Alpha - Bases Weren't Always Poorly Laid Out

Skip to 7:15 -- Nights were also dark in Alpha. Hense why flashlights were in the game to begin with. Currently flash lights are useless because they brightened up the nights due to complaints that people could just turn up the brightness/gamma on their monitors to cheat. I'm pretty sad that he was boasting in the video that planetside 1 didn't really have nights ("It was just kind of purpley") and that PS2 would have *real* nights. Then... the developers stripped the real nights away and left us with exactly what he described: purpley nights.

Base layout was so much better. The tops of towers had groin-high cover the whole way around (instead of the sparce shields we have on the tops of towers now), they had the great roofs over walls, etc. I really want THOSE bases back.

Good find by the way.

BUMP

Why did they change it? Did a lot of people hate them?

The best explanation I've heard so far involved dumbing bases down so that the unwashed/ungrouped masses wouldn't have to coordinate to get in. The old design, being defensible, meant that only outfits/platoons using strategy could get in. The mindless zerg would just get farmed trying to get in.

Personally, I think that's EXACTLY how the game should be.

On the contrary -- we yelled and b*tched during most of beta trying to get more walls, more defensibility, more of what we saw in those tantalizing early screenshots.

Get this: the Galaxy was the AMS for most of beta. Big map means you need a flying spawn point that can move fast, was their logic. The AMS will not be coming back; that is from the old game LOL and this is a new game LOL. So you'd fly in and plop down on top of the spawn building or flight pad and camp the defenders. Wash rinse repeat. It was infuriatingly lame.

Higby told us several times in his pleasant way that no, this was the way it was going to be and the AMS wasn't coming back. Until it did. But the game practically died in beta before that decision was made. As in people were leaving in disgusted droves. The nerdrage was palpable and populations were perceptibly dropping. You know. Kind of like now.

I was working on a contract and trapped with cruddy hotel WiFi during the last weeks of beta when they finally, FINALLY added a cert tree to the Sundie, so I missed that transition. But the feedback on the beta forums was rhapsodic. People were gushing wow, we can have real fights now...! Everything's slowed down! You can make it from the spawn building to your cap point half the time! Yipee! So positive change is possible. It's just like yanking teeth in slow-mo, and now that PS2 has gone public we don't have time for that... but that's a whole 'nother rant...

They also added a few more walls to *some* of the bases, and brought back the gate fields. But they have yet to shuck the e-sports dynamic-offense-uber-alles mentality. H*ll, look at what they did in the last major patch. And I don't believe them when they say that the bases they showed us during tech test were just slapped together for publicity shots. That's pure bull. There was a political battle, and somebody lost. Bank on it.

(I also don't buy that there's some kind of performance issue involved. How are multiple internal walls, for instance, harder to render than the zillion-odd small outbuildings and random piles of junk strewn in the courtyards of the bases we have now?)

Any beta vet who wants to correct anything I just said is free to blow me out of the water. But that's how I remember it.

I think it was during a Friday Night Ops that the devs said that it was likely the Galaxy will get its AMS feature back. It might not have been during FNO, but I know I heard them utter it post-release somewhere.

Oh that's good. They should include heavy gunship weapons, too, so if there's a friendly AMS nearby you can just blow it up and land.

They should put an auto-hover function into the Liberator, too, so the pilot can park his craft over a juicy target and farm it to his heart's content. After all, you can already kinda-sorta do this in short increments. If it's possible and it facilitates 'dynamic gameplay', then it should be made easier. That was the logic behind letting everybody play all three empires on the same server, after all.

Yeah, I mad. And it's dang near what I half expect at this point.

Defensible bases would also slow the front lines a bit, and make the game more like an ongoing war. Currently it takes about an hour for a zerg outfit to take an empty continent, with defensible bases the frontlines would move a bit slower and we've have many more tactics and organization going on.

I have dropped about a 100 on this game in only a month, so I join your anger...

The way I feel about these Devs is the way I felt about the old ones when the launched BFR's onto the community... But alteast they gave us a couple years of awesome gameplay...

Exactly, which begs to question what are these "Devs" thinking?... Or are maybe that's just it, they aren't!

Another huge problem is that enemy infantry are allowed to drop directly onto a base they don't own. In PS1 each base had a sphere of influence that extended about three hundred meters what changes was off limits to enemy drop pods. That also needs to be brought back.

It's weird how the " quick " to take continents make the game feel less like an ongoing persistent World and more like a Death Match arena.
I'm one of those who believe continent's should take days, weeks , even months to capture and to be a sense of achievement .. Atm They swap hands so fast who own's them has become a non-factor ... and that's all down to the bases being designed for the Xbox Generation

This is pretty much the main issue I have with the game. You can have an awesome multi-hour battle to conquer a base. It was awesome! But not because you finally started earning more resources or hold more land for the glory of your faction. It was awesome because of the battle itself, the terrain you fought in just happened to be a base (some of my most memorable battles so far have in fact been outside bases, when two attacking groups meet by accident).

The territory holds zero value, and you will probably lose that hard-fought for area within the next 30 minutes to the 5 attackers who play whack-a-mole with the 3 remaining defenders. And you won't even feel sad about it because you're elsewhere fighting lots of enemies.

When I log in, I check the map to see which continent has the best population balance. I'd like to be checking the map for if the control of territory has changed in my absence instead and trusting that population balance is good everywhere.

WOW Thanks for this thread. After seeing the pictures, remembering TotalBiscuit's alpha footage (and watching them again), I am very frustrated. I really don't want to play Planetside 2 anymore. I've been slowly starting to dislike PS2 for the past few weeks, and this just locked it in.

The graphics in Alpha are insanely good. It's unbelievable how different the current graphics are.
The nights in Alpha were actually "night." What is this thing that we have right now?
The bases in Alpha were actually good. What else is to say about that?
The sounds for weapons, ships and such that were different in alpha are BETTER than the ones we have now.

TotalBiscuit's video simply looks better than anything I've ever seen in this mess that we have now. I remember anticipating 'this game so highly after watching TotalBiscuit's alpha footage. This game now is absolutely BS. I remember today. I logged on just to check if there are any zergs capturing a base quickly. I just went to the one base that was being captured, captured it and got the EXP, and just logged off right after. This game is extremely boring and I didn't see any reason to continue playing on after, consdering all the problems it has.

What will PS2 become?

Regarding the graphics, using the UserOptions.ini changes that max the game beyond what you can max in the in-game settings, my game looks like his alpha footage. The only difference, visually, is that night time is brighter now than it was in alpha.

I loved how dark night was in alpha. An actual point to flashlights. It also made anything that lit up look really cool (like the Vanu weapons or amp-station lights).

As for the base layout... yeah I'd die to have defensible bases like seen in alpha.

You might die less in game with those bases though, and everyone knows what gamers really want is nonstop action!

@Devs

My response exactly.

The fact that they had these base designs in alpha and took them out for whatever reason has me baffled. I only got in after the bases were rebuffed, so I had no clue. Damn, they need to get those designs out from the bin and rework them.

Bases like this would justify light assaults existence -without- C4 even. lol Just make grenades less spammable and **** like this would be epic.

Exactly. I would at least like to hear a developer response defending their decision to make the bases into swiss cheese designed for vehicles to farm infantry.

At the very least I don't understand the following: Air is already far more powerful than ground/tanks, however there is nothing to slow Air down in terms of forcefields. Tanks have to wait outside of bases until the generator is blown to allow them to pass through the entrances, but there is NOTHING stopping liberator spam in terms of base-defense.