My Community Day Write-Up

[cryosin]

Bullet Points(TLDR Version):
- The game looks amazing, runs smooth and plays like any other shooter.
- The night time is gorgeous beyond belief. You really have to see it in person to appreciate it.
- The classes are all designed well with unique attributes. It never felt like one class was useless or had no purpose.
- There where some bugs as expected, but the bugs where quite clearly a "beta" problem. None of them seemed to be a detrimental and felt like any other game's beta bugs.
- Scythe is really hard to fly. Air vehicles in general are hard to fly, but the scythe is a whole other thing.
- The map is HUGE. We had about 60-80 people playing at Hvar, but I occasionally wandered off and looked at the vastness. I saw the bio-dome from a distance and couldn't believe that was a part of the game, it looked unbelievably gorgeous. T-ray said they wheren't even finished with it yet, but it still looked really good.
- The pace of the game is very solid. A while ago I had made a thread about TTK which got a lot of responses on here. Not sure if that had an impact on the pace, but the TTK in the build I played felt finely tuned and solid. You need fast reflexes to really escape an engagement and survive, but its very doable. It doesn't feel like COD where you die instantly, but it's still much faster than Planetside by a large margin.
- The game was very unique. I always point to other shooters to explain how it felt, like Battlefield meets Halo, but there really isn't anything on the market to compare it to. It's not Planetside 1 with better graphics, it really is a whole new experience. The people saying "This is an [insert X game here] clone" are honest to god idiots(or payed by the respective companies). The closest this game can be compared is Battlefield 2142, but there is so much more going on that it's not a fair comparison either.

Now onto my experience:

So after LA traffic and meeting up with Matthew Peters from Azure Twilight, we began the drive towards San Diego. After a roughly hour thirty minute drive, we had finally arrived and hopped in line. Another AT member, "Nuke", had made T-shirts the night before! These T-shirts looked great. The vanu symbol was on the back, AT Logo on the front and army-like patches on the sides representing AT divisions. There where about 6+ AT members at the event, and some serious VS ass kicking was about to ensue.

The event was coordinated very well. They handed out water, red bull, sodas and pizza to everyone. We joked about how SOE should've adertised with, "Free Pizza and Red bull come play our game", to attract every gamer in San Diego. After about thirty minutes we where finally allowed inside. They had a little over 30 Alienware computers running the game and the room felt like a new-age cyber cafe. I finally sat down and grabbed a machine running VS.

The game was running flawlessly smooth. In fact, I remember when i used to play Battlefield with 64 player maps and the game would be very glitchy and laggy. The engine could barely handle that many people even on LAN. Planetside 2 was running smooth as silk and looked gorgeous. The lighting, the desert wind and the character models looked high quality just as you would expect from any modern day shooter. My first playtest really consisted of playing a lot of classes and finding out what was going on. I setteld on a class called Infiltrator as I was getting multiple kill streaks with it. It was basically a stealth class with a semi-auto snipe rifle. During this first play test my game crashed, but a staff member reloaded it and i was literally RIGHT back to where the same spot in less than a minute. The loading times where fast. During this playtest I met Clegg in person. I joked about how the drop pod looked slightly better than Planetside 1(it looked unbeleivably good). Clegg was real nice in person and we had a blast, but the sparse 30 minutes I had in the playtest made me really want to play the game instead of chat. Sorry Clegg, you're awesome, but your game is REALLY REALLY awesome =P.

One run is not enough so we quickly headed back in line. Before exiting, I saw Matt Higby and introduced myself. He was extremely friendly and it was nice to finally meet him in person. One playtest was definately not enough, so we went back in line for more. On my second play test I got to chat with Tramell Isaac. He didn't know me from streams but we still had a nice chat about the insanely beuatiful bio-dome and other methods of finding combat in the game. Tramell was very friendly and a cool guy. He was happy to see the VS tearing it up.

The third round of playtests was when I finally hit that, "OMG, this is amazing", moment. The night cycle was kicking in, I customized my infiltrator loadout, and a giant mountain and base battle was ocurring between the VS and TR. I was using cloaking to both enter and escape combat, quickly darting around mountain tops when people saw me and then re-engaging with a few headshots. Clegg came up as I was having fun and was happy to see me enjoying the game. He saw how much fun I was having and told me to keep playing and stop talking. Even Clegg agrees, his own game requires more attention than himself =P. This battle raged for a while, as tanks on each side kept driving by the mountain side. The VS where finally making the last push to the base, and time was called. It was at this point that I finally saw Planetside 2 working like it should. Giant battles, front lines, tanks rolling in and everyone duking it out. It was truly epic to play.

Me and Matthew Peters went to go get some beer before we played some more. We came back a little more relaxed and waited in line again. For the rest of the playtests, I tried a few other classes and attempted to fly the Scythe. I also saw Margharet Krohn and got to talk to her, mainly about how wierd it was trying to fly the Scythe. She was also very nice and helpful to others and myself. The last playtest of mine ended hilariously. Matthew Peters was given a command to spawn Scythes, so he told me to try it. I respawned a scythe in the spawn room and killed a few teamates. Apparently you're only suppose to use that command outside, go figure. Anyway, everyone was spawning and looking at a random scythe in the spawn room. I felt bad, but it was pretty funny. All in all a great way to end the playtest.

Before we left a few of us had a nice chat with Matt Higby. He was very open about the bugs, plans and details about Beta. It was a nice dialogue between the fans and we got to hear it on a more personal level. I had a new respect for a lot of the Dev's again. Many game companies release sequels without any of this community involvement, but you guys truly do care.