PlanetSide 2 Review

[aegix drakan_v1legacy]

They REALLY do need to make it easier to distinguish between friend and foe.

I've held my fire a few times only to realize I just passed the enemy by, and I've gotten blasted to hell MANY times by my own team in tanks. ...>:\ You do NOT shoot the medic that's on YOUR team. jeez...

 

[Toastngravy]

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..

I still don't see why is that a problem.

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?

You seem to be completely misunderstanding what I'm getting at just to defend the game.
You need to understand, it's OK to like the game; It really is. But denying it's pay to win is just silly. You can either spend way too much time to get a single thing or pay and have an advantage immediately. Nowhere did I state or imply there was uber weapons. I'm stating that starting out with things that are, more or less garbage, and allowing people to either spend the ridiculous amount of time (compared to the first game which wasn't too bad...but it did take some time depending on how often you got kills... And it unlocked for you all around just not per the class)or shell out a few bucks for things that DO give them an immediate and noticeable advantage is a horrible design choice.

I don't care if you have bad tastes in games, I mean people actually like my little pony [Irrelevant discussion but to answer your burning questions yes I watched some and it was just a horrible show] so to each their own. But that doesn't stop it from being a pay to win game.

Anywho..edited out the name in the post so it doesn't auto link him because I'm lazy and don't see anyone understanding the simple idea of giving people a noticeable advantage for money (with the alternative being needlessly long grinding) is bad.

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

They REALLY do need to make it easier to distinguish between friend and foe.

I've held my fire a few times only to realize I just passed the enemy by, and I've gotten blasted to hell MANY times by my own team in tanks. ...>:\ You do NOT shoot the medic that's on YOUR team. jeez...

Vehicles can be a bit tricky especially at a distance, but I can give you a quick guide to telling the factions' infantry apart at a glance.

New Conglomerate: Boxy, metallic armor
Terran Republic: Rounded, leather-looking armor
Vanu Soveregnity: Spandex Halo rejects

 

[VladG]

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)
[snip]

That the whole point isn't it
It takes weeks to get only 1 weapon. Or just 7 dollars.

There's no "just" in paying 7$ for a SINGLE piece of equipment for a SINGLE class. It's like paying that much to unlock a single champion ability in League of Legends.

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.

And WoW is a completely inadequate comparison. What does PvE item gain have to do with a 100% PvP game?? In WoW you are NOT competing with players who have 2-3 times better gear than you to finish the SAME raid.

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

No... It's not even similar. The game's only enjoyment IS NOT it's unlock system. Once you unlock everything (as absurd as that is at the current rates.. you'd have to spend hundreds if not thousands of $ and game-hours) you still have a game to play. Arguably a BETTER game since now you have access to the ENTIRE game, not just pieces of it. You won't die over and over in a situation because you still need to grind 30 hours to get the weapon that would give you the ability to deal with said situation for one thing...

My problem with Planetside2 is that it's dangerously close to Pay-To-Win. I'd say it has already crossed the line since the best weapons are NOT sidegrades for the most part, and they are very expensive.

 

[VladG]

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.

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...

.

What? The game runs fine on an expensive, high-end card? Noway!

As for the answer to that question: Op-ti-meh-zay-shun! Kinda the point I was trying to bring across with the BF3 comparison.

 

[Easton Dark]

What? The game runs fine on an expensive, high-end card? Noway!

As for the answer to that question: Op-ti-meh-zay-shun! Kinda the point I was trying to bring across with the BF3 comparison.

My baby's expensive and high end? *pets* Compliments are good for its coat.

And uh... optimization. Did Battlefield 3 run as good as it does now at launch?

 

[Lawyer105]

I'm going to have to weight in on the pay2win side here. Although you CAN unlock stuff with certs rather than money, that doesn't make it not pay2win. The whole "you're just trading money instead of time" argument is a strawman and a pretty poor one at that.

What it comes down to is that, if you earn 1000 certs and buy an utterly necessary weapon (and there are several of these unless you plan to significantly limit your playstyle), somebody who spent money bought the weapon and spent the 1000 certs on upgrading it (or whatever). So their weapon, passives, health etc. are better than yours. Chances are, with the nice toys, they're probably earning certs faster than you too.

Unless you pay, you simply cannot keep up. That's what it comes down to. It's about as pay2win as it gets and, personally, I'm already seeing falloff in player numbers as the initial spike realises how much they're going to have to spend and/or how little they're going to enjoy the game without paying.

There's a darned good reason that PS1 ran the reserves program. In PS2, unless you pay (and pay regularly - it's only out for a couple of weeks and they've already released several new weapons and upgrades), a f2p player is basically an even more gimped reserve... and the reserves were gimped enough as it was.

/crystalball - I forsee server merges...

On another note, the lack of meta-game is a killer, rendering most actions pretty much pointless. In PS1, the lattice system (which could certainly have been improved) ensured that grabbing and holding bases was meaningful and, by acting strategically you could "own" continents by the simple expedient of taking all the bases and defending the one base that the enemy could attack. It's not exactly a win, but owning all the conts and sanc-locking your enemy was what every faction aspired to.

With the new system, it's actually advantageous to let your enemy have bases, because you can cap them back for a ton of XP and certs. And with nonlockable warpgates on every continent, the entire game is basically an endlessly ongoing game of whack-a-mole with very little to strive towards.

I'll play it. But as it stands, I've got FAR less investment than I had in PS1, so I'll play it less and I certainly won't pay any significant amount into it.

 

[Nocturnus]

Pretty good review. There are areas where the game could be touched up, sure, but the overall experience seems solid enough. Some balance tweaks here, some optimizations there, and I think it could keep a solid place in the MMO space for a while.

I'm reading a lot of comments about "Pay to Win" though... not just on this site, but on other sites.

At this point, I can't help but roll my eyes ever so slightly when I read said comments. Every Free to Play game that i've seen released has someone claiming some aspect of it is "Pay to Win". If they sell any kind of gear, even if it's equivalent to what you can earn in game? Pay to win. If it's a game that requires unlocks to equip certain tiers of in-game gear if you're a free member, it's "pay to win". Heck, if they sell XP Pots, it's apparently "Pay to Win" as well. This is if I were to believe the comments on Massively, MMORPG, or even here on the Escapist.

That said, the claims of "Pay to Win" pretty much don't resonate that much with me anymore. Most of the time that I see it, I equate it to "I should get the game entirely for free." As the review said, it doesn't put anyone at any advantage.

Game companies have to make money somehow. They aren't going to give you a game like this out of the goodness of their hearts, and subscriptions are now an antiquated business model.

 

[Lawyer105]

Stuff about not pay2win.

Hey there... just a few comments on the unlocks.

If you play a heavy trooper, you get a default, dumb-fire rocket launcher (with rocket drop) to kill vehicles. Except the rockets are so slow that the only people you're going to kill are stationary, camping morons. And probably not even them, because it takes like 5 rockets (over 30 seconds) to get the kill. But you're not going to get ANYBODY that's half awake unless you surprise him with half a squad. And since tanks are cheap and plentiful (and can now be driven by a single dude), there's absolutely no reason to bother. Pull a tank yourself, or quit wasting time and go somewhere else. On the other hand, if you BUY the lock-on rocket launcher, you can make that tank's day miserable with just two dudes and it becomes a lot more doable.

Don't even think of taking on air vehicles with ground based AA. The devs have already said that all ground based AA is only a "deterrent" to air vehicles. Anybody that's not retarded and is making strafing runs at decent speed has nothing to fear from ground based AA (most of which falls into the BUY bracket because of price). The devs say that to kill air you must play air. Fine for real life, stupid in a game. But, oh wait... the A2A rockets are ALSO in the BUY category. Funny thing, that.

Certs are power. Assuming relatively equal skill levels, the dude with the most certs will generally win the fight. If you BUY cert boosters or pay a subscription you get more certs and you get them faster. Nice, huh?

I know they have to incentivise paying, but what they're really doing is de-incentivising anybody that won't or can't pay. That's going to lead to low pops, poor fights, server merges, life-support for a few years, then closed down.

What it's NOT going to lead to is pulling in the BF/COD crowd, so many of the changes they made t(which annoy the PS1 vets) are not going to be useful and will simply result in reducing the hardcore PS1 people that are left.

 

[exobook]

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?

There is a mac version planned at some point in the future. At what point is another matter though.

Personlly I do find the gameplay fun, its just that I'm playing on a laptop with doesn't meet the recommended requirements. The result is that it gets unplayable in the larger battles. As such all I can really do is wonder around the empty parts of the map and attack lone bases.

So unless they optimise things for us low spec players I don't think I can play for much longer.

 

[TheBelgianGuy]

I tried to love this game, I really do. But it's just so completely unbalanced and Pay2Win...

The game is just filled with high-level players in their gunships and heavy tanks farming new players. And you know what? You can't deal with them, ever, because they have the best weapons available and you've got shit.

The heavy gets a dumb-fire missile launcher that needs 6 direct hits to kill a light tank. Oh, and did you know one of the factions has hovering Heavy tanks that can strafe, evading these missiles with no effort whatsoever?

Liberators are gunships that hover 800m up in the air and kill everything that moves. With thermal or IR vision upgrade, nothing is safe for them. AA-turets you find in bases? Completely useless. You'll get killed in 3 seconds if a Liberator shoots at you, and you need 3-4 magazines to kill him if you have 100% accuracy.

And don't even try doing these things as a new player. You'll get mauled in seconds. Stock vehicles suck completely. You'll lose every tank battle because you need to place 7-8 hits on the enemy, and he kills you in 3.
You can't pilot the aircraft, because all you get are shitty stock machineguns that are very inaccurate and deal nearly no damage. And any higher lvl player, or a pay2winner can just effortlessly shoot you down with guided or unguided rockets.


This is what the game is about: Battlerank 30-40 players in Magriders or Liberators standing around your spawnpoint farming infantry for 100 certifications (the ingame currency) / hour.
If you're not willing to fork in several dollars/euro's for all the fancy equipment, your sole purpose in this game is to act as easy points for those who do.

Worst. MMO. Ever.

 

[xDarc]

Worst. MMO. Ever.

I don't know about "ever," but I played the first one in 2003 for 3-4 years. I couldn't stand PS 2 beta for more than 3-4 weeks. I was so excited when I found about the sequel, and then so disappointed that it was nothing like the original. Even if I were still a young 20 something with little responsibility and lots of free time I wouldn't bother.

Can you believe that in their EverQuest glory days SoE was like the #2 Game Publisher in the US? They've fallen from grace for a reason, they cannot deliver and they cannot be trusted to do the right thing; they need to just go under and be gone already.

 

[TwentyPercentCooler]

Played the beta of this and enjoyed it a bit, even though I'm not much of an FPS person. I'm interested to see where it goes, though. After a bit of optimization to make it run a little faster than a turtle in a pool of Jell-o, and some balancing and tweaks, it could turn out to be a heck of a fun experience.

I'm not sure if SoE is that smart, though. By the time they get around to doing all of this, the game will probably be dead because the supply of new players will dry up after the word gets out that the player is mostly useless without shelling out money.

 

[TheBelgianGuy]

Worst. MMO. Ever.

I don't know about "ever,"

Granted, I haven't played every MMO to ever come out so that's hardly a fair thing to say from my part

I just really wish it was a better game, because the concept is amazing.

 

[Worgen]

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.

Your wrong about the default rocket launcher, its actually really good but tanks have varying armor so if you shoot them from the front then you will do almost no damage but a rear shot will take over half their hp, it takes some practice but once you get good with it, takes are less threatening.

Aircraft are all about getting behind your enemy, its not really that hard to dodge a guided missile and the flare upgrade isn't that expensive, I think its only 100 points. Really if you get good at piloting, its not too hard to stick behind an enemy aircraft and down it with the default gun.

 

[The_Emperor]

I tried to love this game, I really do. But it's just so completely unbalanced and Pay2Win...

The game is just filled with high-level players in their gunships and heavy tanks farming new players. And you know what? You can't deal with them, ever, because they have the best weapons available and you've got shit.

The heavy gets a dumb-fire missile launcher that needs 6 direct hits to kill a light tank. Oh, and did you know one of the factions has hovering Heavy tanks that can strafe, evading these missiles with no effort whatsoever?

Liberators are gunships that hover 800m up in the air and kill everything that moves. With thermal or IR vision upgrade, nothing is safe for them. AA-turets you find in bases? Completely useless. You'll get killed in 3 seconds if a Liberator shoots at you, and you need 3-4 magazines to kill him if you have 100% accuracy.

And don't even try doing these things as a new player. You'll get mauled in seconds. Stock vehicles suck completely. You'll lose every tank battle because you need to place 7-8 hits on the enemy, and he kills you in 3.
You can't pilot the aircraft, because all you get are shitty stock machineguns that are very inaccurate and deal nearly no damage. And any higher lvl player, or a pay2winner can just effortlessly shoot you down with guided or unguided rockets.


This is what the game is about: Battlerank 30-40 players in Magriders or Liberators standing around your spawnpoint farming infantry for 100 certifications (the ingame currency) / hour.
If you're not willing to fork in several dollars/euro's for all the fancy equipment, your sole purpose in this game is to act as easy points for those who do.

Worst. MMO. Ever.

If you shoot tanks in the back they go down quicker, mags can drift but dont have a rotating turret so are easliy flanked.

Roll with a commander who will call AA max when there is a lot of air, air to ground is also getting rebalanced in next patch, 1 flak cannon is not supposed to be able to kill a lib it would be way op and if you are a good shot it takes 2 or 3 clips.

The stock tank is fine, I have had no issues with it a regularly blow mosquitos out of the air in 1 shot with vanguard.

you can unlock an aa machine gun for 250 certs which might take a few days to a week to get depending on how good you are.
7 day 50% xp boost is like £5 maybe so yeah, you also gain certs when you are offline btw.

buying dumbfire rockets and zephyr cannons doesnt mean you immediately win as long as you have an organised response you can take a continent with a whole army of randoms. plus I have little trouble with the rocket launcher hitting things far away.

its not so much pay to win as team2win

plus you can grind it mostly completely for free if you so wish. its a free game, a huge free game with nice devs who listen etc. tbh it kinda sounds like you are butthurt because you died a lot.

plus double xp weekend so double certs.

 

[SnowBurst]

wtf are you talking about? this is in no way familiar to battlefield 3 or cod and ive played bf3 since launch this is nothing like it. wtf are yoyu actually talking about? it takes minuites to get anywhere not ages takes seconds for an air veichicle and you shouldnt need to run much anyway

 

[WolfLordAndy]

All the pay to win people are being a bit over the top I think, there are a few options that are straight upgrades, i.e. an extra ability, weapon or slotted item where you had nothing before (such as flairs, bonus armour, c4, etc) but for the most part guns are all variations, giving trade off in range/firepower/etc.

Guided rockets are getting a nerf this patch that means they HAVE to lock on in order to fire, thus making them alot less useful close up (much like BF3 between dumbfire or Laser lock on rockets).

Everyone also seems to forget that PS1 you had to buy the game, the expansion (if you wanted cave weapons/BFRs) and a monthy subsciption fee. Considering how long I plan to play Planetside 2 I recon I'll be hard pushed to spend as much as I did in sub fees to PS1.

wtf are you talking about? this is in no way familiar to battlefield 3 or cod and ive played bf3 since launch this is nothing like it. wtf are yoyu actually talking about? it takes minuites to get anywhere not ages takes seconds for an air veichicle and you shouldnt need to run much anyway

BF3 is the closest current game to PS2. But you're looking at 64 man Capian border type maps, and that would just be the area of a single base. In PS2 if the fight happens to be on the far side of the contenent, you can expect at least a 5minute fly (if you don't bump into the one roaming enemy fighter on your way).

Fortunately when they brought the AMS-Sunderer back in they made it so usually you have spawn points, plus they made instant action actually work properly now.

 

[elilupe]

I'm glad this game came out well, and I've been playing it since Beta, but I just can't overcome the feeling that something is missing in this game that the original had. Something that made me love the original Planetside almost more than any other game is not present in Planetside 2, and I just can't place it. Maybe, since it's F2P, the sense of...community that Planetside 1 had is gone? I'm not sure. Are there any other original Planetside veterans that can help me figure this out?