- Manic-Depressive First Person Shooter
- How the Next One Can Suck Less
- Three more ways to improve Planetside 2
Note to my non-gamer readers: Please indulge/ignore/mock me as I, once again, go full-on gaming-nerd with another post in my Planetside series.
What a flippant title, right?
It’s just a grabber. Anyhow, I wrote an overview of my experiences playing Planetside. The game held a lot of promise, but failed to live up to expectations. I’ve learned that a reboot of the game is coming, so what can SOE do to improve the game on the second attempt?
To recap: Here’s what the game action looks like
Disclaimer
That’s a loaded question, because every nerd has a different answer, and most of those answers are wrong. It stands to reason that I’m wrong, too. So, am I arrogant and presumptive enough to think I know how to separate the good from the bad?
Yes. No. Well, maybe. Anyway, I do have fevered delusions of competence. I’m sure that most of the following has been raised and dismissed in the official or fan forums, but I’m ignorant of all that. I hate random forums for the same reason I hate YouTube comments. So, join me on the well trodden path of ill-informed, geeky, internet gaming critiques. Don’t forget your shovel. You’ll need it.
Keep the Good Stuff
Gamers tend to focus on the bad more than the good, and elevate the bad’s importance too much. But, there are plenty of game mechanics that have been refined and work really well. Here are a few:
- I almost never suffer stuttering or synchronization issues. I know absolutely nothing about netcode, but whatever they’ve been doing has worked. The first few years were bumpy, but tons of bugs have been squashed. I haven’t experienced a disconnect-error in a long time. The action is fluid even in very large fights, and I never see people ‘frozen’ due to a bad connection.
- The certification system is the central mechanic of the game, and for good reason. Gaining character levels provide certification points to spend on a class of weapon, vehicle, or support tool. These certifications allow the player to get the associated stuff. Certifications may be reversed and re-spent, as well. There’s no mucking about with virtual currency. Just go to the console and choose it.
- All characters have the same hit points and access to armor, and every weapon does the same damage, regardless of who’s holding it. This dynamic eliminates a whole class of griefer, and keeps the game focused on player skill and experience, not level climbing. For instance: Using my level 6 alternate character, I’ve routinely killed opponents ranked level 20 or higher, something completely unheard of in World of Warcraft.
- The variety of combat and support skills makes it possible for people who are not primarily shooter fans to enjoy this game. If you lack an FPS-expert’s aim, you can still repair, heal, revive, lay mines, or use splash-damage weapons more forgiving of error.
- The pace of combat is superb, but be warned: this is no twitch FPS game. Movement is slower and more deliberate, and overland travel isn’t instantaneous. Whether on foot or in a vehicle, the time expended to get from point A to B is balanced. The same goes for support times, whether healing someone, hacking a facility, or repairing a vehicle.
- Planetside has the strategic combat department all wrapped up. Nothing is bolder in scope. There are countless options for bringing force to bear against the enemy. The squad that employs competent tactics backed with sound strategy will always beat a skillful, random, unorganized group.
- The lattice system connects the bases on a continent. After you’ve captured a base, you can only claim the next base in the chain (see Figure 1). This focuses combat, and has worked very well since the initial lattice-redesign. In much the same way, the continents (or planets; whatever) are linked together.
Figure 1. The continental lattice system of the Searhus continent. Imagine there are a bunch of other continents, connected to one another in a similar fashion.
- It happened late, but the addition of modules and facility benefits add more strategy to the mix. Which base do you choose to invade next? The answer determines what your empire receives while fighting on the continent, whether its shorter respawn times, base sensors, or shields.
- There is no loot or resource farming. SOE has been fantastic in this regard. There are no +10 Lasers of Idiotic Leetness claimed only by people with the time for 900 man hours of instance-farming. You can use discarded enemy weapons if they fall into the same certification class, but, aside from that: there’s nothing – no junk with purple names, no currency, no pointless bragging rights. This keeps the game focused on action, and not so much on skinning boars for leather. Thank god.
Some Bitching and Moaning
Some nights, I arrive home from work and am eager to play a few hours, but I don’t. It’s usually due to one or more of the following things.
- Getting into combat takes too long. This was mentioned in my previous post, but is worth repeating. Possibly, it’s worth tattooing backwards onto the foreheads of the lead designers. I don’t care what dumb sci-fi backstory you need to justify, just make it so I can say “hey, can I join you?” and then, boom, I’m in a gunner-spot. Time it, limit it, manage it somehow, just please, please do it.
- Combat situations and locations can be repetitive. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve found myself on the same two continents over the course of a month. The flow of combat between empires feels like it rolls down a hill, with Cyssor at its base. This appears to be a geographic/lattice consideration, and should be addressable.
- Improve the flying vehicles. Flying vehicles are effective and all, but they’ve never felt quite right. They’re too like ground vehicles, only they have an extra axis. I know it’s The Future™ and everything that flies can also hover, but it’s more dramatic and interesting when flying vehicles need to make passes like fighter-planes.
- The caverns are a mess. Before the Core Combat expansion was released, we were teased by SOE’s promise of urban-style combat. Naturally, I expected, you know, buildings, walls, and stuff like that. I didn’t expect bizarre, unnavigable, crystal-buildings dumped confusingly at a variety of heights, sometimes carved apart by rivers of molten-rock (See Figure 2). Ziplines and teleporters speed travel significantly, but the destination is still to who-the-hell-knows-where. Navigating the caverns feels like moving through a more confusing, cluttered, asymmetrical M.C. Escher poster.
Figure 2: This image perfectly illustrates all that is wrong with the caverns. Imagine you needed to plan a trip like the one featured here. The yellow-zip lines allow you to speedily cross the chasms, but you must still meander toward your destination, because there are no straightforward paths. All the "urban" action takes place inside the crystal deposits, themselves. While you are confusedly navigating this terrain, enemy Cave Rats (highly experienced cavern-players) kill you with ease, sometimes from air vehicles that are horribly overpowered in such an awkward environment.
- Giant robots are dangerous. We all know this. But, in this case, I’m talking about gameplay. The spectacularly botched release of BFR’s (Battle Frame Robotics) completely broke Planetside’s mechanics for many weeks. Giant robots stomped all over infantry. It’s what caused me to quit the first time, so maybe I’m just touchy. All I know is that robots really threw game-balance out of whack. Just further proof that robots cannot be trusted. So, be careful.
A Few Modest Proposals
Again, I’m just some random player, but I’m still going to offer a few ideas to all those developers not reading this post. To the rest of you: remember when I told you not to forget your shovel? Feel free to add your own ideas to this post.
- Consider adding contests. This is quite minor, and more of a passing thought, but I always wondered if a whole military ‘contest’ could take place over the course of a week or two. Soldiers can respawn, so why not have repeating wars? Some throwaway story reasons would suffice. Here, I’ll make one up: Each war is another iteration of probabilistic outcome of the competition going on in the multiverse. There. Done.
- Here’s how to fix the caverns. The bizarre juxtaposition of oversized, colored crystal deposits with human-style rooms inside them doesn’t work. Yes, it’s creative, but it’s also as goofy as a pulpy, D-grade sci-fi novel. Human-built structures built in and around crystal deposits would make more sense and allow for more rational, less confusing navigation. Keep what feels alien (the crystals, ziplines, etc) while still grounding it in the familiar (buildings). If nothing else, the cave terrain, ziplines, and teleporters must be simplified further.
- Put us back on a single planet. I realize that having each continent on its own world allows you to effectively ‘shuffle’ the continents if you need to alter the lattice-network. It services the gameplay. But, the thing is, you can retain whatever lattice network you feel like even if the continents are back on one world. How? I dunno. Maybe forcefields, energy currents, whatever. Maybe the continents move? Is that really more ridiculous than a set of worlds, symmetrically dispersed in the cosmos, all have exactly one continent in a giant, global ocean?
The game development cycle is mostly opaque to we, the public. This is frustrating, so we wonder aloud in forums and on blogs. Developers are right to hold back from revealing too much, by the way. They must manage expectations. If they posted every damned fool idea they had, they’d generate buzz that they could never live up to. Spore, anyone?
Anyway, some images from the forthcoming game have finally slipped out. I hold out hope that we’ll learn more about any of the mechanical changes in due time. Next in this series, I’ll cover one thing that should have liquid nitrogen poured on it and then smashed with a hammer: the story.
Special thanks to my outfit-members at Section 8 for inspiring me with their thoughts.
Nailed most every point dead-center.
My one quibble would be “Getting into combat takes too long.“, if there’s one thing that ruins grand strategy, it’s instantaneous transportation to every possible point of conflict. The HART system worked fairly well because it had a long timer and limited your insertion point, all that will be accomplished by discouraging preparation, organization, and decreasing travel time is an increase in the “zerg ball” effect, where *all* fighting takes place in one location, because any side-battles resolve too quickly once the defenders notice there’s an incursion.
Good point, Cerus. I, too, value the extensive preparation that made full-scale invasions such a treat. I’ll just think out loud here, but what about a long-timer “jump to the action” deal centered around squad and/or outfit groups? My idea isn’t to make it possible for everyone to travel instantly, but rather to make it so that guy who just gets on can join his buddies. Once he’s done it: boom – two hour timer. Something like that.
Getting into combat takes too long. This was mentioned in my previous post, but is worth repeating. Possibly, it’s worth tattooing backwards onto the foreheads of the lead designers. I don’t care what dumb sci-fi backstory you need to justify, just make it so I can say “hey, can I join you?” and then, boom, I’m in a gunner-spot. Time it, limit it, manage it somehow, just please, please do it.
Err, no? Getting into combat doesnt take too long, you just took the whorst attempt possible.
You dont join a random squad and only roll and gun with them. That doesnt work, because almost everyone of that squad is just as random as you. Random squads never really worked together. Instead, try to get on their voice, in case they use one. Suddenly, alot of the problems you encountered are just gone.
Besides that, getting to a fight takes only a Mossy, or a HART drop. And with a 3 min hart timer, that isnt really a problem. Once your there, just get into something in case youre not using any voice chat. Get into a random tank or Liberator, maybe its a good pilot.
Besides that, allowing people to randomly teleport from place A to place B just for the sake of being able to fight is already there. Its called Instant Action. Adding a teleport from Point A right into a vehicles gunner spot would cause alot of trouble. People could just shift around easily without the need to travel, and with that, every backhack situation would turn into a giant zergwar within minutes. Would kill alot of the tactical gameplay we enjoy so much.
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Combat situations and locations can be repetitive. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve found myself on the same two continents over the course of a month. The flow of combat between empires feels like it rolls down a hill, with Cyssor at its base. This appears to be a geographic/lattice consideration, and should be addressable.
I dont think it is addressable. No Lattience can force players to decide where to go. If just a few want to go Cyssor again, manage to open the continent by taking a base, then the fight will be there. Alot of people always join the next fight, regardless of what CR5s may have decided. I tried plenty of times attacking one continent with the full Vanu zerg, but ended up failing simply because a few guys got a base on anoher continent just minutes before i could execute my plan. People run for the fight, and will always do.
The that isnt even the real problem. The big problem was the lack of content and population. More continents, and big fights on several of those continents (like it was back in the old days, 3 pop locks), would allow you to choose yourself where to go. Spend the last 2 days on Cyssor? Well, there is a fight there, but also is on Searhus and Ishundar.
At the very end, we can just wait and see what Planetside next will give us. And i hope you are there, fireing a Lasher besides me, or getting hit and killed by my Lasher.
Call of Duty is to Childhood as Planetside is to Adolescence. If you truly want to mature you need to upgrade to World War II Online.
Want to attack a town? First you’ll need to make sure the brigades in the towns around your target have the strength to take and then hold the objective. Then you have to get an Attack Order (AO) from the players at your side’s High Command. This might call for political maneuvering and/or a bit of yelling, depending on the importance of the target and the rank (Enlisted ranks unlock classes and vehicles while volunteering to become an officer puts you in charge of the strategic side of gameplay.) of the person requesting the attack.
Then, once the AO is secured, you’ll need to set up for the attack. This means spawning in at the Forward Base for your faction from your chosen brigade with a halftrack or a truck and either towing Anti tank and Anti aircraft guns into positions to lock down the target or parking somewhere inconspicuous and setting up a mobile spawn point so that infantry can spawn close to the fighting. (FBs are usually several kilometers out from the target.)
Now that that’s done the players who set the Mobile Spawn will usually leave it unoccupied and head towards town to precamp one of the Capture Points in the city. Once the AO actually goes up the entire enemy side is alerted that their town is under attack and defenders will begin to spawn and take up defensive positions. The players in the Capture Points (CP’s) will have to hold out for five minutes until the points become capturable and then, after they are taken, must hold onto at least one until the Army Base is taken.
Now, the Army Base is usually a large walled structure with firing positions for the defenders all along the walls. A garage area is where Defending vehicles spawn, and two story barracks is where the infantry comes in if every Capture Point spawn point has been taken. To capture the base you must infiltrate the base itself and then get into the bunker. The bunker is a squat one story building with firing holes usually manned the instant an Attack Order goes up. Winding corridors are great places for machinegun positions, and with concussion effects being nonfatal satchel charges and other explosives cannot breach the building. No, you have to do it the hard way. Grenades, smoke, and gigantic balls are needed to clear a bunker. You know they’re in there with mounted MGs and itchy trigger fingers. They know you have to run down several long, long hallways with nothing to hide behind. Have fun.
Once the Army Base(s) are taken, the town is yours! Congratulations, now on to the next one.
Now of course the game isn’t this simple. There are warnings when enemy infantry or vehicles come near a city even when an Attack Order hasn’t been placed, so there will likely be resistance throughout the entire planning stages, also. There is a full flight system, so CAS is a must. Vehicles are meticulously modeled with armor thicknesses and angle of the hit calculated to decide penetration. Hell, even if the round from that AT gun doesn’t smash through your tank the spalling might still kill your driver and leave you as an immovable coffin with a big KILL ME sign for any sappers who feel like getting some practice finding the best placed to slap their satchel charges.
Ah yes, and since the HUD is minimal you’ll have lots of fun looking out viewholes in tanks and trying to use dive bomb sites on your Stuka. Want to get a better look around? Pop your commander out of the cupola to take in the sights with his binocs. Oh wait, now his brains are splattered all over your engine compartment because of a sniper in that bell tower. Now you’ll have to rely on armored view ports that have more blind spots than Great Aunt Betsy before her cataract surgery. Enjoy it when an armored Car blows past you and wrecks your treads with a few well placed cannon rounds.
Want to play naval? We’ve got that. You’ll spawn in at least a half hour from the fight and then get to play “Find the Range” with your friend, the enemy. Whoever looses gets sunk, and whoever wins usually gets sunk too. If you’re lucky you’ll get to play “Flak Gunner” with Mr. Dive bomber. A near miss might jam his rudders or split a hydraulic line and cause him to splash into the sea. A direct hit and you’ll see each piece split off in flames. If you miss at least you have the pleasure of watching the massive explosion from your magazine going up.
That’s alright, you say. I’ll just play infantry. Hope you know how to judge range, because half of the gunfights take place over hundreds of meters. The other half are frantic close quarters matches where you hope you don’t bleed out even after you’ve won.
Why would anyone want to play this game? Good question. Because there is absolutely nothing like dropping with a stick of paratroopers over the ruins of a town, hoping you don’t get MG’ed on the way down. There’s nothing like scoring a flank hit on a French armored car with a Pak38 just before it stumbles onto your team’s only mobile spawn. There’s nothing like booming and zooming an enemy bomber and watching the wings collapse under 20mm cannon fire. There’s nothing like flying nap of the earth with twenty friends on comms in the backseat and out maneuvering interceptors in a desperate attempt to get your men there and save a beleaguered garrison.
There’s nothing like WW2OL.
I agree that it took to long to get into the battle… particularly when you first log in. You should be able to just select where you want to be dropped straight off the bat. Also while your dead it would be nice if you could pick your weapons/kits and what not so when you spawn again you can get into the fight without having to wait in line for a terminal, plus it would give you something to do while you’re waiting.
I agree with many of the points raised and I also see your meaning in “faster joining”. To the casual gamer, one that might not have an outfit to follow around, joining a squad is far from trivial and it’s undoubtedly annoying.
Part of the issue here is that game design went two ways: Solo or Outfit. Anyone not Soloing will surely have an outfit right? wrong. SOE’s design must find a way to scale options in a gradient fashion instead of just giving the player 2 options (complete “pseudo” randomness ala Instant Action or team-dependence) and saying “well there ye go! have fun finding your way!”. Naturally this is also a very steep learning curve.
I think of all the problems in the game, this one is symptomatic of a game design that assumed fore-knowledge of its customers’ behavior and overly simplistic profiling of activities. I hope they learned. I believe BFRs were also a product of this approach and it’s sad: Galaxy Gunships (a much much later addition to the game) should have been the BFRs, so they did learn – there is hope.
No doubt PS:N can borrow heavily from other games in the genre (Tribes 2/vengeance as the first borrowed heavily from Tribes 1) and also learn from the 1st round’s mistakes. Personally I pray and hope they keep just as they are the level playing field, the no-grind policy and the class-less certification system. These three points that you mentioned are what made this game so special and unique.
One point I don’t think you highlighted and it’s strange since it’s so intrinsic to the game as to be almost unnoticeable: Scale. Bring into a single huge continent a few hundred players of three sides and make combat seemless (indoor, outdoor, across bases … no loading, no instances) and you get Scale. You get supply lines. You get dynamic fronts that don’t need any sort of formal declaration of attack.
The Scale of organization needed is so great that a chain of command evolves. Assigned objectives present themselves (there’s no need for some “quest-a-like” system to point them out or manage them) and players rise to the occassion. Outfits and units form. Players specialize. It becomes more than any FPS’ round of CTF or “Hold the base points”. It gains strategic depth (which was mentioned) and it gains value for the player and his group – either as a small part of it, or as the orchastrator of this curtain call of the opera of war on planetside.
I’d suggest making the backpack/weapons management a little better. It was way to ponderous to loot enemy backpacks for their empire-specific weapons, or having to hot-swap decis etc. Biffers sucked … but you have to admit they are extremely satisfying to kill.
Long time Vanu supporter and actual caver here. I thought the caves worked great the way they are. The complexity simply made it so you had to explore before you could fight effectively. I did it, I showed others how to do it, and I know those mother fucking TRX hacking sons of bitches did it too you dirty rat bastards. Sorry that just slipped out. Adding more familiar buildings to the caves would be good but the complexity made it like slums of a major city and the hanging structures made it feel very cave like. I think we should keep the complexity but add something on say the ground level that will feel more human. But hey perhaps that’s just me.