MECHANICS VS PERFORMANCE - where PS2 went wrong

One of the most important lessons the MMO industry learned from World of Warcraft was that players are more interested in the mechanics of an MMO, than the way one looks. The World of Warcraft engine was polished, it performed well on virtually any machine and was accessible to casual and hardcore gamers alike. It focused on performance and playability rather than effects, creating a new mentality throughout the industry- a belief that, above all else, MMOs needed to be accessible to the average player.

You can probably guess where I'm going with this: Planetside 2 is easily the most graphically demanding, unaccessible game I've ever come across. I understand that Sony is trying to push the envelope with this game, but when extremely demanding visuals come with very a limited capacity for adjustment, you've got a big mess on your hands.

Shortly after launch the Planetside 2 forums were spammed with thousands of complaints about low FPS problems. Sony responded with promises of vast optimizations and performance tweaks. Months passed, minor changes were made, and in many cases the FPS actually got worse. And then Sony went so far as to create an official release date for a performance patch (January 30, 2013) that we were lead to believe would fix it all. The patch was delayed (go figure) but when it was finally released last week, there were ZERO performance improvements made. I'm still stuck at 25FPS in firefights and that's unacceptable.

Personally that last patch felt like a huge smack in the face, and I know a lot of other people are feeling the same way right now. Players who don't own high end gaming rigs are being mislead and neglected by PS2 staff and it's not right. I've been playing SOE games for over a decade and I can't believe that a company that's made some of my favorite titles, opts to throw a large demographic of its players under the bus.

press edit, make your text white, people will be more receptive to your points.

all i see is a blank black section

Try reading this.

The ultimate irony, considering the post is about short-sightedness in product performance, and inaccessibility. Troll?

you get a 1+ and a cookie

To be honest, World of Warcraft was not that optimized as you make it out to be. Quite the opposite in fact. But true, PS 2 has problems with optimization. For me Far Cry 3 runs a lot faster on high settings vs PS 2 on low. Although FC3 does not have a hundred people on screen at a time.

I never had any problems with performance before this patch. And my computer is two years old.

Forgot to mention that they designed a game where even computers that meet the minimum spec requirements can't handle large battles with many players on screen, so they had to add a cop-out "dynamic" rendering system. SIZE.ALWAYS.MATTERS.

Exactly my thoughts. Why would anyone release a F2P game that isn't playable by the majority of their consumers? If it was a retail game it would be ok as people who buy games generally have better PCs than people who stick with F2P games.

Don't get me wrong, but all the succesful MMOs are games that focus on mechanics and gameplay instead of graphics. Look at Counter Strike, it has the worst graphics ever but it's one of the most played MMOs all around the world. 1 of the reasons is because it's playable by any PC.

Lmao are you comparing planetside 2 to wow? Besides being an MMO they have nothing in common.

I'm not comparing WoW to PS2. I'm simply suggesting that Blizzard was on to something when they placed focus on playability and a highly optimized engine rather than visuals.

wow did NOT run well on every machine when it first came out. sorry but it just didn't. the fact that 5 year old hardware crushes a 10 year old engine when you run with low settings really isn't much to write home about.

WoW at full settings does take a decent amount of hardware to run at 60fps @ 1920x1080. not absurd but upper mid range for sure.

in 10 years this engine will get crushed by that hardware too.

Totally different games, in todays world people expect FPS to look good, if this was not the case I'd probably be still playing Battleground Europe.

I have to agree with this, and it's not isolated. Low graphic games, like flash browser games, and even non-graphical MUDs are still extremely, extremely popular. Yes, the graphics do have somewhat of a standard to meet, but that falls back as a distant second to playability.

That being said, I'm not 100% sure what SOE's official position is on graphics quality. In a lot of ways, the game looks pretty sharp, but then there are obvious corners cut in awkward, confusing ways. As a person who works on the graphics side of game design (models, textures, etc) I notice things that perhaps aren't noticed by a lot of people. Take the lightning, for instance. There is a poorly aligned hard seam on the barrel of the stock skin that runs the entire length of the barrel on the side facing the player camera. 3rd rate UV mapping like this is the hallmark of a low budget operation. Not that I necessarily have a problem with a cut corner here and there, but if the graphics are going to be scaled back, then performance should reflect that.

Run PS2 on the lowest settings, you'll see that it looks worse than many old old games, but still runs like complete crap, even pre patch. The problems with the game go much deeper than what you can see on the surface. Engine effects like per pixel lighting and transparency have a massive hit on performance, even if they aren't used properly. Very noticeable on indar where all the trees are vs. the desert, the transparency on the tree leaves kills fps. I haven't payed much attention but there may also be isses with proper LOD levels for models.

Planetside is more of an FPS than an MMO. In other words, the target audience are FPS players, rather than WoW players. You shuld try compare it to BF3, rather than just another MMO.

In FPS world you have to impress with top-notch graphics or else it's just "another FPS".

Exactly. I remember a friend trying to get me to join WoW about a year after its release. My computer was running it at a beautiful 10-15 fps. I was blown away by how 'accessible' it was!

Sure like any MMO, WoW had some issues upon launch (stuttering and lag if I remember right) I never personally experienced issues with the game- but that wasn't the point I was trying to make. Forget WoW, the MMO industry in general has made it a point to produce games that can run on a wide range of systems. All I'm saying is that it shouldn't take a NASA computer to play this game the way its meant to be played

you fail to understand the difference betwee RPGs and how they run and a FPS game and how it runs.

things are absolutely required in the FPS world that aren't required in a game where you target someone by hitting a button and where misses are determined by dice rolls vs statistics.

there have been two MMOFPS games before PS2. world war two online and planetside 1. that should tell you something ... mmofps is actually really f'n difficult. honestly ww2ol and ps1 were way ahead of their time. the internet really wasn't capable enough back then and even now is just barely good enough.

it is really easy to criticize SOE for the bugs and all the things that 'suck' but you really should spend some time trying to understand what they have accomplished and how they've accomplished it. i still wish they would do a distributed cell approach and tie the whole world together (at least the US servers) over private dark fiber with a central control server managing it all. the maps would need to be significantly larger but the world would then be an ever larger battle ... anyway ... point is the hardware needs to catch up a bit. this game may not look like crysis 3 or whatever but that doesn't mean there isn't a lot of crap going on that is equally taxing.