The simple answer is it would not be time efficient. Making other, more meaningful content like the resource revamp being pushed back to implement something like this. The not so simple and rather long answer is that the new animations that would need to be created along with new assets for prone players. That is just the art team, Level design would need to be overhauled so the amount of frustrating/abusable obstacles could be removed/changed. And the sheer man hours of coding required to pull it off would not make it worth it so I can pretend I am a land dolphin and shotgun people whilst flying off buildings. Not to mention how latency, balance, and every other problem that could come from this would wreck many parts of the game. Oh and Higgles said it would slow the game's pace down so there is that.
As much as I feel Battlefield games simply do not play as well without prone, I don't think PS2 needs it. There isn't much need to decrease your profile to stay hidden in this game (at least not beyond what crouching already provides), and snipers already have the cloak to let them procure a visual without being plainly visible from afar.
Somewhere along the line, through all that constant nanite rebirthing, there was a glitch in the system and the nanites failed to reinstate the soldiers' memory of how to lie down. So...nanites!
Why prone if you can fly, become invisible, using a shield, heal yourself or using a personnal shielded turret?
So you cant dropshot Seriously though, it would be very hard to hit proned people and i doubt the majority have the skill level to get them
You know, for a really long time, I would have agreed that PS2 doesn't need prone. Now, after playing games like Red Orchestra, I think its a major component this game is missing. In RO2, hills, berms and other elevated terrain makes for great field cover. You can hide behind the ground, instead of behind a rock, or a crate, or whatever else. In Planetside 2, a lot of otherwise well designed bases (TI Alloys, for example) are basically impossible to attack from the ground as infantry, because there isn't enough hard cover between chokepoints (the rocks in the south hills, the bridges, in the example of TI Alloys). If you add in prone, then you can now cross fields more easily, making AoE vehicle spam less essential to closing in to a base. This considered, who still thinks we don't need prone, and why?
It doesn't matter to me whether we have prone or not. I like it in games like ArmA or Red Orchestra but it can also be very annoying in more fast-paced FPS games like Call of Duty or Battlefield. Granted, I believe that Planetside 2 should be leaning more toward the simulator side of the fence than the console brofist side, but whatever >_>
Planetside 2 should definitely have prone. Granted, it might slow down some combat, but the benefits far outweigh the downsides. For instance, vehicles ruled open field battles for a long time, until they received nerfs and infantry received new powerful weapons. If there was prone, the problem would never have existed in the first place since infantry would have better cover. There are dozens of benefits for prone and only very few downsides. Even these downsides could be easily ameliorated.
Even if prone stopped all movement, had ~1s to go from prone to crouching, and had no bonus to recoil, I would use it. There are times when dropping to prone for cover would be better than the time it took to move to a more substantial piece of terrain, and LAs are highly cover reliant. The main problem with prone in most games is it's really easy to drop to prone while shooting (the "dropshot" mentioned earlier), so you get the benefit of the smaller profile instantly while not really sacrificing your offense. All it takes to fix that is to make the CoF bloom to "falling" and prevent ADS for .5-1s. It's not really a tough design problem at all. If someone wants to go prone while not in cover or misjudges it with that in place? Thanks for giving me your dome in a stationary position. For "Why go prone when you can USE ABILITY X?": Really? Cause all abilities are infinite and win every fight, and you never need any more realistic, balanced options to be a better soldier. For "Slowing the pace of the game": Again, really? It's a situational tool, and things like spawncamping ******edness and medic mass revives and MAX/engi/medi balls do far, far more to make this game look like a standstill than prone ever could. And for logistics concerns: These are never really something worthwhile to mention in a forum post. If a dev says so, sure. But unless you are working for them, "It'd take too long!" or "It'd be easy!" are mostly irrelevant. TL;DR: I don't want instadrop to prone while doming scrubs liek a baws. I want the option to go into prone for quick cover at the cost of mobility and a temporary offensive debuff.
