The Reddit Q&A Makes Me Nervous

[Marsgrim]

This game is beginning to look more and more like a Battlefield copy, and it's distinctly worrying.

When I read things like the continents not being interlinked, that there is no way to take a continent, that tanks are gunned by the driver and no co-operative vehicles, it begins to make me think that the developers have lost sight of the gameplay aspects that made Planetside fun and kept a lot of us subscribed for 10 years.

Although rare, it was possible in PS for one empire to own all the continents and sanc lock the others. Winning a continent and keeping it and the associated benefit was what the game became about. As far as I can see now, there is no win condition at all in Planetside 2, there's no point in committing to the game because there is nothing to commit for. Look at how APB turned out, it looked cool and had endless customisation but it was also an endless repeat of the same missions and that's where PS2 is heading.

It's all very well being F2P, but the reason that BF and COD are successful game series is because they do allow a map to be won and the fight to move on somewhere else. Further to this, they enable easy league and cup play at a competitive level and that is why they are successful, long lived games. They carry a huge competitive edge.

What is PS2 offering for competitive players, or as a reason to play? At the moment I can see nothing that will make people want to log on over the long term, and worse than this as soon as a new BF/COD game is launched it will lose out because those competitive players are going to go back to those. There's a chance in those games for players to win something within that game community, PS2 is offering nothing - it doesn't seem to even have the small win conditions that PS had that made taking a base worth while.

Why even bother taking a base in PS2? It may give resources but it's not going to get your empire moving forward because it's impossible to push the other empires off a continent.

PS2 seems to have completely lost the strategic aspect of gameplay that PS had, the ability to move empire fights by opening one of their locked/home continents, the ability to drive one enemy empire onto the other which I cannot see how it can be maintained in a never ending 3-way fight with no way to push an empire off a continent.

The developers are trumpeting in interviews that it's massive scale combat, but massive scale with no sense of purpose will quickly leave most FPS players going elsewhere. The psychology of FPS games is to win, yet there is no meaningful win in PS2 as far as I can see. Although games are played for enjoyment, the purpose is to win the game, how is this done in PS2?

There is no point in trumpeting a 3 sided game when the dynamic of a third faction interaction at a strategic level (global and continent) has been lost.

Further to this, the sense of team play and freedom of PS is in danger of being lost. The certification system was perfect, the problem was that SOE took the battle ranks beyond the ability of the certification system to balance, resulting in the one man armies. There were no one man armies when the maximum battle rank was 20 and certifications were balanced accordingly, even when BR25 was introduced the additional 3 certification points were within reason given the new Engineering and Hacking skills.

We now seem to have a copy of the Battlefield class system, developed somewhat along EVE/RPG lines, a copy of the vehicle system, a copy of the game play style via iron sights and pace of game/TTK, a copy of the spawning system and a dumbing down of any strategic play what so ever.

Planetside offered a strategic and tactical game that directed the FPS action, limited resources are going to mean nothing if there is no way to use the resource battle to win against the other two factions.


Please do not turn this game into a 3 faction copy of a massive BF3 map/game that never ends. People will lose interest and stop playing.