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

[Rivenshield]

The game is a visual feast. It looks and feels like a battlefield on an alien world. Everything has that slightly beat-up lived-in look.

The audio engineers have done a magnificent job as well. Distant booms and near-miss crackles create an immersive atmosphere.... except for the Phalanx turret, which sounds like a tennis ball mortar, and the TR chaingun, which sounds like someone beating a garbage can lid with a Whiffle bat. For the love of God I hope they cure these weapons of their audio ailments.

Gameplay is... well... like a regular FPS writ large, I'm sorry to say. You have two competing zergs running headlong into each other and the one with even a slight numerical advantage wins. Multiple choke points is fine. NONE is a disaster. Defense is impossible, offense is easy. There is no way for a small group with its act together to stop or even frustrate a larger one. This needs to be fixed, and I hope it will be.

Making spawn rooms invulnerable sucks. Take out those shields, make the tubes destructible, and let the carnage commence as it did of old. (That is *not* how you help the defenders. You help them by adding stuff to defend. Like, you know, walls and occasional choke points and stuff.) There are few things that produce more adrenaline than trying to shove an encroaching enemy frantically away from your tubes... and few things more gratifying than finally forcing your way in and gunning the enemy in his.

Optimization has come a long way even in the past two weeks. Day by day, in every way, we are getting better and better.

I remain cautiously optimistic, but we have a long we to go before we recreate the feeling of solidarity and brotherhood that made Planetside an experience to be treasured, not merely a time sink.