OK so I'm usually die harding Planetside 1 but this update was the first decent update they've really done. 1. People are working together more. Everyone has a weapon they can use rather than driving or being in a hotseat. The vehicles are just damn nice and look epic. 2. PS1 has 10 Planets and 6 caves. STEP UP THE GAME WORLD 3. It needs to Planetside 1 METAGAME. No more random event locks. Full defence and attack attitude from empires and occasional unplanned teaming is what makes the game "PLANETSIDE" New devs, get on it!
Option 2 is the highway to PS2 annihilation. It is an immense task, takes a lot of time and money and that just for a continent that suffers the same gameplay flow issues and the same problem that 70% of the continent is rarely seen and used outside of a Zerg rushing down a lane. You are better off building variants of current continents with alternative warpgate placements and starting frontlines if you want new continents. It means you need to put in 10% of the work while providing much more variety in the existing continents. Another idea for variation with a fraction of a fraction of the work of building a single extra continent is adding new capture mechanics which are randomly assigned to each individual base each time a continent unlocks. PS2 can do various CTF versions, some completely unique to PS2. As well as variations of VIP gameplay and assault modes where you need to capture/destroy various small objectives in the base. Those idea's would do more for PS2 already than 50 new continents, for less work than building a single continent. That is not even a hyperbole.
The vehicles are great. Still some issues, like the NSOutfit debacle. I echo Demigans sentiments on this one. Too much work for the exact same damn issues. We need more gameplay variance and to make being on the losing side more fun and viable, rather than having people gravitate to zergs and Biolabs for their fun fix. Alerts have their issues, true, but they provide some direction in-game. The game just doesnt have the pop to support a full offensive attitude across all four continents. Otherwise not entirely clear what you mean, since I never played PS1. Not new devs i think, old devs under new name. We still curse the name of Wrel here.
What OpoIE's talking about is implementing an Intercontinental Lattice. SOE should have implemented one as soon as they had 3 conts made back in 2013 since its presence significantly enriches strategic gameplay. I don't know if we have the pop to support one now tho - although intelligent use of unstable warpgates might be enough to overcome that. Here's a mock-up of what it could look like with the current PS2 conts, courtesy of Vindicore: https://sites.google.com/site/planetsideupgradeproject/terrain/intercontinental-lattice-v4 Basically, the warpgates on each cont no longer become permanent spawns for each empire. The 3 faction Sanctuaries would perform that role. Sancs would be the haven where you pulls vehicles, muster forces in a place unviewable to enemy eyes, etc. Each cont warpgate would simply be a way to link the lattice between conts, and would act as a "warp in" point to that cont for the faction that is connected to it via the lattice. Own all 3 bases connected to a warpgate, and you would "own" that gate and could then warp to the connected gate on the cont that linked to it on the intercont lattice. From your Sanctuary you can also warp to any warpgate connected to it along the lattice. You can always warp to the 2 warpgates directly linked to you sanctuary. In Vindicore's mock up, the intercont lattice solves the battle flow issue most of the time on all but 1 cont (the center one - Amerish), because much of the time only 2 empires would be fighting on any given cont and you have to capture every base on a cont in order to conquer it and get that cont's benefit. It would also intrinsically provide more direction to the gameplay by adding another layer of strategy and conquest to Auraxis. Although as Vindicore points out in his mock-up, Alerts still could be used in some form if fighting stalls. It would also provide the possibility of an "End Game" event/award if you could manage to conquer all 4 conts.
I severely doubt that it would improve strategy much, but you would have to come up with a system that allows you to rotate continents. You dont want the VS guy to burn out because most of his time is spend on either Hossin or Esamir for example. You also have to find a solution for how fights progress. Currently on a single continent the fight is centered relatively close to the starting battle lines of a continent, most of the time to see any other area a Zerg has to go down a lane. Such unbalanced fights to visit a base for a few minutes aren't exactly what you want. And this intercontinental lattice is that on steroids. For the VS guy to see a fight on Northern Amerish, or even to fight on Indar, he needs to basically move with a Zerg there. Reaching a base you've rarely seen only to breeze passed with a Zerg is not exactly the pinnacle of good gameplay. It is also a massive problem with player numbers. Just the basic starting lines mean that each faction has 2 whole continents worth of battleline. This will heavily encourage ghost capping, especially with the outfit resource rewards. We dont want something close to the hellscape that pre-lattice was with rampant ghost capping and Zergs being able to ignore each other as they would just pick bases where they could keep going with little resistance. I also heavily disagree with Vindicores idea that during the Meltdown alerts the center of Indar is a problem. That is the exact attitude that caused the center of Indar to be gutted. The problem was that the Meltdown was just an Alert with all the bad incentives to cap it through Zerging and Ghost Capping, meaning many players preferred the fights where they werent running as much risk to run into redeployside or massive Zergs making all their work obsolete in seconds. That problem has only increased with the Escalation update with more rewards for Zerging and Ghost capping for outfits. The intercontinental lattice seems like a massive pipedream to me, unless you can solve the absolutely gargantuan problems that are attached to it. That means solving the unfun continent-capture systems and rewards so that zerging, finding easy fights and ghost capping arent as rewarded as finding or creating a balanced and hard fought battle. But also creating enough plasticity in the system to rotate the starting positions, battle lines and continent connections.
9 years of pointless battles. They mean nothing once the continent locks. In PS1 you could fight for days and conquer and stop it being reopened for weeks. This is....... PLANETSIDE
I hope when PlanetSide 3 comes along, and I think it will, they incorporate linked continents into the game from the start along with a sanctuary for each empire. PlanetSide 2 was designed to be too fast in some ways, and lost some of the "forever" bit of the "For land. For power. Forever".
