The reason why PS2 is shallow is not metagame.

[Rothnang]

Lack of Metagame is not the reason why the PS2 experience is shallow. People keep throwing "metagame" around as though it's somehow the magic bullet to everything that makes this game boring, but there is a giant Elephant in the room that nobody ever looks at, and that elephant is infinite respawning infantry.

Yea, half of you are already starting to type flame posts at this point, because if anyone insults the glorious infantry playing master race they are obviously just a vehile noob, but to those of you actually interested in hearing a fresh point of view, I'll try to explain:

Infantry fights in Planetside 2 are incredibly dumbed down to the point where I simply cannot enjoy them. The spawn mechanic and how completely meaningless it makes death is the single biggest reason for that, and by extension, the reason why Planetside 2 lacks depth in general.


Planetside 2 is supposed to simulate a vast and wide open battlefield, however, when you play infantry you never ever get a taste of that. The need to hitch a ride on a transport vehicle for all practical purposes is non-existent in PS2 currently. The only reason why people do it is because it's satisfying to act like combined arms means something for a minute here or there.

You can get to a battle by hitting instant action. If you don't have instant action available you can just redeploy and spawn hop your way to the front that way faster than any vehicle could ever move, and without ever leaving the safety of the spawn room. Even if you've just taken a base and you missed the Sunderer driving to the next one, all you need to do is redeploy and wait for the Sunderer to set up in the next base over, and voila, instant teleport into the fray.

This by itself just utterly shits on one of the biggest tactical aspects this game should have, because getting your guys to the front isn't a logistical challenge in PS2. They don't need help from vehicles getting around on the map. They never even need to set foot in the open areas outside of bases to go to every single place that matters in PS2. Why even bother with having a huge gigantic world if, at the root of it, the only unit that moves through it with purpose is the Sunderer, because that's the one single unit that has to actually move through the world to expand your spawn-network.


Medics are also marginalized to the point of being only a minor convenience, not the backbone of a successful assault by the spawn system. Infantry in theory is the only unit in the game that can stay in the field for an infinite amount of time. A squad with members of all classes is entirely self sufficient, and can accomplish pretty much any task set before it.

The reality is however, this game doesn't reward people for playing in a tight knit squad like that, it rewards people for rolling a Sunderer up to the enemy base, and doing a banzai charge, hoping that the base flips before the Sunderer gets blown up by a landmine suicide bomber who also doesn't really care about medics.


These two things alone make the game more shallow all by themselves already, but the really big thing that ultimately robs PS2 of depth is the fact that killing people simply doesn't matter.

A few months ago removing K/D from being one of the key stats in the game was a big thing that people kept talking about. "Everyone who worries about K/D is just stupid and doesn't get the game" seemed to be the sentiment of the day. My quesion is: Why does someone who worries about K/D not get the game? The answer is pretty simple: If Death doesn't matter, then neither Kills nor Deaths matter. Killing huge numbers of your enemies isn't something that meaningfully contributes to the fight.

The thing is, in a game where getting killed is a bad thing, and killing the enemy hurts them in some way K/D is not a meaningless measure that only stat whores care about. But that's not the kind of game Planetside 2 is currently. You can't win a battle in Planetside 2 by adopting a strategy that yields a particularly high K/D, because since neither you nor the enemy stay dead there is no such thing as attrition. You can't beset an enemy base with a small team of snipers and just pick off defenders until they are weakened to the point where you can move in and take them out for example. As a result there is no need for anyone to ever devise a counter-strategy to such an attack, and no need to devise a counter to the counter and so on. The only strategy that ever matters is "How can I get so many people into this base that they overwhelm the defenders, lock them in the spawn room, and can hold out like that till the point flips. Since that's the only strategy that works, there is no room in the game for clever thinking or the unexpected.


This is really ultimately the reason why this game lacks depth. 90% of all mechanics in Planetside 2 deal with the killing of people. Most of the functional skills that the players need to develop deal with the killing of people. The vast majority of group strategies that squads can employ deal with the killing of people. Yet the one thing that makes absolutely not a squirt of shit of difference in the grand scheme of things... is killing people.

Metagame would be nice to have, but in all honesty, it's the minute to minute ground pounding in this game that falls flat, because it's not your mastery of life and death that decide your fate in a world where death has no teeth.