Planetside Beta Analysed As Release Approaches

An anonymous reader writes "Another Planetside preview can be found over at Dailygame.net. It discusses the scale of the game, and what you can expect from the overall playing experience." The official Planetside site, courtesy Sony, has much more info on this PC MMO shooter title as release (on May 19th) rapidly approaches, and about 30,000 beta testers continue to stress test the game, which is another in a multitude of massively multiplayer titles vying for your money.

Comments

Sounds great

[Asgard]

If they can create a game that truly handles large-scale FPS battles, I am going to join up! Unfortunately I suspect that there will be significant lag issues, plus perhaps the WW2 Online issues with only a small subset of players being visible at once, causing 'invisible killer issues'. It'll be great if it succeeds though.

Re:Sounds great

[disc-chord]

As long as you have a beefy system (People with 1GB Ram need not apply) you will be very pleasantly surprised. The server clusters handle like a dream for the most part and it's always non-stop action. Almost every night I find myself deep in a battle of 50+ vs 50+ vs 50+. You might think that this would promote chaotic and completely spastic combat, but this is only true of people with little-to-no FPS experience. If you know what you're doing you can stay alive, at least long enough to take out a dozen of the spastic guys. And if your squad has good leadership you'll have already secured a near-by place to spawn up in when you die.

I've been playing since early exclusive beta and have seen this only get better. Unlike every other MMOG that's come through the pipes this one is actually stable (both client and server) in beta!

You won't have any WW2 Online-like problems, but that doesn't mean there won't be invisible killers ;) There's a certification that allows you to train in using a Infiltrator suit. You become nearly invisible like the predator while running, and completely invisible while standing still. (This can be countered with an implant that allows you to see cloaked enemies). Fortunatly the Infiltrator provides no armor protection so if you stay alert and keep your eyes peeled you should be able to kill these guys without much problem.

Staying alert seems to be the biggest learning curve for players, though the beta is heavily populated with EQers who are too busy trying to "Hail!" each other and cyb0r some elf. I suspect as a more diverse player base comes in at retail fewer people will be falling victim to Infiltrators.

Not quite that many (simultaneous) testers

[YodaToad]

I'm participating in the beta right now and from what I've seen there's nowhere near 30,000 people stress testing the system. There may be 30,000 people included in the beta, but there haven't been that many people playing. Most I've seen is around 3,500 on the "main" beta world and around 2,000 on the other two. Even so, it's still a blast to play and you can bet I'll be playing when it's released later this month. I can't wait to see what kind of battles break out when there's multitudes more people in the worlds.

Tribes with more depth...

[Wheaty18]

I am also participating in the PlanetSide beta. It is very much like Tribes in many ways, with the addition of a semi-deep character development system (something you'd expect out of any pay-to-play game). While it can be quite entertaining at times, I don't think I'll subscribe once it goes retail. I can get just as much enjoyment out of Tribes/2 as I can PlanetSide.

release already?

[nekoes]

I'm participating in beta, and while it is rather fun, it still has that whole "This is a massively multiplayer game, so that makes it fun!" type of feeling. But really, I still can't believe they are releasing it so soon. Unless they aren't giving us the full version, they are going to be releasing a half product to the public. There are still a lot of bugs in the interface and the game itself. The voice chat is really spotty and crashes the clients that use it, the game refuses to save configs, and whatever else. It's really fun, but I don't think I'd pay for the product if it's anything like the beta clients are like right now.