These are some thoughts I had which I wanted to share. A sequel aside, I still think they should take a look at upgrading the engine. There are quite a few technical and map related issues like poor frame rate, assets and player's popping into view, render distance, falling through the ground, getting stuck in various places, and so on. While upgrading they could also enhance the visuals, but I don't want them to change the game. It's fun and unique with nice personal progression. It has some superb supporting roles like engineer and medic for those of us who don't aim that well, which reminds me of Star Wars Galaxies and parts of what made that game great. The only area I would like to see improvements in would be the missions/objectives, continent sizes, and off-hours game play. So, adding something that would benefit the war effort and your personal progression, but doesn't necessarily involve direct combat. Fortifications are a good step in the right direction. The game does suffer from poor population numbers as I see it. If I jump into the game during they day there are only a handful of people playing and you really can't get anything done. This would be a perfect time to grind other aspects of you player progression. One of the things I really enjoy about Lord of the Rings Online is that there is always something to strive towards, or some personal goal to work for, like professions. I see some of this in PS2, but the game could offer so much more. Especially during the off-hours. Server population is an issue, so I think a good step would be to only have one continent unlocked at a time, and possibly merge servers. But low populations numbers might be an illusion? I don't have any numbers to verify this. I only know that in the middle of the day there isn't much I can do since there are no battles going. Finally I wanted to touch on the point of continent sizes. If you log into the game at peak time you will see about 4-5 large battle raging, but these take place in maybe 10-15% of the entire map which creates a lot of dead and wasted space. What I'm getting at is that I would much rather they would cut the size of each continent in half, but double the amount of them. This would both give tighter battles with more focus on where the fights should be. And it would also give more variety for the player to experience in terms of new biomes and environments.
The beauty of Planetside 2 is that there is no progression. Other than basic certs, everything else is a collection of side-grades rather than up-grades. This means there's no gear ladder, no fear of missing out. You can stop whenever you want and come back at any time, whether it's months or years later. You'll never be behind, no matter how much time passes. I quit this game three times and yet I'm still here now – no other MMO I've played can boast the same. What this game needs is an advertising campaign. Not just the old email stuff, but some way to attract new people who have never heard of it. It's an MMO Battlefield 2142! How hard is it to draw in people with that premise?
Need or Want? I think there isn't a need, but people do want a better engine, different content, etc... and enjoy the game style type that PS offers.
Nope, we need AND want Planetside 3. Planetside 2's engine is limited and AFAIK coding is hard to fix as well. This game is 11 years old, of course it's going to have population issues But you are forgetting the fact that it survived >>11 YEARS<< That is a feat of itself considering the giants it has to go against.
Honestly, a game surviving 11 years is quite common. The only question is how many people would still be around, playing the game. There are still 12000 people logging in to play Counter Strike 1.6 daily! On the question of whether a third should be made or the second kept updated... I honestly don't care all that much, but it would suck to lose all the progress I've made in this game since beta.
Among reasonably popular PC games, they tend to live on for ages. Even things like Serious Sam: The First Encounter, Dungeon Siege and Tiberian Sun – games that were good, but never really stood out among the competition – will still have at least 20 people playing them.
see, you are handpicking ... your average game with a multiplayer aspect to it just doesn´t get popular in first place .. and there are a number of games that even if they were popular at the beginning may drop off hard once the novelty factor is gone after a week to a month ... you could go on and present like 10 to 20 games that may be played by a handful players over a decade or 2 but these are still only a dozent compared to the other 100 to 1000+ games that even with servicable to "decent" gameplay just didn´t take off ...
You're casting your net too broadly. Not every fart is worth a mention. Not every asset flip deserves to be called a game. How about you actually name a few percent of these 1000+ games, that were serviceable, but didn't take off. Planetside 2 is definitely not among the "serviceable, but didn't take off" crowd, so I don't understand what made you draw the comparison.
I feel like there is. The UR5 Engine can handle a lot more things that the developers could use in our game. UR5E can handle several thousand players too.
let´s take arena shooters as example (unfortunately niche these days) just to name a couple games (don´t have time too list more) quake champions unreal tournament 4 (alpha then dropped because of forthnight ... BARRRFFF) shootmania quantum league Master Arena slipgate seems to do fine here is the thing though you said "you are casting your net too broadly" .. by that account i could say you where casting yours way too tighly, no? .. and that in itself makes your point of "games played for 10+ years being common" very questionable .. .. i mean if you go and filter games by set factors then of course the level of quality within that filtered list may be "more" common .. but generally common? .. how or when do you objectively classify something as a fart or mere assetflip and how or when as a "legit game"?
Arena shooters? Niche? Team Fortress 2 and its modern clone – Overwatch – are doing quite alright. Even Dirty Bomb still has 60 daily average players and that game wasn't even available outside of the US. According to steamcharts.com Quake Champions has 351.7 30-day average players on Steam with 745 peak (17476 all-time). Release date: 2202-08-18. Unreal Tournament 4 is not on Steam and if you say it was dropped in alpha, then it was never even released. ShootMania Storm has 5.6 average players and 27 peak (646 all-time). Release date: 2013-04-10. Quantum League (all-time peak of 547) and Master Arena (all-time peak of 327) really aren't alive. That said, I've never heard of those games. When I said that PC games last a long time, it seems you decided to argue with me on semantics. Of the little list you gave, only Quake Champions has ever really lived. Others never even broke the 1000-player barrier, much less become even remotely popular even as a niche, so it's hard to call them dead. By comparison, on Steam, Planetside 2 had 29449 at an all-time peak, 1500 on average in the last 30 days and 2909 as the peak. That's just on Steam, not counting the stand-alone launcher. ps2.fisu.pw is heavily outdated and probably half-way broken, but it still reports those numbers at 13180 all-time peak (probably broken because it tracks by server, some of which are erased), 1781 30-day average and 3755 peak. If you want to imply that Planetside 2 is achieving something extraordinary with these player numbers, you'll have to find dead games that were at a point comparable to it. Ones that are still playable, but no one chooses to do so.
Well, first, this franchise needs proper, experienced and talented game designer, someone like guys who made BattleBit game or worked on old Battlefield game series. Someone, who know how to make playable FPS with big online numbers. Secondly, we need proper level designer - someone, who know how to make big, openworld maps for huge amount of players on them, with vertical gameplay and staged objectives, etc. And only after this, there will be time for thinking about PlanetSide 3 and other dev team members like modellers, coders, art designers, etc. Of cource, its would be reasonable to use modern engine like Unreal Engine 5.x with its endless possibilities for developers and fast prototyping, giant amount of high quality assets and procedural generation abilities. Everything possible with it - high detailed, realistic views and models, huge maps with sizes that way higher than PlanetSide 2 ones. By the way, network part with cluster server engine could be used from PlanetSide 2, thats will simplify and speedup development. Thats how Wargaming changed game engine in their World of Tanks - they changed only visuals, while leaving network part intact. On other hand, SpatialOS with confirmed 5000 online players on same map now is open source, so... And what I would like to see in the game called PlanetSide 3? PlanetSide 1 mechanics with proper level design and infantry gameplay from PlanetSide 2. Mix of the best parts from first two games, alongside with new additions from modern games and game engines. MMOFPS with more reasons to fight than just farming frags and certs. More "MMO" part than in PlanetSide 2.
Third you need a guy in charge who understands you just can't make a bigger battlefield + more players and call it a day.
Just give us Planetside 1 back minus BFRs with better graphics and gun play and use the Armor / Inventory system instead of the class system. boom Planetside 3
