Why copy game design of BF3, except for vehicle limits?

Discussion in 'PlanetSide 2 Gameplay Discussion' started by Balm, Dec 25, 2012.

  1. Balm

    The feel of PS3 is clearly intended to match that of the most recent iteration of the battlefield franchise. It would have worked pretty well, except for one major flaw. There were no swarms of tanks or fighters in battlefield. The numbers were purposefully limited due to their power. Planetside 1 got around this problem by limiting the power of vehicles in numerous ways. Planetside 2 seems designed specifically to enable vehicle spam. I just want to ask: Why?

    Why does this game have to be vehicle spam centric? Yes, driving a tank or aircraft is fun, but is fun at the expense of a disproportionate number of hapless victims attempting to enjoy a part of the game that outwardly appears to be very important and fairly polished (infantry combat).

    Why are 9/10 of the outposts situated in such a way that they can be mercilessly shelled by tanks and aircraft? Why are tech plant shield buildings open and exposed to tank fire? Why are spawn rooms death traps if there is a single he tank within 100m? Where are the bunkers, trenches, mountain trails and hard cover? Do you expect us to believe that for 170 something years, we have been subjecting ourselves to exposure to HE tank shells? Has nanite respawning given all of these eternal, immortal soldiers irrevisible brain damage?

    The maps seem purposefully designed to funnel infantry into situations where they will be helplessly slaughtered by vehicles. The maps where this isnt the case are ignored by the players who use vehicles, and therefore barely anyone fights there. Why are they like this? Is the intent for infantry to be purely fodder for a single man tank? Just tell me if thats the case.

    I truly enjoy this game when everything comes together and I can find a balanced, challanging fight. The problem is that finding a balanced, challanging fight is becoming impossible due to vehicles. Either your side has more and you win, or you have less, and they get blown up, and then the farm begins. Every time.

    The common sentiment I experience on what seems like an hourly basis is "another good fight ruined by air/tankspam". There is a critical mass where the number of vehicles cannot be countered. When that critical mass is reached, it is no longer a fight. The vehicle zergs roll around the continent (just one, mind you, ther are not enough players for massive battles on all
    3 at once) like a game of musical chairs. Sometimes the music stops and they awkwardly collide, but most of the time its vehicles slaughtering infantry.

    Unless things change, then very soon the tanks and liberators will be wondering what happened to all of their victims, because the people playing this game for infantry combat will simply leave. Who could blame them, since there is not much real infantry combat to be found here, even now?
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  2. FelixG

    the fix is simple, make the vehicles cost certs to unlock, the only thing folk start with free of certs is a Fury.

    They dont need vehicles to move from battle to battle beyond a fury as they can just click a redeploy or iron rain on the enemy
  3. AzK

    Question should have stopped at "why the game copied bf3". Ps1 was a much better game to copy, under every possible aspect.
  4. Phyr

    Ever play on instant vehicle spawn servers? One of the reasons I don't play much BF3 anymore is vehicles.
  5. Uben Qui

    What server are you on? There must be thousands of Tanks and Air assets where you play. On my server the most we see is like 20-30 in the air and 50-60 armor pieces on the ground amongst hundreds of infantry.

    On Waterson, only infantry gets 'spammed' for the most part. :(
  6. Littleman

    There's a reason the game is imploding in on itself. It was designed with the BF crowd in mind, but not the delicate map balance. The methods infantry have to engage armor and aircraft are worth less than a puddle of piss at best. Homing missile launchers that leave on so exposed for an absurd duration of time just to pop off one crappy missile. Flak that is, frankly, ineffective in a one on one vs. ESF, and forget about pounding away at libs without a squad. Did I forget to mention one starts with only one burster arm?

    The game NEEDS to be balanced around infantry as the strong point, with each soldier always having access to some effective means of engaging armor and aircraft regardless of class (C4 ain't it,) not infantry counters infantry, tanks counter tanks and infantry, and aircraft counters everything. I'm playing less and less each day, just because I'm tired of my preferred playstyle being only viable in 5 on 5 skirmishes and bio-labs. Y'know... the play style 100% of all FPS gamers play FPS' for?
  7. Rothnang

    That would solve the problem for 3 weeks and then you'd be back to the way it was before except with a few thousand fewer players.
  8. }{ellKnight

    It's silly IMO. In PS2 if you have 100 people you can spawn 100 tanks. That's not balanced in any way. Ground and air resources should be empire wide or something similar thus making tanks, fighters and gunships a special asset not something to fuel a chaotic zerg.
  9. Uben Qui

    You can't blame them much for that. PS1 was never considered a great game by many standards. 70k initial sales, the most ever online was 27k in 2007. After that, it was downhill at a run.

    For comparison SWG lasted 8 years. It released with 480k initial sales and when they closed the servers it had 45k logging in.. even AFTER the NGE fiasco.
  10. K-On

    I think they should put a huge shield like how the warp-gate is, so if u want to get the capture u need to get out of your high horse aircraft or tank and go in on foot and fight. But think about it for a sec, it would be clear so u can shoot in/out of it. Just tanks and aircraft can't come inside the base and camp spawn room or capture point etc, but even so I hardly believe they would do this.
  11. Rentago

    well you see, the issue is that there is no cert limit, before it was "you certed into what you specialize in"

    in this case I would cert into light tanks then into heavy tanks.

    there was a limit though so you couldn't cert everything, you could only specialize in some things at the cost of not accessing other things.

    overall the issue comes down to all the issues we have today in planetside 2 are simply the same issues that came about late planetside except we have it worse.
  12. Eli

    Numbers should not be limited in my opinion, but the access to vehicles should be harder and base fights should not be decided by vehicles.
  13. Disorder

    1) I think it should be a global pool for all resources on one continent and instead of gaining resources personally you just get a bigger slice (%) of this based on what you did.

    2) Vehicles should be certed again.

    3) Infantry respawns should have timers when switching to a different class, so you can't hot-swap and have to stick with the choice a bit more.. maybe 30 mins.

    It will stick to more of a PS1 feel with these things.
  14. xBoneBreakerx

    if the numbers arent limited a zerg can just wait till they have amassed enough tank/air to steamroll everything as they do now...
    so maybe they need a bit of time before they get going but it would pretty much turn out the same...

    only way to fix this is to set a max cap for tanks/air...
  15. Gavyne

    This game is larger, I suppose it makes sense to not copy BF3's limits. In BF3 on each given map, you are playing in a controlled environment. You start at a certain point, you fight at a certain point, you end at a certain point. The game gives you different vehicles to use, and limited number of them, depending on what point you are at. It's a controlled environment battle.

    Where as here, it's not controlled, you don't spawn at the same location, you do not all go to the same place to fight, you don't all have the same objectives to attack & defend, and the maps are persistent. It makes sense that with possibility of 500+ players in each given battle, that you do not limit vehicles by tiny amounts.

    Vehicles can be scaled back by simply creative landscape and better base design. You'll notice certain facilities, like the bio labs, are offlimits to vehicles. Amp station are also protected from vehicles until shields are down, and when shields are down the vehicles still can't get everywhere. Now the only off balance part about vehicle spam is the aircraft. Air right now can access places that tanks & ground vehicles can't. Bio labs, tech plants, amp station, tower base, all accessible by air. When tanks have to single file through canyons, air get free roaming sky.

    The spam feels worse because of air, not because of tanks. Tanks die off, infantry aren't afraid of tanks, I see people charging towards tanks all the time. That's because tanks can be killed. The problem comes when you got ESF & Liberators bombing the ground units, that's when things feel overwhelming.
  16. Imps

    Well, as always I have to say obviously the devs don't play their own game. Also, they need to make a dedicated pilot class. It's ******** how hard it is to damage tanks/aircraft, and it becomes absurd when you finally get one to half health, driver just pops out and repairs their own craft and continues OP. Could make it so infiltrators are the only class capable of piloting any vehicle or aircraft, then that class might be more than a gimmick. This coming from someone who has unlocked at least 50% of all infiltrator certs.
  17. Borisblade

    Exactly, BF is an average game at best, better than the awful CoD games, but still only average. PS1 did a much better job than ps2 in most every single area. Its only flaws were in relation to its dependance on needing to support dial up, such as the hit detection issues, and inferior gun play. But everything else was far better, vehicle fights were far and away better than anything in ps2, its not even close. People dont even move and fight at the same time in ps2, its just 1700's era style, line up, sit still, and shoot at each other til you die. Solo tanks are terrible design, turrets than turn with vehicles instead of being independant to allow for movement while firing is bad design, and the solo tanks just promote spam rather than the teamwork that shoudl be in a game thats primarily about playing with lots of people, but instead focuses on "playing together, by yourself". Super fast ttk that just promots zerging since instant death grenades and near instant death from any weapon makes grouping together to defend hack points or other spots near worthless unless you spread so far out that it almost feels like solo, more terrible design. I miss being able to sit shoulder to shoulder with friends defending gens, etc. Thats all impossible with instant gib grenades and weapons and super low ttk, ttk needs to be twice as long but respawn penalties much longer, so each life is longer and more meaningful but spamming spawns/bodies less effective.

    No lattice, no direction, no focus, no meaning. If someone caps your base, who cares, it doesnt mean anything when you have to defend all 500 bases at once. If the targets were limited to just a few bases and outposts then defending would mean somethin. But even then defense is penalized with bad base design, impossible to defend entry points with a zillion entrances into every base, turrets are just sitting duck coffins. Many bases dont even have walls or have cap points far outside the perimeter which are almost never contested, just ghost capped. Everything is so focused on single player experience and copying other games which not only were mediocre at best, but didnt exist in this large scale persistant world, which causes their systems to fail miserably. In short, make a sequel to Planetside, stop making a fail BF game.

    Again the problem is not limiting vehicle spam with numbers or resources, its turning them into proper multiplayer vehicles. Drivers only drive, you need gunners to shoot, and you cant switch seats on the fly without getting out and getting back into the other seat. No instant entry/exit either, realistic mount/dismount just like ps1. Armor would be buffed accordingly for the extra manpower (dont buff firepower, everything already dies too dam fast). The solo tank would be the lightning, its turret would be changed to not turn with the body, so movement and firing would be possible there as well. This would vastly limit vehicle spam, and allow for tanks to actually move in combat and provide vastly superior aka far more fun fights. It provides real differences in gameplay between the mbt and lightning and gives them each clear roles. And before someone says it, you would refund all MBT certs and SC spent on the MBT's, just like talent tree resets before big changes in WoW.

    All these things are not hard at all to fix, most are simple and were already done in PS1. There are a few systems such as a new way to do lattice thats a bit more complex than ps1's, it would need some creative ideas and lots of testing, but thats really the worst of it and thats not that bad. Again, make a Planetside game, not BF. Stop pretending ps1 never existed or that it did poorly because of bad game design, thats not the case in the slightest. It was a game that was too early with bad internet tech of the time, zero marketing, and terrible money grab development that rushed out bad designs like bfr's and caves and drove people away and failed to deliver content to keep them playing. 90% of the rest of the game was far superior to anything ps2 has.
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  18. Moises J.Ramos

    Reason = Money so in 5 years they can develop PS3, and keep doing the same thing every five years.
    Also BF3/CoD crowd = More money in a short term. Though they don't realize that crowd will not last more than 2 years in PS2. Since the next BF4/CoD/Massive game will come out, and I hope it does so the Smed,Higby, etc realizet the failure they have done, and perhaps they redesign PS2 to more Planetside 1ness.
  19. smokemaker

    This game is nothing like BF 3.
    BF 3 is a console port
    MAx 4 aircraft, 2 helos, 4 tanks, 2 Mobile AA. Everyone else is infantry. Max 64 players.
    Balance is BF 3 is like squirt guns.
    2 - 3 head shots to kill.
    Sniper glare - a flashlight attached to sniper rifle to give away their position. Cant turn it off.
    Suppression that physically changes your aim.
    not optimized for pc
    And a mess of un fixed bugs
    Balance gone crazy, therefore no balance

    PS 2 is everything BF 3 is not. Its a good game.
    Adapt.
  20. Moises J.Ramos

    Exactly PS2 should have been what PS1 had, and more. Not what "BF3 is not"