Quick Look: PlanetSide 2

@LordLOC said:

I'm only disappointed in that this QL was only 26 minutes long. Normally (read: usually) PC games especially, get longer QL's. Not that it matters, but I thought Jeff (and Dave, Vinny, Patrick even, etc the PC kinda dudes) would have wanted to show more of the game. But hey, this is awesome either way. I'm curious to see how the GB crew reacts to the game as it evolves over time actually. Especially Jeff and Drew.

Patrick isn't really a PC kind of dude. We'll see what happens if he actually ends up building one, but they seem to scare/repulse him. He IS however an indie kind of dude, so that sort of forces him onto the PC.

Another tip for noobies is to not just concentrate on playing infantry. Your faction specific jet fighter and main battle tank are very powerful and great for solo play. Put some certs into them and learn how to use them effectively and they'll add a great deal to the variety of the game and to your enjoyment for solo play.

The blue dudes have this sick guitar song in the faction select menu. That was all I needed to know to get down with the blue guys.

Jeff and Drew, an odd but interesting couple. Just like ToeJam and Earl.

@CaLe: Are you kidding?:D NOTHING is better than sex.;D

I think the Free to Play stuff in this is done terribly. $7 for one gun is pretty fucked up. Considering there are a dozen guns for every class and Cert points come soooo slowly...

I gotta say i'm really disappointed with PS2. I never played PS1 (lack of CC and beefy hardware) so i really looked forward to trying PS2, i even liked that they went F2P (no upfront investment to try it). But in the end it's all the F2P stuff that ruins the experience for me. Unlocking anything at all is a pita because stuff is expensive and points come in so slowly, they basically force you to pay2win if you want to get any feeling of progress. It just feels like such an grind to get anywhere remotely interesting.

@anzejk: What about having sex while playing Planetside 2? Or screw that and go the full distance, have sex while playing Far Cry 3 ;)

@doomocrat: Yeah it is nice. Although I believe it also suffers due to the amount of certs required for a vehicle to be effective and fudges up balance a little.

Two of my mates have bought the AT railgun with StationCash (I think it is called the Saren) for the magrider and we wipe the floor with any tank that hasn't also dropped real dosh for comparable upgrades.

@drewbert Audio is out of sync.

@BallsDeep said:

TR for life.

Go hard or go home.

To get into a MAX suit you need to enter one at a Sunderer or base loadout kiosk. A MAX is considered a vehicle and is treated as such (medics can't heal it, but engineers can).

It's Giant Bombs mission statement to crash any aircraft they find. Anyway I need to upgrade my video card badly but if I do I will probably put some time into this game.

Complaining about a lack of teamwork while the platoon he's in is using teamwork and communicating in chat.... and also not following his team and playing as a lone wolf light assault... If Jeff really wanted teamwork then once you join a squad you ask what class they need most or if they need any vehicles. You don't just jump in as a solo class and ignore them. If the squad you're in isn't working together then it takes roughly 5 seconds to change squads and the squads that work together usually include TEAMWORK or some such info in the squad description. But frankly after seeing Jeff play multiple team based games I'm starting to wonder if he even knows what teamwork is. (yes I realise that doing teamwork in a QL isn't realistic but he showed no sign of ever haven't worked as a team)
 
The game isn't particularly hard or complicated, Jeff just doesn't seem to care enough to bother to learn the systems properly. As he said in the video, in PS1 you had to learn all the systems before you could get a feel for the world. The same is true for PS2 but this time he just doesn't care to learn.  
 
If anyone is super stuck for some reason there are probably a hundred tutorial vids on youtube or something. Also you never have to spend any money on this game and you won't lose out on anything. Everything can be bought with certs from xp. 
 
PS2 is awesome and if played appropriately it's really fun. There are a lot of little issues still but hopefully the devs will continue to improve on them. It's a real shame Drew hadn't had more time in the game I feel like he would of had a much better grasp of it.

@sharkeh said:

Also you never have to spend any money on this game and you won't lose out on anything. Everything can be bought with certs from xp.

You won't lose out on anything except time.

I know that it's everyone favourite argument, how much time is worth, but my average, solo, not-trying-to-grind rate of XP gain has been getting me maybe 30 cert points an hour. So lets say, a cheap gun or vehicle attachment in 8 hours. 4 times as long for the expensive ones.

There's ways I could bump it up higher, like trying a little harder to follow the main 'zerg' of players a little better rather than getting lost and distracted by defence, but even then. I know it's because of the free to play model that it's this slow, but it really almost completely removes any feeling of progress (and as Jeff says, there's no permanence to territory you take either).

The games fine, as a shooting thing. And the basic guns are competent enough too. But without any progression to speak of, it doesn't feel like its going to have much hooks.

@Nethlem said:

I gotta say i'm really disappointed with PS2. I never played PS1 (lack of CC and beefy hardware) so i really looked forward to trying PS2, i even liked that they went F2P (no upfront investment to try it). But in the end it's all the F2P stuff that ruins the experience for me. Unlocking anything at all is a pita because stuff is expensive and points come in so slowly, they basically force you to pay2win if you want to get any feeling of progress. It just feels like such an grind to get anywhere remotely interesting.

Agreed that does feel like a slow grind when playing, but I have to say that I love the fact that Certs automatically generate 1 per hour whether you are online or not. So in a week of not playing, you should still have an estimated 168 certs that you didn't before. This may not seem like a lot, but it will definitely help me out since I only have time on the weekends to play.

Farcry 3 is coming out in 10 minutes on steam and when I beat it, I will play this.

"Whose side are you planet?" should be on a t-shirt.

You know I never get why people complain about things being pointless in planetside, it's absolutely no different from any other shooter, running around nuketown 50 times in a night is COD is just as pointless.

The difference is you can get a bunch of dudes together form up an air squadron and command the skies for an hour or two with super intense dog fights, all while supporting the infantry below by bombing the shit out of the enemy armour. it's really the most comprehensive shooter experience out there.

but in the end it's gaming, unless you're playing something profoundly moving like journey it's all pointless. that doesn't mean it isn't fun.

@sharkeh: it might be great now, but when i played it in closed it was pretty confusing and very few people were doing any sort of teamwork, so it was mostly hours of jumping between teams and soloing and a few moments of having found a cool group and getting shit done.

I am kind of surprised how good this look. I will have to give this a try.

@roguehallow said:

"Whose side are you planet?" should be on a t-shirt.

Yes please

Jeff, if you didn't already know there's a button to go third person in vehicles.

@MeatSim said:

It's Giant Bombs mission statement to crash any aircraft they find. Anyway I need to upgrade my video card badly but if I do I will probably put some time into this game.

From what I understand (and have experienced, actually), Planetside 2 places much more stress on your CPU than your graphics card.

"Hey Drew"

As soon as I heard that I knew I was going to like this video.

ehh.... uhh... I'll stick with BF3? loosing territory overnight, just because im sleeping would annoy the hell out of me.

They could for sure have a better basic tutorial, but its not hard to find all the ins and outs of the game on tutorials on youtube. Then you have whoever is saying the gunplay is terrible(you're smoking something seriously) couldn't be farther from the truth. The fact is there's so much going on in the game that its just a harder game to get into and learn properly, it has a far higher skill ceiling than something like BF3. All these claims are honestly just excuses for not being any good at it, but its your own enjoyment of said thing you're hampering by just giving up so whatever. Less terrible players than are already in the game to deal with.

I enjoyed the beta a lot but when capturing the bases with no resistance is fucking boring. Some can take upwards of 20 minutes to capture even when there are no enemies and you're just standing there doing nothing. When you're actually in full scale combat or you and a small squad are taking places out it's a lot of fun but it really does take a number of hours to really familiarize yourself with what you need to do. When I first started playing, I was so completely lost and the game does nothing to help you. The devs are at least updating it on a regular basis so I can see them fixing the problems that exist unlike something like APB:R where every update is one to sell you more shit and not fix performance issues which have plagued that game since 2010.

@sharkeh said:

Complaining about a lack of teamwork while the platoon he's in is using teamwork and communicating in chat.... and also not following his team and playing as a lone wolf light assault... If Jeff really wanted teamwork then once you join a squad you ask what class they need most or if they need any vehicles. You don't just jump in as a solo class and ignore them. If the squad you're in isn't working together then it takes roughly 5 seconds to change squads and the squads that work together usually include TEAMWORK or some such info in the squad description. But frankly after seeing Jeff play multiple team based games I'm starting to wonder if he even knows what teamwork is. (yes I realise that doing teamwork in a QL isn't realistic but he showed no sign of ever haven't worked as a team) The game isn't particularly hard or complicated, Jeff just doesn't seem to care enough to bother to learn the systems properly. As he said in the video, in PS1 you had to learn all the systems before you could get a feel for the world. The same is true for PS2 but this time he just doesn't care to learn. If anyone is super stuck for some reason there are probably a hundred tutorial vids on youtube or something. Also you never have to spend any money on this game and you won't lose out on anything. Everything can be bought with certs from xp. PS2 is awesome and if played appropriately it's really fun. There are a lot of little issues still but hopefully the devs will continue to improve on them. It's a real shame Drew hadn't had more time in the game I feel like he would of had a much better grasp of it.

You shouldn't have to look on youtube, to learn how to play the game. And to every one who is complaining about this being Pay2Win. Your wrong. This is a team based game with thousands of players. and the wining scenario involves one faction killing off the other 3 factions from the world. Unfortunatintly this is impossible because the main bases are unkillable. It is an unwinable scenario. It isnt Pay2Win. Because no one will ever win.

Sooo....Yea....Looks like the first Planetside....Really boring. Ill be honest thou, I was turned off by the game right away, prob did not play more then 2-3 hours. So maybe it got better. There doesnt seem to be any real atmosphere to the games. Which really draggs the combat down as it has to try and off set the lack of atmosphere.

Just wanted to chime in and say that the number one reason to play PS2 is for the epic large battles that games like Battlefield 3 barely touch on. They showed a very small segment of it when they spawned on the sunderer attacking the base. Think of that moment, multiplied by 100. If you know where to go, you'll be getting involved in massive fights every night.

Also, more permanence is coming, from the forums, the developers are going to put more continents with something closer to PS1's system where you could lock down a continent for some time, and not just happen to conquer it for a short time.

That said, you really shouldn't be playing PS1 if you're looking for permanence, or any MMO really. The only permanence in MMOs is that most MMORPGs don't change much at all, or only seem to change. There's also way more permanence than other shooters, where you just switch maps as soon as an objective is done for that map.

It's also important to note that you get 1 cert every hour free, whether you're logged in or not. This goes to a maximum of 24 cert points from the last time you logged in. So basically 24 free certs daily if you log in once a day. You also get extra EXP for doing normal stuff as part of a squad on top of the normal XP. So if you're hanging around your squad, following waypoints, and generally using teamwork, not only do you get more certs, you also get a fun team based experience.

I knew this was going to be one of those quick looks for me, but I watched it anyway and here I am.

Jeff, there are indeed only a few types of buildings. You will learn them soon if you keep playing. You are only rank 5, that cant be more than a couple hours.

I had some fun playing alone, 100x more fun when I found some people to play with. Maybe try that.

edit: FYI, I'm pretty sure you only get free cert points if you have been logged out for 8 consecutive hours. Every hour after that point you get a cert.

Gave up on Planetside 2 in the beta because it felt too confusing (even after having played Planetside 1 for 4 years) but I'm glad I gave it another chance at release and put more effort into figuring it out, got 50 hours played now and it's the most fun I've had in a FPS game in years. It's too bad they didn't get VR training zone or something into the game before release because sadly it will scare off many people just trying it out the way it is now.

There isn't much of a metagame right now and capturing/defending bases can feel like whack-a-mole but because of the scale there will be much variety in fights, I already have many memories of epic battles which you simply won't see in any other game, and they're insanely fun if you know what you're doing. It was rushed out maybe a bit too early but atleast they got the "fun factor" down at release and can now work on adding content over time.

Also slash the Station Cash prices please, I'm fine with paying for a F2P game I like this much but 7 usd = 7 eur (= 9 usd for europeans) for most weapons and skins is just too much.

Can you say... THURSDAY NIGHT THROWDOWN?

For once we would actually be able to fit a ton of GB players in! And it's free!

@Rox360 said:

[..], I'm gonna try NC instead. Their guns look slightly BF2142-esque and they're, like, the resistance and that's cool. But then I realized all their stuff is blue and yellow (which is an ugly combination) and things like the [..]

As a Swede: :(

Damn i could have easily watched Jeff play for another hr. Lots of fun.

I really wanted to like this game, but after playing it ever since the alpha technical tests it's just nothing like the original planetside I loved and happily paid for monthly. It's fairly competent in it's own right but I really wish they did it with a new IP.

As someone who went into Planetside 2 completely blind, not having even played many multiplayer shooters, I really enjoyed my time with it.

I've always dreamed of these kinds of games being possible, with giant squads descending on bases and whatnot. Every other multiplayer shooter I've played felt like a shooting gallery at best, while this feels like an actual war and I'm just a grunt playing my role in battle. It's a very interesting experience to say the least.

It still didn't hold my attention for terribly long, but I might hop in now and then for fun.

@FoolishChaos: Sounds like you were in the beta. Near the end of beta, it was capped at 8 passive certs. However, just before release, they changed it to a cap of 24 passive certs, 1 per hour, after your last login.

Planetside 2, like a lot of other free to play games, or even MMOs, is only going to get better as it matures. More organization, more continents, weapons, vehicles, experienced players, as well as libraries of community generated tutorial content.

Just recently they posted images of some kind of giant TR carrier that no one even knows how or where it'll fit in.

@Vertrucio said:

Just recently they posted images of some kind of giant TR carrier that no one even knows how or where it'll fit in.

That's just concept art that may or may not have already been scrapped. It might make an appearance if they implement open waters between continents.

@daywoo: Do people really still use vent? I just assumed everyone used skype now.

@Osiris said:

ehh.... uhh... I'll stick with BF3? loosing territory overnight, just because im sleeping would annoy the hell out of me.

Kind of like how when you finish a map in BF3 you lose all the progress you made on that map when you come back to it.

@Rox360 said:

[..], I'm gonna try NC instead. Their guns look slightly BF2142-esque and they're, like, the resistance and that's cool. But then I realized all their stuff is blue and yellow (which is an ugly combination) and things like the [..]

As a Swede: :(

Free to play is nearly a dirty word for me. I would much rather pay the full price for a game to have it come with everything included or pay a subscription to have it included. I don't like getting a game free and then being forced to pay to win.

Breakdancing!

@Osiris said:

ehh.... uhh... I'll stick with BF3? loosing territory overnight, just because im sleeping would annoy the hell out of me.

Kind of like how when you finish a map in BF3 you lose all the progress you made on that map when you come back to it.

@Rox360 said:

@Anund said:

@Rox360 said:

[..], I'm gonna try NC instead. Their guns look slightly BF2142-esque and they're, like, the resistance and that's cool. But then I realized all their stuff is blue and yellow (which is an ugly combination) and things like the [..]

As a Swede: :(

Yeah, dude. Trust me, also as a Swede, I was not happy with how stuff looks in that game. Seriously, why would you use these colors on a weapon?

You're not helping! I am playing NC and put most my certs into my MAX!

@Rox360 said:

Yeah, dude. Trust me, also as a Swede, I was not happy with how stuff looks in that game. Seriously, why would you use these colors on a weapon?

You're not helping! I am playing NC and put most my certs into my MAX!

@Rox360 said:

@SSully said:

@Osiris said:

ehh.... uhh... I'll stick with BF3? loosing territory overnight, just because im sleeping would annoy the hell out of me.

Kind of like how when you finish a map in BF3 you lose all the progress you made on that map when you come back to it.

Nothing like it. When you leave a match on BF3, you're done. There was a conclusion. Whether you won or faced defeat doesn't matter, the round ended and someone came out a victor. There's even a permanent record of it having happened. You can save it, too! The record of the match, to prove that it happened, that you were there and that you kicked ass, got X many kills and Y deaths and scored Z points throughout a half hour engagement at the harbor, or whatever. Each map, each session, has a very clear objective and there's always closure at the end. That feels good.

But it is still just as meaningless as the persistence in planetside 2 right now. The fact of the matter is after that map ends, you start back and square one just like when you lose previously held territory in Planet Side. The only difference here is you have a number saying you won the match, but who gives a fuck?

Finally there seems to be just as much closure in Planetside 2. When you win over a base and hold it, it is yours. That battle is over, you move on to the next battle or you leave just like in any other shooter. The only difference here is when you come back to Planet Side again there is a chance that previously held territory is lost, but it's because the opposing team won it fair and square. Of course, that is still only a chance. Your team can hold territory. In other shooters every time you jump into a fresh map, you are back at square one each time.

Planetside 2 for TNT