Your personal observations

[Figment]

Making this thread so you can just make lists of things you noticed while watching the footage. What stood out for you in terms of gameplay implications and did you personally like this? This then is mostly intended as a "personal impression and opinion"-thread, rather than a discussion thread of other people's observations.

Since so many points are made, it might be wise to just stick to your own observations as it'd become too chaotic otherwise.

Thus if you disagree with someone else's observations, just post your own interpretations of what you think you saw instead, rather than provide quality judgements on others.


The goal is to help devs look through random people's eyes at how they experience the game as a whole and how random people feel the gameplay flows currently.


I'll start.

• MBT drivers do not wait for gunners (I've not seen one do so!)
• Sunderers are hardly used at all as a combat vehicle
• The secondary gunner position is hardly used, even when they fight aircraft, few switch as they try to keep moving.
• Ground vehicle drivers and pilots alike continuously bump and crash into foreign objects, friendlies, etc while driving in first person mode
• When they drive in first person mode, they use about a 40 degrees turret range so they can drive forward.
  
  
• When firing sideways they tend to come to a halt and turn their hulls towards the enemy because of locational damage, inducing static ground vehicle combat. This happens even if they have a gunner.
• A lot of accidental suicides, but also a lot of people blowing themselves up on purpose to get back to a vehicle pad.
• Galaxies are only used as troop carriers and not used as a nearby spawnpoints. Regardless of having the most hitpoints of all units and despite of having turret defenses, they simply die too fast to everything to be useful in any other role than PS1 style dropship.
• People seem to prefer spawnpoints that give them direct, personal logistical benefits: the SpawnOnSquad (SOS) to get right back in the action and bypassing defenses and logistical time or the temporary forward barracks with vehicle pulling options.
• The Galaxy tends to just wait next to another spawnpoint for safety and loading up troops, just like in PS1
  
  
• Galaxy's guns are indeed in the locations of tail and far wings and thus have huge limitations on what they can feasibly fire at. They do not suffice for protecting the Galaxy once deployed.
• Vehicles survival rate is very low, one grunt can quite easily kill a MBT or lighter aircraft
• A lot of players eventually gravitating towards MAX units
• Quite clear why MAX units probably won't be able to use vehicles later on due to bailing before vehicles die (an old known problem from PS1 with regards to aircraft/agiles and AA MAXes in a more general form)
• Cheap units often not being chosen: not regarded as competitive units?
  
  
• Infantry TTK is very fast, often it seems people don't even have time to realise they are being engaged from behind
• Because people move so fast and erratic, very few people seem to use boomers.
• Very few people wait for and use medics
• Engineer's turrets are deployed inside, but overall don't seem to be very useful as their users tend to die on a flanking move or grenade, before they can turn to get a shot
• Sunderers are NOT used for repair and resupply, partially because they do not get the chance: people and vehicles die too fast to make this useful
  
  
• Lightnings can singlehandedly kill MBTs, whether or not they have a gunner
• Aircraft explode the moment they hit an object and the suicide rate is therefore extremely high. This even occurs during landing attempts. Perhaps players should get a bit of slack with collissions (take less damage than 100%) and help with landing (extremely reduced impact damage in landing mode, perhaps linked to speeds).
• Base defense structures are largely ignored both due to Spawn on Squad (which is very frequently happening, simply because there's so many people respawning)
• Base turrets are typically ignored because people don't know when or how they can enter them. Possibly capture points interfere because they change hands constantly?
• It's incredibly, almost ridiculously easy to reach capture points.
  
  
• Vehicle combat mixes almost completely with infantry combat indoors (very few places vehicles can't go or deliver firepower)
• A lot of bailing from vehicles by drivers right before they explode
• Pilots bailing often die upon hitting the ground
• Bunnyhopping does not occur and people trying to do so die fast
• Infiltrators try to use sniper rifles for melee quick scoping combat
  
  
• Infiltrators at least in the demo have nothing different to do from regular grunts: it's all about shooting other people and capturing positions at the same rate as grunts, just slightly different combat.
• Infiltration in PS2 has very little to do with sneaking (mostly seen sprint relocations to surprise attack enemies rather than sneaking behind enemy lines) and gameplay is too fast and chaotic to even establish an enemy line to sneak behind. There seems little purpose to this side of the infil in PS2. That disappoints me a lot since it was 80% of my PS1 gameplay.
• Infiltrators and other light classes can fight MAX units quite succesfully
• Infiltrators cannot cloak continuously, at least not from the start
• Combat is as chaotic as a Call of Duty Random Deathmatch: attacks come from any and all directions at once. There is no "flow" to it.
  
  
• Often hard to distinguish friend from foe, especially for new players, but also because vision is regularly obscured.
• Very few players use the "spot player" command (feature doesn't seem very useful because they can kill them before they spot them and it only interferes with their actions).
• A lot of self-healing occurs, though it frequently takes a long time to kick in (attrition should be possible).
• Few medics and engineers aid their buddies in comparison to PS1. I would chalk this up to people not wanting "to be the healer lackey while other people are having fun". Where in PS1 people would bring med or engi along for themselves, but then also would assist your buddies as you had it at hand anyway.
• Compared to PS1, a lot of situational awareness is lost for infantry and people therefore get ambushed far more often (third person not only helped create ambushes, it clearly also helped to prevent ambushes as well)
  
  
• Light assaults often throw down ammo for themselves, not so much for others
• The randoms aren't really inclined to work together from the start. Instead focussing on their own benefits. IMO there should be more incentives to work together in the form of less individual options. For instance, having to hart in in groups, rather than alone.
• Only the second day would people start working together. Might have been just me but they may have been provided with headsets the second day?
• When people are too low for the more expensive personal vehicles, they still often won't pick the teamwork vehicles. There should IMO be a lot more attention to instructing players on when and how to use such vehicles and provide more strong incentives to work as teams.
• Few people repair their own vehicles (could be they don't know it is possible, could be they don't get the chance to survive long enough to find a repair spot)

These are just some of the observations, some good, some bad, though I'd say most IMO confirm what was expected. I'm sure a lot of tweaking still needs to be done though.

EDIT: As said above, demo won't be comparative to beta, it's simply about initial impressions, observations and general pointers. Not fine-tuning.