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.

[OutlawDr]

The topic you are trying to see does not exist.

Thats what the page says

[rTekku]

Topic does not exist?

[sameer]

Why not just copy paste here?

[GreatMazinkaise]

- The game looks amazing, runs smooth and plays like any other shooter.

This sentence is the complete opposite of helpful... but the response I got later was...

[cryosin]

Originally Posted by GreatMazinkaise

This sentence is the complete opposite of helpful...

Like "on-par", play just like they do in terms of quality.

This post wasn't suppose to be helpful really. I wasn't doing QA testing for the dev team over there. I got to play 30 minute snippets, that would be a different experience if I was actually QA testing and they wanted feedback.

I came to meet the dev's and enjoy the game, and this is my write up of that experience. If you have any questions I'll be happy to answer them.

[Xyntech]

Sounds pretty good.

With the tech test now being live, and intended to run about two weeks give or take, did you see Heavy Assault weapons in game yet?

[DarkChiron]

Originally Posted by Xyntech

Sounds pretty good.

With the tech test now being live, and intended to run about two weeks give or take, did you see Heavy Assault weapons in game yet?

HA weapons were not in the game for the event.

[Xyntech]

HA weapons confirmed for vapor(hard)ware.

[GreatMazinkaise]

Originally Posted by cryosin

Like "on-par", play just like they do in terms of quality.

This post wasn't suppose to be helpful really. I wasn't doing QA testing for the dev team over there. I got to play 30 minute snippets, that would be a different experience if I was actually QA testing and they wanted feedback.

I came to meet the dev's and enjoy the game, and this is my write up of that experience. If you have any questions I'll be happy to answer them.

Fair enough... I'd just like to know how it felt. Are we looking at fluid, quick movement and aiming or gluey and unwieldy like Bad Company 2?

[Kran De Loy]

Yeah the community event on Friday ran on a sort of a older gutted version. Smedley said it was about 5 days old by the time we got to it. A lot of the customization was taken out. Like the certs weren't available it looked like, (we only got 30 minutes to play so I didn't bother even trying to look into it, a mistake in hindsight for me ). There was variety of different choices of scopes and a few weapon mounted attachments, but there was only one primary weapon, one secondary, one class specific tool, etc... Same with the vehicles.

All in all the Community Event on Friday was more of, "come play PS2 at SOE and Meet the Devs!" than it was any kind of demo or test build to be able to pick apart and analyze.

Was still lots of fun and glad I could thank (I think I thanked him for it) Higby in person for dealing with a problem with my PCGamer mags when I mailed them to get signed.

Edit: Also the game was only with about 30-50 when I played (30+anydevs that may have tried sneaking in). So everything was super chaos, so no where was ever 'secured'.

I can't wait to get into the game again ><

Originally Posted by GreatMazinkaise

Fair enough... I'd just like to know how it felt. Are we looking at fluid, quick movement and aiming or gluey and unwieldy like Bad Company 2?

I'd say fluid, but I'm no connoisseur of FPS's...
Game didn't feel unwieldy at all. Well except for the aircraft. God those were a pain to control.

Edit:

Aw, saw what you wrote in the ADS thread:

Originally Posted by GreatMazinkaise

That ship has already sailed (though I'm not incredibly convinced that the devs know what they're doing; they seem to be terrible at playing their own game). The key thing in the end is getting a balance of ADS/non-ADS shooting and movement that feels natural instead of forced. It has been done well in some games... others, not so much...

Yeah the distance between being able to go without ADS seemed short to be honest. However it was entirely possible to go without ADS with most weapons up to I would guess about 30-40 feet. At about 50ft I was wasting about 20-30% of AR bullets on empty air instead of hitting the target. Using better controlled bursts would up that effective distance up by 20 feet, maybe 40 I would guess. I'm not a terribly effective player. ADS however was fluid to get into and out of and it was much more precise.

[RadarX]

We are glad you guys had a good time! The turnout was significantly higher than we expected. It was one of the best events Ive had the privilege of planning and participating in.

[fb III IX ca IV]

Do you know what graphics card was in those Alienwares?

[Furber]

Originally Posted by GreatMazinkaise

This sentence is the complete opposite of helpful...

The irony...

[cryosin]

Originally Posted by RadarX

We are glad you guys had a good time! The turnout was significantly higher than we expected. It was one of the best events Ive had the privilege of planning and participating in.

Radar I didn't get to meet you!

We all had a blast thanks a lot for hosting the event.

Originally Posted by GreatMazinkaise

Fair enough... I'd just like to know how it felt. Are we looking at fluid, quick movement and aiming or gluey and unwieldy like Bad Company 2?

It was very fluid. You could run around, quick scope then un-scope and run around the other direction all very easily and quickly.