PlanetSide 2 Review
- Thread starter WMDogma
- Start date
Really love the game, but the F2P model is totally broken in my opinion. Some things are insanely expensive to unlock: It costs up to 7$ to unlock a single weapon for a single class or 1000 cert points (and you gain cert points at a rate of about 15-20 an hour... if you're very lucky. My rate is more along the lines of 10-12)
And being competitive with the default load-out... No. Just No. Some classes can pull it off - the infiltrator or the medic and engineer... other classes not so much. The default Rocket Launcher on the Heavy for example is next to useless on anything than a close ground vehicle... and anything with a lock-on is 7$/1000 cert points.
Same goes for Air vehicles - the air superiority fighters equiped with default auto cannons are next to useless when up against air superiority fighters equipped with rockets (both in the guided an unguided variety).
Gunboats with default weapons are pretty much only fit to carry 3 people from a to b, while a gunboat with a certain load-out can wreak devastation on a massive scale. Again, a very expensive load-out.
If you want to be effective you have to either grind for literally weeks of game time or dish out a ton of cash.
There's also performance to take into account... you kinda need a strong rig to play it. On a PC that runs BF3 on high-ultra I had to turn everything to Low in order to barely get 30 FPS in Planetside2. I don't know if there's any more optimization SoE could have done, the game is massive... but it's still quite a high entry barrier.
And being competitive with the default load-out... No. Just No. Some classes can pull it off - the infiltrator or the medic and engineer... other classes not so much. The default Rocket Launcher on the Heavy for example is next to useless on anything than a close ground vehicle... and anything with a lock-on is 7$/1000 cert points.
Same goes for Air vehicles - the air superiority fighters equiped with default auto cannons are next to useless when up against air superiority fighters equipped with rockets (both in the guided an unguided variety).
Gunboats with default weapons are pretty much only fit to carry 3 people from a to b, while a gunboat with a certain load-out can wreak devastation on a massive scale. Again, a very expensive load-out.
If you want to be effective you have to either grind for literally weeks of game time or dish out a ton of cash.
There's also performance to take into account... you kinda need a strong rig to play it. On a PC that runs BF3 on high-ultra I had to turn everything to Low in order to barely get 30 FPS in Planetside2. I don't know if there's any more optimization SoE could have done, the game is massive... but it's still quite a high entry barrier.
That the whole point isn't itVladG said:
It takes weeks to get only 1 weapon. Or just 7 dollars.
But think about what you just said. And lets say it takes 1.5 weeks to get those 1000 points.
Now lets take WoW. New patch, new dungeon, new item tier. How long do you think it will take most people to get even close to those items when not playing in a top guild.
Or just 7 bucks per item you really want.
Its the same type of discussion as "is a 20 hour game long or short".
If you game whole days its short.. if not then long
Wow comparisons aren't valid; you're actually playing and building up new gear, exploring different stories, areas, etc., and constantly making progress and improving your character throughout. In terms of WoW, PS2 is essentially grinding one mob with no new gear for hours on end, just to get one new weapon, instead of going on varied quests and getting bits and pieces of gear with side improvements in professions.
PS2's current model for leveling and "F2P" is broken; the devs have even admitted that the aircraft weapons are somewhat imbalanced, and a lot of things are flat-out upgrades, not "sidegrades", as had been advertised... It's definitely fun to play, even at 5~15FPS on my apparently well out of date computer (only now playing games from past year or two), but the long-term aspects are in need of a serious improvement. Lots of discussions on their official forums, but all in all, they *really* need to speed up the cert gain or decrease the costs of weapons and upgrades. Remember, 1 weapon may be 1000 certs, but you then have upgrades for that weapon requiring hundreds, if not thousands more. Getting a vehicle with the weapons and upgrades you want, or fully upgrading those weapons, can take well over 20~30k certs... For a lot of people, that's over 100 hours of gameplay, just to maximize one vehicle, although you can shave a lot of time off by going only part way as costs rise exponentially.
I'd definitely recommend spending a couple hours to get a feel for this one, and pay close attention to how fast you gain certs vs. how much you want gear; for most people, the current model will seem ridiculously slow... Though I will say that you can make a lot more certs per hour by being in small squads fighting independently of major battles, or by being on the front line of big battles... never sit around handing out ammo; hand out ammo while also marking targets (big, free XP for spamming one key), get kills, repair MAXes as an engineer, etc... Though be wary that it takes 250xp for 1 cert, meaning 2.5 kills, so if you go *purely* based on kills without the (relatively minor) capture bonuses, that means 250 kills per 1000 certs in a game that takes at *least* 10 seconds just to respawn you.
PS2's current model for leveling and "F2P" is broken; the devs have even admitted that the aircraft weapons are somewhat imbalanced, and a lot of things are flat-out upgrades, not "sidegrades", as had been advertised... It's definitely fun to play, even at 5~15FPS on my apparently well out of date computer (only now playing games from past year or two), but the long-term aspects are in need of a serious improvement. Lots of discussions on their official forums, but all in all, they *really* need to speed up the cert gain or decrease the costs of weapons and upgrades. Remember, 1 weapon may be 1000 certs, but you then have upgrades for that weapon requiring hundreds, if not thousands more. Getting a vehicle with the weapons and upgrades you want, or fully upgrading those weapons, can take well over 20~30k certs... For a lot of people, that's over 100 hours of gameplay, just to maximize one vehicle, although you can shave a lot of time off by going only part way as costs rise exponentially.
I'd definitely recommend spending a couple hours to get a feel for this one, and pay close attention to how fast you gain certs vs. how much you want gear; for most people, the current model will seem ridiculously slow... Though I will say that you can make a lot more certs per hour by being in small squads fighting independently of major battles, or by being on the front line of big battles... never sit around handing out ammo; hand out ammo while also marking targets (big, free XP for spamming one key), get kills, repair MAXes as an engineer, etc... Though be wary that it takes 250xp for 1 cert, meaning 2.5 kills, so if you go *purely* based on kills without the (relatively minor) capture bonuses, that means 250 kills per 1000 certs in a game that takes at *least* 10 seconds just to respawn you.
There's a few ways to "game the system". Stepping into a battle by a large installation (like a tech or bio lab) where victory is imminent will score you beaucoup XP even if your finger never touched the trigger of your weapon; you can also rack up XP by playing a support class (Engineer or Medic) in large skirmishes- dropping an ammo replenisher by a chokepoint brings in the "dings". Or if, like me, the life of a combat pilot is not for you (rolling or doing maneuvers in the cockpit view sets off my vertigo, and even being a gunner can have the same effect) you can still pilot a Galaxy for troop transport, or get the AMS system for the Sunderer, pick a good place to deploy and get experience just for having people spawn there.VladG said:
There still are quite a few optimizations to be done, but there's some workarounds. Setting rendering quality to 95%, turning off ambient occlusion or high-quality shadows, or using a custom .ini file have all been suggested.VladG said:
I've tried it and have found it to be quite fun, but the performance gets very bad as soon as I find myself engaged in anything greater than a small skirmish battle. I don't think it has anything to do with graphics, as turning down graphics quality doesn't help. It's probably either CPU or network limited. I've stopped playing it because playing a shooter with a framerate of 10-16 FPS is not fun. I suppose I'll peek in again sometime in the future when the game has been patched and optimized.
I was in the beta. It runs poorly on AMD and ATI setups, and requires a beefy CPU with a high clock speed. It is not optimized particularly well for multiple cores or hyper threading.
However, it does run on this laptop, which is only an i5 3210m @ 2.5GHZ, 6GB RAM, AMD Radeon HD7670m. Not well, but it runs.
Hey, it's f2p, so download it and give it a go to see if it works. If not, nothing lost.
However, it does run on this laptop, which is only an i5 3210m @ 2.5GHZ, 6GB RAM, AMD Radeon HD7670m. Not well, but it runs.
Hey, it's f2p, so download it and give it a go to see if it works. If not, nothing lost.
What? I just have a single 580 card and I run everything but shadows on high with, I dunno, 50-60fps. How is it you can play BF3 on those settings but not this? This game's probably a bit more CPU intensive...VladG said:
OT:
The one thing you need to know about this game is that you should like seeing purple hexagons.
You'll be seeing a lot of those.
Vanu for Victory. Purple is truth. Twilight Sparkle.
At first, I hated it. I seriously did. I was ready to scream to the four winds of the internet to people to not play it, I was jealous of people who did enjoy it, then I forced myself into watching the main site's tutorials and try to understand how it all works, by the end of that day, I already captured like 4 to 5 bases and I was playing for 4 hours straight.
This is a game that you need to understand in order to start having fun, if you, like me, dive into it headfirst, you'll be in for a big surprise and you'll die a lot.
Give it a few minutes, even a few hours to understand it, or watch the tutorials (highly recommended), for the price of free, this may be one of the very best games I've ever played this whole year (The Secret World comes first).
This is a game that you need to understand in order to start having fun, if you, like me, dive into it headfirst, you'll be in for a big surprise and you'll die a lot.
Give it a few minutes, even a few hours to understand it, or watch the tutorials (highly recommended), for the price of free, this may be one of the very best games I've ever played this whole year (The Secret World comes first).
![jFr[e]ak93](https://eg-forums-escapist-data.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/data/avatars/l/91/91030.jpg?1620781506){kind=avatar}
Glad to know I'm not the only one that had mega problems. I'm not exactly using a gaming work horse, but it's still a decent rig. For me, this game is barely playable with more than 5 hostels on screen.Tiamat666 said:
Though that was on the beta, hopefully they fix it up. I really loved it otherwise.
+1 for optimization. My GPU is a few places below the recommended one in benchmark charts, but miles above the minimum. And Everything else is above recommended specs. And yet, in large battles I get... wait for it... 3fps. Turning all settings to the absolute minimum didn't help one bit either.
I've been playing this for a few days now, and I can say that it is really fun. The massive battles you get into are very exciting, though assaulting a base can be frustrating for the time it takes.
The original article mentions travel time, and it can be somewhat of a bother, but a Flash (quad bike) is cheap and its respawn timer is fairly low (and can be even lower if you invest some certs). I never have problems getting to fights quickly, between Flashes, re-deployment options and Sunderers (the mobile spawing points).
One thing I strongly recommend is joining an outfit (the equivalent of guilds). Having people to play with makes all the difference in PS2, playing solo gets really boring really fast. If you can, join an outfit that has access to voice coms. The game has them built in, but I've only seen one guy using them (and he was just looping Gangam Style over and over again).
I don't really have an opinion on the "is it expensive or not" argument. I'm a cheapskate, so I don't see myself ever paying for anything in this game that I can get for just playing, even if it takes me weeks to get the certs I need. In the meantime, I'll be shooting people and crashing planes into mountains that I swear weren't there a minute ago.
The original article mentions travel time, and it can be somewhat of a bother, but a Flash (quad bike) is cheap and its respawn timer is fairly low (and can be even lower if you invest some certs). I never have problems getting to fights quickly, between Flashes, re-deployment options and Sunderers (the mobile spawing points).
One thing I strongly recommend is joining an outfit (the equivalent of guilds). Having people to play with makes all the difference in PS2, playing solo gets really boring really fast. If you can, join an outfit that has access to voice coms. The game has them built in, but I've only seen one guy using them (and he was just looping Gangam Style over and over again).
I don't really have an opinion on the "is it expensive or not" argument. I'm a cheapskate, so I don't see myself ever paying for anything in this game that I can get for just playing, even if it takes me weeks to get the certs I need. In the meantime, I'll be shooting people and crashing planes into mountains that I swear weren't there a minute ago.
Neglected to mention the biggest flaw in the game- server stacking. When one continent has an overwhelming advantage in population for one side, it's pointless to even try and fight them. This results in almost everyone on the other sides simply abandoning the battle and going to a different continent where they actually have a small chance of making a difference, making things even MORE one-sided. You probably saw in the video how one of the maps was almost COMPLETELY red? Yeah, that's not because the red so awesome and brilliant and genius, it's because they stacked a ridiculously high percentage of their population onto that continent so everyone else just gave up and let them have it.
That's my big issue with PS2, sometimes it's VERY hard to feel like you're actually DOING anything worthwhile and not just going through a pointless, boring and frustrating cycle of "spawn-die-respawn-die-respawn-die".
That's my big issue with PS2, sometimes it's VERY hard to feel like you're actually DOING anything worthwhile and not just going through a pointless, boring and frustrating cycle of "spawn-die-respawn-die-respawn-die".
Yeah I don't care.
Planetside 1 was fantastic. This is garbage.
There's absolutely no point, no point what so ever, to progress in the game when you can just pay money to win. And that's the sad truth, it's pay to win and it truly is. Cash shop should not give you an actual gameplay advantage. It can boost exp so you can naturally get things faster, maybe cosmetic stuff. But the moment you just let them buy anything they'd need the game be comes void. Why is that a hard rule to understand?
Granted it's SOE and I've stopped trusting any choice they make by this point..
Planetside 1 was fantastic. This is garbage.
There's absolutely no point, no point what so ever, to progress in the game when you can just pay money to win. And that's the sad truth, it's pay to win and it truly is. Cash shop should not give you an actual gameplay advantage. It can boost exp so you can naturally get things faster, maybe cosmetic stuff. But the moment you just let them buy anything they'd need the game be comes void. Why is that a hard rule to understand?
Granted it's SOE and I've stopped trusting any choice they make by this point..
I like the game so far, I played the game for about an hour, and sure I died....a lot.... but after I got a hold of some of the controls I started to rack up the points. Though I am still confused on the landing for the aerial vehicles.
Such a shame that I don't have a PC. Hey, can anyone point me to where I can get software to run PC games on a Mac?
I still don't see why is that a problem.Toastngravy said:
You are not paying money to win, you are paying money to get other stuff (which is a lot of money). That doesn't make you instantly lose the game, does it?
As far as I know, there are no insta-kill uber powered weapons, and if they are, a competent group should be able to counter them.
Come on, you even play the game?
So is it possible to win matches somehow in this game? I haven't seen anything that says it is and that makes me wonder what the point of capturing bases is if they don't add up to anything.
This game is vastly improved by being part of an outfit, since it's simply not cut out for solo play. You might be a really capable individual, but you'll be outnumbered and outgunned by the other side every time unless you're moving with an organized group.
I've never quite understood the complaint, either with PS1 or with PS2, regarding the battles not 'adding up to anything'. You're earning XP and you're unlocking more weapons, and ostensibly you're having fun actually playing the game. You can stay and fight for as long as you want in any given location, or if you're tired of that particular locale, go attack somewhere else. But no, just because you held a given position eight hours ago doesn't mean you're going to hold it when you get back, just like capturing flags or bases in other games doesn't mean they won't reset at some point.
I'd think Planetside 2 would really benefit from the explosion of XP-based shooters over the last decade since Planetside 1 debuted in 2003, and given how busy the servers are, I think Sony really has a hit on their hands with this one.
I've never quite understood the complaint, either with PS1 or with PS2, regarding the battles not 'adding up to anything'. You're earning XP and you're unlocking more weapons, and ostensibly you're having fun actually playing the game. You can stay and fight for as long as you want in any given location, or if you're tired of that particular locale, go attack somewhere else. But no, just because you held a given position eight hours ago doesn't mean you're going to hold it when you get back, just like capturing flags or bases in other games doesn't mean they won't reset at some point.
I'd think Planetside 2 would really benefit from the explosion of XP-based shooters over the last decade since Planetside 1 debuted in 2003, and given how busy the servers are, I think Sony really has a hit on their hands with this one.
Your faction gains advantages for every base held. I think there is also a bonus for taking an entire continent.romanator0 said:
This outlook makes no sense. While the system is certainly flawed, you are in fact "Actually playing" when you play the game to earn certs. You are fully engaged in the game and can make a contribution to the battle no matter what you're outfitted in. I have yet to see a loadout that is completely unbeatable by a person using a default loadout, at least on the ground level. In WoW, grinding new content is far more of a grind. You not only play the new content over and over and over, but there is no variation or change between iterations of your run. Most of the time, you make no new progress at all while waiting for that rare drop. And seriously, you call playing an FPS "grinding one mob"? Isn't the point of an MMOFPS shooting other players in a massively multiplayer environment? If anything, PS2 is more varied. Playing with other players, making friends, fighting in battles that never play out the same way twice, exploring the rather beautiful scenery. If you play it as a lone wolf, you're not going to have fun. The thing is, if you want to go completely solo you're playing the wrong game.Shakura Jolithion said: