News: Beta Status/What's Coming

Geist · 2012-09-11, 02:01 PM

http://forums.station.sony.com/ps2/i...-coming.17498/

Hello everyone,

First off a big thank you to everyone that purchased Alpha Squad. We sincerely appreciate your support. As a happy surprise we are going to be emailing everyone that purchased Alpha Squad an extra beta invite in the coming days.

A bunch of stuff is coming in the next few weeks. Our goal is to have all certs in the game in the next few weeks. It's a lot of work and we may not make it but that's our goal. you can expect big changes to the gun balance in the game and a lot of changes related to spawning behavior that Matt put up in his other post.

Matt and his team are also considering adding base ownership benefits and discussing the third rail "continent locking" issue in more detail. I want to be very clear that we are listening very, very closely to what you are saying. Those spawning changes (Sunderer, Galaxy, Maxes) are the direct result of us listening to what everyone (and I do mean all viewpoints here) has been saying and carefully considering how we think they will impact game balance.
I make no promises here about what our designers are going to come up with.. just that the conversations are happening. Please be patient. you can see we're working super hard to deliver a really fun game. We're also playing the heck out of it ourselves and we see and feel what you see and feel.

We also are working hard on Esamir. It's getting closer and closer to a finished state where we want you guys to play on it. It's pretty awesome and very different gameplay wise than Indar. After that Amerish will go back to being worked on. These continents are taking longer than we expected and it's possible we end up launching with two and delivering the 3rd shortly after launch. We're working super hard but we have some resource bottlenecks. We also are going to see how the game plays with two continents before making any final decisions, so please do us a favor and don't judge any of this before you play the game with two. Too many people knee jerk react to things. There's no point. Just wait till Esamir is live and let's all see how it goes. We are showing with Planetside 2 a strong dedication to launching this game when it's ready, and not before. But that also means we need you as our playerbase to understand that this is like riding a wave that we have an idea where it's going but aren't precisely sure. Actually, that's kind of fun to tell you the truth. We've been seeing gameplay you guys are coming up with that we sure are having fun watching and being a part of.

Performance is another big thing we continue to work hard on. As I've said many times this is an ongoing fight. The single biggest issue remains CPU performance. We have a lot more work to do. We also have work to do on RAM. Right now roughly 75% of our playerbase has 6 Gig of ram or over. The ones that don't feel pain. We get it. We aren't ignoring that and are working hard to reduce that. We know the real problems in performance come in big fights. We are measuring the heck out of it and fighting the good fight. I promise no magic here. It's all hard work and our team is literally working a ton of hours to make this better. I believe this game is always going to have higher spec requirements for a machine to really play well than most other PC games. I want to be up front about that. At some point the size and scale really does cost. But we're getting it better every day and every patch.

Gunplay - expect a lot of changes here in the next patch and beyond. We've seen the average engagement distance is longer than originally anticipated and we are going to more of a recoil model with certs to calm down the recoil. Again.. judge it when you play it. The patch this week will likely have rough spots on recoil mostly because we have work to do on the animations. Please be patient and don't assume it sucks the second it hits the servers. Some stuff will be better, some worse.

Certs / Resources - right now resources don't matter enough. Soon they will matter a lot more. Certs will also be getting their closer to final times. We fully intend for the high end of certs to take weeks but the lower parts to be minutes and hours. Certs are going to matter in this game. Time invested IS going to matter in this game.

That's all for now. I'll be watching this thread and replying as often as time allows.

Thanks

Smed

When they put in Esamir, I don't think I'll ever go back to Indar. <3 Snow.

TestyVenom · 2012-09-11, 02:07 PM

I knew Esamir would be the next one available!

I can't wait to see it.

Frotang · 2012-09-11, 02:08 PM

So if I buy Alpha Squad ill be able to invite my brother to beta? If this is true my money will be thrown at you right away.

Hamma · 2012-09-11, 02:46 PM

Looks like that might be a possibility

KiddParK · 2012-09-11, 03:17 PM

sold.

Exmortius · 2012-09-11, 03:45 PM

thanks smed. glad to see you guys are listening to players about balance. it'll be hard to get it perfect to where everyone likes it but i'm sure your data grabs will show the balance and you will find a happy medium. just make sure AA stays relevant so we aren't getting reaver farmed constantly

can't wait to see some of the other certs and weapons and helping unlock those and get them balanced. mini chaingun is gonna be sweeeeeeeet. i'm sure any negativity is more cause we all want to see this game succeed and rule for a long time. this game has so much potential to crush everything else. i'm also probably going to live on esamir almost non stop cause that and ceryshen were my favorite continents in ps1. i'm sure what you do with it will be bad ass.

Kij · 2012-09-11, 03:53 PM

I'm curious as to whether they will put in different death animations in the future. The slow flail animation can get a little long in the tooth after seeing it so many times like I do.

zzzornbringer · 2012-09-11, 03:57 PM

if anyone of those additional beta keys is free to give away, plz let me know.

or, if soe would offer more cheap alpha squad variants i may even throw my money at them. don't know though if my pc is even able to run this beast properly. really not a fan of framedrops but i think in a game like planetside, with lot's of variables, you cannot fully prevent some frame drops. at least with this generation of hardware.

EVILPIG · 2012-09-11, 04:04 PM

All hail Smedlonious.

Lafen · 2012-09-11, 04:49 PM

what they mean with "continent locking" exactly ?

Mod · 2012-09-11, 05:03 PM

In Planetside 1, it was where one empire would captures all territory on a continent. This would give them a particular benefit globally and stop the other two empires dropping on the continent using drop pods.

Assume the same idea will be applied to Planetside 2 if it is a route they decide to go down, only difference being all three empires would always have a way back on to every continent via their warpgate.

Aaron · 2012-09-11, 05:14 PM

I'm excited for them maybe implementing continent locking. Personally, I believe it gives drive to the fight. It adds a bit of goal to the expansion of your territory. A little bit of "this is where we are going with this."

All of the other changes sound exciting as well!

Thanks, Smed!

Ghost Runner · 2012-09-11, 05:35 PM

Sweet so when I buy my Alpha squad this week I get a bonus key for my wife now I am totally sold yay!! \0/

Hamma · 2012-09-11, 05:42 PM

Great thread by Smed (I'm a poet!) Can't wait to see Esamir.

Morsong · 2012-09-11, 05:43 PM

Loving these updates and how well the devs and smed interact with the community. It really does make a world of difference.