►Why PLANETSIDE 1 is better than Planetside 2!

Whenever anybody brings up planetside 1 base design, I like how they forget about the towers of hell.
"Lets funnel the entire attacking force into a single chokepoint that's being showered with thumper and plasma grenade spam!"

I still have nightmares.

Well, PS2 has Biolabs. And towers.

You're microstuttering on a 10 year old game in that video.

I like Planetside 2 better than Planetside. I don't think either are "better" as they are very similar, while being vastly different.
In Planetside, most of the vehicles are copies of each other, with minor differences. All vehicles are the same, there is no variety. There were no ways to make your vehicles different from another, you could have 200 auroras and they all would be exact copies of each other, not a single difference, making them bland and boring. You might say the bugs in PS2 are bad, but almost half of PS1 is broken (core combat).
And I have played Planetside, don't bring those stupid assumptions. I like Planetside 2 more, it's as simple as that.

Ps2 towers aren't as bad, if you choose to play as light assault you can pretty much skip all the rocket primaries and AV grenade spam.

Biolabs can get pretty bad as well, but again so long as your faction has at least a foothold light assaults can avoid the Max and AI turret spam.

I enjoy Planetside 1 over Planetside 2 except for when it comes to the gunplay. But everything else about PS1 makes so much sense and works out pretty well. Also, the only reason why caves are not in Planetside 2 is because the engine makes creating underground structures practically impossible for the dev team. I think Arclegger tried it last year and then showed the reasoning behind it why it was something that couldn't be done.

If they wanted to do caves, they would have to subtract from some kind of mound or something of that sort, but the engine itself made creating craves pretty damn impossible.

Quoted 3 times because I felt this was rather a standout line.

Do you mean THESE caves?
No those lines aren't tracer rounds or combat. they were how you got around these "caves".
Half of them didn't even have line of sight to the destination.. there was no zipline map and no hopping off or going back once you'd started:

Caverns were universally hated.
They didn't even look like caves, they looked like someones half-arsed highschool geometry assignment.

Actually they were continents originally.
Guess what changed when they made them "planets"?
The map screen.
They were still each a single map with out of bounds areas... just like Planetside 2.

Gunplay was terrible.
People didn't RUN up or down stairs, they slid up and down, occasionally bumping their heads on the roof rubberbanding worse than Kate Bush.
Auto turrets are something they're looking at adding to this game in some form, if it's feasible.

Planetside 1 as it is now, is almost indistinguishable from Planetside 1 on release.
Planetside 2 engine is clearly more flexible and (aside from some unexpected flip-uppery involved in such a complex game) has been improving steadily since launch with some rather dramatic changes to bases, continents, upgrades, vehicles, player customisation, individual weapon customisation (take that Planetside 1) and gameplay.

What Planetside 1 did have in spades is a lot of BRILLIANT ideas, (the whole manual resource collection, command rank tools etc. gave the whole thing more of an RTS feel on top) but lets not kid ourselves that they were all executed brilliantly.

It's easy to look back with rose-tinted goggles (if you're a fellow soldier of the Terran Republic).

Ah, who am I kidding?

Bring back BFRs!

I much prefer PS2's gunplay over PS1, but there are definitely features and mechanics in PS1 that I'm still waiting for in PS2. The biggest thing PS1 had is the fact that it launched in a far more complete state that PS2 is likely to ever achieve.

I love having a good rant, then listening to it over a few times.

And yes a slurr a bit. Im trying haha

Yeah, he complains about Fraps acting up somewhere near 2/3 the way through the video so even he isn't used to that kind of performance.

Do you have any links to the notes from Arclegger about cave difficulties?

Well, initial release Oblivion was rather iffy and stayed at some level of iffy-ness until at least Shivering Isles. Skyrim managed to trump it out of the gate, however.

Really don't remember, but check the planetside universe forums. It was either Malorn or Arclegger. It's been over a year, so it could've been when Arclegger was running with us in Auric Eclipse op nights too.

Entirely beside the point.

If the question is why PS2 doesn't really have caves (it has a few, but not many, it probably comes down to how the terrain works. PS2 uses a very standard method that is also used by most other games around. The terrain consists of a giant mesh with many points. To create the terrain, these points are raised to create hills or mountains or lowered to create gullies or valleys. This base terrain mesh is then embellished with large static meshes in the forms of rocks or the giant crystals. While this system generally works well, most examples I've seen of it have the same problem. You can't pierce the mesh, nor can you move the points side to side. Only up or down. This makes it impossible to create any kind of horizontal tube using the terrain mesh. As a result, what they have to do is lower the terrain or make a big hole in the ground. Then then bury that hole using the static mesh rocks. Or in some cases it's metal plates. Look for them on the ground. Chances are there's a tunnel underneath them. Anyway, the problem is that the more of these meshes they place in an area, the greater the impact on performance. Too much of this going on and the game will be too laggy for some people.

From the very beginning the problem was mine. I was expecting too much.

I can't imagine why. I mean, voxel based games aside, how many games don't use height map terrain?

I have nothing against heightmaps. Forgelight can do Voxels (see Landmark) but I already know PlanetSide has hardly a thing in it that can be called a Voxel. I was actually hoping the problem was more complicated, or engine-ingrained, than boulder mesh stacking.

I have no clue how anyone who played the two games could claim PS1 had better base designs.

1. Towers.
2. Most facilities were extremely similar to one another and extremely dull.
3. 3rd person stairwells is the stupidest FPS gameplay I've ever experienced.
4. Several bases required you to fight through the enemy respawn room to actually get in to hack the CC. These bases were colossal meatgrinders without much tactics.
5. Indoor base tunnels didn't scale well to large zerg fights at all. I wouldn't say they were worse than PS2 biolabs since at least you could suddenly and immediately end the fight with a sneaky generator destruction (which was often instant -- not a timed event)

PS1 had a lot of great stuff, and it's layered depth made for a fantastic game, but PS2's gunplay alone makes it better. The only things I strongly dislike about PS2 is how brutal the progression system is for new players (who should start with a max-rank item in ever slot so they're on equal footing) and how so many of the bases are allowed to be defender-biased (and therefore shallow and no fun to fight at.)

PS1 was not without problems (third person, Rexos, towers), but fixing PS1s problems would've been a thousand times easier than fixing PS2's problems, which at this point basically would require rebuilding the game from the ground up.

Well since the forums are broken and you can't edit stuff, I'll say that these are the biggest flaws between the two games.

- Certs. How they're earned, how they're spent. The limit on how much you could do (before they made it all ******** with BR40) was critical to PS1's function. It meant not everyone could do everything, so you never had a problem of 80 players at a base magically turning into 80 tanks.

- Inventory. The class system in PS2 is fundamentally broken and badly balanced. The inventory system was unique and while somewhat abusable with Rexos (which could be fixed easily), it also alleviated all these stupid imbalanced class issues and ********.

- Base dynamics. You spawned to life in 'spawn armor', which was an inferior loadout, requiring you to hit an equipment terminal to suit up. This meant if your spawn room terminals were destroyed, you were at a huge disadvantage and had to find another one, or get the terminals fixed up. You had spawn tubes and generators you could outright destroy. Doors you had to hack. There were things all over the place you could do. Planetside 2 could've expanded on this immeasurably with its larger bases concept, but instead it went backwards.

- Spawn dynamics. "Redeployside" didn't exist. Also the HART was cool. Galaxies weren't flying spawn points, and the AMS was its own lightly-armored vehicle instead of a huge armored bus.

- NTUs and resources. The PS2 devs say 'they're coming', but I don't believe them.

Pretty much this. Planetside 2 feels like it's already ******. It's been out for two-years and there has never been a week that goes by where I've sat down and played the game thinking 'hey, this is pretty solid'. Just feels like an extended beta and the launch design choices pretty much laid a ****** foundation for the current devs to work with.