What is the most important part of Planetside?

[Tikuto]

United with one goal.

[Raymac]

Originally Posted by NapalmEnima

1: SCALE. Hands down.

2/3 combined arms/teamwork. To acutally combine the "combine arms" requires teamwork, but you can have teamwork with just infantry (or just air), and you can have air/ground/infantry with not particular coordination.

PS gives the unique opportunity to have combined arms at a huge scale.


People can and do have a good time "soloing with the zerg", as infantry, air or ground. But I think they're missing out on what makes PS truely great.

As long as PS2 gives us an updated taste of that epic gameplay, I think they'll do just fine.

^This IMHO is the most important.

[NapalmEnima]

Originally Posted by Tikuto

United with one goal.

Errr... "Blow up the other two empires"?

[Graywolves]

The conquest is the most important part to me, as with the scale and persistent battlefield.


I love fighting to take bases/territory against/with other players.

[Rbstr]

Scale and persistence.

It's the only real differentiator from any other FPS title. You can find everything else to suit your tastes in the plethora of other sci-fi shooters.

[Xyntech]

Based on the responses in this thread, here's a simplified list of what seems to be most important to various players:

- Scale/Persistence

- Teamplay/Combined Arms

- Empire Diversity

- Extensive Support Roles

- Planetside 1 Style Game Mechanics

- Rock-Paper-Scissors Ballance

I'm not sure if I can add a poll to the thread after the fact. Maybe a mod could help me out. Also, is there any option on these forums to give multiple answers to a poll? That could be useful here.

[NapalmEnima]

Originally Posted by Xyntech

- Planetside 1 Style Game Mechanics

You're going to have to be far more specific on that one. 1+1 = 3? grid inventories? No classes/just gear certs?

[Talek Krell]

Originally Posted by NapalmEnima

You're going to have to be far more specific on that one. 1+1 = 3? grid inventories? No classes/just gear certs?

Don't forget "Greets!".

[Xyntech]

Originally Posted by NapalmEnima

You're going to have to be far more specific on that one. 1+1 = 3? grid inventories? No classes/just gear certs?

I'm open to suggestion for how to abbreviate it. Pretty much something like this, only in the form of a short poll length option:

Originally Posted by BorisBlade

My fave parts of PS, the gameplay aspects. I'll play 64 man PS over 1000 man battlefield anyday. Epic scale is nice, but if the gameplay is just the standard bf/cod stuff then i could care less about the game.

The vehicles were my fave part, and were a huge step over any other game. The awesome teamwork and the feel that its an actual vehicle, not just a buff like BF style veh's are, really added a entirely different feel. Much more of an epic and community/social based playstyle. Some great stories come from my zillion hours driving. Its sad to see that great idea PS1 pioneered scrapped and them taking a step back with the BF style stuff, hopefully thats changed.

The much more tactical TTK times were second on my list, aka you dont instantly die, you can take a few hits then react and have an interesting fight. Its much more tactical feeling than just runnin along, instantly dieing never seeing what hit you, and respawning, adnauseum. (yes the netcode and often exaggerated CoF made it too long in ps1, but it still needs to be much longer than BF.) This may work out ok tho, atleast im tellin myself that =D. Having played BF3 beta and its god awful MW ttk (lost interest in the game completely now), im very glad ps2 wasnt ruined by goin that route too.

The epic size fights were cool, but just as important was the terrain. Huge open areas with so much variety. No more boring coridor maps, no more repeating the same tired little bitty map in a deathmatch. Lots of new and interesting stuff all the time.

And finally the customization, i dont mean gettin too crazy with it like PS2 does which can actually limit variety in that you can customize one vehicle to do a bazillion roles so that you dont need but a very few of them. But i mean seeing all the differnt vehicles and various specs, yes it got outta hand with too many certs, anything past br20 just was too many certs. It was a good system that needed some tweaks and more options to focus down trees to keep people more specialized. The new system isnt too bad in that regard other than the aforementioned issue and the fact that with no cap on certs you can eventually get everything, so just a simple class change at spawn/terminal means you can do anything at all. Kinda half specialization and half br 40. The attactments and version choices and even weapon choices tho could help with customizing too. In other words, I cant really say yay or nay on this til i see it in action and get all the details.

In other words, people who like the gameplay mechanics themselves more than they like the gigantic scale combat. I wonder if there is any chance of PS1 being kept open for people like this? Because I am hoping Planetside 2 is pretty different than the first Planetside in quite a few gameplay aspects and it may even be different in a few ways that I don't want, but I could care less as long as it is still balanced, fun and most importantly has THOUSANDS upon THOUSANDS of players as the rule, not the exception.

how about summing it up this way:

- Gameplay that's exactly the same as the first Planetside

The "don't change anything but the graphics and the netcode" demographic.

[NapalmEnima]

Originally Posted by Xyntech

The "don't change anything but the graphics and the netcode" demographic.

So PS1 is a shining gem of perfection? Anything deviating from that formula will only makes it worse?

Wow.

Okay, how about "A larger population"? Can we at least agree on that?

To attract them, it might help to tweak things here and there. And lets improve on this over here... but if we do that, then we should do this... and so on and so on.

And now you've gone from "Planetside Next" to "Planetside 2".

Imagine that.

I suspect that's pretty much a nutshell around the PS:N to PS:2 evolution.

[Xyntech]

Originally Posted by NapalmEnima

So PS1 is a shining gem of perfection? Anything deviating from that formula will only makes it worse?

Wow.

Okay, how about "A larger population"? Can we at least agree on that?

To attract them, it might help to tweak things here and there. And lets improve on this over here... but if we do that, then we should do this... and so on and so on.

And now you've gone from "Planetside Next" to "Planetside 2".

Imagine that.

I suspect that's pretty much a nutshell around the PS:N to PS:2 evolution.

That's you and me. I just wanted to see what the numbers looked like.

I feel like if most of us can agree on certain core concepts being paramount, that a lot of the debates could be kept more civil and level headed.

So far, just from the written answers, it looks like scale is the most frequent answer with teamplay being an extremely close second.

This actually isn't very surprising, considering that many of the debates on things such as tanks has been centered around people who think things like soloable tanks will destroy teamwork and dumb down the game, versus people who think they will help attract new players and wont dumb down the game.

[Helwyr]

Large scale combined arms relying on player skill (FPS) in factional warfare set in a persistent future world.

Regarding team play since I didn't mention it. This too often means grouped play in peoples minds, which I do not agree that every player needs to participate in. The essential part is in the team work of all working towards the goals of your Empire/faction whether grouped with other players or not.

edit: just to clarify... before I get misunderstood. I do think certain vehicles should require multiple players, my comments on team play aren't advocating making everything possible solo.

[Xyntech]

Originally Posted by Helwyr

edit: just to clarify... before I get misunderstood. I do think certain vehicles should require multiple players, my comments on team play aren't advocating making everything possible solo.

I hope nobody takes this thread to be suggesting that a huge population be the only thing that matters. I just noted that in some threads, the opinions seemed so diametrically opposed that I wanted to make sure that we all wanted some of the same things first and foremost.

Obviously some people will never be happy with PS2 and there is nothing that can be done about that. For the rest of us, hopefully we can vocally contribute to the development of the game to help make it the biggest, deepest, most bad ass team oriented FPS in history.

[Raymac]

Originally Posted by Xyntech

I hope nobody takes this thread to be suggesting that a huge population be the only thing that matters.

True. I think PS1 is an excellent reminder that although the scale is what makes it unique, that alone will not make it a success.

[Malorn]

IMO it is the persistent world that is the most important. Every other shooter other than WWII online has instanced maps that repeat ad infinitum. Planetside has a persistent world and you can go anywhere, do anything, and the turf you fight for is yours until someone takes it back.

Teamplay is a close second, but good teamplay is not unique to Planetside, while the persistent world is. I would argue even the "massive" numbers of people are not as important as the persistent world, since 32v32 can seem quite "massive" in a fast paced shooter in a confined map area. When you factor in respawn time and re-acquring vehicles many PS engagements were about that size. But knowing that your conquests are permanent and not something that resets at the buzzer and that the world you are in is entirely conquerable and explorable is truly "massive" in my mind.