Reduced scale of gameplay

[texico]

The whole class/inventory thing aside, there's one other issue that's been concerning me with PS2. So this doesn't turn into a big wall of text, I'm just gonna sum it up short and sweet:

- Sanctuaries have been done away with and uncapturable footholds placed on each continent

- THEREFORE you can essentially fight where you want AND you can never fully own a continent if it has footholds of enemy empires

- THEREFORE you won't be able to fight over continents as if they represent actual pieces of territory themselves (in their entity) as in PS1. You'll only be able to fight WITHIN each continent

- THEREFORE, the game loses its "global" scale - the highest exchange of territory is the exchange of facilities/territory within each continent, so the game's maximum level of territory exchange and ownership is a fight over a continent.

- Each different continent will essentially just be different backgrounds to fight on, maybe with vaguely interacting exchange of benefits, I don't know, but not ownership, strategic use and loss of ownership of continents.




I understand that the goal here is not to have whole maps unplayable at a given time. But unfortunately that's a necessary part of creating the perception of "ownership" - you need to be able to lock down and control something if you're going to perceive that you won it, and that therefore means stopping other people from using it. The same logic could be applied to territory in a continent - by allowing the capturing and ownership of territory you're making large parts of the continent unplayable at any given time because the side that owns it is trying not to let a fight occur there so they can continue to perceive ownership. If you take the territory system away and have the empires running at each other from opposite corners of the map, you can get fights occurring all over the map in random locations - but you'd lose the perception of being able to have ownership over the land and therefore kill motivation for the player to fight.




So yeah, it's a problem that's been nagging me. I understand there will be just 3 continents to start, + footholds. It does seem like the game is being designed to focus on continent-scale battles. A key concept of the massive scale of PlanetSide 1 wasn't the fight size, but the fact that the continents themselves were actually the commodities being fought over to try and capture Auraxis itself.




Also, Chelsea won the Champions League.