News: MMORPG.com Interview with Matt Higby

[Kouza]

Ant is going to be kind of obsolete.. The whole purpose of the Ant was to accent the stale mate breaker (NTU SILOS).

Now stalemates will be broken by the need to defend other land. Since it is territory based and not lattice based, you can simply capture around strong holds... Eventually you will hit a sweet tooth that needs defending more then the strong hold.

[Kouza]

THAT BEING SAID... Now we are missing a vehicle.. We were promised the same amount of vehicles at PS2 Release as PS1 Release :o

[CutterJohn]

ANT drops to refuel a contested base = awesome
ANTs running around to refuel bases after a fight was over = boring maintenance.

So hopefully they will reintroduce the first aspect of ANT gameplay, and just make things recharge on their own so that maintenance is unnecessary.

[Shogun]

pretty much this!

in ps1 it would have been better if ntu would only have drained during yellow or red alerts but refill slowly when there is no alert.
since we don´t know much about the new ressource systems, we cannot give good ideas for ps2, yet.

[Xyntech]

Originally Posted by CutterJohn

ANT drops to refuel a contested base = awesome
ANTs running around to refuel bases after a fight was over = boring maintenance.

So hopefully they will reintroduce the first aspect of ANT gameplay, and just make things recharge on their own so that maintenance is unnecessary.

Sounds like the kind of thinking the dev team has been using. Cut out some of the unnecessary, tedious stuff, while encouraging "Planetside moments."

If they don't have a system like this at launch, hopefully they add it afterwards. They added stuff like LLU's after launch in PS1, so I could see them working it in.

I'd love to see them bring back all of those awesome moments and come up with some new ones on top of it.

[Coreldan]

An ANT just for ANT drops sounds a bit waste.

What could be a perhaps easier to implement way to basically do the mid-fight ANT drops without having to make it into it's own vehicle, if the "boring maintenance" part is gone. Perhaps one of the existing vehicles?

[Trolltaxi]

Call NTU ammo crates and call the ANT "Ammunition and Nanite(?) Transport" and you have the support veichle that keeps rolling to the front and back.

If the frontline needs any means of supply, this veichle would mean the difference between victory and defeat. It would be an important job, escorting and defending it would be first priority. It could even be a stalemate-breaker. The team able to ambush and destroy the enemy supply line could easily overcome on the front.

No boring maintanence, only adrenaline-filled battlefield logistics. Quartermaster Jake Duffy would be so happy with that!

[Raka Maru]

After several hours of grueling battle, the ant maintenance was something to look forward to if you didn't want to jump straight to the next continent.

[Xyntech]

Originally Posted by Raka Maru

After several hours of grueling battle, the ant maintenance was something to look forward to if you didn't want to jump straight to the next continent.

Maybe they'll throw some of that crowd a bone and offer some nice, low impact activities that can help your empire, but aren't essential to the core gameplay.

I like the idea of cutting out any mandatory tedium, but I also want the game to cater to as broad an audience as possible without destroying the games focus, especially when that includes catering to PS1 players of every sort possible.