I'm going to miss the old base fights - Page 6

wasdie · 2012-06-07, 11:22 AM

We'll see more defined lines and areas of control when the game is in beta. Right now they spawn everybody so close together it becomes like a disorganized game of Battlefield 3. People are just trying to get kills and experience the game, not actually win.

Kaw · 2012-06-07, 11:25 AM

Originally Posted by Figment

PS2 is about sieging and capturing bases so naturaly they should be more like castles, or rather, fortresses and bunkers.

This is supposed to be a game first and foremost. Even in real life, where defenders can't respawn, these fortresses are only captured by far superior numbers. At the Battle of the Alamo, for example, 2500 soldiers took two weeks and lost more than 600 men to take a monastery from 200 farmers. At the Battle of Monte Cassino, in the video you linked, the allies suffered 55,000 casualties to the 20,000 of the German defenders. This was after flattening the abbey with thousands of tons of bombs.

Trying to take a castle when both sides have even numbers and the defenders respawn closer to the fight wouldn't be fun at all. The god awful base design was what created the never ending stalemates around doors of PS1 bases, and it is one of the things that shouldn't return in PS2.

Rbstr · 2012-06-07, 11:27 AM

Originally Posted by Figment

Pictures of old bases

Yeah, none of those structures are worth shit with modern weaponry.

A modern fortified compound might be something like the US's Iraq Embassy: Just some thick concrete buildings and some walls. None of which would stand up to modern military equipment.

Figment · 2012-06-07, 11:28 AM

Originally Posted by EVILoHOMER

I wont miss them or the towers, they were the reason most people quit because they were boring to fight over. We asked for new bases time and time again but never got them and instead were given BFRs so everyone quit lol.

People didn't quit over the bases. BFRs also wern't a replacement for new bases. The main issue was that if they would change a base, they would force people to download the entire map again. They could add BFR terminals though, since they did not interfere with the map (already on flat ground, didn't cut through the map).

Furthermore, people didn't ask for bases to be completely replaced because they didn't do, they asked for new base designs for increased variety.

They also asked for specific improvements regarding corridors (things like doubling the width, not creating lobbies out of each corridor, nor fully open base design). And the aforementioned improvements to fight from indoors to outdoors. Nobody ever asked to completely remove indoor underground combat and replace it with Core Combat/urban style base design: single/triple room small door buildings that can be camped easily from the outside. Urban combat though was requested on a regular basis as an addition, but usualy not in relation to base layout, usualy more as an alternative to completely exposed field combat.

What people quit about in relation to choke points, was the effectiveness of AoE weapons, but that had little if nothing to do with the choke point design, but the AoE weapon balance.

Landtank · 2012-06-07, 11:32 AM

Has anyone noticed that military bases aren't the main line of defense in modern military conflicts? The city itself is, because its significantly more practical. Lessened chance of starvation, bombing runs that take out your whole garrison etc. Planetside 2 has no cities though, YET!!! One can hope.

The "bases" were designed as research and production facilities, not fortresses. I wouldn't be against the occasional fortress at all, definitely not, but I take the bases as what they are, a collection of structures each serving and individual purpose. By making multiple capture points they ensure that you have to have complete control of the whole facility, instead of zerging the CC and blocking up the stairwells and corridors with MAXs and AOE.

Can't wait for this game, give it to me nao!!!

EVILoHOMER · 2012-06-07, 11:39 AM

The way I remember it was 3 months after launch people were bored of the game and calling for new content. SOE rushed out Core Combat which was something no one asked for and we were saying it sucked in the 2 week short beta. So it got released and no one ever went down there as it was too much effort to travel to them places and it just added even more land mass.

So many people I knew quit then because like JTLS for SWG it was make or break for the game. It became clearer and clearer SOE didn't care about Planetside as we had no more content after that and very little in the way of actual major patches.

The whole time people were asking for new base and tower designs because the ones we had clearly were broken and weren't fun to fight over. Towers especially were poor design where it just became about camping the doors with vehicles. We didn't get anything really, they scrapped the capital base concepts and they just added shields to a main base in the middle of each island if I remember correctly.

The bending and BFRs happened in 2004 and it was like great more stuff we weren't asking for. They changed the look of the map, it looked like someone designed it in MSpaint and replaced one useless island with 4 even more pointless mini ones noone ever went to.

BFRs were the things where EVERYONE quit and I mean it killed my Outfit and to that day not a single friend of mine went back to Planetside and neither did I. I mean not only did they look dumb but they were so OP.

Those 3 months in 2003 though were amazing and I can't wait to have them back. These new bases are so much better in design and I don't miss a thing from Planetside.

Aurmanite · 2012-06-07, 11:40 AM

You couldn't make AoE weapons any less powerful without making them completely useless. The problem wasn't the weapons, it was the dozens of people using them in tightly packed corridors. I'm being antipathetic again, because I disagree with what you're saying.

The bases in the original were designed by people that couldn't fathom how they would play out when you stuck 200 people in them. No one could have reliably guessed how they would have played out in 2003 because there was absolutely nothing to go by.

The best parts of Planetside, especially for cloakers, was when battles were going on around and in the courtyard of a base, and the space between the base and tower/AMS. Once you got inside it was simply about slapping on RExo, heavy assault, the odd MAX, and plowing through until you got to the gen/tubes. It was ridiculously bland.

Your original post about the thrill of hacking a door as a cloaker, while cool, illustrated how little there was to do as a cloaker in/around the base. If I wanted to hack a door, I'd haul out my MCG, kill the fuck out of everything that moved, hack the door, pull out my decimator and nuke any MAXes that might be standing there.

Your cloaker would hack the door, and likely be shot half a second later. Or, if you did make it somewhere, your options were to sit still and provide intelligence, or die horribly to everyone else. Cloakers could sometimes do boomer runs, but most often they occured when the attacking force held all but the lower portions of the base.

I don't understand how a crafty player like you can look at these new bases and not be extremely excited by the overwhelming amount of area you will be able to employ your ninja skills.

Figment · 2012-06-07, 11:44 AM

<3 People... PEOPLE.

I simply responded to Aurmanite with the extreme opposite. I've never once stated here we need every base to look like a medeval fortress!

READING COMPREHENSION/CONTEXT PLEASE.

Now calm down and try to look closely at what I've been saying:

Bases should be defendable (the whole point of a defensive structure is a bonus to defenders)
Bases should be possible to take (PS1 style choke points should be less critical: more and slightly bigger entry points)
Vehicles should stay out of the interior of buildings
Individual rooms are easy to camp and take. It would make no sense to not have buildings where you now and then would have to fight through consecutive rooms to at least reach a control point: if a control point is one room away from the outdoors, it's incredibly easy to take. There's no challenge in that!
The same goes for generators and other critical functions and capture points. Try to remember this: Why did people hate the Bio Lab? Because it was over so damn fast!
Why were AMP stations, Redoubts, AT Plants and Mod Buildings no fun to defend? Because you could not reach the control point due to being camped indoors. Why? Because the control point was basically in another building than the spawnpoint, meaning you'd have to pass through a highly camped area in order to reach and defend these points the moment you died once. They put too much power in the hands of the attacker.
Why did people hate Interlink Siege? Not just because it had good chokepoints, it had more entrypoints than a Bio Lab after all. No, because the radar (!) gave the defenders loads of information on how and where to defend. Without radar due to the radar virus, Interlinks (despite the choke points) always fall within minutes.
I'm all for variety, some open bases, some closed bases. Some in between.
I'm very much against creating bases that make it too easy to assault. That reduces the need for tactical maneuvres, teamwork and thinking and simply strengthens the effect of numbers alone.

Having some open bases is fine, having all open bases is a zergfest's wet dream. Getting zerged in every base is going to be a nightmare and demoralising for the smaller defensive teams.

Don't forget that you run the risk of scaring those people away, too, if numbers, not brain and brawn become too important.

ringring · 2012-06-07, 11:45 AM

It's very odd that some people seem hate the best game that there has been out there over the last few years. Perhaps they're trying to show some loyalty towards it's replacement, sort of a variation on the Stockhom syndrome.

Kalbuth · 2012-06-07, 11:54 AM

Originally Posted by ringring

It's very odd that some people seem hate the best game that there has been out there over the last few years. Perhaps they're trying to show some loyalty towards it's replacement, sort of a variation on the Stockhom syndrome.

Being able to point out (fatal) flaws in something you like >>> blindly defending it.
PS1 base design was a fatal flaw. Overly defensive stance has proven to be a fatal flaw in the end, making people incredibly bored. In the last years, the game revolves around trying to be defending an Interfarm ....

On top of that, it wasn't "the best game" I played over the last few years for me. It was one of my prefered game from 2003 to 2007.

@Figgy : big difference between PS1 and the open design you see here : PS1 bases had what we internet network guys call Single Point of Failure : 1 gen. 1 CC. 1 spawn room. You lose either of these, you're near the end.

It's not the case in the PS1 base we see at E3, making the "campability" of the base rather low.

Turdicus · 2012-06-07, 11:54 AM

All of the arguments made here have some merit to them, but considering the number of people the game is going to support it doesn't surprise me that bases look like they do now. If PS1 bases were bad with 200 people fighting over them, imagine how bad they would be with 400 people, or 600 people, or 1000 people. Yeah I think you know where I'm going with this.

I won't pretend to know what other bases will look like or how they will operate, but it does seem to me that having one central CC to fight over for an entire base wouldn't work very well with 600 people all going there at once. As for the fortress argument, I wouldn't be opposed to having some interesting variations on old fashioned castles in the game here and there

Maybe 1 to 3 per continent, in an update. After all many castles went out of fashion because cannons knocked down all of the walls too easily, or shot over them entirely. In PS2 the structures are immortal, so that should count for something.

Figment · 2012-06-07, 12:01 PM

Originally Posted by Aurmanite

You couldn't make AoE weapons any less powerful without making them completely useless. The problem wasn't the weapons, it was the dozens of people using them in tightly packed corridors.

It would have been quite easy to not make the effects stack (like if plasmad, any further plasma would not do damage). That would have been a change to the weapons that would have changed everything, at the same time you could do something about the damage per tick. So I strongly disagree with you on that.

Plasma was too easy to use en mass. That's a problem with the weapon.

The bases in the original were designed by people that couldn't fathom how they would play out when you stuck 200 people in them. No one could have reliably guessed how they would have played out in 2003 because there was absolutely nothing to go by.

I'd say that goes for the entire continent. I'd also say there's still lessons not learned about outdoor play judging from the design of Indar being the same open wasteland that made infantry combat poor outdoors.

PS2 bases aren't perfect either. There's big issues with it because the change has been so radical IMO you get the complete opposite effect where now the attacker >(>>) defender (PS2, depending on base), rather than defender >(>>) attacker (PS1, depending on base). We'll see though. I'd rather see that range of bases go more like this: defender <<(<>)>> attacker. But for the big ones, I'd say defense should be a tad stronger. If they're so important, why wouldn't you defend them properly?

The best parts of Planetside, especially for cloakers, was when battles were going on around and in the courtyard of a base, and the space between the base and tower/AMS. Once you got inside it was simply about slapping on RExo, heavy assault, the odd MAX, and plowing through until you got to the gen/tubes. It was ridiculously bland.

Yeah... No. You clearly aren't an infiltrator-type cloaker. The best parts as an infil is being able to handle any given situation. Including the indoor fight, but especially the outdoor-to-indoor siege bit, because that's where you can be the most decisive.

Your original post about the thrill of hacking a door as a cloaker, while cool, illustrated how little there was to do as a cloaker in/around the base.

Wait, what? I give ONE example and you suggest that's all I ever did? And you ignore the bit about the CC stealing, the ANT destruction, the CY vehicle jacking, AMS jacking, the Router placement, the gen blowing, the spawntube blowing, the equip/vpad blowing and ambushing to stall vehicles getting out, the assasinating, the module stealing, the Flail disrupting, the prepping of an entry point for a Galaxy drop or MAX crash, creating distractions on the other side of a base (or easiest: pretend to blow the gen and get a hack on instead making people move throughout the interiror of the base en mass instead of acknowledging the actual incoming invasion of other people)... should I go on?

Geez, talk about lacking imagination!

If I wanted to hack a door, I'd haul out my MCG, kill the fuck out of everything that moved, hack the door, pull out my decimator and nuke any MAXes that might be standing there.

Your cloaker would hack the door, and likely be shot half a second later.

Who needs a REK to open an enemy door? They're curtious enough to open them for you. Again, use some imagination. If you didn't bring an EMP and there's a mine at the door? Just lay your own mine next to it, wait. Someone will think it was an attempt to get a kill, rather than them removing the mine for you. And after they run back in to get new suit, you're in safely. Yay!

Or, if you did make it somewhere, your options were to sit still and provide intelligence, or die horribly to everyone else. Cloakers could sometimes do boomer runs, but most often they occured when the attacking force held all but the lower portions of the base.

Again, you underestimate a good infil. Seems like you were pretty horrid at it.

I don't understand how a crafty player like you can look at these new bases and not be extremely excited by the overwhelming amount of area you will be able to employ your ninja skills.

Considering I'd have to actually have, you know, a stealth suit that works, I'm more than a little underwhelmed.

See, 15 seconds is not enough to take someone out and run away if you actually have to cross half a base if not back and forth through a base to lose the people chasing you. It's incredibly fun, but hard enough when you're invisible. I don't need to be a visible easy one shot kill all the time.

Neither do I think infils need sniper rifles. That's literally the worst design decision I've seen so far because it just encourages an entirely different form of playing.

Xaine · 2012-06-07, 12:06 PM

Originally Posted by Bags

Uh, we've only seen the insides of two, maybe three bases, and all of them have unique interior designs as per Arclegger on TB's stream.

It's a bit early to make that claim don't ya think?

All of them have a unique design?

I hadn't heard that.

I'm not saying your wrong, but for each base to be properly 'unique' would be a hell of alot of work.

MrBloodworth · 2012-06-07, 12:09 PM

Originally Posted by Xaine

All of them have a unique design?

I hadn't heard that.

I'm not saying your wrong, but for each base to be properly 'unique' would be a hell of alot of work.

As with all video games, they are made from modular pieces.

Aurmanite · 2012-06-07, 12:20 PM

Originally Posted by Figment

Lots of words

Pretty much everything you mentioned a role you performed in a stealth suit, you could do better and safer in armor. Except maybe the router placement and the CY vehicle jacking. Half of those take place outside of the terrible bases.

After the pistol pass I absolutely merc'd fools as a cloaker. It wasn't my favorite setup, I usually preferred to drive/gun a tank, but I played a bit of everything.

In my experience there were 2 types of infiltrators. The ones I killed, and the ones someone else killed.