So, just logged into Planetside 1

Decided to download and login after all these years and was amazed my characters were still there. It also made me realize how PS1 is an infinitely better game, with much more depth, than PS2.

Flying over the continents in my Phantasm and running through some of the bases made me wonder why they didn't decide to just "re-build" PS1 on the current engine.

The base layouts on PS1 always provided great, protracted battles; as opposed to what we have in PS2. There was so much more depth and strategy involved in character loadouts and abilities. Anyone who played PS1 should know what I'm talking about.

The sad thing is there is zero population in PS1 now. Guess I'm just getting nostalgic and wishing we could see more stuff from PS1 brought over to PS2.

Any other PS1 vets have some fond memories to share?

Haven't played Planetside 1 bought it a long time ago but could not afford the monthly subscription lol. Anyways some reasons to why certain aspects of Planetside 1 was left behind could be seen as a way for performance and making it easier to attract a audience already playing other FPS, that way the lay out of what class does what makes it easier for them to jump in and enjoy.

Other objects from the game such as base layouts can still happen it's not unheard of for them to re-work the design of a base. Another issue to some things can be referred back to the whole "OMFG" (Operation: Make Faster Game) in which they would remove certain assets in order to increase performance. That would also include the doors a lot of people are fond of in Planetside 1. Because of that as well you can kind of guess at how adding in certain items all over the world may possibly revert the work they did.

On the other hand new toys are always welcomed to play with. Wish I jumped aboard the Planetside 1 game to experience it all but looking at Planetside 1 to Planetside 2 I doubt I would enjoy it as much. Hopefully any of what I said sheds some light on something if not just take it as a time waster and get back in the war.

Yup. I remember working up my implants, getting those specializations polished out.... I loved Jackhammer, Phoenix and TR maxes in PS1, battles were quite epic too with much more to them than just zerging. In fact, i don't remember all that many zergs at all. They got something right in PS1.

A lot of the problem is that they did "dumb it down" to make it more accessible. They tried jumping on the Call of Duty bandwagon by emulating the hundreds of other FPS's out there. I'm not saying it is a bad game; I enjoy it quite a bit. The shooting mechanics are definitely way better than PS1.

I don't know how more doors and other things may impact performance on this engine. That is a fair question. I'm just saying they already fully developed assets and ideas in PS1 that could probably be added into this game. I'm looking at you Phantasm and spitfire turrets.

You can still download and play PS1 for free. Doesn't seem to be anyone on, but it would let you play around with some of the mechanics and be able to compare them. Here's the link I found it at: https://www.planetside.com/register

I don't know about CoD, the game feels more like BF3 than anything.

And BF3 is like Bad Company 2 which is BattleCoD. Why those two games get so much praise is beyond me. I have been enjoying BF4 a lot since they decided to go less corridors and more open maps though, the maps from the last DLC they put out are really big and well designed.

The shooting mechanics are a clear upgrade from PS1. Also it is a really good thing that they did not implement 3rd person view for infantry, as people were using it to peek around corners.

In PS1 some fights could become too long, like it could take hours to drain a base of its energy, but I think this was only really an issue with interlink facilities - arguably a base needing a little redesign.

I think it was awesome in PS1 that when it came to a base fight you basically had to leave your vehicle behind if you wanted to participate. No cheese farming of a spawn room, everything was underground. MAXes were also easier to take out, just unload a tripple shot from your decimator and puff they were gone.

$$$'s unfortunately (building a PS1 was likely just to expensive for them at that time) they did consider it though, I believe, and I do think they geuninely thought they could somehow condense PS1 into a new PS2 experience without spending the $$$'s and even make it better than PS1...... they were wrong, of course.

The change for characters though was about F2P almost certainly, PS1's system is vastly superior, but just doesn't fit well at all with a F2P/microtransaction model, and they had to monetize characters to make it work with a non-subscription model.

There's very little from PS1 that wouldn't make PS2 a better game, even Core Combat if this time they left the 70's discoball meets 80's healing crystal and has a hideous love-child vibe out of it and just made it Stalingrad-esq city-fight like they were supposed to (and everyone wanted) with the orginal.

I remember getting CR5 for the first time. Pretty much the best feeling ever.
JeffBeefJaw being able to run routers into Red Alert sieged bases, and having 90+ storming the basements.
Killing AzK for the first time.
The update that added more deployables.
Fun HARTs dropping the entire empire in one location.
Stealth draining the NTU of a base on a locked continent.
25 liberators carpet bombing something.
The hacker update, uploading viruses to bases and remote-disabling enemy vehicles for the first time.
The first time you locked down the enemy's home continents and gained access to their vehicles.
2 full months of Cyssorside.
Being able to shoot from stealth when the Phantasm was first released (think ESFs with permanent stealth)

I played PS1 a few months ago and there were Red Alert fights happening.
Most days when i played a while back, the player numbers grew over a few hours until a hacker logged on and emptied the server for the day.

Not counting the low population, hackers are the only real problem PS1 has.
These days, upon joining a squad, the first question everyone asks is: 'How's hacker pop today?' followed by: 'Where are you guys at?'.

Thank you everyone. Really nice to see others feel the same way. I know we won't ever get everything we loved from PS1 back again, but hopefully a dev will see this and take note. Planetside is something special and it deserves more than being relegated to just another F2P shooter.

On the F2P thing, I would gladly go back to a monthly sub if it meant getting more of these things added! FieldMarshall, you are making me remember some of those multi-hour battles that I loved so much!

You know what I miss? Loading my trunk full of ACE's and AMMO then driving to the bridge and completely prepping to stop the zerg. twenty mines, bunch of spit fires, flack spit fires....tank traps....:-(

And the VS navy! Rolling those mags down the river and scaring the hell out of the NC parked on the shore shooting across the river!

And that deep siege holding a base from the enemy who has taken the court yard...the base about to go neutral because the NTU level is near zero....but an organized squad flew a galaxy in with an ANT...dropped an infantry to clear the mines around the NTU tower with EMPs and then hot dropped the ANT in to get some NTU's in before they destroyed it and drove the base neutral. The accomplishment of it was always so entertaining.

I miss that feeling when you finally managed as infiltrator to sneak the router pad into the gen room of an interlink after a 2 hour battle to try and get in. I miss interrupting the lattice, viruses, base drains, even the caves.

You guys are bringing back some good memories. Nothing like the tug of war going on at the front door, while worrying about the inevitable MAX rush coming through the back.

Infinitely better?
Huh. Well, that's an opinion, of course. This game is ten times better, with infinitely more possibilities. Give it more time and a lot more advertising, and PS2 will be able to overcome PS1, not only as it has in the fun department, but in the depth department as well.











Noticed the irony?

Hate to tell you this.. but you're dead wrong with this statement. Here's why.

How many servers are open in PS1? One right? There is a reason for that. It is an utter ghost town. PS1 lost almost all of its playerbase, including you. Why did you stop playing PS1? Why are you playing PS2 over PS1 even now, even after authoring this thread?

Planetside 1 did not age well because it simply wasn't a good enough game in its own right to do so. Age does NOT diminish a great game. Super Mario Bros is a good example of that. So is Everquest 1 (also made by SoE/Daybreak), as evidenced by the fact that it has more players on ONE server than all of the PC servers of PS1 and PS2 combined. Not to mention it has released its 21st expansion.

What you are experiencing is nostalgia through rose colored glasses. Take an outfit sized element and migrate to PS1. I give you a week before you come back here.

This isn't to say it wasn't a good game. But it is not the great game everyone remembers. But everyone who thinks differently feel free to prove me wrong. Migrate on over to the better fleshed out game. If I'm proven wrong and some how there is an exodus, even if it is a small one, I will honestly be pleasantly surprised, I might even go on over and play with you all (as I do enjoy the charm of older games). But I doubt, I'll be met with personal attacks, excuses and other inane commentary that is the norm of Forumside.

Actually, at first, they were going to re-haul the graphics for PS1 but keep the core game. I'm not exactly sure what it was that made them move to an entire new game. It could have been the game code was too hard to interpret for the changes they wanted to do. Perhaps they couldn't justify changing the business model to free-to-play the way they wanted because that would upset the existing player base/not fit in with years of character progression and how the game worked. Maybe they wanted the game to play differently and decided a new game was better then re-hauling. Maybe it's a combo of all of the above and more....

PS1 was technologically advanced for it's time. People were still using dial-up then. Also, as someone else mentioned already, the gun play wasn't all that great. It's one of the only games, along with PS2, that supports the amount of players it does, as well. Planetside was and still is one of a kind. And I think a lot of the core mechanics PS1 had were solid. I hope they can get more of those mechanics in to PS2 one day.

We'll have to agree to disagree. The reason I quit playing was because it had become a ghost town and was no longer being supported.

I did mention I am being nostalgic, to an extent. PS2 does have some better elements, but not nearly enough to say it is the better of the two.

The reason it has all the players is quite simply because it is the newer game. PS1 is definitely the more fleshed out game. To be fair, it also had several more years of development than PS2 has gotten.

Hopefully, with more time, PS2 is more fully realized.

The gunplay is probably the thing that kills it the most, I'll concede that much at least. But to be honest, I think I like the class system in PS2 better. It takes what Tribes 2 did and focused more on classes, and like I said in another thread, I wouldn't even mind seeing that go a bit further. But that's my opinion.

I'm just glad you didn't take what I said personally. Forumside is what it is and all.

I don't think PS2 being newer is a good reason though. Everquest 2 is decent (decent enough to have a larger player base than PS2), but still actually lags behind the original.

Everquest earlier this summer released a new progression server. It had advanced features such load balanced zones and increased server capacity. It filled up and stayed filled up 24/7 for nearly 3 weeks, only alleviated by opening a sister server. Its sister server also reached capacity. They had to design a queue system that the game never had in its 16 years of existence. Now why am I bringing this up?

Because each of those two servers held 5,000 players. That means 10,000 people were playing plus the numbers on the normal servers. Can you imagine a server on PS2 having 5000 players? That's world record event numbers on ALL four continents.

Now I do have to be fair and remind everyone that EQ also has quite a bit of boxing. Boxing is playing more than one account. But judging by what I saw, boxing was only a fraction of the player base. But I also do have to point out that every character logged in was $14.99 a month as you had to be all access to play on said server, so even if someone was running 6 toons, they were paying for each account by monthly fee or Krono (someone having paid $17.99).

Why can't PS1 do that? Well forget about that, why can't PS2 do that? If either game could do it, it would be beneficial to the other. I agree with you that I'd love to see PS2 fully realized, and I do have to say that PS1 had expansions, where PS2 did not. Perhaps that is the key to PS2's success? I've seen games double their numbers with a successful expansion launch.

Course.. I've also seen them fold. So its not without risk.

I preferred the free form inventory system in PS1 but I didn't like the interface for it too much. But the ability to pick and choose what you wanted only restricted by armor type was my cup of tea.