Planetside 2, off-planet

[Femtobyte]

There are other ways we could address this, to cut down on people being that lone-man floating in space -- which don't involve suiciding to the nearest spawn-point. I'm going to start with the terrain limitations, and then go over a couple of gameplay mechanics that are a possibility.

Terrain based limitations:
Option 1: We could go with moon-based game-play. Basically this is what I feel is most likely to come to PS2 given the relative ease with which the devs could implement it. In moon based game-play, what we have is essentially the same as the ground continents, different units, different sky-domes, different cappable structures, and obviously some different terrain. But in the end, it would be basically the same as fighting on Indar, or any other ground continent, except you can look up, and see Auraxis.
Option 2: Asteroid belt type game-play, bases, and hexes are made up of various free-floating chunks of debris, some massive (main-bases) and others smaller (tower sized). I would love it if they were able to be walked around, in a sort of Super Mario Galaxy way (only game I could think of that does its gravity in this way). Think like the Hallelujah mountains in Avatar for about the size and distance from each other, that I think these things should be. Infantry could be stuck on these, unless they were able to go across on some bridge type thing, or maybe have a deployable zip-line to eliminate choke points. For me this type of game-play is sort of the holy Grail of space based warfare. Infantry and Space-vehicles could/would have all sorts of ways to interact in the same place. The large outfit specific ships would be able to maneuver in and out, being useful to the outfit as an extra staging point their enemies don't have. But at the same time they would have to be very careful with their big fancy ships, crashing into one of these asteroids would mean damaging their precious ship. And given the intrinsically 3-dimensional strategies that opposing empires would use, it would be very easy to become trapped in some sort of clever ambush.
Option 3: Massive Starbase / Orbital Station. This is, of all of the potential map-types I can think of, one of the most difficult for me to decide if I like it or not. On the one hand, the strategics involved in say, capturing that nano-respawn control generator, so that your troops can respawn 1 second faster than the enemies troops down on Indar (or whatever continent) would be really interesting. It would also be fairly easy for SOE to implement, as down is still down, and there is no real reason to mess with the physics engines. It would also allow for the Outfit specific ships to really come into play, outside the main starbase, But, there would be no real cross-over here. Ships would shoot down other ships, and maybe shoot down the starbases turrets if other players were controlling them or whatever. But the lack of really Airborne vs Infantry play would make this quite un-planetsidey... at least to me.

Game-play Mechanics
Option 1: A simple jetpack and an O2 tank: It could be just like being an infantry on the continent and hoofing across the continent. You can do it, if you want, it will just take you a long time. In order to stop people from just being an infiltrator and hiding somewhere just floating for hours and picking people off, I suggest like a 2 minute (open to suggestions/certs/inprovements) O2 tank, you can get where you are going with no real problems, and as soon as you are on land, your nanites begin cannibalizing the ground to replenish your store of O2.
Option 2: Nanite Sytems to the rescue: you could also have some sort of distress signal that would go out, and a Nanite Systems automaton would come and pick you up, then take you to the nearest friendly hex. I haven't completely thought this one out, but I'm sure something like this could be implemented. Possibly it could cost resources and be destroyable by any enemy that happened to spot it meandering back to your hex.

Anyways, this post is getting quite lengthy and that is where I will end it.