What are your thoughts on PlanetSide 2 now that you have played?

[JawsOfLife]

I just got into the beta 3 days ago and have only played about 4 hours total. Also keep in mind I never played PS1, so this is a perspective completely new to Planetside games.

First off, the way base balance/design is right now, there seem to be no large scale battles around bases. It's basically just an infantry race to cap the points. I spent very little of my time fighting in/around bases, there is not much point as it basically goes:
>Base captured
>Locked for 5 mins.
>Other faction comes in, decimates with air, recaptures
>Rinse and repeat.
Not terribly compelling, unfortunately. In fact, the only large battles I got into (it happened twice) were both infantry vs. tank battles. It was me and about 20 other infantrymen huddled behind one piece of shelter while the HA's in the group tried to pick off the 4-5 tanks that were besieging us. That honestly was the most fun I had during the play time.

I should also note I was going solo this whole time, which is not very fun. I did manage to run into a group of 2 Sunderers, 3 Magriders and a couple Lightnings while I was in a Lightning and we stormed a base at night, that was super fun as well.

Closing notes: Yes, performance is quite lacking at the moment but honestly I was impressed that my meager rig could run medium settings at 1080p. Server load is the most important factor in performance though. A full server will tank framerates regardless. The game looks very good, the lighting as everyone has noted is spectacular. There are of course rough patches (like top of building textures, many ground textures that are 2005-alicious even on High) and other problems but this is beta, and my experience was largely positive. Huge thanks to the dev team for being so open and I have complete faith that as they get feedback the bad balance and vanilla combat design of bases will come together to make a much better experience.