Recording Battles

[Tapman]

I'm sure that many of you out there have thought about or attempted to make a Planetside video using Fraps or some sort of screen-capture software. There are some good videos out there but it is insanely hard to truly capture the scale of our battles, especially when the cameraman is at risk for being blown up at any time.

Given that SoE is working to make the minimum system requirements very generous, I would venture to say that there is a possibility of creating a system similar to the "Saved Films" feature of Halo 3 where people could record their battles to allow for replay from any angle (limited by the hexagonal sectors that the battle is taking place in) and upload them to share with the community. Throw an in-game timestamp on it so that if multiple epic battles are going on simultaneously and affecting each other then the originals could be combined into a larger replay to show the real scale. As I stated in the original thread where I mentioned this idea, this should always take a backseat to content development and balancing. To prevent griefers from crashing the server, keep the recording client-side and have a separate server for the combination/rendering of the replays so that gameplay is unaffected.

Give subscribers the chance to vote on the battle of the day, the winners become finalists for battle of the week, and so on for the month and year, and annually you could have votes on the best battle of all time. Outfits could use this for training purposes and for analyzing what went right and wrong after battles, helping individuals become better and developing specific situational tactics. It would also give people a record of battles for anecdotal purposes, instead of text-based flame wars on the forums you would see those people posting the videos of them owning their rivals, a much more concise way to conclusively settle these disputes.

Besides the benefits for current subscribers, the marketing implications of having these battles recorded for anyone to see is pretty tremendous. Giving anyone the opportunity to see how awesome this game is is sure to have every FPS gamer who sees it drooling shortly before they join the ranks. Thoughts?