I had high hope for this game since I was a PS1 player. PS2 started off on the right track but then got lost on its way to improvement when it started adding thing in like base building. how this game should have gone to keep the player base. -should have ringed stratified defensed around the warp gates. with the center base defenses being easy to overcome and it getting harder as armies get closer to the enemies warp gate. -air and ground should have been on too separate rendering layers. Air should always have had to rely on ground to spot targets and call in airstrikes. we could have ended up with something better than a boring old lighting with an AA cannon on top; something with active radar and target acquisitions. -air should have been more specialized with proper ground weapons with large blast radius but leaving them vulnerable to air superiority weapons. -command vehicles accessible by platoon and squad leaders and gals with off map supports like arty, active radar with datalinks, bombing priority and OS. -better tank defense options for countering locks and missiles (rather than just adding more health) The game didn't have to be made bigger with lego bases, its already huge. it just needs to be made better.
Being close minded to vehicles actually participating in base fights;not just the inbetween, almost no active objectives, base capturing is literally all the same, no real networking between units, infantry being pretty much the only thing you need in the game, no other repairable objectives making engineers feel more or less clunky, turrets don't feel like turrets; more like deathtraps, vehicle v vehicle is also rather stale, very little diversity in the weaponry, the balance between classes revolving around the heavy assault and not around having a balanced comp, bases feel very stale and repetitive due to reused building models, no tech plants are dissimilar, killing a vehicle is about the same as killing 3 infantry which feels incredibly dissatisfying, auraxium directives are more or less a chore that unlocks weapons that aren't even worth the bother, vehicles by design feel clunky and unfun, there's not much of an active element in vehicle combat, each gun does blah and nothing ever feels good, it just feels like a different shade of mediocre, not to mention you are completely reliant on your gunner to deal damage as well so if you get a bad one, you're screwed, no matter how good you are at vehicle combat, you can be ****** on what rando you get paired with, that's not fun, that's like if you needed a medic strapped to your *** in order for your LMG to do it's regular damage, wtf? I'd recommend ps2 take a page from battlefield at least a tad bit. The environment for example, possibly the main aspect of what draws people to the game, is unflinching, unwavering, constant, stale, repetitive, boring, dull, etc. What's so hard about coding a wall that can be destroyed by C4 and repaired by engineers? Or maybe address why literally every class that isn't an infil has C4? When it comes to class diversity, I get shooters try to keep it on the moderate, but god damn does medic feel like a chore. there's the heal my and your *** tool number one and number tool is heal someone elses *** tool, not much deviation on that.
Oh boy, here we go again.... Every base is unique, that would completely destroy the way the world looks. And it DOES get harder the closer you get to a warpgate! What the hell for? It's pretty clear that you aren't a pilot yourself with a suggestion like that. Target spotting in aircraft is already hard enough after the thermal nerf, and air is exactly where people have placed it after whining about it for so long! It was like that up till the moment where the devs listened to all the whiny kiddos complaining about air superiority weapons being too strong such as lock-on missiles, and now they are getting nerfed to oblivion again. No, stay in the fight and learn to aim. Fight like the rest of us, don't hide in vehicles or off the map pretending to be "tactical". If you get killed by rockets and missiles as a tank driver, you aren't a really good tank driving :/ That is true, but considering all the garbage you just mentioned, I doubt you have any idea on how to make the game better.
I can appreciate you think PS2 took a wrong turn at Base Building, but Base Building only happened recently. The game has been out since November, 2012, and has been losing players year after year. You may not like Base Building, but it's a drop in the bucket in terms of what SOE/DBG has spent their PS2 development budget on, and its overall impact came long after the game was already abandoned by most its players. Wasn't the game lost long before Base Building? That said, I agree with you Base Building has turned out to be (so far... and likley to remain so with this DBG design team) a bad thing for the game. I personally think Base Building as a rough concept is a very neat idea, and could work with better designer changes (like so much of the game). But I feel ultimately it was added (and kept in the game for a long time) in a dumb way that was too impactful on the overall game in a very negative way (too hard for average player to fight [get to or combat against], too affecting Continent capture points), and it remains something that doesn't fit well with the rest of the game and that is not something the average player will either use or interact with or have positive interest in.
I would hire Higby and his crew to make another PS in a second. I just would have someone else do all the balancing, to handle the support tools for multiplayer interaction, and to eyeball and approve (or be able to overrule) and change all their features/tasks/etc.
Planetside 2 went wrong the moment they decided to abandon everything PS1 had set up and everything it was. They even totally ignored some of the already existing solutions to issues that PS2 had that PS1 already fixed. They made a mistake in trying to make Planetside like Battlefield or an arena shooter, and trying to shoehorn a "pro" scene into PS2 with MLG. And IMHO, they made a mistake making the game Free to Play. If PS2 had been firmly rooted in PS1s legacy and built and expanded upon it, like a sequel is supposed to do, I would gladly pay $15 a month for it just as I paid $15 a month for PS1 until the day it went F2P. It was a cacophony of terrible decisions that caused a game that should have been great to stumble and fall onto its face right out of the gate.
-I was not suggesting to make all the bases the same, merely a layered defense so it becomes harder to attack the further you go. -I know it is hard to target already specially on the map with lots trees. if troops gave targets to gets by either laser or IR smoke then it would be much easier. this then removes the need to even render troops on the ground or hover. -I never complained about air superiority, as an avid player or WARGAME with all its air superiority glory I enjoy the fact that an AA load out would be useful for bringing down air and be rubbish at ground attack. -you are playing the wrong game if you don't like vehicles. -I don't get killed by missiles, I just think it would be good if they had more intelligent systems. It is a futuristic universe and yet weapons in the US army have better tech then PS2 weapons. Hell, there isn't even radar; they must have some sort of an idea about the Doppler effect and radio waves in the future. -most of these arn't my ideas, I just borrowed them from WARGAME and ARMA 3 and squashed them together. I have always wanted a game that is more than the regular game where it is just a mater of aim, bullet drop and velocity. ARMA 3 comes close but they don't have the huge size of PS2. Which is something the devs never took into account when designing the weapon systems, they are all based on counter strike sized maps.
explain to me why it should be a good idea to lock people out by a double paywall? not free to play so having to pay an initial cost AND a monthly subscription for a niche game? this isn't world of warcraft we are talking here ..
I wouldnt have started playing if it was P2P. For this size of game you need players, the more the better. I think a one time purchase after a testperiod of a month would be fair, still this would stop ppl from playing.
Why all the negativity? 5 yrs I've played the game. Since closed Beta. It's a pretty damn good game. It has it's faults and it's felt like unpolished beta for most of those 5 yrs. If the devs have "gone wrong" it's not spending near enough time ironing out bugs and weirdness. They've gotten a lot better recently but that's definitely been an underlying theme since lauch. Consider this. No other game besides PS1 and a few MMORPG's have ever even attempted what Planetside2 does. Huge battles with hundreds of players has always been the epitome of war game potential imo. 25 years after Doom Deathmatch every multiplayer FPS still does small scale closed map battles with some kind matchmaking systems. There's no MMO about them at all. There's a lot to be said for what Planetside2 does uniquely and therefore better than any other Multiplayer game out there. I used to think MMOFPS and massive war games were the future. It's been a long long time and we've had exactly 2 entries into the genre. Thank you for that SOE/DBG you've done what no one else has done. That's definitely "GONE RIGHT" in my book.
See that shield generator in biolabs and amp stations? Notice it has different collision when you destroy it? How hard is the concept when it's already in the game?
Adding base building to PS2 was practically a wet dream that no one ever thought possible. The fact that they pulled it off is nothing short of a miracle. The fact that they managed to still make it a dead-end that mostly weighs down the game in it's current form is nothing short of a miracle too. But they are trying to improve it and that's good. This wouldn't necessarily be a good thing. Not only does it mean that it becomes nigh impossible to approach the warpgate, it also means that if you could get into the better defensive bases, it becomes increasingly harder for the owners of that warpgate to retake the territory. Not to mention how it promotes zerging over strategy. No, air and ground shouldn't have been on separate rendering layers. There should have been more tools to have infantry, tanks and aircraft communicate with themselves and each other, such as Q-radial menu's to quickly request an airstrike/tank attack/infantry push. But separating them and forcing the air to be completely dependant on the ground? That's a bad idea. Blast radius has nothing to do with it. The fact that the ESF, which is used 5x more than all other aircraft combined, can fight from hover and high speed and switch between them no problem while holding two weapons at your fingertips that really don't sacrifice any firepower compared to any other weapon system that tries to specialize? That's the problem. Combine that with an enormous incentive for players to simply kill the lowest denominator (Infantry, hence the crying about "we can't find targets without the old cheatvision scope" even though anyone with half a brain can just use situational awareness to judge where the infantry will be fighting and bomb them to oblivion), and with that incentive there's really little reason to join the air-game. Add insult to the numerous injuries by making the A2A game a niche endeavor that no average player can get into, ever, and you've got an airgame that's screwed from end to end. No, no no. Teamplay should be omniversally applicable, not just by squad/platoonmembers or even worse, some killwhore who's only incentive to become a Squad/platoonlead is to use those support things for themselves. If you want to have teamplay command vehicles and such, make them globally useful regardless of players being random, squad or platoon. Any teamplay should be possible between anyone, from different platoons/squads to randoms. Squads and platoons only function should be making it easier to use those same teamplay mechanics. Making tank combat more interesting and dynamic, yes, but this niche anti-lock/missile thing? That's just saying "I want to bash infantry and they aren't allowed to even touch me". You might mean well, but that's what your request would come down to. The lego bases were actually one of the few idea's they had right. PS2 has these massive continents available, and only a teeny tiny portion is really used for combat due to the way the capture points and bases focus all those players? The Player Made Bases (PMB's) were the perfect way of creating new focal-points of attention that could be build anywhere. The problem ofcourse is that the way they set it up, PMB's incentivice players to build as far as possible from enemies and to make attack virtually impossible, rather than put it smack-dab in the middle and invite enemies to attack you so that you can either stall and break them or they can push through you to the goodies you might be hiding inside your base. One of the few places, or possibly the only place, where PMB's are used in such a way is between Quartz Ridge and Indar Excavation, where teams actually have a chance of defeating the PMB's in a relatively fair fight while the base offers a good solid point for the owners to assault from making it hard to simply circumvent.
Legos split the game into two seperate games, there is the part where som people are playing MMO then there is the other part where a handfull of ppl are derping it out in the middle of no where. if you want to build stuff go play sim city or red alert. PS is supposed to be amout mobile warfare, bases arnt about stagnation and more about nice taragets for pod spam.
PS2 is supposed to be about large-scale warfare. Nothing gets more large-scale than modern RTS's, and PS2 is the largest player vs player FPS out there. As I mentioned, the construction system wasn't implemented properly, but the actual idea behind it was solid and an incredible step up.
Don't we already have that option in the form of the smoke defense thingy? I believe it's in the utility slot however, so you'd have to give up the ES utility to equip it. EDIT: I could see using the smoke over stealth every now and then if they moved it into the defense slot.
