I don't think the game is in as much trouble as people make it out to be, and for entirely different reasons.
Any high profile free to play launch will see a big swell of players early on, but as they figure out whether or not your game is for them some of them will leave.
The new patch will fix a lot of what's broken about infantry, because the biggest problem with infantry is honestly just that playing in a way that kills as much infantry as possible currently is better than anything else you can do, and that leads to situations where way too many players completely eschew anti-vehicle roles and instead pull more stuff that kills infantry. When vehicles become a ton more profitable to kill I think that will change.
There are a few other things with this game that are dragging it down.
The Metagame isn't really complex enough to have the depth of PS1, so it's kind of losing a lot of the hardcore crowd that really thrive on tasks that are impossible without high end coordination. We'll see that fixed soon enough.
The casual game could be enhanced with a daily XP bonus to bring people in more often. PS2 has a bit of a problem with that, since it rewards you the same whether you play for 6 hours straight or just hop on for half an hour. I think it it gave you a bonus for hopping online for a bit every day it would keep the player numbers a lot higher.
The progression system isn't really quite there yet. I have never had that feeling in Planetside 2 that I just have to grind for something that I wanted and put the time in to really work for it, which you get with a lot of MMOs. The Bonuses are not that impressive, and you can't unlock anything that really makes your character stand out. This is also something I think will improve in the future. Imagine something like an advanced vehicle you can access once you reach 100% unlocks in a basic vehicle. The advanced vehicle wouldn't have to be a lot better, maybe a 10% upgrade across the board and an awesome looking model that makes everyone go "Woah, this guy is serious about ____" Things like that would keep people around longer. People want something to work toward.
Those are things that I see will bring the biggest increase in players. The gameplay for Planetside 2 is pretty damn good, and the balance will get there in time. The biggest balance factor that was completely out of whack was XP distribution and population imbalance and this patch is already adressing those two - even if that doesn't work, it means the Devs are completely aware of those issues and will see them fixed in time.
|
2013-01-11, 04:34 PM
Linear Mode
