News: Jimmy Whisenhunt Joins PlanetSide 2 Team

[Vancha]

Originally Posted by AThreatToYou

PlanetSide needs DISTINCT gun sounds, not REALISTIC. I should be able to easily distinguish all weapons from one another when they are being fired. It was like this in PS1 and it was extremely important to combat awareness. Everything from the Cycler, to the Gauss Rifle, to the AMP and Punisher had very unique firing sounds that made it very easy to figure out what someone was using without looking at them.

Absolutely. We need to be careful not to conflate good sound quality and good-sounding weapons (which translates to them feeling better), with "realistic".

[Zekeen]

It's always a hoot watching the community grab torches and throw stones at any new entity that enters the world of their game.

I personally think any diversity of the team has got to enhance it. Haven't watched any of his videos, but I can tell the fellow has a head on his shoulders. It's going to be interesting to see what sort of improvements he will suggest for the vehicles, seeing as e-sport style games are almost completely infantry based.

[Zar]

Originally Posted by Crazyduckling

Its good to get an outside perspective of the game.

Not a huge CS fan, but its fine by me to have more people looking at the game.

all for outside perspective right up to the point where they try and turn ps2 into another *modern shooter*. then i really don't care what they have to say they have like 15 games in that horrid class of game's. planetside can and hopefully will be a new breed... well old but revamped and better model that will show its true color's in coming year's. i want game's to become planetside clone's i want to get away from the horrid cod lawl fest that i have seen the last few year's and sorry /end rant

[Bags]

How will a CS caster make PS2 more like a modern shooter...?

[bigcracker]

Originally Posted by whisenhunt

Hi!

I did play Quake III competitively but ended up sticking with CS over the years, I still play quake live to this day.

I played TFC before steam was released also, TF2 is just goofy fun with friends of mine that play it quite a bit.

Feel free to listen to my podcasts that include my feelings about FPS gamestyles and models =D

I might have to do a PlanetSide AMA on reddit to go through a lot of these questions and stuff.

Congrats on being able to work on planetside 2 whisenhunt, and if some of them podcasts are about Ps2 i will watch also the biggest question..... Which faction do you support?

[Pella]

Best thing that has happens to PS2. Someone with a awesome track record of FPSs. Hopefully now he will be driving the E-sports side of it for PS2.

[Doctorcool]

What everyone fails to remember is none of us run a gaming company or work as a hiring manager. Do i agree with it? Yes and no but what right do we have to say no.

Also just a recommendation to you whisenhunt, Download and play Planetside before you do any work on ps2 (This is if you haven't already or are a vet, i honestly don't know.)

[Satexios]

Shame he played Counter Strike, everyone knows that Tactical Ops was the game to play before Atari raped it.

Welcome to the community and wish you the best of luck during these beta times at SoE.

[MrSmegz]

Any FPS guys looking at this game and giving them feedback is a good thing. I wouldn't be surprised if SOE had a few more competetive FPS'ers look at the game as well, have a good round-table before the public's gets its hands on it. To SOE this is a HUGE thing to get right and worth spending a few thousand dollars on to get guys like these in on, even though I don't care to much for the FPS experience. They can all feel the "wrong recoil" from my Liberator's cannon as far as I'm concerned. Yes I am a self proclaimed vehicle whore.

I would also like to see SOE hire some white-hat BF3 hackers to hack this game in beta for every possible exploit they can find or think of. Another few thousand dollars well spent IMO.

[Kyros]

I played counterstrike some years ago. I HATED how the weapons felt. They felt clunky and non-fluid and just really uncomfortable to handle. I really hope the planetside weapons don't fall in step. I would prefer someone with a background in battlefield 3 or arma. This is all personal opinion though and I could simply be overreacting.

[GuyFawkes]

Originally Posted by Pella

Best thing that has happens to PS2. Someone with a awesome track record of FPSs. Hopefully now he will be driving the E-sports side of it for PS2.

+1

for all the chicken littles out there :

The game developers want PS2 to be a great game.

They've put so much into the focus for first time players ; the mission system , they've added classes to reduce confusion , a simplified resource system.

They are advertising the game , really great interaction with the community. Something that never barely happened first time around.

They've built from the ground up new engine in forgelight ,specifically to have the means to adjust /balance/ track almost everything in the game in real time. Allowing fans to access info to create all the background stuff for websites.

Its FTP! One of the biggest drawbacks in 2003 was persuading people to pay a sub to play a fps. That barrier is gone! Forever. It's a dying formula , no more buying the next big thing for £40, adding a sub to find out within 2 months that its just a generic clone of another generic clone.

You can see they are doing everything to make the game accessible to as many people as possible. They have a never ending cert and specialization angle to character development to hopefully keep people interested.

But, as you can see if you watch Jimmy's videos posted here. For a game to be popular and still feel worth playing years after release, you have to set the benchmark really,really high skillwise. And thats where the sheer genius of adding him to the dev team comes in.

Whether you are into e-sports or whatever is not the debate. It's the point of having to push your character and yourself to its extremes to be competitive. Thats why the likes of Starcraft2 the devs change the classes slightly to make people change tactics and counter other new ones. Doing A/B/C one day may work, but your enemy will adapt and counter so you need to react accordingly. Planetside is an eternal war and people will try new stuff.

If you constantly lower the bar to facilitate the masses, people don't improve, the game stagnates and there's no incentive to remain. It happened in ps1. So many good players were gone within its first year or 2. Many who tried everything, created styles and methods within the game. Poor decisions were made and drove them away. The skeletons of what made the game great still linger on life support today. Facilitate for the masses only and you end up with the reverse. You need both.

[Canaris]

Originally Posted by whisenhunt

I couldn't agree with your large capital letters any more, I may even make them a bit bigger... and red even!

Does that last part mean you favour a certain Republic over some rebels and a bunch of crasy technophiles? Cos if it does....... AWESOME!
Welcome to the war Mr Whisenhunt

[Madfish]

Originally Posted by Virulence

CS is the most played FPS in the history of ever. It's significant.

Given that game development is such an iterative process, you NEED a diverse team with experience in numerous facets of the genre.

I don't know that Planetside 2 will provide a good format for an e-sport given the nature of the game, but having competitive-quality gameplay - that is, having extremely high quality moment-to-moment gameplay, weapon feel and balance, and team play - will only make the game that much better.

This is only a good thing, I think.

I agree. Hiring everyone from the PS1 community would make a small niche community. PS2 is for the big time. In addition, don't forget CS is a massive team game, with great tactics and gun play. I know I still play it at lan parties myself.

[Hermes]

Welcome on board sir.

It's good to see the team expanding. This is always a positive sign, and I'm sure is going to help with the influx of data coming in from beta.


I'm not going to comment on some of the reactions here to this news, other than to say that it made me laugh in bits.

[That one noob]

Originally Posted by Reefpirate

Yes... Because we all know the most important thing about the PS2 guns is their audio.

In all honesty, I would like the Magshot to sound like what its called and what it looks like, ie a big fucking sidearm.