Slashdot Mirror
Game Review: Planetside 2 (video)
In this video (with transcript), we review Planetside 2, a new MMOFPS game from Sony Online Entertainment. The game is a true first-person shooter, using its MMO nature to bring a persistent world into play, with battles sometimes involving hundreds of players, and it does so without trying to shoe-horn in ill-fitting MMORPG tropes like questing, story development, or insurmountable gear disparities. The combat favors relative realism (you won't be rocket jumping around, and nobody gets to be Rambo), but it's mixed with vehicle combat in a way that manages to be entertaining without being unfair. Planetside 2 is free to play, using microtransactions to support itself. It wisely avoids selling gear you can't acquire in-game (aside from cosmetic stuff), and doesn't require purchases to be competitive. Hit the link below to see/read our review.
So what does the rootkit that it installs do?
if I play it?
Planetside 2 is amazing, until you go to upgrade anything and it all costs money, ridiculous amounts of money. Every little upgrade in the entire game has a paid option to it. I really enjoy the game, but im afraid im always going to be low-powered because i refuse to spend real money on a gun for EACH class and vehicle.
Planetside 2 is all we feared would come to pass, a great game shackled with a horrible 'pay for every little piece of functionality' mode. For the record, i have no problem buying TF2 gear because its tradeable, craftable, sellable and confers no true advantage.. Planetside offers none of that, its just a huge money sink.
Good-bye
I thought this game looked pretty good (never played the first one), however I won't be touching it because it's Sony. I wish more gamers would make ethical decisions when purchasing games (no, I don't share the feelings of Stallman, I'm just against a company that spies on you as a reward for being their customer) so that companies would actually be punished for their evil practices.
Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.
The hardest thing about PS2 is getting past the first 15 minutes.
You make a character, pick a faction, then get dropped into battle. Active battle. You have a near 100% chance of dying as soon as you land. Enemy players will be looking for the drop pods and will instantly target and kill you. You then will be shown a map with places you can respawn. If you run outside, you have about an 95% chance of dying instantly.
It is very unforgiving if you are used to playing other MMOs.
Part 2 suffers from the same repetitiveness as part 1. There is very little else to do in this game except shoot, shoot, and more shooting. You also have to deal with veteran players overpowering the map. Walk outside the base and you're guaranteed to get snipped. I'll stick with games like Skyrim, and Mass Effect.
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
Having played Planetside 1 from beta (sill have cd's!) and for a few years after launch, a lot of the people I used to play that with were pretty excited about planetside 2, until we actually got to play it. The summary about it was pretty much this:
Everything you hated about planetside 1? We took it out.
Everything you liked about planetside 1? We dropped most of that too!
Things you thought were missing from Planetside 1? We put some of those in.
This one feels like pretty much a large map rip-off of all the other fps's out on the scene now, and I've taken to calling it Planetfieldfall2: modern agenda.
Graphics are pretty good, maps are still huge, but all the things that would make us get 20-30 people together to storm around and kick some butt together are gone. Thanks for nothing and you won't be getting any cash from me.
01:36AM up 426 days, 2:46, 1 user, load average: 0.14, 0.11, 0.05
I played PS1 a lot and afterwards haven't played another shooter game since (just a couple of xbox sports games), until now. At first I played around a lot without paying anything... now I've spent about US$30 to get a few items that would make my gameplay more enjoyable. I figure, the Dev's need to get paid and that's fine, better than the subscription option IMO, I spent a heck of a lot more on the subscription based model. I may purchase some more station cash the next time they have a double value thing going on (hopefully around the holidays again). I now feel like I need to get a new gaming machine, however, which will cost significantly more than what I may pay the dev's as a "thank you" for bringing back planetside. While it isn't perfect, it's still the most fun game I have played. But I was never into skinning cats on WoW (uh oh, if any of my friends see this post, they'll know who I am...).
From a realism perspective, it sounds like a compare and contrast with Arma (dayz) would have been more productive than compare and contrast with something its really far away from like Quake.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
All of those 'cons' that are listed as problems with MMORPGs, you know, like questing and gear progression, are actually things that people enjoy, as long as they're designed fairly. See GW2 as an excellent example of this.
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
Planetside 1 was already something.
10 years ago you could play with 300 other people on persistent maps far bigger than other FPS of that time.
Now Planetside 2 offers to play up to 2000 players at the same time on the same map (instance). Something I have never seen elsewhere. Even in Eve online (not followed Eve for 2 years though).
Sure you need to be organized with so much people. And the game becomes really interesting when your outfit (guild) can align many people. And when you are organized.
For instance on Miller server (the biggest European server) our French outfit (French Connection) aligns more than 80 players during our Friday night ops. This is real thrill to be part of such massive group. Which is finally only 1/6 of all other Vanu players !
Editor Sony has chosen F2P to monetize the game. And sure they push to have you pay.
But seriously nothing is free in this world and many players choose to spend money as they would with any non F2P other game.
For curious people, here are our films (sorry, in French when we speak). http://frc.planetside.fr/index.php?static3/tv-french-connection
The world belongs to those who get up early. - I'm far from being the king of Earth then
but it would load to 15 percent and then crash. Every time.
Looks cool too. I'm bummed.
I've been around. I have had so many highs like getting a 2600 and playing Space Invaders one Christmas, booting up Lemmings for the first time on my Amiga, beating Kid Icarus on my NES, rescuing the princess in Link to the Past on the SNES, blowing people up in Doom with three other people sitting next to me, slaying Dragons for the first time in Everquest with 50 people, toppling enemy mechs with a few other players in Chromehounds, and now finally being in a squad of soldiers, being led by a platoon leader across an alien world with thousands of other soldiers made up of different outfits that consist of multiple platoons. All tasked with taking specific objectives. Blinding the enemy installations with smoke grenades and turning on your IR vision and sneaking around taking people out. Jumping into a huge flying whale of an airship that can carry over a dozen people. Being flown over a distant enemy base to drop out onto the roof and storming into buildings. Leaping over obstacles and into the air with your jet pack and over 5 enemy guys who dont see you. You look over the ledge and drop a grande onto them racking up the kills. You secure the base. Load up and move to another. All with real voice coms chatting back and forth warning of mines, and enemy armor.
Not only is this one of the best looking games I've ever seen, it can give you one of the most epic war moments you will ever experience at this time. Two dozen troopers running over a hilltop flanked by tanks as your air support swoops down ahead of you to soften up the line. IT IS THAT EPIC.
The free part makes this a no brainer to try at the very least. I would hate to see someone pass by the opportunity. It is one of gamings greats.
No, I don't work for Sony. But I love this game. A lot. Try it! We need you!
It suffers from CPU-related frame rate issues (yes, I'm aware the some pedantics consider lag to be exclusive to latency and bandwidth issues), especially in areas with lots of players. It's basically the Crysis of CPUs. The problem with this, though, is that turning down settings doesn't help, unlike with Crysis. Even with an i7, you are boned if you're used to playing with high frame rates, when there are too many people in one area. Those fights basically come down to who's most used to playing with unreasonable frame rates.
I downloaded it and played it for a bit. However, I won't be playing it again until implement some kinds of caps or optimizations to ensure a minimum performance level.
I've had a ton of fun with this game. The review just scratches the surface, but if you've played any of the Battlefield games multiplayer you will largely understand the basic game. It's just instead of having a small map with 3 or 4 command points, you have 3 huge maps (continents) with dozens of command points.
As the review says, the starting weapons are plenty good, and upgrades upgrade the way you play rather than the damage of the weapon. For example, you can get red dot scopes for short range battles, magnifying scopes for long range battles, or a forward handle to make the bullet spread less.
I spent $10 just to support the developers, and with that bought an anti-air launcher for my heavy. It seemed to discourage the air at least, many times tanks or air will completely dominate a base. I'm not sure whether that's because the air is overpowered, the infantry or bases or underpowered, or the air was just more skilled. Personally I think the base turrets should be upgraded to probably 2x their current damage. Tanks and aircraft should think twice about approaching a base.
I really like the fact that you can't buy anything functional that you can't earn by playing, but I will say the point cost for many items is very high.
Although it's not perfect Planetside 2 is a breath of fresh air and makes me look forward to what's to come in the future.
Steam tells me I've played Planetside 2 for 72 hours. In general, it's a valid review that covers a lot of good points, despite noticing that the reviewer's player was obviously low-level.
Some that I would add however, is:
a) The game does not offer a comfortable intro to the brand-new player, it will probably spawn you into instant death and there are a lot of things to figure out. The flipside is much of the reason for that is depth.
b) It's not so vital to play with actual friends, but rather a good squad. When you join the game look at the squad tab and go through them looking for someone using voice comms and setting waypoints on the map. Provided I do look for one, I will usually find an enjoyable squad and that is despite playing at off-peak hours. Playing without a decent squad is very tiresome, lonesome, has no direction and you'll find yourself wondering what to do. Playing with a good squad is the opposite and the trouble is keeping up!
c) Unless I missed it, he didn't mention that there are 3 factions (hence the 3 colours demonstrating control on the map screen) and they are not quite symmetric. The reviewer is playing as Vanu which is the only one that has that alien-ish theme with ultra futuristic uniforms and laser type weapons. The other two are more conventional. Each faction's weapons and vehicles have attributes with that factions trend e.g. one faction has lower damage per projectile but higher rate of fire, another faction the opposite.
d) He's a bit harsh implying individual skill doesn't matter. Your l33t skillz might not be quite so obvious to everyone, you're unlikely to "pwn" everyone quite so hard with ridiculous k/d ratios. But the game is balanced pretty well so skilled fraggers will have higher k/d and certainly will make a difference, all else being equal - it's just that you cannot solely rely on your skills and will also need teamplay.
e) I think this is also where the reviewer goes wrong saying that it's hard to feel you are contributing. In an okay squad it's actually very easy and the game gives you congratulatory messages and experience point rewards making it very clear. Players are generous with the "thank you" voice command. There's also a lot more variety in the ways you can contribute than any game I can think of. Maybe you're not actually any good at FPS shooting, but maybe you'll be good at tank tactics, dogfighting, support roles like engineer or medic, infiltrating and hacking, or simply ferrying people around.
f) Agreeing with the reviewer and contradicting some other posters, I'm having difficulty finding a need to put real money into this game. I've spent about half the cost of a typical new game so far, and all of that was a splurge because I felt I should contribute given the hours I've gotten from the game. Sure you could spend a lot of money but there's really no need to. Aside from a couple of vehicle items, anything items to buy where to experience-point cost is high thus viable for real-money, they're sidegrades more for preference, like trading short-range raw damage for longer range accuracy. A complete set would cost a ton of money, but you don't want a complete set and anyway you can get everything with enough experience points so if you stick with the game you can be finding yourself picking up rare-use options for no money.
g) There is no other game where you can experience the epic, massive battles that this game can offer. If that is what you are looking for - you can also easily avoid those and go running around with a small or moderately sized squad.
The Station Cash currency that is used for the real money transactions goes on sale pretty much monthly for a day at 2x or 3x, seems the next 3x sale is on the 21st, but usually there's no notice.
Items also come up on sale, the weekly ones usually as equipment packages and individual items daily usually for about 40-60% off if bought with Station Cash. So even the top priced $7 guns could cost as little as a dollar if you spend wisely and others as little as a quarter. You can also try all the weapons before you buy for 30 minutes. Only cosmetic items are cash only.
The only downside is that earning the top end items just through playing would take an extremely long time, but that's obviously the drive for the game to earn money. I've payed $60 for games that had less good play time than this one so I don't mind dropping some cash on items.
Ok, so is this your typical MMO? How many months will it last before the bean counters decide they are not making enough money and shut the servers down? Sorry but I've been burned before, before I plunk down another $50 on one of these I want to know that it's going to be around for more than four months.
Regarding dying the 1st 15 minutes you play... yea that will happen, but they have also taken some steps to reduce it. I haven't seen anyone mentioning the video tutorials for the game that are linked form the game client start window. Dropping right into combat is a bit harsh the first time you play. Not auto joining a squad (and dropping on the squad leader) is probably the wrong option as well. Something else many may not realize is that the drop pods are steerable to some degree.
1500 points cost 15 dollars, a basic gun costs 500 points. You figure it out from there.
That is the problem I have with micro transactions in games, there is NOTHING micro about it. You can play for free... you just will die a lot unable to kill others because your gun does half the damage. If your lucky.
As for buying things with in game currency, that requires either cheating (rampant) or an amount of time few adults are likely to have.
Is the game itself any good? Not really. While tactics could exist, the real problem is that one cheater can earn enough certificates to totally upgrade himself and go havoc.
Most multiplayer shooters fail because they are to open, you can't do tactics if enemies can litterally come jumping from ANYWHERE with a big tank. Oh, they might get killed in a second by a group but if they respawn and rush straight back in, tactics tend to go the way of the dodo. You end up with a large open counterstrike server. Endless battles around the same central points. Played it for a few days and then stopped. It just ain't fun to play in a good team and then a cheater blows everyone away from across the map.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Planetside 2 has the same problems as all SEO and PvP games. Bugs and rampant cheating. Aimbots and people using exploits to get stuck in walls were they can shoot others but can't be hit. Oh, you can report people and some do get banned but in a F2P game, a new account is a few clicks away and they are right back, exploiting again.
Balance is also completely absent from the game, possibly the worst mistake they made is including friendly fire. There will be idiots who drive over their own side with a tank. Oh, they might get scolded for it by the game but even if it gets them banned, a new account is just a few clicks away.
THIS IS THE INTERNET developers. Expect assholes. Any F2P game is going to have the community from hell and any bug is going to be exploited. You can talk though about it but you need to have dealt with this BEFORE the game launches, not by releasing interviews afterwards. When youtube has dozens of videos showing cheating, your game is done for.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Whether it's doing a fly over and destroying an enemy encampment, or spawning and creating a well placed a Sunderer, a single player can turn the tide of a battle. There's more ways to help in this game than just shooting people.
Examples:
1. Placed a sunderer right next to an enemies spawn building, and we were able to keep them pinned down inside to give us a chance at winning
2. Used a Scythe (combat jet) to destroy a sunderer that was doing the same to a facility, and it allowed us to retake it. It was the enemies only sunderer
3. Got inside a base and destroyed their spawn generator while everyone was distracted, so they couldn't spawn anymore.
4. Placed an engineer turret at a doorway in a Bio Lab and kept the enemy from advancing as my teammates attempted zerg rushes.
So on and so forth. Great accomplishments can be made as a squad, but so can they be by a solo player.
As a gamer who's been around since the 2600 too, I agree this is one of the best games ever made. The war moments you have in it are just priceless. You can shoot down air with a tank if you have a lucky shot. You can strap c4 to a quad runner, and hit boost on the quad then jump off, so it goes flying into a tank and kills the tank. You can jump out of a plane, but die on impact. Yet if you have jet packs, you can jump out of a plane, but boost so you don't die. Then you're fighting behind enemy territory trying to sneak your way out to safety. There's fun to be had as a vehicle, as a plane, or as infantry. There's so much this game has to offer. I laugh at anyone who trashes this game because they obviously haven't been playing video games long enough to see a real development of games, and this one is at a peak of what we have so far. Sure there isn't much past shoot em up and base capture, but its still really fun just doing that.
Finally freemium games are the way of the future: Try the game for free, if you like it, give the developer a couple bucks for what you think the game is worth. This game is not pay2win. You can get anything in the game with a bit of leveling.
God spoke to me
uh what about planetside 1?
They should at least change something so tribes 2 players will feel like they are playing something different. Surely they didn't just steal the unofficial patch? I didn't see a disc gun so I guess removing stuff makes it "different".
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
LOL.
Revisit this comment in 2 months. Please. If you can say you still enjoy the game I will spend $50 in station cash to support the "best game ever made".
Eh, it was alright. My last FPS game was CS 1.6. So I'm really rusty. My system is outdated too with a Q6600, 8800GTS, and 4gb of DDR2. I have FPS issues with the larger fights. My experience is much like someone else had with the being killed from somewhere by a larger gun. Really chaotic. No real idea what I'm supposed to be doing. I had 45 deaths and 3 kills last night. I've been on a GW2 kick the past month.
For free I'll leave it on the system. I'm slowly gathering parts for a new build; i5, 680, 16gbDDR3 etc. Maybe with that I'll get more enjoyment out of it. meh
At about 100 hours played so far, the 6-month subscription was money well spent. I've spent that much on AAA titles which only offered 20-30 hours of content.
And once you learn to read the map and make educated guesses about who is going where and when, there's not a whole lot of downtime.
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
I began playing this game about a week ago.
I am a huge hater of games like APB that give real money advantages to other players.
This game does have weapon upgrades and xp boosts for real money.
You do NOT have to buy these to be competitive.
Every race has different specialties, Terran Republic for instance has a stock pistol that is one of the best in the game. Everyone gets one of these from day one who chooses this race.
Vanu has one of the better submachine guns and definitely the best plane,(scythe) stock, no money spent.
New Conglomerate has one of the best noob sniper rifles. Sure, it's range and damage is not as good as the purchasable one, however it's rate of fire is better and it can one shot unsuspecting light infantry.
With all that said, I DID spend 50 bucks on station cash (yesterday during the special 3x station cash bonus) and it was nice to get some new guns. I still find myself swapping to non purchasable guns for many situations, however, so their utility should not be dogged because they are not purchased weapons.
All weapons in the game are sidegrades, not upgrades.
I would highly recommend you try it out. It's free. What have you got to lose?
Also, get into an organized outfit. It's really important to have an organized outfit or you will be kind of floating in limbo and not really know what to do.
I am currently running with the Devil Dogs, http://www.planetside-devildogs.com/ which is one of the largest operations in the game, and I love it.
There are other large operations as well for each faction, Vanu and TR, and the beautiful thing is, that at the end of the day, the large ops all still have respect for eachother and still work together to have huge battles over the continents.
If you are interested in a live stream, check out the twitch live streams and you can see for yourself how the game plays from the friday night ops:
http://www.twitch.tv/planetside2/
Honestly, those that feel this game is currently milking people like LoL by being pay to win are certainly mistaken.
If you simply put 20 bucks in you can get your class outfitted with every weapon you'd want for multiple play styles, or you could just farm the certs (basically xp) for a week or so and have them as well. It is really free, I just CHOSE to put money in, not because I was impatient, but because it's really a good game and I felt 50 bucks was better money spent than if I bought another CoD clone.
As for the folks talking about aimbotters etc, they are horribly mistaken.
I can pop a guy in the head from 130 yards currently as they are running with my sniper rifle. It takes practice, but it can be done. There are some speed hackers out there and some other folks doing whacky things, however it is such a low rate it has no bearing on the game. If you are in an organized outfit, you just send 40 guys at the hackers spawn and he's dead. He cannot get back and his little cheese game is ruined in a few minutes.
So yes, this game is the real deal. I am not affiliated in any way with Sony, and you can also tell by my post history and my SD number that I'm not some new guy just making shit up. So yeah, download it and try it, if you like it come on and hang out. IF you roll NC on Connery give a shout out to the devil dogs, and if you roll TR or Vanu, feel free to die by my hand you evil emperial or alien scum! :-)