Battle Royale games are slowly encroaching on PS2's niche. PS2 needs to take lessons from them.

Planetside 2 features large armies battling for control of a continent. Now we have battle royale games featuring (and others soon to be featuring) epic scale 50v50 battling for a continent. The latter has explosive popularity and it shows that a large scale FPS can indeed succeed.

PS2 would do well to take notes on what makes many of these games successful:

1). Limited Lives & Revives

• Players are scared to die.
  • "Adrenaline" and constant "Edge of my Seat" factor from trying to always stay alive
  • Taking risks feels more rewarding when there is more consequences for failure.

• Firefights have a natural conclusion, instead of a respawn vs respawn point stalemates
  • Spawncamp battles are avoided--an unnecessary time waster

2). Low TTK, high weapon lethality

• Penalizes zerging strategies
  • One flanker can eliminate a good chunk of your team
  • Dangerous explosives and 1/2/3 hit kill weapons force players to spread out
    • Fights have a "combat width" where more people per square meter doesn't equal more combat effectiveness

• Rewards flanking and ambush playstyles
  • Terrain, vision, and spotting become more important skills
    • A natural consequence is that good leadership becomes more critical

There are countless little things you could focus on (having zombies, or a building system), but they tend to share these traits mentioned above.

Planetside 2 has been struggling with spawn room fights, zerging, and a lack of depth, but never seemed to be bold enough to try do the above. But with battle royales taking the gaming world by storm, I argue its about time we move beyond just tweaking 1 or 2 weapons stats and try and cash in on the potential that deep mechanics changes could bring.

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Since PS2 also handles combined arms, its more complicated, but there are many ways PS2 could go about doing the above, but I'll close this post with one vision of how it could be with the above principles and I would encourage others to offer theirs as well:

3). What if PS2 felt more like a battle royale game:
-----aka limited resources & lives, higher lethality, more tactical gameplay, and so forth

• Players would spawn in waves every 60 seconds on a shared timer.
  • Reviving is only possible once every death
  • After dying, you can spectate your teammates

• Weapons would be extremely lethal
  • Shotguns would 1 hit kill if most pellets connected
  • Semi-auto rifles would kill in 2 hits, 1 hit headshot
  • Most automatic weapons would be 2 (assault rifles) to 4 (smgs) shots to kill
    • recoil would be higher, but with no artificial cone of fire bloom
  • Cloak is a more limited and temporary resource
    • does not recharge by itself, must recharge at a sunderer
    • body shots kill in most situations
    • Snipers need to brace their weapons on terrain or objects in order to have accurate aim

• With extra lethality comes new tools like body leaning and crouch sprinting

• Vehicle terminals can only support a small limited number of vehicles spawned plus a timer after death to pull a new one
  • Though limited in number, vehicles would be very lethal.
    • A single shot would wipe out a few people huddled together
    • Most infantry would have to avoid them
  • Hits to the rear and sides of a vehicle would be extremely deadly: 2 or 3 hits to death
  • Vehicle repair is extremely slow

• Vehicles would be locked into first person
  • limited vision, must rely on teammates to keep them safe on the flanks

• Aircraft would have very limited ammunition
  • though extremely lethal and powerful, they only have a few "bombs/rockets" and a few seconds of cannon fire
  • aircraft have to do quick sorties and constantly "refuel and rearm"
  • Aircraft radars would be limited to Galaxies which act as an AWACs
    • shares enemy aircraft locations with friendlies
    • eliminating them forces enemy pilots to fly "blind" against other aircraft

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As it stands Battle Royale games are slowly making headway into PS2's niche, and they have a different set of assumptions on what makes large scale shooters fun. I think it time PS2 tried to follow them in some form.

Usually the fundamentals of a game are set in stone, but with PS2's current state and other games showing a large-scale fps formula can work, PS2 (or even a future PS3) doesn't have much to lose in being experimental at this stage of its life.

Thoughts?

I would love a shift towards heavier logistics and a quicker ttk. But I disagree with your premise that PS2 should become a lobby shooter. I think its main problem is that it's been trying too hard to accommodate lobby shooter players, and not open world players. I'd argue that they do the exact opposite of what you suggest and instead focus on what makes them unique, and stop trying to beat other games at what other games clearly do better.

OTOH to introduce a respawn-timer, even low, may well encourage more tactical gaming.

This is the antithesis of everything that is the PlanetSide franchise.

1: PS2's niche is large-scale combat, not "die once and watch as your enemy takes your base before you replenish your limited lives".
Additionally, PS2 features a constant unbalanced gameplay: One team will always have more infantry or vehicles to overpower the opponents, and many weapons still aren't properly balanced (like G2A vs A2G). This means you can die to something you could never have protected yourself against. In fact, with things like Stalkers in the game and vehicles capable of OHK's at long range it would be a crapshow to add limited lives.

If anything, PS2 needs to diversify itself from the battle-royale games by allowing for less punishment for deaths, and faster full-scale warfare.

2: Lower TTK's means that spray&pray becomes more powerful. It also means that a single player would have the capabilities to kill more people with a single successful flank, completely upsetting the balance and ruining any chance at proper "limited lives".
Also if you've played something like PUBG, then you would know that the TTK is actually pretty high due to the way gun mechanics and armor works. It's just that you have a single life and they have an incredible headshot multiplier.

PS2 already rewards a flanking playstyle, and would be better off with new capture mechanics than a hamfisted way to promote other playstyles but in effect make the HA even more important because of his overshield. Spawnroomfights, Zerging, lack of depth would heavily increase with such systems, as sudden deaths become more common and you are better off using a group to increase survival chance, increase chance you get the drop on a flanker and wipe him out and increase the chance of available Medics to utterly overpower the opponent. So you would get even more Zerging, rather than less.

3: "Most shotguns would OHK if most pellets connect, semi-auto would require 2 hits". You do realize that semi-auto and auto shotguns are already somewhat like that (or used to be, but with lots of RNG). And that all you've just said is "Pump-actions will remain OHK, semi-auto will get a bit better again"?
Vehicles under this system would dominate, as every cheap kill they make matters more.
Players who die will now have to wait in a deathscreen for a long time with nothing to do. That's going to be a severe problem especially with the timers to capture bases often being mere minutes, and allowing enemies to easily control chokepoints by wiping out the opposition once and then having the entire base to themselves for a minute is going to be hell on the game.
2 to 4 shots to kill would mean spray&pray become the norm. Want to defend a base? Just stand at a distance of the entrance somewhere with 2 or 3 Engies, fire at the doorframe in sequence. Done! Door is now almost impenetrable. If the doors are in one line with eachother you can even defend multiple doors simultaneously. A low TTK is not what PS2 levels are designed for.

Limiting vehicle access will also cause problems, as now only a select few can enjoy the vehicle game while the rest just has to watch as they get minced/see their opponents minced by the vehicles. PS2 is about as limitless battles as you can get in gaming. You show up with 40 people and 6 vehicles to dominate 2 people? You can! If anything, PS2's slogan of "death is no excuse" should be the norm: Less penalties for death, more freedom in vehicle usage. Make all vehicles costless, but give them resource-costing special ammo and abilities, do the same for infantry. That way everyone can play whatever they like whenever they like, but the resources are there to limit the amount of special stuff you can do at anyone time.


As it stands, battle-royale games have only one thing in common with PS2: There's a ton of players at the same time. However what these battle-royale games miss is the large-scale combat scenario's that PS2 offers, or the vehicles, weapon choice, class abilities etc. So battle-royale is just as similar to PS2 as it is similar to WoW.

This is where I completely disagree with you. Current flanking doesn't really matter, it's all about how many troops you can spam at the objective. In that time it took a squad to flank and kill twice their numbers, they could have killed twice as many by just rushing the objective with HAs. Lower ttk means positioning would matter more, and a spawn penalty would make up for the time it would take maneuvering to flank the opponent.

Battle royale games still don't have combined arms or the MMO nature of PS2. What I'm trying to say is that PS2 already has the assets and mmo infrastracture in place. If they blend the mechanics to be more tactical and more limited lives like battle royale shooters, they'd be ahead of the competition which is already outpacing PS2 by miles.

What I'm trying to argue is that if you want zergs to go away, they need to be punishable by a smaller group who can literally gun down multiple people. Zergs are a natural consequence of being unable to be killed quickly by a smaller group when they have advantages in positioning and terrain.

There are even more hardcore fps games that boast respectable numbers that are 1-hit kill plus with random artillery (examples, RO2, RS2, Squad, Insurgency). They are not as unfun as you make them to be (quite the contrary, some have higher numbers than PS2). One of the lessons these games have learned is that a wave spawn system works in large scale combat as it adds heightened moments of glorious charges and tense moments as the survivors duke it out.

I've played many of these, and it works both ways. You may spend some time dead, but you will also have more glorious moments when you killed many people due to lower TTK and turned the tide of battle personally.

If anything, player contribution goes up. A common complaint right now is that people have too little impact on fights.

You two fail to see one thing:
If one player can potentially mow down an entire squad, then there's still a higher likelyhood that that one player gets spotted and killed first. Especially in PS2's environment where getting spotted from long-range by the one's sitting on the control point is easy, and especially in PS2 where a larger group would have an easier time suppressing and murdering the smaller team regardless of the TTK.

All a lower TTK would promote in PS2 is more cheesy gameplay, a higher reliance on survival strategies like overshields, stealth and vehicles.

Add a higher punishment for deaths and you've got even more reasons to pick the cheesiest method you can find to fight, rather than letting players do what PS2 is/should be about: large scale combat without any restraints to your inventiveness in taking on a situation, no matter how many lives it costs.

Are you aware of a game called H1Z1? If not it's a battle royale game made by SOE/DBG. Go play it and leave PlanetSide alone.

PS2 isn't exactly on a rosy future trajectory.

If we want to leave things as is with problems with zergs, lack of depth, and so forth, we will continue on this path.

I don't see your point. Players always gravitate to what is most effective for the meta regardless. Is the constant use of harassars or the prevalence of 1 hit kill knife mains also cheese? It will always exist.

The game is definitely failing, but I still think that it needs to focus on what makes it unique. Other games offer a better lobby experience than PS2 ever could. Copying them would slightly delay its death at best. It needs to be unique to succeed.

The only way that time spent maneuvering would be worth while is if the dropped targets' time out of the fight made up for it. You have this theory that death mattering would lead to less risk and more clustering, but what it would actually do is let that flank pay off, and let those risks be worth it, not just be wasted dps by not rushing the point.

PS2 is on the bad path not because it's not battle royale game. It's because of poor community relations, slow game improvement and complete lack of marketing program. PUBG have made it, it doesn't mean that every single game now should turn into the same BR genre. PS2 has niche that no other online game has, zerging is part of it, lack of depth is fixable. Turning it into BR will be like a sledgehammer to the forehead. People play PS because of the way it is and if it gonna turn into a PUBG wannabe (which already exists in for of H1Z1) I bet that 90% of gaming community will just leave. To the PUBG, because it was made as BR game from the start and better polished in that way, rather than PS2 that was designed for massive combats.

We also do not gain anything by attempting to copycat the flavor of the month. We'll never beat the flavor of the month at being the flavor of the month.

We don't lack depth or features because we, the players, want to lack that depth or those features. Spending even just a few minutes on this forum should make you realize how motivated we can be in regards to detailed and complicated expansions to the gameplay. That doesn't mean we have to give up who we are as a game to achieve it.

The game is more than about death and respawn times. This is similar to the vehicle vs infantry discussion: It's not about death, respawns or even resources, it's what you achieve with it.

So you took a 1 minute detour and killed 2 dudes, granting you a total of 14 to 20 seconds of respawn for your enemy. That might look like a loss, but you are still alive, and you've just taken the ground they were on. This can give you access to a chokepoint, capture point, or could give your allies the edge they need to enter an area and take it, pushing your faction closer to victory. In absolute time spend vs time taken this is a loss (except ofcourse that it takes about 30 seconds for both players to return to that position and thus you get that 1-minute worth of time back). But in accomplished feats, this is a definite win. Even if your faction ultimately doesn't succeed, the attempt was worth the try.

There's a huge difference between "gravitate" and "be forced to play like this or else you'll lose".

Also, 1-hit-kill knife mains? Where? I want to get some cheap kills like during the Halloween event, so some knife-mains are good fodder for that.

Also the reason why people gravitate somewhere is because something happened to be the most effective method to achieve something. If you are heavily punished for attempting to find a counter to something like that, less people will do so and the skill required to find and master the counter will be a lot higher. A low punishment allows the meta to evolve faster, and something that might seem like a no-brainer that everyone gravitates towards will eventually be broken.
Assuming the game is properly balanced, if not, then the balance needs changing.

And the more sever death is, the more rewarding flanking would be. That travel time just isn't worth it in the vast majority of cases. I do think we need to keep some form of instant action for players who just want to throw bodies at the problem, but that doesn't mean that they have to instantly be back at the zerg. Let them instantly re-deploy where their faction is under-pop, or let them wait a while to get back in their current fight where they have a numerical advantage. A local penalty like that would lead to more competitive fights, which is the single greatest thing holding this game back.

That may well be, but the reverse is happening for BR games. Games like Fortnite started small with FFA and 4 man FFA teams, but now its recently offering 50v50 modes over an entire continent and other BR games are planning to do the same. One only needs to visit fortnite's subreddit and numbers for instance to see how big a successful hit that 50v50 game mode was.

Its not quite the scale of PS2 but it offers something approaching PS2's niche somewhat. All I have to say is that these games have a formula that works for base shooting mechanics and are now expanding their breadth. Must PS2 languish over being so conservative?

It's not approaching PS2's niche because it's a lobby game. CoD and Battlefield have successful formulas, and so does Candy Crush, but that doesn't have anything to do with PS2. Trying to do something better than a game built for that sole purpose would be a nail in the coffin for PS2.

Lower TTK increases the effects of lag on the gunplay, which is a massive issue in PS2.
It's already very low, but seems to have hit a decent sweet spot.

The fact that you talk about reducing TTK just tells me that the rest of your post has no merit.

Biggest detractor for lower TTK is client-side hit detection vs network latency. It's why they've nerfed most of the very low /1HK TTK weapons over the years. It's just annoying to fight against when the lag hits 250ms or more between server and players.

50/50 is large scale? I swear I remember 64/64 fights in other FPS's (can't remember which)

Talk to me when another game boasts 200+ players interacting in the same zone/map whatever. Till then Planetside2 is the only massive battle FPS.