- Manic-Depressive First Person Shooter
- How the Next One Can Suck Less
- Three more ways to improve Planetside 2
Back at PAX 2009, Global Agenda was my game of the show. It appeared to have much of what made Planetside so appealing: character advancement, customization, and fierce 1st & 3rd person combat that relied more on player skill than stats. The element of agency vs. agency competition over contestable land gave me hope.
Global setback
It got released, became free to play, and changed some more. The equipment and advancement trees got overhauled. We even got a spacious, interesting, and fun open world. It has nothing to do with the whole contestable geography thing, but whatever. The game remains quite fun, but just isn’t scratching my Planetside itch because the scope is too small.
Global Agenda has a lot of match options 
, but it’s still not enough. Where are my sprawling, non-instanced 100+ Player-vs-Player battles over giant facilities framed by diverse geography? Nowhere.
That’s the promise of Planetside 2, but SOE has a variation on the Duke Nukem Problem. The original game is just old enough that existing fans will carry their baggage straight into the new experience. Beta hasn’t yet begun, and already the bitching has begun. Hell, a small portion of the existing players will hate the game no matter what it turns out to be.
For some Planetside fans, eight years of evolving gameplay will be flattened in the first moment they shoot a gun in Planetside 2. Time’s dulling edge will have pushed much of what drove them insane into the distance. The new thing, when compared to the old thing, will disappoint. Nostalgia’s a bitch.
From the very beginning, Planetside fell off a ledge, then a cliff, then it stumbled, stinking drunk, into a party, and then [Frame Missing] – where did this blood come from? I’m sorry, Playerbase. I didn’t mean to do that.
By the time it became a fully realized, rehabilitated, balanced MMOFPS, nobody cared. Well, some of us did, and we continue to carry the standard, but not enough of us are left. The engine looks dated, and if not for an influx of Chinese players, maybe it would have completely died.
Enough redundant backstory
Now there’s a new game, a new engine, and a new stone to roll up Lombard Street.
Every other forum and blog is focused on game mechanics, weapon types, character models, and art direction – stuff like that. For whatever reason, I’m not interested in that conversation. Let the gaming nerds hash it out. Art style is neat, but it’s irrelevant. That’s not what made Planetside great.
SOE has likely been iterating the thing in-house for a while. They’ve seen the moving parts put together, but we see only scraps. That’s likely to continue in Beta. We fans have the blind man’s hand on the elephant problem, so I find SOE’s request for input to be both adorable and perplexing.
What every Planetside veteran can agree on is that we want extremely memorable experiences. Here’s what SOE can do toward that end.
Note: A recent FanFaire panel dissection includes some bullet points (by Togikagi) that are worthy of mention (and included in green text within my points).
#1 : Employ little-to-no cutscenes
Figure 1. Just wait.
I can’t think of a single Planetside fan who’s raved about the game’s cutscenes. Ever. It’s a noteworthy fact, because:
SOE President John Smedley said they’d be taking the story to the extreme by creating movies and other surprises for fans.
I’m all for surprises, but to the extreme? Please don’t. Even if it’s To The Maxx.
No matter how cool you think your cutscene is, just remember: It’s going to end up on Unskippable (see Figure 1). That just science. Planetside is not a roleplaying game, and it shouldn’t pretend to be one. Nobody in it is named Cloud. And, anyway, if he was in the game, you could shoot him.
Let’s pretend there’s some law that requires creating X minutes of cut-scene video or you get shackled to the GC-department’s mini-fridge. Fine. Just make it short and put as little dialogue as possible in it.
Maybe show someone blowing the generator. Don’t employ C-grade voices actor to recite a complex sounding conversation about it. It’s cliché inside a nanosecond. And, for god’s sake, no technobabble.
Convey tone, don’t focus on story. Keep whatever rendering power is reserved for this task to create quick, arty representations of the action. Use the opportunity to illustrate gameplay, not pump out fluffy videos.
Though I love them, all three factions are a variations on Space Marine Model-set 5B. Cut-scene hokum will be hard to avoid, no matter how well intentioned it may be.
#2 : Ditch all the timelines
This worries me some:
Higby didn’t want to reveal too much regarding the storyline, but he did say the “timeline is very similar to the launch of the original PlanetSide.”
Figure 2. The late 1990's must have seemed an eternity to the simple folk of the mid 1960's. Not like us. No. Not at all.
I’m a timeline connoisseur to the point where I collect historical timelines. Seriously.
Back in my pasty D&D nerd days, I created elaborate fantasy-realm timelines for campaigns. In my professional life, I’m no stranger at all to the GANTT chart, which is the timeline all growed up.
So, when I say ditch all the timelines, I have a good reason (see Figure 2).
It’s not trivial. With regard to the action, or even the story, it’s patently irrelevant. Will it help me shoot that guy better? Will it provide a strategic edge?
A certain class of nerd can’t imagine a fantasy realm or a sci-fi world without a timeline, but consider this: Would Team Fortress 2 be improved with one? What year did Red Team beat Blue Team in Dustbowl? How about Left 4 Dead? When did the last outbreak occur? Timelines are missing from those games, and it’s not because Valve is absentminded.
Those games include well-drawn characters and immersive environments. That’s a more than adequate replacement for lore. For the same reason, all official timelines should be expunged from Planetside.
Whatever whiff of a story that does exist should be the stuff of legend.
Who stranded everyone on Auraxis? Who knows. There are many versions. It was a long time ago. Dave lost the records. The lack of a bullet-point list of history is a feature.
And that feature is called constant dispute. And this can apply to all sorts of questions about the game world. Let the conflicting stories fight it out in-game and in the forums. There is an army of nerds dying to be a fictional crowd-sourcing tool, and if SOE wants us to feel connected to the game, then this is a great opportunity.
It’s Win-Win. Players gain an added sense of ownership, some of them will write fan fiction, and SOE gets to avoid creating the equivalent of Uwe Boll’s next film outline.
#3 : Capture our Experiences
As far as customization is concerned, Smedley hinted that players will be able to earn outfits that make them look distinct within their empire.
Customization is great. A clan hall to call home would be nice too, though I don’t see why we need a building, you know, away from the action, to stand around in. Mobile apps that manage our training? That’s neat, I guess. I’ll certainly do it, but there’s another opportunity.
Planetside fans, when they think about the game, or look at screenshots, remember one thing it that few other games offered: Every vehicle on the field, every soldier on the ground, and every plane in the air was controlled by a fellow human. That’s the glue at the center of the game that allows it to get by without silly cut-scenes or nerdy backstories.
Even the solo player, with no interest in extra-game contact, can contribute toward teamwork in a way that few games can match. In other words, it’s innately social.
Time was, when I wanted to capture some of that coolness, I loaded up Fraps, struggled to remember the activation key, and then captured some video. My PC would chug. In the end, much of it was crap, but I could edit that out. At the very least, I had a screenshot key, so I could get take some snapshots. It was a lot of work, but it was worth it.
What if, while waiting to respawn, I could ditch the junk photos, or add captions to ones I’m saving? I’d be doing something with that downtime. This kind of thing could integrate with whatever website emerges to support the players. It’d be nice if it was easier to create our stories.
The gang at The Sims figured this out, by the way. Ditto the Team Fortress 2 devs. When you put tools in the hands of players, the will run with it. Planetside 2 may be a different game, but the community’s love for sharing their experiences is the same. Fans will effectively micro-advertise for SOE, they just have to make it a bit easier.
Like a lot of open-world games, but unlike most FPS games, Planetside players are part soldier, part tourist. Help us grab hold of those experiences before our aging memories betray us. I’ve been in some really marvelous fights that I can no longer remember. Maybe we can fix that.
Maybe it’s not what most of us want.
But what if all this qualifies as something we don’t know that we want.
SOE can fiddle with graphics and mechanics all day. But, how much better could Planetside 2 be if they resisted checking off back-of-the-box feature lists? It seems a much better trade-off to ditch the bad fiction and all those videos I’m going to ignore.
Let SOE focus on the game’s chewy center and then give us the tools to tell our own stories. That’s what I want.
I agree with some of this, not all.
Doing something while we wait to spawn could be a creative and fun activity. Maybe have something to publish screenshots to facebook.
I disagree with not wanting cut-scenes. Though I don’t want them every 10 seconds, and I sure as HELL don’t want one when someone blows the gen. Having cutscenes at the start of the game to begin the lore, having cutscenes during character selection / when deciding what faction to be, or having cutscenes when you’re avatar achieves some sort of imprint or anything Major that happens, once. Cutscenes help immerse you, placing them correctly will keep them from being reptitive and annoying.
You have to have some sort of time-line.. Somehow… someway.
This article touched on some possible improvements, but it comes off to me as you being more of a pessimist
Nice article. Perhaps I misunderstood John Smedley at the time, but I thought his reference to “movies” was for marketing i.e. trailers, not an actual in-game cut scenes.
If there are ANY cut scenes, I hope they are just when you log in. I don’t think anybody wants to get shot because their avatar is just standing there while their screen is dominated by some cut scene.
LOL,we do not need a cut scenes at all,if you can’t keep yourself occupied for the 20 seconds that it takes to respawn then you are a retard.
what helps immerse you is the combat not some waste of resources like silly cut scenes or veh entry/exit animations
I’m with Raymac on the trailers vs cut scenes thing. I heard that and thought “trailers”.
OTOH, if they can come up with Epic Trailer Of Win (see Dawn of War), it’d be both epic, and winful.
–
As for quick-return-to-the-fight vs unstemmable-tide-of-guys-I-just-killed: that’s solvable. You put some distance between where-folks-spawn and the-thing-you-need-to-capture. Forcing you to go through one to get to the other isn’t so good either. And if the-fight-is-that-a-way is different from to-defend-the-capture-point-I-go-that-a-way, so much the better.
Internal defense doesn’t have to be a function of spawning, thought it can be. That’s a matter of base/tower design. A conscious decision rather than Status Quo.
Now if they were to design some of these bases with defense in mind, yes, they’d be much harder to capture given the unstoppable-tide-of-guys-you-just-killed… but defense isn’t really the goal here. FUN is the goal.
These are professionals here. I’m eager to see what they reveal next.
Okay, “eager” isn’t nearly strong enough. I await their next tidbit with all the patients of your neighbor’s spastic chihuahua after a criminally insane whack-job slipped it some meth.
Theory: if you put a chihuahua into a paint shaker, it’ll look like it’s holding still. The last time I tried, the dog just exploded, but I’m pretty sure I just need to get the frequency right. Practice practice!
Entry/exit animations had an important gameplay effect: You were vulnerable and on a fixed path while you were entering/exiting a vehicle. They aren’t simply fluff. Insta-boarding makes a cloaked assassin’s job Much Harder.
Oh, you could get the same effect by forcing a player to freeze for N time before automagically popping into their vehicle, but that would just look cheesy.
Ooh. You might “assume the driver pose” while you were tractor-beamed on board and the canopy closed around you. Same effect, but the only animation is moving from a sitting pose to a standing pose with no worries about surrounding objects or the floor.
If all pilot suits have some spider-man-2-doc-oc-spine-reader-gizmos, the pilots could just curl into a fetal pose as they went in, leads and tubes freed from gravity and drawn to their anchor points by the PhysX engine (can’t forget those catheters).
If the game has 30+ sec respawn, I simply wont play it, and I know alot of others who wont either, so ditch the idea of doing something else while the respawn counter goes down, 10-15 sec each time I die, is the maximum I would allow myself to waste my life on in this game.
nutcase, take your A.D.D. attention span and go back to C.O.D., and take your lack of skills with you… If you can’t handle a spawn time over 15 seconds, don’t die often… meaning don’t suck. What would be the point of even avoiding death with a 10-15 sec respawn… “OMG I’m out of ammo!, I’ll just die and respawn in 15 seconds and get more…” GTFO Planetside certainly doesn’t need meatshields like you
I want to thank everyone for chiming in. Both here in the comments and on the PSU thread, I’ve read some interesting stuff. I’m one of those people who’s playing PS2 no matter what it turns out to be. Some random responses follow:
Like Mr. Storer, I’m some kind of rabid dog about the news, but I’m also not pessimistic. I’m just critical of damned near everything (myself included). This applies even to the things that I love.
When I wrote about cutscenes, I actually hadn’t given though to entry/exit animations. I assume those will be part of the game, and don’t really have a problem if it’s not gratuitous. Creating movies for marketing is another matter. I certainly don’t object; I’m just focused on the in-game experience. So I hope Raymac’s observation pans out.
With respect to Blindshot’s observation, Planetside certainly does need meatshields like nutcase. Planetside needs every kind of player, not just the ones that we might prefer. One of the things that I like about the game is that we can play it in our own way. I can’t even think of a time I’ve had 30+ seconds on the timer, so that’s an exaggeration. More than most games, respawn times factor into our strategy. It’s there for a reason.
My desire to do something during the brief downtime of a respawn is not due to impatience, but rather wanting to fill all the available spaces of time in the game. This is where in-game screenshot stuff has potential. I want to spend less non-Planetside time managing that tedium. I like Duke’s idea of being able to post to your Facebook-feed. If I saw some cool snapshots from a friend, I’d probably jump in the game, too.
Thanks again to all of you. I enjoy diversity of opinion. It gives me something to think about and helps me challenge my own suppositions.
I generally spend my respawn time looking at the zone map and making strategic decisions, or talking to my squad about what I/they did wrong or just how good that guy was who killed me.
i do agree with most of that , SONY needs to listen to the community more, especially with this game, dont just make it great sony , make it FREAKIN EPIC…. Planetside 2 deserves it. As for cutscenes, i have to say , the after schock cutscene was insane – i was only and playing at the time and bring more of that , storyline progression can fit alot better with a quick cutscene.