gameplay a bit of variance (beyond the day/night cycle which is also a good thing), and for immersion. Esamir is covered in snow and has snow piled up against facilities, yet we never see it snow there. Amerish has running water, rivers and streams, but it never rains. Hossin has tropical swamps and a strong equatorial sun, there should be thunder showers there every day.

I fully agree that this would make everything better and significantly add replayability to the game.

We know it's possible because GTA3 did it years ago, and we've seen the awesome things the PS2 graphics engine can cope with.

YES YES YES! BUMPS! HAVE THEM

This has been suggested quite a few times...
But you explained it so vividly, your weather suggestion post is the best I've seen.
SOE please give this to us :3

I'm still kinda 'meh' on the whole weather thing.

It sounds nice, but at the same time, I feel this game needs to move a large portion more focus to longer range battles.
CQC is already prevalent enough as it is, and to further drive battles in that direction seems like it would force us just another step closer to becoming SMG/shotgun/max-side 2.

Again, this is just personal opinion, but I cannot help but notice that the battles tend to either be nothing but thermal vehicles, or CQC building fights.

I miss the old fights that used to happen out on the seabed, with infantry taking up the frontlines, MTB's and lightnings in the back, and aircraft constantly held back by AA.
These things just don't happen anymore, and it's really detracting from the ranged combat as a whole.

Well in windy/rainy situations that wouldn't damage ranged combat too much. It'd actually make CQC more tense. I mean everything in motion with wind and thunder and rain in your visor its going to be pretty hard to concentrate on where the sniper fire is. And heck, even things like simple snow wouldn't hurt range combat but in fact improve it. If you have snow blowing in your eyes keeping you from seeing, a well placed sniper with white camo on could tag you and you'd never even know where or why. Long range combat has its place in bad weather. But really it would just force you to pick the right job for the right situation, which is really what it is all about.

Yeah... This game feels too.... Static........ Everything is in the same condition all the time. Could use some weather effects

Exactly. Cookie cutter bases. Environments just reskinned with snow or grass. Make them different. Give each continent a different feel, with different effects and strategies and counter strategies. Then continents wouldn't be just about population it'd also about who can use the environment to the greatest effect!

yes to weather effects! sandstorms, rain, hail, fog, blizzards, planetside2 needs all of them to make battles more dynamic!

Glad for the supports guys

Voted up.

However, I still have some concerns about how the gameplay would be balanced out between suped-up computer systems and low-end machines / toasters. If players were able to switch off weather effects completely, it would give them a distinct visual advantage against others that keep it on / up high. If players were NOT able to switch them off completely, they would still likely have a moderate advantage over others on higher weather settings.

I believe that there may be certain tricks that could be used on lower settings to simulate their higher counterparts, but I'm not entirely sure as I'm not an expert in the field of computer generated graphics. All I can suggest is that the brightness, contrast and colour settings could be dynamically changed to help simulate some weather effects (such as overcast weather and lightning) without reducing performance, but this would not be enough by itself to balance things out overall.

Going on common sense, wind in particular gives particles a definitive direction to travel in. If wind speed and direction were to change at any time, the direction of these particles (whether they are dust, water, ice, snow, leaves, debris, smoke, etc.) would need to be recalculated, which in turn affects performance. A truly immersive game would have all of this, and more.

I don't know if you know this already, but SOE developers have been trying to implement nVidia's PhysX technology into PS2, but haven't yet managed to fix all of the bugs and glitches with it, limiting it only to particular effects. While this technology is cutting edge stuff, giving players the immersive gameplay environments that they have been long yearning for, it's only available on nVidia GeForce 8 series cards and higher (toasters may not have this), and since it is computationally intensive, it can affect performance considerably, particularly on low-end machines.

I had to like you because of that gif...

ALL HAIL WEATHER, I question what I would be like on a lava continent though...

Weather would be awesome, Heavy Storms in Amerish would be all that is NEEDED during a Blitzkrieg battle

That's the 10th person to say that

Well written post. Everything that adds to the immersion factor is a instant yes from me.

Weather in PS1 was amazing for immersion...at one point you could see the weather systems on the map approaching. Unfortunately you could shut it off if you wanted...but there was nothing like hearing the door close behind you coming inside from the elements...so I kept it on. I don't recall it hindering my performance at all....and besides that is not our problem to solve. If they could do it tastefully 10 years ago by blowing in our ears and making it foggy then they can do it now.

PS2 atmospherics feel...sterile...isolated....lacking...and that is sad.