After 700+ hours, I can conclude that Planetside is by far the most broken game I've ever played. Performance is FUBAR. We all know this, the devs just noticed it after a year. FPS is poor. Medkits fail to activate, mines fail to drop. It's a mess. We're all waiting for the patch and I'm betting that a lot of people will be quitting if it doesn't provide significant FPS gains. Level design is among the worst I've ever experienced in a FPS. The bases are seemingly randomly designed and it feels like half the game consists of spawn camping or being spawn camped. Towers on Indar, such as Crimson Bluff, you can easily surround with armor and basically shell the poor sods who are dumb enough to try and defend it. _You can fire directly on the main exit and the corridor just beneath the spawn_ Why??? Did they not test this? Bio labs are a tug of war, mostly ending when the defenders get sick of camping the platforms or spawn rooms. Balance is laughable. While infantry weapons are somewhat ok, MAX balance is a joke. Weapon models are reused like this thing is still in alpha. Crossing rough terrain is an excersise in frustration, aking to playing Skyrim. Is this hill supposed to be traversable or not? Most of the time it's impossible to tell, since the mechanics for climbing is laughably clunky. Way too many crutch weapons for farming - HE shells, Fury, Marauder etc. The most reasonable AI weapon, the Kobalt, is rarely used because that one actually requires you to hit the target and not the general area around it. Combined with exceptionally poor level design, the infantry farming weapons cement Planetside as the definitive spawn camping simulator on the market. The meta game is.... not existant. With that out of the way, let's reflect for a while on what actually works in Planetside. Why do we spend ungodly amounts of time on this game? TTK is slightly longer than Battlefield. This is by far the main one for me. You have more time to react when getting shot, and killing at range requires a bit more persistance, which is a major plus point for me. Epic stuff occasionally happens. Giant armor columns, explosions, air squads flying above. Such a shame that you're often witnessing these things at 20 fps. Certs and levelling your character are incentives to keep playing. That's it for me. I'm hoping you guys have more to add. Especially regarding the good parts.
The scale of it. The fact that I'm running beside my friends in a squad lead by another friend who's commanding 2 other squads of troops, a squad of tanks, and a 5th squad as an air team all together. Even when I log on alone its easy to find a group of about 8-12 to shoot terrans and laugh with. Even battlefield cannot compare with this game's level of combined arms and massive scale. That, and that alone is why I still play this game.
Hit the nail on the head. While the core gameplay is hardly original, the sheer scope of the game gives it a life of its own that's unlike any other. And it has the potential to be so much more in the near future. However, I agree that the base design (on indar) is abysmal, and defense just isn't a thing at this point. The main issue with the game at the moment is that you'll be spending most of your time behind a spawn room door if you decide to play on a defensive front. Making the spawn rooms bigger around GU3 didn't do much to solve the matter either. Neither did the tunnels at major facilities. No change to the spawn room makes a difference if the exit is a narrow choke point that the attackers can camp to death (currently just about every base on indar, and a lot of bases on the other continents). While giving the spawn rooms more angles to shoot out of was fairly helpful, it only solved a small part of a much larger problem. I'm very impressed by Hossin's base design so far though. It gives the attackers more choke points to work against than the defenders, in most cases. I just pray that they tweak the other continents this way eventually.
Yeah, the scale. The size of the map and the number of players that can take part in battles. Everything else about the game is utter garbage, it looks like crap, runs like crap, and plays like crap (e.g. awkward and clunky movement, sights and scopes not actually showing you where your gun is pointing when you're strafing, and a host of other issues). And yet I find myself unable of going back to traditional FPS with their tiny maps and ten minute 16v16 matches.
The best thing about this game is getting to visit this lovely forum where rational and intelligent discussion goes on daily.
To me, the best aspect is the ability for just a few to make a difference in a large battle. Crashing a plane, guns blazing, through a hail of AA fire and into the enemy's AMS sunderer and jumping out at the last second to mine it or C4 it, and that brief disruption in enemy respawns letting our team push them out. My friends and I are the stars of our own action movie a few times every day. Also pod-dropping. I enjoy it way more than I probably should.
I've played games that were actually broken. This game isn't broken. total war rome 2 is an example of a broken game. Civ 5 was broken for its first 8 months. E.T was a broken game. Gangsters 2, broken. Fallen enchantress was a broken game. I spend very little time being farmed or farming a spawn room. spawn rooms are set up well, and the fact that tanks (god forbid) can kill infantry at a base isn't a problem for me.If your being farmed don't spawn there. Join an outfit and fight real battles. There aren't many balance issues considering the scope of the game and the combined arms element. Balance is 10% a real problem and 90% a bias toward your faction. Your crutch weapons for farming with HE is relating to a time long passed before HE was nerfed. Noone even uses HE. Fury is hardly a serious problem. The meta game is in beta stage, and the devs are very open about it, and suggestions for it, but it does exist in a big way. We get huge XP boosts every week for it. I enjoy the base layouts even though they are a bit repetitive. I think PS2 is one of the best multiplayer FPS to date. Its free, it has a variety of vehicles, it has a huge scope. I don't have much to complain about that the devs aren't actively fixing as we speak.
It's your own fault that your game consists of spawn camping or being spawn camped. If you hate it so much, why don't you go somethere where you presense is actually needed? I know it's really hard to give up on that "huge" small outpost capture exp , but believe me you can get 10 times more exp in an actual fight. And on top of it, you even get to play the actual game.
The feeling when back in the old days when you dropped 2-3 platoons on the crown with galaxies swooping down from ceiling height, into a fight with 2-4 platoons + randoms allready going at it. Battlefield and cod aint got nothing on PS2 ... Pesky 64 players max ..
