I appreciate SOE for doing long holiday events like the current Halloween one. My main critique is pointed at the mechanics and the theme. Why can't these month long events have more impacting game mechanics and be themed more in-line with the Planetside 2 lore (or even close)? As for the Halloween event, I have actually not seen a pumpkin yet and quite frankly don't want to. Don't remember seeing any snowmen either. Instead of whining though I thought I'd get creative and think of something new. So, here's my concept for a new month long event (posted on both Reddit and PS2 Forums). Alien Invasion An alert triggers as a continent gets under attack by massive amounts of drop podding alien eggs and large alien hives. Their source, multiple massive and durable motherships in high orbit (flight sealing). There are speculations that the motherships have been sent by a more sophisticated alien race than the ones being drop podded. The aliens may have defenses against attacks (alien AA, AT and AI possible?), so alien hunters must be cautious. At the very least watch out that you don't get crushed by those drop pods! Each hex can take only so much alien eggs and hives before turning permanently into an alien infested wasteland. Aliens start to capture bases when they have more population than the alien hunters on the hex and complete the capture when the timer runs out. Alien hunters must either out populate or out kill the aliens. Each faction must protect their land and possibly go help the other factions that are being overwhelmed. An alien captured base cannot be recaptured. The continent can be captured by the aliens if they get more than 50% of the landmass, ending the alert as the continent is locked from all factions. Faction rivalry prevails since greedy soldiers collect precious alien DNA by destroying the eggs. The larger hives are much more vulnerable to vehicles and give out more DNA. The motherships are most lucrative, but can be reached only by aircrafts (shooting them with your pistol is not super effective). The DNA can be traded for special alien hunter gear like the triangular laser sight. Destroying the aliens also gives points to the faction, where eggs give least, hives more and motherships the most. Faction with most eggs, hives and motherships destroyed at the end wins the alert, unless the aliens infest the continent. The size and extent of the alien invasion varies both during the alert and between different alerts. During an alert the aliens may decide to focus on a key hex so the factions must respond accordingly. One alert may focus on a few hexes with massive drops (off peak). Another might be continent wide with more scattered drops. At peak hours aliens may periodically dump everything they got. As a personal preference, I'd like to make some of the alerts very challenging and requiring factions to come together in order to defeat the aliens: "1000 aliens detected at the Crown, get there now!" Let them come. I will have my flamethrower ready. TL ; DR Pumpkins taste bad, so instead aliens are invading a continent. Time to grab your favorite armament be it a rifle, tank or ESF and hunt for some xenomorph DNA. If you don't they take your continent. We need flamethrowers, lot's of flamethrowers...
Alien abduction alert: Aliens are abducting farmers of Auraxis. Players are advised to stay out of Banshee Mossies, PPA Magriders, MAX suits and any other farming equipment.
WELLLLLLLLLL i can't see WHY we don't run into aliens and such, but they are very much against NPCs and AIs in the game for some reason or another. I could see them doing the same events from the first though where players were randomly selected every so often to join the "green" team and they had access to all faction weapons and vehicles, so this small green team would simply run around and cause mayhem between all factions as some 4th faction guerrilla fighters who liked no one. I'd rather them do the old events though where meteor showers, earthquakes, sand storms, etc. It would be pretty neat to be fighting on indar only to have meteors come raining down causing havoc to the people not in the safety of building cover. Regardless though, it would be neat to have events happen beyond the "kill <blank> target dummies" for holidays. Next were gonna have to hunt down santa claus or something, or turkeys will be taking over auraxis.
personally I don't mind something like that during alerts (if you don't like it just go to another continent) although SOE should polish the game and fix bugs in the current content instead of adding more +1 for the idea of the event destroyables falling down in DROP PODS, because that would make the search for stuff so much easier
That was one of the things developers promised, but I highly doubt we will ever see it, same with oceans, too ambitious.
Why not replacing the alien invaders AI horde by a 4th alien faction? no need to code for A* algorithm, and it would be amazing to play as an infected/alien auraxian
There are 3 reasons why this won't happen: 1) AI is hard 2) AI requires a lot of backend stuff you don't see - like processing the maps and meshes into a format that the AI can understand how to traverse and not get stuck running into a slope 3) Good AI is obscenely hard, PS2 is daunting even for people, creating competent bots would be a nightmare. In order to make this work, you'd have all enemies hover and fly to simplify pathfinding, they'd be either bullet-spongy or aimbot-like accurate (because those are the easy ways to increase difficulty) Look at Destiny and how many compromises it had to do. I like the idea, but unless you've got a spare 3 million USD, it ain't happening.
I think I get what you're trying to do, but thats not what this game is about. There are no alien invasions in railroad tycoon either. It does not fit into the premise of the game. If you want to go up against massive enemies in a MMOFPS let me tell you about a possible game for you: Firefall I haven't looked at it for about half a year since I enjoy PS2 so very much, but this game might have what you are looking for.
Some misinterpretations have been made. Obviously anything [alien] related can be replaced with what ever theme they want to go with. Snowmen and pumpkins just don't fit as well as aliens. What I'm suggesting is a almost 1:1 match with the current pumpkin alert. Just replace the pumpkins with aliens and add drop pods. All of the presented alien assets are stationary except for the drop pods falling down. The idea of making three different aliens (pumpkins) is to bring all the aspects of the game infantry, vehicles and aircraft into the alert. The idea of having the aliens capture territory is just a way of making the whole alert matter and have purpose. Maybe even create new interactions between players and factions. I do realize that the amount of PvE assets suggested require server performance, but this should not be impossible to implement, seeing that the pumpkins work. As for the statement that good AI is hard to do in this game, how come SOE is planning to make automatic engineer turrets then? There would be a lot of those up at any given time and they would have to balance them. Reskin the automatic engineer turret and there you have it, your stationary alien egg that shoots parasites. Modify damage to vehicles and increase size of egg: Hive. Rinse and repeat for mother ship. It's not rocker science... And finally, I don't want to turn this game into PvE. I'm just trying to give ideas for more meaningful season long alerts, that have better suiting PvE elements. I don't want aliens infesting Auraxis all year round. Besides, PvE already happened with the pumpkins. ps. 4th faction / assign willing players as aliens is an interesting concept that resolves the PvE "problem" people seem to have
They should honestly just do something that doesn't change the game play for the sake of an event. Having a stupid Easter egg hunt for pumpkins or w/e re skinned holiday thing it is isn't what i want to do when i log onto planetside. Just make it X% bonus exp and every time you get a kill or certain amount of points while playing you get a pumpkin seed or w/e.
no because AI=total overload. its a pipe dream. would be cool if there was a 4th faction that could drop in for alerts that players could play. but again thats a big feature and SOE cant just be dropping those in without risking their servers blowing up for a long long time.
Has anyone played Firefall? Here they have a lot of players and a lot of AI. An AI in such a large game is hard to code, balance, and will only give much, much more issues than it is worth. AI not moving, lagging, shots going wrong, whole battles broken. In PS2 it will be extra harsh, due to the massive coding that is needed for the PC players alone. The way all the servers work is a truly amazing feat, even though it is working after a fasion. AI in this game will kill it, either by a disillusioned fan-base, but most probably due to all the errors and0 unplayability it creates. There is a basic in the idea I like though, but I would do it differently. I would create a meta alert that is tied to the normal game. For example, capturing three amp stations on a continent will unlock the ability to do something near the other faction's warpgate. Destroying this will destroy the shield and let people capture the warpgate. After destruction, the warpgate reverts to its normal state and gamplay continues normally. This way a faction "Wins" over the other factions, giving them a monthly bonus or something. This gameplay is unlocked once a month for a Friday evening and the whole weekend. No winners means no change, population must be at least a certain number before the warpgates can be attacked. Just a basic idea. But no aliens.
Would be quite fun, but then they would need AI for the aliens too. Would be nice to see in the long term though.
No NPCs/AI characters, please. We play this game to compete and fight against REAL people. That is what makes PS2 so great - fighing against waves of enemy controlled by real people on a scale that no other game can match. If I want to play bot DM I can play unreal tournament. Or something.
Who says the aliens have to be A.I.? SOE could just generate a number of alien characters of different abilities and if you want to play one you login in and are randomly assigned a character. Once you log out that character becomes available for another player.
I love the idea but I think it is unrealistic for the reasons listed by other people. However, assigning players to a fourth faction randomly, giving them "alien" cosmetics and weapons and looks, and making them drop in and capture bases for the "Alien" faction would be so cool! I would play as an alien any day. It would add a whole different play style and a very nice storyline as well. "The Return of the Aliens" would fit in with Planetside 2 lore (say a new wormhole appeared and we find out aliens have taken over the Earth and are now coming to Auraxis). Love the suggestion.
