Questions from a Disgruntled Battlefield Veteran

[YaJackWagon]

So, as the title says, I am a Battlefield fan. Bad Company 2 and "Battlefield" 3 have kinda killed the franchise for me. Although Team Fortress 2 is by far the best FPS I've ever played, it just doesn't satisfy for that Battlefield experience. For reference, I think 2142 is the best Battlefield game to date, as it was properly balanced (unlike BF2-jet rape) and could support intense combat on a fairly large scale.

I imagine you all might look upon me like us old school Battlefielders look upon the consolers and CoD kiddies that inspired DICEA to sell out their long time support and turn BF3 into just another CoD clone (but it has doritos so it's original ). I sincerely hope that my suggestions and the reasons this game attracts me aren't things that you all think are poisoning your game. I have never played Planetside and had never heard of it until one of the members of BF3 UK (affectionately known as Mordor) started mentioning it as the only real hope for a Battlefield 2143.


I've been trying to read up on this game for the past week. Frankly there's alot of info (and jargon) that I've been muddling through. And I've got some questions. I apologize for length (that's what I said ) and if I missed something in that stickied info thread. Bolded "So,"s contain the boiled down question.



1. PS2 is F2P, but there are microtransactions. In one video () the dev dude says that nothing that affects gameplay will be exclusively sold. In other words, the only things for sale are skins (weapon and playermodel) and cosmetic items, which is nice. But I believe later on he says that you can "purchase sidegrades." As a TF2 player, I know there's no such thing as a perfect sidegrade. A gun with higher ROF but lower damage (and even does the same TTK) than the stock gun is not a sidegrade in the right hands.
So, is it "not a single weapon skin that you purchase has unique properties" or "SOE says that this gun fits criteria for a sidegrade, you must purchase" ?


2. Related to #1, if I can indeed unlock everything gameplay-affecting via playing for a while and earning my weapons, implants, and certifications without having to spend a penny, what's the catch? From my understanding, BF Play4Free said the same thing, but you lost the weapons you earned from endless grinding at the end of the day unless you paid. In TF2, it can take weeks for a new weapon to drop for you, while the guys who buy get it the next day (or recently a couple weeks early).
So, just how free are we talking? I don't have to pay, but I have to grind day after day to earn my weapons that I only secure for a limited time?


3. Infiltrators have invisibility, and from what I've read, they could be invisible indefinitely and kill invisibly in PS1. That doesn't seem like it's fun or balanced... but I never played PS1. What kind of limitations were there in being invisible.
So, is this the same in PS2 or are talking 2142 and TF2 invisibility where you have to switch to a weapon slot for limited-time invisibility with significant cooldown?


4. Apparently, there are faction specific weapons and vehicles, that only differ in minor capacities from the rival empires (sidegrades... and all that).
So, are there non-faction specific weapons and vehicles? If I take so-and-so territory, do I effectively "capture" the spawn point of a light tank that is "sidegraded" differently from all the other empire specific tanks?


5. Related to #4. Opposed to taking access to a tank away from your enemy, does taking a territory instead give your side access to a "perk" for marginally heavier armor on your tanks? (doesn't apply exclusively to tanks, can be weapons, sprinting, etc.)


6. What is an implant? What is a certification? It seems like it's similar to "perks" in CoD and "specializations" in BFBC2/BF3. I'm not saying that in disgust, I actually think it's a nice addition to FPS's nowadays (if it's done right).


7. What is a MAX?


8. Doth mine eyes deceive me? Commanders and Squad leaders? Just how similar are they to those positions in the real Battlefield titles? It seems like you have to specialize your soldier to be able to utilize these roles.


9. I keep getting references to hacking like it's a game feature. I assume this might be similar to Blacklight Retribution or Brink (keep in mind I have only watched brief youtube videos of gameplay for those). What is it? A fancy name for a Flag capture or MCOM arming event (if we use BF terminology) by holding a button while a timer counts down?


10. What other features vastly distinguish PS2 from BF2/2142 that I've missed? Besides the obvious MMO bit where there's a thousand (or 2) more people trying to kill everything.

[Stardouser]

There are very few of your questions that I can answer but as a fellow Battlefield refugee I wanted to answer the 2 that I can answer:
4. I believe what you are asking is if you capture an enemy base, can you spawn enemy vehicles. I don't think so. And as far as I know, vehicles do not spawn until you visit a terminal and request them to spawn. Which is not like Battlefield.

I believe in PS1 you could hack enemy vehicles that were already spawned and steal them, that apparently isn't coming back.
8. I don't know enough to really answer your question on the Command structure, but as for squads - YES! I don't know what specializations are required for squad leading but I do know at a minimum that we will have squad VOIP which Battlefield 3 denied us.

And there's something else. Apparently Planetside 1 had Outfits, the equivalent of a MMORPG "Guild" or a "Clan" for shooters. And you could chat in text with your entire Outfit while in game. And Outfits maintain member lists, you can be an officer, etc. That's the kind of Clan Support I think people want in Battlefield but never receive.

[noxious]

1. 'Sidegrades' will be purchasable, and you're right that a sidegrade will actually be an upgrade if it suits an individual's playstyle better than the weapon that the upgrade replaces, but the reality is that if you make any change to something, it's going to be beneficial to some and detrimental to others; there's really no way around this. The goal, however, is that you're never getting something for nothing; each gain is offset by a loss.

2. Whatever you unlock is yours to keep permanently. I don't think they've stated just how long it will take to unlock a particular weapon.

3. In Planetside you could use an implant to see cloakers that were nearby. In order for a cloaker to kill you in one hit, they had to use a weapon which was rather loud, so you would hear them coming. I don't think people ever complained about them much. That said, it sounds like they're making some changes to the infiltrator, so it's hard to say how things will play out in Planetside 2.

4. You can only use your own faction's equipment. Using terminals in a facility formerly owned by an enemy faction will spawn your own faction's equipment.

5. Not sure here, but I don't think so. Territory will give you resources.

6. Pretty much right.

7. Dudes with heavy armor and big guns. They're weak to anti-vehicle weapons and move slowly.

8. It's hard to say because they're changing up command roles a lot, and it doesn't sound like the system is fully fleshed out yet.

9. Yeah, pretty much. There is no minigame or anything like that.

[sylphaen]

1. n/a

2. The catch is that once you try it, you are hooked and all other FPS games experiences seem dull. Eventually, you would feel like supporting such an awesome game and get a sub.

3. Infiltrator suits had no armor and their users dropped like a leaf when shot. Their inventory was also very small and only offered a handgun slot (you had to open your inventory to equip something else). Only the knife did not take inventory space nor a weapon slot (but it was not one shot kill either; it was however perfectly fine to finish off someone hurt).

4. All I know is some sidegrades are empire specific.

5. n/a

6. PS1 mechanics that do not seem to apply in PS2 anymore. Certs were like a skill tree where you chose what equipment your character could use. Implants were 3 situational "powers" you could activate to power-up your character (but using implants usually cost you energy (energy was for jumping/running; running only stopped when your energy hit 0 and stayed <20. There was no sprint mechanic in PS1.))

7. Specialized Infantry tank that could go AI, AV or AA. They were usually destructive at their intended role. As a trooper, you usually did not like facing an Anti-Infantry MAX user alone or unprepared.

8. Due to the scale of PS1 and its social dynamics, I guess leadership roles were like in BF and most by-passed the in-game system to organize their groups. There was in-game benefits to being in a squad such as shared radar information, etc... It will likely change in PS2.

9. Hacking was a cert (i.e. a skill) that was necessary to take control of enemy equipment (from their bases/towers to their vehicles). Hacking may make a come back in PS2 but so far, only for capturing objectives and not stealing vehicles (it's under discussion).

10. The scale of PS magnified many aspects of BF. BF is like playing in a box. PS is like opening that box and molding it to your ambitions. We can only hope PS2 will keep the best aspects of PS1 and enrich the experience of PlanetSide.

[SGTalon]

In PS1, a running stealther was visible as a blurry mirage type thing. There is a sound from the stealth field generator. I never played one so i don't recall all the details. But i think the generator used power so you could not leave it on indefinitely. I know you lost stealth at least partially when shooting/knifing.

Vehicles are pulled from a terminal/vehicle pad. When the base is captured it converts over to building your faction equipment.

There was an ability to hack enemy vehicles to take them over. But it was an expensive certification.

Implants were minor buffs.

MAX= AWESOME!
Basically it is powered armor. Much beefier than heavy armor, carried bigger weapons (2 of them) but less maneuverable and could not use hacking tools to open locked base doors or repair/med up. They were the tip of the spear on infantry battles inside bases and towers. And I can't wait to strap another one on.

A squad is 10 people. You can create a platoon or 3 or 4 squads. Command rank allows you to chat with larger groups of people and develop strategies above the general chat anarchy.

Leadership abilities included things like placing waypoints on maps and huds for your squad/platoon. UAV type sat scans, all the way up to commanding an orbital strike to decimate a courtyard or rooftop.

If you really want to know everything that is awesome about PS read Malorn's Manifesto - http://www.liberty-clan.com/topsecret/psm.pdf
it is long but worth it. You will be assimilated. (resistance is futile and all that stuff)

[Aurmanite]

1) Side grades are purchased with in game resources you earn by capturing and holding territory. You start out with an empire specific weapon that your selected class can use, and you can modify it to your liking using these resources. There are common pool weapons available to all three empires. There will likely be weapons that you will have to unlock with resources/certifications.

2) We don't really know yet.

3) Yes! Invisible, sneaky, murderous dudes. In the original, they were limited to pistols, explosives, and knives. Their role was a little muddled throughout most of the game as they were stuck between being saboteurs and assassins, without real objectives to saboteur, and without the lethality to assassinate. There was an implant specifically for the detection of cloakers.

4) There are common pool weapons and vehicles. The empire specific vehicles (tanks and aircraft) are pretty damn different from one another. They will use different tactics, have different strengths and weaknesses, and require different strategies for dealing with each other. Side grades will not change their uniqueness.

5) No.

6) An implant is a special ability you can augment your character with. In Planetside your character had 3 implant slots you could fit with things like regenerating health, dark vision(spotting cloakers), sprint, and more.

We're still not sure exactly how certifications will work in Planetside 2. From what we know, you will earn certification points by playing the game and while offline. You will use them to unlock upgrades/weapons/further advancement down a skill tree.

7) Mechanized Assault eXoskeleton (I think?). MAX's are power armor that can be outfitted for anti-infantry/armor/aircraft roles.

8) Squad Leaders look like they will have a lot of cool stuff including: squad spawning, mission generation (capture the base, disable the generator... which will provide an XP bonus for completion). In Planetside, command rank eventually lead to EMP's, orbital strikes, and world wide chat broadcasts.

9) In the original, hacking was holding a button while a timer counts down. You could hack enemy vehicles, equipment terminals, control consoles, etc. We don't have much information on hacking in Planetside 2.

10) There's lots of stuff out there to read on this one. It's simple enough to say "1000s of players", experiencing it is something altogether different. Shooters are pretty much shooters, but when your outfit is rolling groups of 30 with tanks, aircraft, and support vehicles on a huge persistent battle field...it's a new ball game.

[SGTalon]

Did i mention that i can't wait to strap on a MAX Pounder?

[Whalenator]

Warning: TL;dr ahead!

1. (Sidegrades & TF2)

Don't get me wrong. I'm an avid TF2 player too (free really ruined it though). But the sidegrade labels Valve has slapped on some of their weapons are, like many things Valve makes, lies. Take an obvious example; the Tomislav. A higher, silent heatup time that only costs you a little bit of your DPS? Count me in. TF2 included plenty of obvious upgrades, like turning the generic pistol into a "Bonk!" invulnerability soda. Valve is kind of a money whore though, any hopefully SOE doesn't follow in their footsteps.

2. (Weapon Unlock Expiration)

This is an easy one. The answer is no, and thankfully that doesn't look like it's going to change anytime soon. Right now the cert tree is a huge part of the game: Making hard-earned certifications for weapons, vehicles and other unlocks expire over time would be really, really stupid.

3. (Infiltrators)

Infiltrators had a unique feature where their opacity could vary based on rate of movement and activity. They were only completely invisible if standing still (unless the observer had a stealth-detecting implant). Movement would make them slightly more visible. But if an infiltrator were to shoot or be shot their stealth would almost completely fail for more than long enough for someone to kill them.

4. (Sidegraded Common Pool Vehicles)

All vehicle "sidegrades" are tailored by the player that spawns the vehicle. We're yet to see if capturing a facility allows further sidegrades, but at the moment it seems that all Common Pool Vehicle's sidegrades will be available to members of any empire provided they have the certification for it.

5. (Territory Bonuses)

So far all we've seen as rewards for capturing facilites from the enemy are additional resources to purchase special weapons and spawn special vehicles... and by special I mean sidegraded. Though keep in mind the demos featured three unique kinds of resources; my hypothesis is there is one for empire-wide vehicle spawning (Nanites), one for the individual character to purchase sidegrades (SOE Cash), and one for the individual character to purchase upgrades (Auraxium).

6. (Implants & Certifications)

An implant, in canon, is having a piece of your organic body substituted for a superior mechanical replacement such as a robotic eye, foot or ear. These would give you individual bonuses based on the body part replaced and could be earned by increasing your Battle Rank. Some bonuses were; Seeing stealth (Eye Implant), Zoom vision (Eye Implant), and Silent walking (Foot Implant). You can view more here, under the 'implants' section.

7. (MAXes)

The Mechanical Assault Exo-Suits were the tiny tanks of Planetside. They had over three times the armor of any regular infantry and had big, customizable arm cannons to match. All of them could activate an autorun mode that would pentuple their normally slow speed and each empire had specific abilities for each max: The Vanus had a jumpjet, the Terrans had a "lockdown" boost to accuracy and the Conglomerate had an rechargeable shield.

8. (Commanders & Squad Leaders)

I played BF2, BF1942, BF2142. The Bad Company series was decent, I suppose, but trying to slap a singleplayer campaign on a multiplayer-focused game really detracted from everything. We blew up buildings while the game blew up teamwork. But back to commanders. In the original Planetside commanders were only outfit leaders, and the in-game engine made it hard to relay orders down a chain of more than a platoon's worth of people without TeamSpeak or Ventrilo. In Planetside 2 this problem is going to be "solved" with sort of popularity contest, something I admit I'm not looking forwards to. We're either looking at a system where you'll automatically receive missions from the generals followed by the most people (again, popularity contest), or a system where you'll only receive missions from commanders you have followed. As for Squad Leaders, they lead squads.

9. (Hacking)

Hacking was a huge game mechanic in Planetside and it's going to be big in Planetside 2. Pretty much anyone could carry a little hacking device to open locked doors, slowly capture hostile outposts and even contest enemy facilities. By putting some "cert points" into it, you could learn to hack faster, or even do neat stuff like jacking enemy vehicles or installing viruses into base mainframes. Though sometimes in the original Planetside people likes to hack in other ways. ಠ_ಠ

10. (Differences)

Well, for one, there's actually going to be teamwork. When you throw two teams of 500 people into a 10sqkm arena and tell them to fight to the death, they might think it sensible to organize a bit, and that's how outfits are born. Another thing you'll see in Planetside 2 (hopefully) is a fairly slow game pace. You're not going to see just a handful of guys successfully break through a line of hundreds in a couple minutes, no. Some of the larger facility battles in Planetside took hours (until somebody was smart enough to pull a flail >:3). Persistence is another big deal, and something Higby seems to be waving around like a second dick, though I see no point in persistence if you can't capture a continent anymore.

WHOO THAT WAS A MOUTHFUL. of cock
Also, please...
If you're just going to post a topic with questions in the discussion section, why not just ask in IRC instead?

[oosik]

A couple of things about infiltrators that weren't mentioned:

You could stay invisible if you moved slowly in a crouch. I did this a number of times in some tower battles.

You could be seen by someone engaging a darklight implant, but such implants could be disrupted with a jammer grenade, emp strike from orbit, or emp (grenade?). Darklight also had a range limitation. Very difficult to see anything beyond, say, roughly 10 meters.

An infiltrator could also be seen if he was near a detonating plasma grenade and got splashed with plasma.

An infiltrator using his hacking skills could be detected by the beam between the device and the object he was attempting to hack.

[Brusi]

Have you played tribes? PS is like a cross between Tribes and BF. I suggest forking out $15 and playing PS for a month.

You may be dissapointed with the graphics and low (for PS, not BF) server pops, however it is still quite fun and after a couple of sessions, you will begin to understand just how different PS is to BF.

Worlds apart.

PS2 however, will have some of the same FPS mechanics as BF, but hopefully the combined arms side of it will stay more true to the original Planetside. Main difference being that you can spawn your own vehicles from a friendly base rather than waiting for them to respawn. UNLIMITED TANKS!!!

[Capt Mytre]

Good to see some other BF vets here. Recognize a few names from Mordor.

[fod]

Originally Posted by Capt Mytre

Good to see some other BF vets here. Recognize a few names from Mordor.

yeah theres a few of us here (im LSD-25-00)
im a ps1 vet also though

[ringring]

A couple of points ....

Cloaker were not over-powered in PS1. Yes they could sneak up on you unawares but, they move too quickly you see they and they're dead. You hear someone opening a door and there isn't a friendly on the radar? Kill them! And so on.

People who played as a cloaker often became really skilled but I think even they had to accept death came swiftly and often.

Outfits: These are are the core of PS1. In reality all the game provided was an ability to create/join an outfit various permissions covering who could invite to or kick from your outfit and a text outfit chat channel. All the rest of the organisation was done off system.

Many outfits in PS1 had different styles. Some had open invitation poilices some had a qualification criteria. Some specialised in maxes, some in air combat, some in armour and so on.

My outfit was more of an all-arms outfit but standard mode for the initial attack was Gal Drops .....

Most PS1 outfits are now talking internally via their own websites and forums about PS2 and that will including folks who haven't played in a long while. We're all making plans, everyone is excited and no doubt we will be back and rockin in PS2.

Suggestion: Why don't you ex-BF guys get together and create your own outfit in ps2 .... call youselfs BF Revenge or BF Renegades or something?

[Shogun]

yeah cloakers were nice in ps1 but hard to play because literally everything would decloak you, and at some point almost everybody had the darklight implant, that could make you visible.

playing sucessfully as a cloaker was more like playing splintercell. you had to sneak and time your movement very well because being seen was being killed. no armor, almost everything osok and you only had explosives, supportstuff or small sidearms.

in ps2 cloakers will be customizable. we don´t have the full details, but it´s going to be perfect cloak but only small weapons. if you want the sniper rifle, you only get a blurry predator cloak that wouldn´t let you fire while it´s activated.(like klingon ship cloaks)

about the sidegrades:
you will unlock them permanently either by ingame ressources, or if you don´t want to grind those for real money. everything game-accecting will have both options.
weapons are then permanent and you can switch between your unlocked sidegrades at respawns or terminals.
vehicles will work similar but maybe with the difference, that spawning a vehicle with installed sidegrades may cost some extra ingame ressources.

cosmecical stuff will be only available through real money.

implants in ps2 will be different than they were in ps1. matt told us, that implants will now be consumables and will work like potions in mmorpgs.
you use a fast-run implant, it gives you fast run for some time and burns out.
i guess those implants will also get both ways to buy them. (ress or money)

[Knocky]

Bottom line is anything that changes the way a weapon works can be bought with ingame resources.