Once upon a 2003 there was a multiplayer game called Planetside. Being as it launched before World of Warcraft dumbed down the MMO concept to an unrecognizable farce worthy of the lowest common denominator, Planetside still aspired to MMOs' rightful convergence of genres, mixing hundred-player strategy with first-person pugnacity in a single reasonably persistent virtual world. (With admittedly mixed success.) This largely meant embracing what I'd later call the #1 rule in my Massively Multiplayer Manifesto: The world is the game.
It played up its nominally futuristic setting by making a big deal out of dropping out of the stratosphere onto each new continent or manually flying your vehicle through gigantic glowing warp gates. Teleportation was limited to your nearest spawn point or a single point you yourself bookmarked, making organizing transport with other players a crucial skill for all involved. Bases had to be supplied to remain functional. Thanks to the stringent practical limits on how many objects could be rendered in an online game at the time, they were also massive, monolithic structures with relatively few rooms and defensible choke points. The emphasis was on locations, not players.
Planetside 2 chose to reverse that. Bases no longer have any passive defenses. Calculated, premeditated long-range carpet-bombings and artillery shelling was replaced with overpowered invisible snipers, insta-kill dogfights, an overpowered "harasser" light vehicle capable of ignoring battle lines and worst of all, massive amounts of terrain clutter. Almost every room and courtyard has at least three entrances and is utterly stuffed with boxes piled upon boxes blocking line of sight, with the overall result randomizing player movements to make it impossible to predict one's enemy. Base capture times were trivialized and base-flipping made a constant occurrence and teleportation was made so ubiquitous that there are now fewer passenger vehicles without built-teleporters than with them. The result is a clusterfuck. Planetside 2 was re-tooled from the first installment's emphasis on epic battles for terrain to a Call of Duty clone, team deathmatch heavily favoring opportunism over planning. Players no longer have to specialize every day for a particular role, vehicles are paper-fragile (especially the aircraft) and it's impossible to advance in any battlefield without getting flanked, because with such permeable battle-lines, there simply are no flanks. Only a roiling melee of fast-fingered, slow-brained twitch gamers taking potshots at each other. Sheer population numbers count for more than they ever did.
Planetside 2 traded in the persistence of its virtual world for mindless twitch and kill-counting, traded in the concepts of territory control and conquering a world for petty sadism and narcissism.
Aesthetically, the game pushed its dumbed-down reinterpretation by downplaying SF elements in favor of military jargon, tanks and assault rifles. Even the constant teleportation takes place without any bells and whistles, by players simply appearing in their respective vehicles. The somewhat airy, exploration themed music from the first game became more martial. Most interestingly though, four years ago the game acquired new loading screens. If memory serves, this came about as the result of a fan-art contest. Each and every one of them featured a group of soldiers of one faction killing one single specimen of one of the others. Running him over with a tank, executing him at point-blank range, etc. There's an obvious link between the mentality and the product. The hyperactive degenerates with no attention span who love PS2's focus on unfocused opportunism, zerging and constant reversals are also primitive enough to swallow the idiotic message of those loading screens, to want to see themselves as only ever beating down an outnumbered opponent.
Yet a virtual world has little to offer if it doesn't focus on the world itself. If you're just into machine-gunning down random schmucks, then Call of Duty just does Call of Duty better. Though PS2 had a decent run, it rapidly lost the interest of the right customers and as a result also the wrong ones (the ones you draw in with splash screens of unopposed victories; bullies) who depend on better minds for leadership. Somewhat unsurprisingly, PS2 is now being re-tooled as... even more of a standard "khakis and Kalashnikovs" team deathmatch game. With a touch of Fortnite clone via a battle royale mode. Because copycatting a competitor who's already kicking your ass in popularity can't fail, right?
I find amusement in one discrepancy.
They apparently held another fan art contest in the past year, and the new loading screens do indeed try to showcase Auraxis as an alien planet, new worlds and new civilizations, the romantic feel of exploration. They show lone players or groups with their weapons holstered trudging among luxuriant otherworldly vegetation, misty craters and unspoilt wilderness stretching to vast horizons. Wow. Very nice, but it's too little too late. It took you six years to realize you've been catering to the wrong audience?
____________________________________________
P.S.:
Players have collected most of the loading screens in question at this link. It should be easy enough to discern the first and second wave.
Showing posts with label planetside. Show all posts
Showing posts with label planetside. Show all posts
2019/02/21
2017/08/17
Clevon, the Lesser Evil
"I'll be your scapegoat
I'll be your savior
I'm the better of two evils"
Marilyn Manson - The Better of Two Evils
Planetside 2 seems to be stagnating a bit after Sony sold off SOE. Its painfully uncreative monotony of tanks and assault rifles, while lacking any of the first Planetside's Science Fiction immersion, has nonetheless attracted a stable following of drooling rednecks eager to deafen each other with military slang. Seriously, I've never heard so many southern accents over voice comms. Though most of the intelligent leadership which made things interesting at the game's launch has wandered off in search of something more engaging, I still find it possible to get into semi-organized squads about half the times I randomly decide to log in.
Hey, it's still more purposeful coordination than you'll get in other online games. Sadly, PS2 lacks the necessary interface features (beyond waypoints) to integrate strategic / tactical planning (nothing like Savage 2's RTS command interface) but they did at some point implement the ability to draw directions on the map.
Now, anyone who's visited the Internet will tell you the inevitable consequence of letting players draw on the map:
Granted its rather rare to see something like this (the screenshot itself dates from this past winter) so I assume Daybreak's facetiously policing morality and taste like every other company. Nevertheless, PS2's playerbase comes across as just slightly different. They're idiots, sure, but they can occasionally push an objective.
Anyone who's played the game can tell from the screenshot above that, aside from his questionable aesthetic tastes, the artiste in question was also leading his platoon into a pointless, inevitable three-way stalemate instead of being satisfied with holding one of the most easily reinforced positions on the map. Nevertheless, he was leading. He was providing initiative and a focus for a group of forty players, and if you've logged into any online game over the past decade, be it MMO, FPS, RPG, Arena, whatever, you know how increasingly rare that is. A few of us told him he's an idiot. Then we kept playing, because the game is the game, and the practical effects of his game-play outweighed the sheer irrelevance of anything he said. No insults, whether drawn on the map or shouted over voice chat or typed, will ever blow up an enemy tank column. Having someone to call for a coherent missile launcher defense will. The game is the game. It is its own world, and the worth or guilt of any player should always be weighed by how much it impacts that world. The greatest crime he committed was obscuring more relevant information on the map with his crayon scrawls. That has practical repercussions within the game. That matters.
I more recently played with a hyperactive little shit who constantly spammed voice chat with overexcited war movie catchphrases. Cluttering voice chat with white noise is counteproductive. I loathe it. And yet... I have a mute button. I muted him and kept playing. In fact, I supported him in asking the platoon leader for a squad leadership position because I knew this attention-starved little meth-head would actively place beacons and update waypoints and provide transportation for our squad... and he did. Then I called him a degenerate retard as I muted him, then we both kept playing.
The game is the game.
It is not a chat room. It is not a social club. It should most certainly never be a "safe space' for the spineless millennial snowflake Gestapo policing language and choking the life out of any public interactions.
The Secret World's recent re-release as "Secret World Legends" has been filled with endless numbers of bugs. Anything and everything is bugged, from graphics to items, monsters, whole missions or instances, crashes to desktop, etc. At the same time, Funcom's very aggressively trying to force players to buy amusement park money by selling items, inventory space, even character movement speed increases for cold hard real-world cash. Of course, they refuse to put any of this income into bettering the game itself, only cranking out more glitz. Among other things, they've refused to pay for anywhere near enough customer support to handle their playerbase's desperation at the product's nigh-unplayable state. Petitions pile up. As I mentioned, response time to three of my petitions for bugged missions and gear took anywhere from five to eight days, with the item being irrevocably lost.
When I cursed out the retarded trash in General chat, I was harassed only an hour or two later by a GM who took the time to personally materialize in game next to me threatening to ban me. When this is developers' single focus, morally cleansing their games' chat box, is it any wonder multiplayer -anything- has become such a joke?
Meanwhile, every single redneck, valley girl, dudebro, jock and church lady in TSW is mindlessly grinding the same instances over, and over, and over... so long as someone else leads the team. So long as someone else tanks, so they can continue to measure their social status in terms of DPS meters. So long as someone else organizes the raid so they don't have to think about goals. Their demands for oversimplification are what's destroyed MMOs. As much as I despise PS2's redneck brigades, they are still preferable to the painstakingly polite but actively counterproductive population of most online games. I will gladly take the racist, drunken, dick-obsessed crackheads so long as they actually work towards the activity's logical goals, toward playing well.
I've been banned temporarily or permanently from half a dozen different games for calling retards retards, and in each and very single one of those games I was addressing degenerate vermin actively sabotaging their teams, actively damaging the game itself, not the chat box. Quitting in the middle of a match, refusing to work toward team goals, abusing exploits, refusing to try anything with a difficulty level steeper than the bunny slopes, any and all of this should be a bannable offense before harassing your own customers over their chat is even considered. All we've gotten with this idiotic politically correct head-chopping is a population of cowardly, brown-nosing schoolyard bullies, shoving you down the stairs then crying when the teacher shows up because you called them doodyheads.
Worse yet when the teacher coddles the bullies, neh? Isn't it amazing that you can grief to your heart's delight in any multiplayer game yet the only thing that will actually get you banned is cursing out a griefer?
And how fucking sad has this culture gotten when hicks and hillbillies show clearer thinking than urbane modern society? Did John Galt already steal all the nerds off the Internet when I wasn't looking?
There's a line I used to repeat when recruiting players for teams a decade ago in CoH:
LFM for whatever. "Must be able to follow simple directions."
That was usually the only criterion I considered worth adopting. It is the main criterion by which gamers should be condemned by game-master authority: their gameplay. Once you have a population of pragmatically cooperative, honest, dedicated players, then worry about the aesthetics of their moronic babbling.
I'll be your savior
I'm the better of two evils"
Marilyn Manson - The Better of Two Evils
Planetside 2 seems to be stagnating a bit after Sony sold off SOE. Its painfully uncreative monotony of tanks and assault rifles, while lacking any of the first Planetside's Science Fiction immersion, has nonetheless attracted a stable following of drooling rednecks eager to deafen each other with military slang. Seriously, I've never heard so many southern accents over voice comms. Though most of the intelligent leadership which made things interesting at the game's launch has wandered off in search of something more engaging, I still find it possible to get into semi-organized squads about half the times I randomly decide to log in.
Hey, it's still more purposeful coordination than you'll get in other online games. Sadly, PS2 lacks the necessary interface features (beyond waypoints) to integrate strategic / tactical planning (nothing like Savage 2's RTS command interface) but they did at some point implement the ability to draw directions on the map.
Now, anyone who's visited the Internet will tell you the inevitable consequence of letting players draw on the map:
Granted its rather rare to see something like this (the screenshot itself dates from this past winter) so I assume Daybreak's facetiously policing morality and taste like every other company. Nevertheless, PS2's playerbase comes across as just slightly different. They're idiots, sure, but they can occasionally push an objective.
Anyone who's played the game can tell from the screenshot above that, aside from his questionable aesthetic tastes, the artiste in question was also leading his platoon into a pointless, inevitable three-way stalemate instead of being satisfied with holding one of the most easily reinforced positions on the map. Nevertheless, he was leading. He was providing initiative and a focus for a group of forty players, and if you've logged into any online game over the past decade, be it MMO, FPS, RPG, Arena, whatever, you know how increasingly rare that is. A few of us told him he's an idiot. Then we kept playing, because the game is the game, and the practical effects of his game-play outweighed the sheer irrelevance of anything he said. No insults, whether drawn on the map or shouted over voice chat or typed, will ever blow up an enemy tank column. Having someone to call for a coherent missile launcher defense will. The game is the game. It is its own world, and the worth or guilt of any player should always be weighed by how much it impacts that world. The greatest crime he committed was obscuring more relevant information on the map with his crayon scrawls. That has practical repercussions within the game. That matters.
I more recently played with a hyperactive little shit who constantly spammed voice chat with overexcited war movie catchphrases. Cluttering voice chat with white noise is counteproductive. I loathe it. And yet... I have a mute button. I muted him and kept playing. In fact, I supported him in asking the platoon leader for a squad leadership position because I knew this attention-starved little meth-head would actively place beacons and update waypoints and provide transportation for our squad... and he did. Then I called him a degenerate retard as I muted him, then we both kept playing.
The game is the game.
It is not a chat room. It is not a social club. It should most certainly never be a "safe space' for the spineless millennial snowflake Gestapo policing language and choking the life out of any public interactions.
The Secret World's recent re-release as "Secret World Legends" has been filled with endless numbers of bugs. Anything and everything is bugged, from graphics to items, monsters, whole missions or instances, crashes to desktop, etc. At the same time, Funcom's very aggressively trying to force players to buy amusement park money by selling items, inventory space, even character movement speed increases for cold hard real-world cash. Of course, they refuse to put any of this income into bettering the game itself, only cranking out more glitz. Among other things, they've refused to pay for anywhere near enough customer support to handle their playerbase's desperation at the product's nigh-unplayable state. Petitions pile up. As I mentioned, response time to three of my petitions for bugged missions and gear took anywhere from five to eight days, with the item being irrevocably lost.
When I cursed out the retarded trash in General chat, I was harassed only an hour or two later by a GM who took the time to personally materialize in game next to me threatening to ban me. When this is developers' single focus, morally cleansing their games' chat box, is it any wonder multiplayer -anything- has become such a joke?
Meanwhile, every single redneck, valley girl, dudebro, jock and church lady in TSW is mindlessly grinding the same instances over, and over, and over... so long as someone else leads the team. So long as someone else tanks, so they can continue to measure their social status in terms of DPS meters. So long as someone else organizes the raid so they don't have to think about goals. Their demands for oversimplification are what's destroyed MMOs. As much as I despise PS2's redneck brigades, they are still preferable to the painstakingly polite but actively counterproductive population of most online games. I will gladly take the racist, drunken, dick-obsessed crackheads so long as they actually work towards the activity's logical goals, toward playing well.
I've been banned temporarily or permanently from half a dozen different games for calling retards retards, and in each and very single one of those games I was addressing degenerate vermin actively sabotaging their teams, actively damaging the game itself, not the chat box. Quitting in the middle of a match, refusing to work toward team goals, abusing exploits, refusing to try anything with a difficulty level steeper than the bunny slopes, any and all of this should be a bannable offense before harassing your own customers over their chat is even considered. All we've gotten with this idiotic politically correct head-chopping is a population of cowardly, brown-nosing schoolyard bullies, shoving you down the stairs then crying when the teacher shows up because you called them doodyheads.
Worse yet when the teacher coddles the bullies, neh? Isn't it amazing that you can grief to your heart's delight in any multiplayer game yet the only thing that will actually get you banned is cursing out a griefer?
And how fucking sad has this culture gotten when hicks and hillbillies show clearer thinking than urbane modern society? Did John Galt already steal all the nerds off the Internet when I wasn't looking?
There's a line I used to repeat when recruiting players for teams a decade ago in CoH:
LFM for whatever. "Must be able to follow simple directions."
That was usually the only criterion I considered worth adopting. It is the main criterion by which gamers should be condemned by game-master authority: their gameplay. Once you have a population of pragmatically cooperative, honest, dedicated players, then worry about the aesthetics of their moronic babbling.
2015/04/18
Exemplary Bad Multiplayer: PS2 Sniping
Once upon a time, I used to play World of Warcraft. As per my usual high-fantasy preferences, I was an elven druid herbalist. I liked exploring. I'd often find myself out in the middle of nowhere, overlooking grandiose swaths of persistent world filled with a myriad players and interactable resources, monsters, NPCs, etc, most of which were sadly out of render distance. A crafty gnome I knew mailed me a gift one day: a telescope! Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy! I scrambled up a cliffside by Maraudon caverns with as wide a view as possible over the desolate scrubland terrain imagining myself spotting rare monsters and encroaching orc parties and relaying their movements to my faction. Hero of the Alliance I'd be, brave wilderness scout extraordinaire, yessiree. I lifted the telescope to my eye (okay, fine, I clicked the damn thing in my inventory) only to find that it did indeed magnify... terrain. Everything else was still out of render distance. What a frikkin waste of development time.
Before that I'd played Counterstrike when it came out as the mod to beat TFC before it was out-done by Natural Selection and Day of Defeat and though I normally shun internets slang, sometimes it's apt. I loathed AWP-whores. You could fit a one-shot-kill weapon into the game, arguably. You could fit long-range weapons into the game, sure. However, a gun which out-damaged and out-ranged everything in the game with pinpoint accuracy was simply blatantly, idiotically, inexcusably overpowered... and at the same time useless. AWP-whores sat back and did nothing to help anyone else, leeching killing blows on enemies I'd flush out of hiding but never providing actual backup and never bothering to actually attack/defend the team objective. This was my first exposure to the parasitic sniper mentality which has now become so entrenched in team FPS games. Of course if you really want to make AWP-whores even more idiotically overpowered you'd give them invisibility as well.
The first Planetside included some sniper rifles, but these were only one of many long-range gimmicks like player-guided MIRV warheads, high-altitude bombers and indirect artillery fire. Planetside 2 unfortunately picked up on the new industry standard, the perceived necessity to pander to idiotic parasites by including a playable class which can kill one-on-one with impunity. Brain-dead gamers demand ways to win 1v1 in team games without actually playing for the team. As in most games these days, that... well, I can't call it "role" in context since by definition it lacks synergy, but it's filled by the rogue archetype, in PS2's case termed Infiltrators. They get one-shot kills, they get ridiculous range, they get invisibility. They are utter wastes of space who contribute nothing to the control-point push around which the game revolves, but in terms of moronic dick-measuring they're manna from heaven. Boom, headshot! Just watch your K/D ratio rise.
There is nothing wrong with the disparate elements here. Range, killing and invisibility are all excellent game devices and topics which have been talked to death online since there were games online. There are proper ways to implement them. PS2 even includes some true utility for infiltrators in the form of sensor darts which reveal enemies on the minimap and "hacking" which gives access to enemy equipment and vehicle purchase terminals. Both valid roles for a thief class... except that hacking is melee-range and sniper rifles vastly outrange sensor darts, which means most players who like playing infiltrators never make use of these team-friendly abilities, but merely sit back on hilltops and leech killing blows off the edges of fights. A PS2 sniper is an utter parasite using his teammates as bait, refusing to put himself in danger. Instead of having a teammate nearby with whom to share the risk, you get an opportunistic leech who will cloak and run as soon as an enemy appears allowing you to be focus-fired. I'd love to see some PS2 session stats on the number of snipers a faction has and the likelihood of it winning an alert. I'm betting on an inverse correlation.
There is no room for that kind of stupidity in a team game.
Again, the MMO rogue archetype is made idiot-friendly by the emphasis on damage-dealing. Infiltration adds a great deal to multiplayer games when divorced from the instant gratification of assassination. In Planetside 1, infiltrating an enemy base meant finding some quiet spot to place a teleportation beacon through which a horde of friendly infantry could pour behind enemy lines. You could hand your faction victory over a base, break an hour-long siege, without ever firing a shot. It was elegant, dangerous and above all, team-friendly. It was the best of James Bond, as opposed to the bloodthirsty caveman American Sniper craze of today.
Or take the question of range, for instance. There is a place in team games for dealing large amounts of damage from outside your enemy's range. It's called artillery. PS1's Flail vehicle could shoot halfway across continents in a lovely ballistic arc for massive AoE damage. It required a spotter at the front line, anyone, to mark intended targets and therefore required some willing cooperation from other players. Unlike opportunistic sniping, the flail was not a way to rack up kills but mostly suppressive fire limiting enemy movements, and a deployed Flail was an easy mark for enemy aircraft unlike PS2 cloakers. It both required and provided synergy with other gameplay elements. PS2's greatest flaw is that it avoids such devices in favor of opportunism. There is some artillery fire in PS2 via tank cannons but it's completely divorced from whatever anyone else on your faction is doing, disorganized potshots.
Instead of pandering to imbeciles who take up space on crowded continents without contributing anything to their faction by handing out sniper rifles, put infiltrators in their proper place as spotters. Here's me today, watching one flank of a large fight from a nearby base:
That thing I'm looking at is an enemy AMS, a mobile spawn location for infantry (a priority target if there ever was one) plus it happens to be flanking my team's defenses to boot, sneaking in below that hillside out of sight. Now, the sniper routine is to wait for enemies to start spawning from it and take some potshots, maybe get a kill or two, set them back by fifteen seconds each over a few minutes' time. Spawn-killing. Big e-peen boost for me, pnz0ring sitting ducks who have no chance of hitting me, but almost entirely meaningless in terms of the faction conflict. I could also spot the vehicle and the players spawning from it, but that only lasts a few seconds and since I can take the chance of killing them instead, the game actively de-incentivizes me from taking the time to do so. Only so many buttons I can mash at a time. My ability to spot that enemy target is actually less relevant to my faction than if I were playing a gunner in a vehicle and had a free finger for not having to use my movement keys.
So fuck snipers. They're worthless, brainless parasites who add nothing to the game and though they help keep players moving by making it dangerous to stand still, that's a cheap way of making the game seem intense and fast-paced. Fuck snipers and their rifles. Instead of sniper rifles, give infiltrators tagging rifles instead. Return the Liberator to its high-flying carpet-bomber role, re-institute long-range indirect fire a la Flail bombing, and tie these into team-oriented targeting via infiltrators. Allow me to fulfill that wilderness scout role I so wanted as a WoW druid a decade ago.
Give me a rifle which marks enemy targets for twice or three times or five times as long as the normal spotting which any class can do.
Give me a rifle which acts as an automatic rangefinder for friendly ground-based artillery or long-range beacon for friendly bombers up in the clouds.
Give me EMP bullets for disabling enemy vehicles without doing damage to them.
Give me an "infectious" spotting rifle which marks the first enemy it hits and spreads the effect to his nearby teammates.
Hell, give me, anything, anything at all, instead of the imbecilic "BOOM, HEADSHOT!" routine. Take away those worthless retarded AWP-whores' dick-measuring and turn infiltrators into team players, then see how many people will actually play the class. You'll lose all the right customers. We don't need their stupidity cluttering team games.
Before that I'd played Counterstrike when it came out as the mod to beat TFC before it was out-done by Natural Selection and Day of Defeat and though I normally shun internets slang, sometimes it's apt. I loathed AWP-whores. You could fit a one-shot-kill weapon into the game, arguably. You could fit long-range weapons into the game, sure. However, a gun which out-damaged and out-ranged everything in the game with pinpoint accuracy was simply blatantly, idiotically, inexcusably overpowered... and at the same time useless. AWP-whores sat back and did nothing to help anyone else, leeching killing blows on enemies I'd flush out of hiding but never providing actual backup and never bothering to actually attack/defend the team objective. This was my first exposure to the parasitic sniper mentality which has now become so entrenched in team FPS games. Of course if you really want to make AWP-whores even more idiotically overpowered you'd give them invisibility as well.
The first Planetside included some sniper rifles, but these were only one of many long-range gimmicks like player-guided MIRV warheads, high-altitude bombers and indirect artillery fire. Planetside 2 unfortunately picked up on the new industry standard, the perceived necessity to pander to idiotic parasites by including a playable class which can kill one-on-one with impunity. Brain-dead gamers demand ways to win 1v1 in team games without actually playing for the team. As in most games these days, that... well, I can't call it "role" in context since by definition it lacks synergy, but it's filled by the rogue archetype, in PS2's case termed Infiltrators. They get one-shot kills, they get ridiculous range, they get invisibility. They are utter wastes of space who contribute nothing to the control-point push around which the game revolves, but in terms of moronic dick-measuring they're manna from heaven. Boom, headshot! Just watch your K/D ratio rise.
There is nothing wrong with the disparate elements here. Range, killing and invisibility are all excellent game devices and topics which have been talked to death online since there were games online. There are proper ways to implement them. PS2 even includes some true utility for infiltrators in the form of sensor darts which reveal enemies on the minimap and "hacking" which gives access to enemy equipment and vehicle purchase terminals. Both valid roles for a thief class... except that hacking is melee-range and sniper rifles vastly outrange sensor darts, which means most players who like playing infiltrators never make use of these team-friendly abilities, but merely sit back on hilltops and leech killing blows off the edges of fights. A PS2 sniper is an utter parasite using his teammates as bait, refusing to put himself in danger. Instead of having a teammate nearby with whom to share the risk, you get an opportunistic leech who will cloak and run as soon as an enemy appears allowing you to be focus-fired. I'd love to see some PS2 session stats on the number of snipers a faction has and the likelihood of it winning an alert. I'm betting on an inverse correlation.
There is no room for that kind of stupidity in a team game.
Again, the MMO rogue archetype is made idiot-friendly by the emphasis on damage-dealing. Infiltration adds a great deal to multiplayer games when divorced from the instant gratification of assassination. In Planetside 1, infiltrating an enemy base meant finding some quiet spot to place a teleportation beacon through which a horde of friendly infantry could pour behind enemy lines. You could hand your faction victory over a base, break an hour-long siege, without ever firing a shot. It was elegant, dangerous and above all, team-friendly. It was the best of James Bond, as opposed to the bloodthirsty caveman American Sniper craze of today.
Or take the question of range, for instance. There is a place in team games for dealing large amounts of damage from outside your enemy's range. It's called artillery. PS1's Flail vehicle could shoot halfway across continents in a lovely ballistic arc for massive AoE damage. It required a spotter at the front line, anyone, to mark intended targets and therefore required some willing cooperation from other players. Unlike opportunistic sniping, the flail was not a way to rack up kills but mostly suppressive fire limiting enemy movements, and a deployed Flail was an easy mark for enemy aircraft unlike PS2 cloakers. It both required and provided synergy with other gameplay elements. PS2's greatest flaw is that it avoids such devices in favor of opportunism. There is some artillery fire in PS2 via tank cannons but it's completely divorced from whatever anyone else on your faction is doing, disorganized potshots.
Instead of pandering to imbeciles who take up space on crowded continents without contributing anything to their faction by handing out sniper rifles, put infiltrators in their proper place as spotters. Here's me today, watching one flank of a large fight from a nearby base:
That thing I'm looking at is an enemy AMS, a mobile spawn location for infantry (a priority target if there ever was one) plus it happens to be flanking my team's defenses to boot, sneaking in below that hillside out of sight. Now, the sniper routine is to wait for enemies to start spawning from it and take some potshots, maybe get a kill or two, set them back by fifteen seconds each over a few minutes' time. Spawn-killing. Big e-peen boost for me, pnz0ring sitting ducks who have no chance of hitting me, but almost entirely meaningless in terms of the faction conflict. I could also spot the vehicle and the players spawning from it, but that only lasts a few seconds and since I can take the chance of killing them instead, the game actively de-incentivizes me from taking the time to do so. Only so many buttons I can mash at a time. My ability to spot that enemy target is actually less relevant to my faction than if I were playing a gunner in a vehicle and had a free finger for not having to use my movement keys.
So fuck snipers. They're worthless, brainless parasites who add nothing to the game and though they help keep players moving by making it dangerous to stand still, that's a cheap way of making the game seem intense and fast-paced. Fuck snipers and their rifles. Instead of sniper rifles, give infiltrators tagging rifles instead. Return the Liberator to its high-flying carpet-bomber role, re-institute long-range indirect fire a la Flail bombing, and tie these into team-oriented targeting via infiltrators. Allow me to fulfill that wilderness scout role I so wanted as a WoW druid a decade ago.
Give me a rifle which marks enemy targets for twice or three times or five times as long as the normal spotting which any class can do.
Give me a rifle which acts as an automatic rangefinder for friendly ground-based artillery or long-range beacon for friendly bombers up in the clouds.
Give me EMP bullets for disabling enemy vehicles without doing damage to them.
Give me an "infectious" spotting rifle which marks the first enemy it hits and spreads the effect to his nearby teammates.
Hell, give me, anything, anything at all, instead of the imbecilic "BOOM, HEADSHOT!" routine. Take away those worthless retarded AWP-whores' dick-measuring and turn infiltrators into team players, then see how many people will actually play the class. You'll lose all the right customers. We don't need their stupidity cluttering team games.
2015/02/08
Planetside 2: Half-Cliche, Half-Iconoclast
Something very strange is happening with Planetside 2. It's improving.
Now wait, hear me out. Normally by this stage in an online game's lifespan, it should be hitting its "timesink" expansion pack. Developers toss one of these hings out onto the market and for little bit at the start seem to be trying to make it playable. Gradually, players begin to lose interest, and instead of upping the ante by trying to fix whatever's wrong with their product and recapture their audience, developers tend to play the numbers game. They cut their losses. They try to wring as much money as they can out of the few customers they have left while investing as little as possible in what has become to them a high-risk, low-confidence proposition.
The Shadow Shard, Moria, the Silithis faction-farm, Venetian Scenarios, etc. all fit into a greater trend. When you expand an online game, you do so with recycled content, perfunctorily re-skinned monsters and most importantly, timesinks, timesinks timesinks. A year or two into things, your customers by now have realized what you as a developer knew all along: your product is crap. This is not the time to try to save your reputation, to over-re-think things. It's time to double down. Double down on crap. Don't complicate the game experience by removing the bugs and imbalances players have gotten so comfortable exploiting. Don't confuse and scare them with mechanics which do a better job of challenging them. Just recycle some content to keep them subscribing just a few... more... months. A few hundred hours of zombie-farming should do it. Preferably, bundle it as an expansion pack to wring another $10-30 out of your die-hard fanboys (by definition not discerning customers) and hope they'll drag their friends into buying it, exploit those social contracts.
If this kills the game, then so be it. Hell, the biggest pay-off is a big initial release anyway. The subscription reward per work-hour investment tapers off after that anyhow, so screw it. Gut the development team down to a skeleton crew and move on to other projects. The first expansion is not actually meant to expand the product, but just to wring the dwindling reserves of blood from customers you've hyped into gullibly becoming emotionally invested enough in your tripe so as to buy blindly. It's not meant to keep them interested - just busy. If the product survives after that, fine, if not, fine too.
Now, Planetside 2 being entirely PvP, it sort of lacks the cheap expedient of re-skinning some mobs, placing hundreds of them on floating islands and keeping players busy with a "kill 1000 of these" achievement. This is not to say they couldn't still have followed the pattern. They could have constantly released new, more powerful "must-have" versions of existing weapons to keep players subscribing a few months longer, left the existing three continents intact and cut-and-pasted existing elements into a fourth one for the Hossin expansion. Ta-daaa! Money!
And they didn't. It's weird. They didn't just treat post-release content as a low-confidence investment. The one thing almost no company does is seriously address its existing gameplay issues, yet the patches following the Hossin expansion seem to have been characterized more by changes to existing mechanics and content than simply slapping on a bit of extra spending incentives for die-hard suckers. Oh, sure, there's quite a bit of that going around, lots of flashy new gimmicks in the cash shop, but new utility has surprisingly been limited to one new vehicle and a couple of new guns. To a surprising extent they've concerned themselves with improvements to existing terrain layouts, weapon mechanics, spawning and battle-line flow patterns... stuff that's not immediately justifiable by a pay-off estimate per man-hour in a power-point slide to impress investors. It's even making some steps in breaching the third dimension with vertically-oriented bases and smartly-placed cliffs and walls. Sony seems to be in it for the long haul. Which of course they did say they were from the start, but hell... you'd have to be a complete idiot to trust anything a game developer promises.
Here's a funny story. I had an old handy-cam. I'd lost some connectors for it so a few years ago I fished around an electronics store and found the technology for most of what I was missing was the equivalent of zip-disks for computers. Abandoned technological paths. The salesman just shrugged and said "yeah, it's Sony, they do weird stuff like that."
Planetside 2 is being developed slowly, rationally, even intelligently. It's no artistic masterpiece. Instead of a true scifi setting, it's disgustingly army-centered in all its aesthetics or lack thereof, banking on drawing in all the brainless Zero Dark Thirty fans who want to drive around in tanks and spew phonetic alphabet just like big-boy soldier-types. It is doing nothing to advance game concepts. Its combat mechanics and gameplay options are pathetically unimaginative even by FPS standards. Yet in treating their product not as a get-rich-quick scam to be gambled on and abandoned when the marks catch on but as a continual investment whose quality must be continually improved, it's kinda putting the industry's fly-by-nite attitude to shame. It's weird stuff. This is not the way you're supposed to be acting, you jackasses! Quit proving me wrong!
You know what's even weirder, though? It's actually working. Oh, sure, the player population dwindled somewhat after the first few months and PS2 condensed a few servers, but by and large it's succeeded in actually improving its playerbase. By increasingly putting the emphasis on large faction-wide events and cooperative advantages, it's been slowly selecting for a better type of gamer. Well, relatively. There are still plenty of attention-whoring little snots about who spam music and broadcast their every emotion over voice chat but more and more it has become possible to get into squads which actually want to play the game for its own sake, which simply cooperate toward greater goals without fuss or flamboyance.
Last year I was derided while giving commands over voice chat. "Is our platoon leader Alan Rickman?" one of my underlings commented. Now, I'd love to think he was referencing any of Rickman's wonderful performances in Perfume, Sweeney Todd, Dogma or Galaxy Quest, but given that I was drawling direct orders like "Bravo squad to Chimney Rock" without further embellishments in a bored, bitter monotone, I'm pretty sure they just resented being led into combat by Professor Snape.
Coming back to the game now, I find a lot more people are Snaping it up. Perhaps not quite dripping with my disdain for human life, but conversation tends to be much more to the point, less about insecure bragging or validation-seeking and simply about enjoying the game itself. Players are more aware of the big picture, less obsessed with farming their individual characters for achievements. Those who prefer that sort of idiocy can find it represented much better in WoW-clones. Simply by making the game playable as a faction war, PS2 is gradually building up a core following not of blindly fanboy-ish trend-hoppers but more and more of sedate, interested old-school gamers. Yes, things haven't completely tipped in that direction yet, but still, the gradual change is fascinating to note.
This is in an FPS game, mind you. So much for roleplayer conceit. I'll gladly take PS2's current playerbase over TSW's, not to mention WoW-clones.
Planetside 2 will never be as interesting as more imaginative games, but it is growing into the more grandiose replacement for the humdrum routine of online FPS represented by Counterstrike or Call of Duty. It is angling to become the new reference point for FPS games and maybe even MMOs, and given how seriously it's been developed so far, it might just happen. Calmly... coolly... entirely without incident.
Weird.
Now wait, hear me out. Normally by this stage in an online game's lifespan, it should be hitting its "timesink" expansion pack. Developers toss one of these hings out onto the market and for little bit at the start seem to be trying to make it playable. Gradually, players begin to lose interest, and instead of upping the ante by trying to fix whatever's wrong with their product and recapture their audience, developers tend to play the numbers game. They cut their losses. They try to wring as much money as they can out of the few customers they have left while investing as little as possible in what has become to them a high-risk, low-confidence proposition.
The Shadow Shard, Moria, the Silithis faction-farm, Venetian Scenarios, etc. all fit into a greater trend. When you expand an online game, you do so with recycled content, perfunctorily re-skinned monsters and most importantly, timesinks, timesinks timesinks. A year or two into things, your customers by now have realized what you as a developer knew all along: your product is crap. This is not the time to try to save your reputation, to over-re-think things. It's time to double down. Double down on crap. Don't complicate the game experience by removing the bugs and imbalances players have gotten so comfortable exploiting. Don't confuse and scare them with mechanics which do a better job of challenging them. Just recycle some content to keep them subscribing just a few... more... months. A few hundred hours of zombie-farming should do it. Preferably, bundle it as an expansion pack to wring another $10-30 out of your die-hard fanboys (by definition not discerning customers) and hope they'll drag their friends into buying it, exploit those social contracts.
If this kills the game, then so be it. Hell, the biggest pay-off is a big initial release anyway. The subscription reward per work-hour investment tapers off after that anyhow, so screw it. Gut the development team down to a skeleton crew and move on to other projects. The first expansion is not actually meant to expand the product, but just to wring the dwindling reserves of blood from customers you've hyped into gullibly becoming emotionally invested enough in your tripe so as to buy blindly. It's not meant to keep them interested - just busy. If the product survives after that, fine, if not, fine too.
Now, Planetside 2 being entirely PvP, it sort of lacks the cheap expedient of re-skinning some mobs, placing hundreds of them on floating islands and keeping players busy with a "kill 1000 of these" achievement. This is not to say they couldn't still have followed the pattern. They could have constantly released new, more powerful "must-have" versions of existing weapons to keep players subscribing a few months longer, left the existing three continents intact and cut-and-pasted existing elements into a fourth one for the Hossin expansion. Ta-daaa! Money!
And they didn't. It's weird. They didn't just treat post-release content as a low-confidence investment. The one thing almost no company does is seriously address its existing gameplay issues, yet the patches following the Hossin expansion seem to have been characterized more by changes to existing mechanics and content than simply slapping on a bit of extra spending incentives for die-hard suckers. Oh, sure, there's quite a bit of that going around, lots of flashy new gimmicks in the cash shop, but new utility has surprisingly been limited to one new vehicle and a couple of new guns. To a surprising extent they've concerned themselves with improvements to existing terrain layouts, weapon mechanics, spawning and battle-line flow patterns... stuff that's not immediately justifiable by a pay-off estimate per man-hour in a power-point slide to impress investors. It's even making some steps in breaching the third dimension with vertically-oriented bases and smartly-placed cliffs and walls. Sony seems to be in it for the long haul. Which of course they did say they were from the start, but hell... you'd have to be a complete idiot to trust anything a game developer promises.
Here's a funny story. I had an old handy-cam. I'd lost some connectors for it so a few years ago I fished around an electronics store and found the technology for most of what I was missing was the equivalent of zip-disks for computers. Abandoned technological paths. The salesman just shrugged and said "yeah, it's Sony, they do weird stuff like that."
Planetside 2 is being developed slowly, rationally, even intelligently. It's no artistic masterpiece. Instead of a true scifi setting, it's disgustingly army-centered in all its aesthetics or lack thereof, banking on drawing in all the brainless Zero Dark Thirty fans who want to drive around in tanks and spew phonetic alphabet just like big-boy soldier-types. It is doing nothing to advance game concepts. Its combat mechanics and gameplay options are pathetically unimaginative even by FPS standards. Yet in treating their product not as a get-rich-quick scam to be gambled on and abandoned when the marks catch on but as a continual investment whose quality must be continually improved, it's kinda putting the industry's fly-by-nite attitude to shame. It's weird stuff. This is not the way you're supposed to be acting, you jackasses! Quit proving me wrong!
You know what's even weirder, though? It's actually working. Oh, sure, the player population dwindled somewhat after the first few months and PS2 condensed a few servers, but by and large it's succeeded in actually improving its playerbase. By increasingly putting the emphasis on large faction-wide events and cooperative advantages, it's been slowly selecting for a better type of gamer. Well, relatively. There are still plenty of attention-whoring little snots about who spam music and broadcast their every emotion over voice chat but more and more it has become possible to get into squads which actually want to play the game for its own sake, which simply cooperate toward greater goals without fuss or flamboyance.
Last year I was derided while giving commands over voice chat. "Is our platoon leader Alan Rickman?" one of my underlings commented. Now, I'd love to think he was referencing any of Rickman's wonderful performances in Perfume, Sweeney Todd, Dogma or Galaxy Quest, but given that I was drawling direct orders like "Bravo squad to Chimney Rock" without further embellishments in a bored, bitter monotone, I'm pretty sure they just resented being led into combat by Professor Snape.
Coming back to the game now, I find a lot more people are Snaping it up. Perhaps not quite dripping with my disdain for human life, but conversation tends to be much more to the point, less about insecure bragging or validation-seeking and simply about enjoying the game itself. Players are more aware of the big picture, less obsessed with farming their individual characters for achievements. Those who prefer that sort of idiocy can find it represented much better in WoW-clones. Simply by making the game playable as a faction war, PS2 is gradually building up a core following not of blindly fanboy-ish trend-hoppers but more and more of sedate, interested old-school gamers. Yes, things haven't completely tipped in that direction yet, but still, the gradual change is fascinating to note.
This is in an FPS game, mind you. So much for roleplayer conceit. I'll gladly take PS2's current playerbase over TSW's, not to mention WoW-clones.
Planetside 2 will never be as interesting as more imaginative games, but it is growing into the more grandiose replacement for the humdrum routine of online FPS represented by Counterstrike or Call of Duty. It is angling to become the new reference point for FPS games and maybe even MMOs, and given how seriously it's been developed so far, it might just happen. Calmly... coolly... entirely without incident.
Weird.
2014/06/12
Fire-fall lazorz! pew-pew Planetside
I hopped into Planetside 2 today for twenty minutes; that should about do it for this month. However, twenty minutes was long enough to get exposed to a near-lethal dose of mass-mindless blabber, including a recurring theme over the past year or two "hey, didja hear about that game Firefall, it's kinda like this one!"
And of course whenever I've hopped into Firefall I've heard the same about PS2.
Never mind that one is a strict PvP faction war without resource collection and the other a PvE, largely solo resource collection grindfest. They both use twitchy, fast-paced FPS mechanics and are both set in vaguely syencefyctiony locales, so hey, that must be all there is to it.
No, sorry. A slice of bread is not the same as a chicken wing just because they're both off-white and edible.
However, this does bring up a couple of points.
Un
Though the online game market is finally edging out from under the desperation to copycat World Of Warcraft as closely as possible, WoW's detrimental influence will be felt throughout at least the next decade in ways I can't even conceive sitting here so close under its looming shadow - but likely the worst of these is the irrelevance, the complete trivialization of player action. It seems ridiculous that the average FPS-er wouldn't care whether he's shooting a techy-lookin' gun at another player or computer-controlled "baddies" until you realize that they've been taught it makes no difference.
Resources and monsters instantly and randomly respawn in Firefall. Bases flip in four minutes in Planetside 2. There is nothing to plan for. There is no intelligent authority (like player guilds in olden-days MMOs*) to decide whether you're pulling your weight or not. Repetition is everything. Under those WoWified conditions, yes, it really makes no difference whether you're shooting at a live or simulated entity, especially in the context of FPS. Ever since Unreal Tournament... let's say 2003, bots have easily been as twitch-capable as human players.
Computers are faster than us. We are still (narrowly) better planners. Without a greater context in which to place the action of the moment and without repercussions for player actions, those little deadheads in PS2 and Firefall can't really be blamed for their inability to discern between man and machine.
Deux
WoW's legacy also includes the decisive shift toward fantasy themes. Don't get me wrong, fantasy is always easier to slap together than science fiction ("it's magic" being all the logic demanded) and even something like Firefall is actually science fantasy. Still, given that the concept of an MMO stemmed from cyberpunk's popularization of decking into the matrix, the early MMO scene divided itself pretty evenly between SciFi and fantasy. Ultima Online, Asheron's Call, Lineage and Everquest shared the stage with Anarchy Online, Earth and Beyond, Project Entropia and EVE:The Second Genesis.
However, the industry's attempts to copy/paste WoW's market appeal after 2005 also included a complete dedication to the cheap elves-and-goblins Tolkien knock-off setting ripped off from D&D and Warhammer. To players who have grown up with the past decade's utter fanatical devotion to pointy ears and green skin in MMOs, yes, that must seem like part of the definition, and when two well-publicized multiplayer games hit the market handing out plasma rifles and dropship rides that superficiality weighs much more heavily in the comparison.
So. I may scoff at the younger generation's ignorance but I really can't blame them for it. It's all they've known. Don't hate the players, hate the game.
Hate World of Warcraft.
*Challenge me on this, I dare you. The concept of a guild or clan has been another one of WoW's victims.
^Trois?
And of course whenever I've hopped into Firefall I've heard the same about PS2.
Never mind that one is a strict PvP faction war without resource collection and the other a PvE, largely solo resource collection grindfest. They both use twitchy, fast-paced FPS mechanics and are both set in vaguely syencefyctiony locales, so hey, that must be all there is to it.
No, sorry. A slice of bread is not the same as a chicken wing just because they're both off-white and edible.
However, this does bring up a couple of points.
Un
Though the online game market is finally edging out from under the desperation to copycat World Of Warcraft as closely as possible, WoW's detrimental influence will be felt throughout at least the next decade in ways I can't even conceive sitting here so close under its looming shadow - but likely the worst of these is the irrelevance, the complete trivialization of player action. It seems ridiculous that the average FPS-er wouldn't care whether he's shooting a techy-lookin' gun at another player or computer-controlled "baddies" until you realize that they've been taught it makes no difference.
Resources and monsters instantly and randomly respawn in Firefall. Bases flip in four minutes in Planetside 2. There is nothing to plan for. There is no intelligent authority (like player guilds in olden-days MMOs*) to decide whether you're pulling your weight or not. Repetition is everything. Under those WoWified conditions, yes, it really makes no difference whether you're shooting at a live or simulated entity, especially in the context of FPS. Ever since Unreal Tournament... let's say 2003, bots have easily been as twitch-capable as human players.
Computers are faster than us. We are still (narrowly) better planners. Without a greater context in which to place the action of the moment and without repercussions for player actions, those little deadheads in PS2 and Firefall can't really be blamed for their inability to discern between man and machine.
Deux
WoW's legacy also includes the decisive shift toward fantasy themes. Don't get me wrong, fantasy is always easier to slap together than science fiction ("it's magic" being all the logic demanded) and even something like Firefall is actually science fantasy. Still, given that the concept of an MMO stemmed from cyberpunk's popularization of decking into the matrix, the early MMO scene divided itself pretty evenly between SciFi and fantasy. Ultima Online, Asheron's Call, Lineage and Everquest shared the stage with Anarchy Online, Earth and Beyond, Project Entropia and EVE:The Second Genesis.
However, the industry's attempts to copy/paste WoW's market appeal after 2005 also included a complete dedication to the cheap elves-and-goblins Tolkien knock-off setting ripped off from D&D and Warhammer. To players who have grown up with the past decade's utter fanatical devotion to pointy ears and green skin in MMOs, yes, that must seem like part of the definition, and when two well-publicized multiplayer games hit the market handing out plasma rifles and dropship rides that superficiality weighs much more heavily in the comparison.
So. I may scoff at the younger generation's ignorance but I really can't blame them for it. It's all they've known. Don't hate the players, hate the game.
Hate World of Warcraft.
*Challenge me on this, I dare you. The concept of a guild or clan has been another one of WoW's victims.
^Trois?
2014/02/10
Stop Talking
Please, for the love of Euterpe, please, please, please, stop, just stop. Un-glue your finger from your microphone key for just a few seconds and actually look and listen to the game around you. Try to remember that what you're engaged in is an activity in itself and not merely your own private social club provided to make you feel as though you're constantly surrounded by a fawning entourage mindlessly clapping their paws at your idiotic narration of your every mundane experience.
Stop. Talking.
Voice chat is not "on" by default. It is not a core game element. I did not pay twenty or fifty or a hundred dollars for this game we're playing to listen to you podcast your hooting and belching or giddily ask me if I saw that shot, omygawd didjasee it? huh? huh? ooooh muuuuyyy gaaawwwd duuuuuuuuuuuuuuuude !!!
Now let's face it, voice chat is sometimes necessary. No matter how good a game's interface is (I'll get to good and bad examples in a moment) it cannot cover all possible situations. There may be no automated command for "hang a left after the second tree" and if there's no time to type it you might need to whip out the bullhorn and bark some orders. This is especially true of fast-paced first-person-shooter team games. However, voice chat should never, ever be considered the default means of relaying information. When I log into an online game, I am logging into a game, not sitting on a random stranger's couch to have a beer and bullshit about how manly we are. I want to play the game, see the game and yes, hear the game. I want to hear well-composed, atmospheric music, I want to hear the sweet sound of zombie skulls collapsing under baseball bats, I want to hear trained voice actors' perfectly-modulated impressions of panic or triumph, not Cletus the slack-jawed yokel telling me about this like, dude, like totally like awesome thing he just did, dude.
I want to listen to the sound of bullets flying, not some little mouthbreather's rambling macho attention-whoring.
While voice chat might be necessary once in a blue moon, it is generally detrimental and should never be allowed to become the endless droning background radiation of online games it is at present. The default means of relaying game information is through the game interface. Barring that, typing is not exactly such an obscure skill that it cannot be expected of a playerbase, and neither, one might hope beyond all hope, is reading. Voice communication is not superior to typing. Both are equally flexible ways of conveying game-related data. Voice is faster but text allows multiple players to communicate at once and does not have to be repeated.
Unfortunately, as I've often remarked, the endless mass-market deadheads which have clogged online games over the past decade have no interest in the products they're suckered into buying, in themselves. They have no objective appreciation of the activity. They only seek attention, approval, gratuitous social reinforcement. They cannot fathom the separation of an escapist fantasy from the sickening interaction of human existence. They only seek to expand their desperate grasping for social status into new, facile venues. They just want attention.
Case-in-point:
I recently tried a new online game. As soon as I logged in for the first time I was accosted by a random dimwit constantly babbling over voice chat: "Hello, sir? How are you? Can you say anything? Hello? Can you talk? No? OK, goodbye." Then he wandered off before I could even scramble to look around for the source of the incessant white noise, much less answer.
This was not a purposeful exercise. He was not asking "does anyone have any bullets for sale" or "anyone want to hunt some goblins" or "hey you know there's a big angry bear behind you" or anything else even remotely utilitarian. He was instead acting on the monstrously conceited assumption that I had logged into this product for which I'd paid good money not to enjoy my purchase, but to be engaged in nonsensical chatter by him, a complete stranger.
For the record, I had not sought to be engaged in nonsensical chatter by a complete stranger.
I've quit or been kicked out of three outfits (guilds) so far in Planetside 2. My complaints about them have run the gamut of the usual human stupidity displayed by leet-kiddies, but the common thread all three times has been the incessant babbling over voice chat, the complete unwillingness on the part of guild leaders to restrict communication to those ideas worth communicating like "oh, look, cannon shells flying right at us." This extends to being unable to even get a word in edgewise when something crucial really is happening because everyone's too busy yammering about this totally awesome thing they heard about.
PS2 makes a great show of the mutually reinforcing destructiveness of supply and demand. A side effect of the influx of mass-market deadheads in online games over the past decade has been the increasing certainty that reading is just too hard. Companies instead provide voice chat. Kiddies overuse voice chat, ignoring other means of communication. Companies feel less pressure to provide other means of communication. Thus, the necessary interface tools are no longer present and everyone is forced to rely even more on voice chat.
Planetside 2 hinges on players' organization into squads with squad leaders. However, it includes no command interface whatsoever, aside from placing very generic waypoints on the map. Contrast this with a much more carefully structured multiplayer game like the long-dead Savage 2, where a team commander, playing the strategic side of the game, acted through, shockingly enough, a strategy game interface. Context-sensitive commands could be given directly to players by simply selecting them and right-clicking on objectives. These were accompanied by automated voice commands to get the player's attention. Action players, conversely, could get the commander's attention with voice macros linked to map pings. The location and status of each player was easily discernable through the command interface. Much older games like Starsiege: Tribes even included the ability to see through the eyes of another player, to ghost for teamwork purposes. In Planetside 2, all you can do is best describe verbally what you want done over the endless symphony of attention-starved little cretins patting each other on the back for being teh awesome. You are further incapacitated by an incredibly clunky, almost useless text chat system. There is nothing but voice chat in PS2. Zero development time = extra profits.
However, the concern here extends beyond immediate utility. Video games have an audio component. This is not optional. You yourself may be comfortable replacing professional music and sound effects with the nasal boasting of some random imbecile, but you have no right to impose this denial of quality on others. Voice chat is not chat, but a tool for emergencies.
Unless you've got critical, urgent gameplay-related information to relay, keep your goddamn idiot mouth shut!
Stop. Talking.
Voice chat is not "on" by default. It is not a core game element. I did not pay twenty or fifty or a hundred dollars for this game we're playing to listen to you podcast your hooting and belching or giddily ask me if I saw that shot, omygawd didjasee it? huh? huh? ooooh muuuuyyy gaaawwwd duuuuuuuuuuuuuuuude !!!
Now let's face it, voice chat is sometimes necessary. No matter how good a game's interface is (I'll get to good and bad examples in a moment) it cannot cover all possible situations. There may be no automated command for "hang a left after the second tree" and if there's no time to type it you might need to whip out the bullhorn and bark some orders. This is especially true of fast-paced first-person-shooter team games. However, voice chat should never, ever be considered the default means of relaying information. When I log into an online game, I am logging into a game, not sitting on a random stranger's couch to have a beer and bullshit about how manly we are. I want to play the game, see the game and yes, hear the game. I want to hear well-composed, atmospheric music, I want to hear the sweet sound of zombie skulls collapsing under baseball bats, I want to hear trained voice actors' perfectly-modulated impressions of panic or triumph, not Cletus the slack-jawed yokel telling me about this like, dude, like totally like awesome thing he just did, dude.
I want to listen to the sound of bullets flying, not some little mouthbreather's rambling macho attention-whoring.
While voice chat might be necessary once in a blue moon, it is generally detrimental and should never be allowed to become the endless droning background radiation of online games it is at present. The default means of relaying game information is through the game interface. Barring that, typing is not exactly such an obscure skill that it cannot be expected of a playerbase, and neither, one might hope beyond all hope, is reading. Voice communication is not superior to typing. Both are equally flexible ways of conveying game-related data. Voice is faster but text allows multiple players to communicate at once and does not have to be repeated.
Unfortunately, as I've often remarked, the endless mass-market deadheads which have clogged online games over the past decade have no interest in the products they're suckered into buying, in themselves. They have no objective appreciation of the activity. They only seek attention, approval, gratuitous social reinforcement. They cannot fathom the separation of an escapist fantasy from the sickening interaction of human existence. They only seek to expand their desperate grasping for social status into new, facile venues. They just want attention.
Case-in-point:
I recently tried a new online game. As soon as I logged in for the first time I was accosted by a random dimwit constantly babbling over voice chat: "Hello, sir? How are you? Can you say anything? Hello? Can you talk? No? OK, goodbye." Then he wandered off before I could even scramble to look around for the source of the incessant white noise, much less answer.
This was not a purposeful exercise. He was not asking "does anyone have any bullets for sale" or "anyone want to hunt some goblins" or "hey you know there's a big angry bear behind you" or anything else even remotely utilitarian. He was instead acting on the monstrously conceited assumption that I had logged into this product for which I'd paid good money not to enjoy my purchase, but to be engaged in nonsensical chatter by him, a complete stranger.
For the record, I had not sought to be engaged in nonsensical chatter by a complete stranger.
I've quit or been kicked out of three outfits (guilds) so far in Planetside 2. My complaints about them have run the gamut of the usual human stupidity displayed by leet-kiddies, but the common thread all three times has been the incessant babbling over voice chat, the complete unwillingness on the part of guild leaders to restrict communication to those ideas worth communicating like "oh, look, cannon shells flying right at us." This extends to being unable to even get a word in edgewise when something crucial really is happening because everyone's too busy yammering about this totally awesome thing they heard about.
PS2 makes a great show of the mutually reinforcing destructiveness of supply and demand. A side effect of the influx of mass-market deadheads in online games over the past decade has been the increasing certainty that reading is just too hard. Companies instead provide voice chat. Kiddies overuse voice chat, ignoring other means of communication. Companies feel less pressure to provide other means of communication. Thus, the necessary interface tools are no longer present and everyone is forced to rely even more on voice chat.
Planetside 2 hinges on players' organization into squads with squad leaders. However, it includes no command interface whatsoever, aside from placing very generic waypoints on the map. Contrast this with a much more carefully structured multiplayer game like the long-dead Savage 2, where a team commander, playing the strategic side of the game, acted through, shockingly enough, a strategy game interface. Context-sensitive commands could be given directly to players by simply selecting them and right-clicking on objectives. These were accompanied by automated voice commands to get the player's attention. Action players, conversely, could get the commander's attention with voice macros linked to map pings. The location and status of each player was easily discernable through the command interface. Much older games like Starsiege: Tribes even included the ability to see through the eyes of another player, to ghost for teamwork purposes. In Planetside 2, all you can do is best describe verbally what you want done over the endless symphony of attention-starved little cretins patting each other on the back for being teh awesome. You are further incapacitated by an incredibly clunky, almost useless text chat system. There is nothing but voice chat in PS2. Zero development time = extra profits.
However, the concern here extends beyond immediate utility. Video games have an audio component. This is not optional. You yourself may be comfortable replacing professional music and sound effects with the nasal boasting of some random imbecile, but you have no right to impose this denial of quality on others. Voice chat is not chat, but a tool for emergencies.
Unless you've got critical, urgent gameplay-related information to relay, keep your goddamn idiot mouth shut!
2013/10/21
Ideal-grams
Quick, can you tell me what this symbol represents?
Now just as quick, can you tell me what this symbol represents?
Or maybe this one? Does it have anything to do with ents, to you?
Oh, LotRO, is there no end of screw-ups to cite about you?
Back right before Planetside 2's launch, I criticized a few of their visual design elements. Overall, the game just looks unnecessarily "busy." There's a difference between "decor" and "random junkpile"and it only compounded the usual graphics card issues of first-person-shooters. However, my greatest complaint was about the needless ambiguity of HUD symbols. I believe I said something to the effect of "I should never hear words like fuchsia or magenta and I shouldn't have to decipher something that looks like the bastard child of Sanskrit and Hebrew - stick with primary colors and universal symbols."
And really, that's my main message here: don't get fancy with symbols!
Back over a decade ago with graphics cards getting more powerful, resolutions rising and 3D becoming standard fare, graphic designers also started to embellish the means of conveying information. I don't know if this was a means of maintaining job security by inventing more things to design or just childish glee at the newfound flexibility of colorful 32x32-pixel images but it led to a trend of utterly unintelligible skill/weapon/vehicle/ability/effect/map icons.
LotRO is a perfect example. The two skills I linked at the start of this post are only a taste, and that needless confusion stands as a sad counterpoint to the game LotRO copied for its gameplay mechanics. While I rail against WoW for various reasons, Blizzard's expertise as game designers showed in many ways, one of the more minor of which was an intuitive array of skill icons.
For instance, look at the druid travel form image. For clarification, druids' travel form was a cheetah. And yet, the icon shows a hoof. Why? Because you're hoofing it! You don't need a 16-color representation of a cheetah face and in fact it would only get in the way. When you're making an escape, you need to quickly scan your skill bar for the idea of fast travel, not marvel at the artistic triumph that is the travel form icon.
Now, I don't mean we have to limit ourselves to black-and-white math symbols and arrows. Universal symbols are all that would be needed in PS2 because it has relatively little information to relay and it uses a modern, vaguely sci-fi setting. In fact Planetside 1 used many universal symbols for stairwells and the like. Third-person RPGs with target-lock mechanics, which as a rule use a much wider variety of abilities, would logically need a more flexible system to distinguish those abilities in a taskbar. But a button icon does not need to tell a story. It should be intuitive. A hoof is good enough, thank you.
We could probably think of endless ways to re-use one icon for different purposes. If a hoof conveys the basic idea of travel, use it on a blue background for an escape ability, red background for a charge ability. Use a hoof in a stylized house icon as a horse-stable map icon.
And if you're designing the icon for a skill called "march of the ents" which does damage, put a little green ent in an angry red background. No further detail is necessary.
There are plenty of areas in which graphic designers should get creative. Character models, flora, terrain, spaceship designs... but not symbolism. Symbols serve a different purpose than entertainment. They must convey information quickly and clearly.
If the symbol you just came up with is nothing but a confused mass of colors or a random image that you think looks more artistic, you are not worth your salt as a designer.
Now just as quick, can you tell me what this symbol represents?
Or maybe this one? Does it have anything to do with ents, to you?
Oh, LotRO, is there no end of screw-ups to cite about you?
Back right before Planetside 2's launch, I criticized a few of their visual design elements. Overall, the game just looks unnecessarily "busy." There's a difference between "decor" and "random junkpile"and it only compounded the usual graphics card issues of first-person-shooters. However, my greatest complaint was about the needless ambiguity of HUD symbols. I believe I said something to the effect of "I should never hear words like fuchsia or magenta and I shouldn't have to decipher something that looks like the bastard child of Sanskrit and Hebrew - stick with primary colors and universal symbols."
And really, that's my main message here: don't get fancy with symbols!
Back over a decade ago with graphics cards getting more powerful, resolutions rising and 3D becoming standard fare, graphic designers also started to embellish the means of conveying information. I don't know if this was a means of maintaining job security by inventing more things to design or just childish glee at the newfound flexibility of colorful 32x32-pixel images but it led to a trend of utterly unintelligible skill/weapon/vehicle/ability/effect/map icons.
LotRO is a perfect example. The two skills I linked at the start of this post are only a taste, and that needless confusion stands as a sad counterpoint to the game LotRO copied for its gameplay mechanics. While I rail against WoW for various reasons, Blizzard's expertise as game designers showed in many ways, one of the more minor of which was an intuitive array of skill icons.
For instance, look at the druid travel form image. For clarification, druids' travel form was a cheetah. And yet, the icon shows a hoof. Why? Because you're hoofing it! You don't need a 16-color representation of a cheetah face and in fact it would only get in the way. When you're making an escape, you need to quickly scan your skill bar for the idea of fast travel, not marvel at the artistic triumph that is the travel form icon.
Now, I don't mean we have to limit ourselves to black-and-white math symbols and arrows. Universal symbols are all that would be needed in PS2 because it has relatively little information to relay and it uses a modern, vaguely sci-fi setting. In fact Planetside 1 used many universal symbols for stairwells and the like. Third-person RPGs with target-lock mechanics, which as a rule use a much wider variety of abilities, would logically need a more flexible system to distinguish those abilities in a taskbar. But a button icon does not need to tell a story. It should be intuitive. A hoof is good enough, thank you.
We could probably think of endless ways to re-use one icon for different purposes. If a hoof conveys the basic idea of travel, use it on a blue background for an escape ability, red background for a charge ability. Use a hoof in a stylized house icon as a horse-stable map icon.
And if you're designing the icon for a skill called "march of the ents" which does damage, put a little green ent in an angry red background. No further detail is necessary.
There are plenty of areas in which graphic designers should get creative. Character models, flora, terrain, spaceship designs... but not symbolism. Symbols serve a different purpose than entertainment. They must convey information quickly and clearly.
If the symbol you just came up with is nothing but a confused mass of colors or a random image that you think looks more artistic, you are not worth your salt as a designer.
2013/07/23
The Golden Age of Planetside 2
With MMOs in general, it tends not to be worth looking into them, even the somewhat worthwhile ones, unless you get in on the ground floor. You're either in it from the start and building up your character, or you may as well wait for the next one. Hey, sorry MMO developers, the truth hurts.Until you ditch the moronic illusion of infinite character advancement through level/loot accumulation, your games have expiration dates. Why would I buy into your years-old game world where everyone will be ridiculously richer and more powerful than me when I can just shop around for some brand-new identical copycat of your game system? Unless of course you manage to snatch the rights to the grand-daddy of all modern fantasy worlds, middle-earth, but that's another story.
This was not a problem for Planetside 1. Access to various vehicles and weapons in PS1 was determined by the number of certification points which the player had accumulated, one per character level, to level 20. Heavy infantry armor was something like 2-5 certs. A relatively weak, single-seater tank or aircraft was again about 3. More advanced vehicles or infantry equipment required a heavier investment along that line of certification, to let's say a dozen certs or so. With a moderate time investment in the game, a few hours a week, you'd soon enough get 10-15 certs to play around with, which meant you could specialize in something like heavy infantry assault or interceptor aircraft and have a little wiggle-room to also fly a plane or just get a decent rifle, respectively. And when you got bored, you could switch certifications, with a few days' cooldown between re-certing. It was a system which allowed those who did not play enough to reach max level to still try various things.
Aside from that, there were no big advantages to playing nonstop or bribing the company by feeding them more cash. Everyone got to use the same tank for five certs. Being level twenty did not make a difference, aside from more flexibility. You didn't shoot faster than a level ten, or get tougher armor.
Sony moved with the times however, and Planetside 2 re-defined 'certs' as basically just experience in its standard meaning in level-grinding games. Killing a couple of people or being present while your faction captures a minor base gets you a cert point, and certs accumulate endlessly. Weapons, vehicles, infantry class functions are all improved through certs, tens of thousands of them overall, (non-refundable of course) an endless level-grind. What's more, Sony ensured their customers' right to cheat. Though improvements to various weapons can only be ground-out with certs, the initial weapon purchase can be made in the game's handy-dandy real-money-shop. Not only that, but players can raise their experience/cert gain rate... you guessed it, by paying real money for it.
Never mind the actual numbers involved. You can argue endlessly about when exactly it becomes pointless to set foot in the game because some schmuck who paid his way to success can just trample you, but it should be clear that that time is coming. I haven't kept strict track but between the starter package from the game's launch, a few monthly fees and a straight-up purchase of amusement-park money, I've probably paid a neat hundred dollars into PS2. If you were just starting out, then I've probably got a steadier rifle than you do and 20% more hit points. I have air-to-air seeker missiles for my interceptor and have its jets upgraded to turn on a dime while you just have a piddlin' little machine gun. Good luck, red baron. Even if you shoot me down, hey, guess what, I can immediately respawn as an anti-aicraft tank with reinforced armor. Destroy than and I can switch to half a dozen other roles, all beefed up through legitimized cheating, through bribing the referee so I can have an advantage over you.And we're not even through the first year. And I'm not even one of the die-hard, eight-hours-a-day players.
Now, there is a reason why I deign to play PS2 despite this, why it is worth the money for even moderate FPS fans. Though many of the interesting features from PS1 were removed, as I previously mentioned, it still provides some of that hellish mix of dozens to hundreds of players stretching as far as the eye can see, goin' at it. You still get to charge up a hill among the pounding of artillery shells and dodge behind cover through a hail of gunfire to take an enemy base as part of a larger conflict, and it's all PvP. And this is getting to be the point where PS2 is worth playing: it is reaching maturity as a project but has not yet been wholly invalidated by its real-money-trading scheme. It's not very well balanced, but it's far from the godawful "my pistol can destroy planes" or "my bomber has more armor than an entire base" mess it was for the first few months. The constant base capturing nonsense I complained about before has not really been addressed but it's mitigated by events which happen several times during a day which focus players on specific objectives, forcing some actual fights. Now we just have to wait for the legitimized cheating advantage to accumulate.
This is it. This is the sweet spot. If you're ever going to play PS2, do it now. From here to the new year or if Sony drags their feet on throwing more paid level-grinding advantages into the mix maybe this time next year, this is the game's golden age, such as it is. And don't get suckered into investing much money into it thinking it'll be worth playing three years from now.
Camelot is being unchained as we speak.
This was not a problem for Planetside 1. Access to various vehicles and weapons in PS1 was determined by the number of certification points which the player had accumulated, one per character level, to level 20. Heavy infantry armor was something like 2-5 certs. A relatively weak, single-seater tank or aircraft was again about 3. More advanced vehicles or infantry equipment required a heavier investment along that line of certification, to let's say a dozen certs or so. With a moderate time investment in the game, a few hours a week, you'd soon enough get 10-15 certs to play around with, which meant you could specialize in something like heavy infantry assault or interceptor aircraft and have a little wiggle-room to also fly a plane or just get a decent rifle, respectively. And when you got bored, you could switch certifications, with a few days' cooldown between re-certing. It was a system which allowed those who did not play enough to reach max level to still try various things.
Aside from that, there were no big advantages to playing nonstop or bribing the company by feeding them more cash. Everyone got to use the same tank for five certs. Being level twenty did not make a difference, aside from more flexibility. You didn't shoot faster than a level ten, or get tougher armor.
Sony moved with the times however, and Planetside 2 re-defined 'certs' as basically just experience in its standard meaning in level-grinding games. Killing a couple of people or being present while your faction captures a minor base gets you a cert point, and certs accumulate endlessly. Weapons, vehicles, infantry class functions are all improved through certs, tens of thousands of them overall, (non-refundable of course) an endless level-grind. What's more, Sony ensured their customers' right to cheat. Though improvements to various weapons can only be ground-out with certs, the initial weapon purchase can be made in the game's handy-dandy real-money-shop. Not only that, but players can raise their experience/cert gain rate... you guessed it, by paying real money for it.
Never mind the actual numbers involved. You can argue endlessly about when exactly it becomes pointless to set foot in the game because some schmuck who paid his way to success can just trample you, but it should be clear that that time is coming. I haven't kept strict track but between the starter package from the game's launch, a few monthly fees and a straight-up purchase of amusement-park money, I've probably paid a neat hundred dollars into PS2. If you were just starting out, then I've probably got a steadier rifle than you do and 20% more hit points. I have air-to-air seeker missiles for my interceptor and have its jets upgraded to turn on a dime while you just have a piddlin' little machine gun. Good luck, red baron. Even if you shoot me down, hey, guess what, I can immediately respawn as an anti-aicraft tank with reinforced armor. Destroy than and I can switch to half a dozen other roles, all beefed up through legitimized cheating, through bribing the referee so I can have an advantage over you.And we're not even through the first year. And I'm not even one of the die-hard, eight-hours-a-day players.
Now, there is a reason why I deign to play PS2 despite this, why it is worth the money for even moderate FPS fans. Though many of the interesting features from PS1 were removed, as I previously mentioned, it still provides some of that hellish mix of dozens to hundreds of players stretching as far as the eye can see, goin' at it. You still get to charge up a hill among the pounding of artillery shells and dodge behind cover through a hail of gunfire to take an enemy base as part of a larger conflict, and it's all PvP. And this is getting to be the point where PS2 is worth playing: it is reaching maturity as a project but has not yet been wholly invalidated by its real-money-trading scheme. It's not very well balanced, but it's far from the godawful "my pistol can destroy planes" or "my bomber has more armor than an entire base" mess it was for the first few months. The constant base capturing nonsense I complained about before has not really been addressed but it's mitigated by events which happen several times during a day which focus players on specific objectives, forcing some actual fights. Now we just have to wait for the legitimized cheating advantage to accumulate.
This is it. This is the sweet spot. If you're ever going to play PS2, do it now. From here to the new year or if Sony drags their feet on throwing more paid level-grinding advantages into the mix maybe this time next year, this is the game's golden age, such as it is. And don't get suckered into investing much money into it thinking it'll be worth playing three years from now.
Camelot is being unchained as we speak.
2012/12/27
Planetside 2
SOE is a very rich company. While this is good in theory because it ensures the initial server support which a virtual world badly needs, extensive in-house testing and the ad-campaign to draw players in, it also ensures a paralyzing fear of innovation and experimentation. The more established a creator is, as a general rule in human affairs, the less creative it is, be it individual or committee. PS2 was obviously created by some very, very established people. Even if it were a good game, it would become worthless eventually because of its legitimized cheating, each new weapon and vehicle meant to be purchased with real-world money, but it won't even get to that stage because it has nothing to offer.
The first Planetside is memorable as the MMOFPS game and one of the few reasonably persistent worlds ever created. PS2's creators seem to have forgotten however that in itself, this made Planetside innovative. It was the first, it was the largest. It blended various elements of existing FPS games and made liberal use of others, like multi-occupant vehicles, which even smaller games were afraid to implement. It did all this in gigantic battle lines shifting slowly across the face of continents, allowing players to help their faction grow or defend its shrinking territory through offensives which could last whole days.
While PS1 had many, many problems, most of them stemming from the outsourced expansion pack and PS2 addressed many of them, it overcompensates and oversimplifies the gameplay. Everything from the cluttered scenery and large damage-to-health ratios which reward twitch-reflexes over planning to the lack of focus on faction advancement reek of catering to the idiotic instant gratification culture.
Take base captures, for instance, which have been one of the worst issues with both iterations of the game. In PS1, players had to wait at a base for up to 15 minutes in order to get credit for capturing it. This amounted to a great deal of boredom. Bases were also linked together in a 'lattice' so that players followed a fairly predictable route from one base to the next, usually having two or three choices as to how to proceed, with smaller objectives along the way. Another criticism was that base design included many long corridors which created long stand-offs, and this supposedly didn't sit well with the instant-gratification culture. Not when they're also too cowardly (in a virtual environment, really?) to suicide-charge a reinforced position.
PS2 removed all AI-controlled base defenses, removed auto-targeting player turrets and uses base designs with easily scalable walls and many small buildings with large numbers of entrances. Even a ten-foot by ten-foot cube will always have two, and bases are littered with cubes. This makes defense much more difficult, which wouldn't be a horrible idea in itself. It is a big issue when combined with the fact that bases can be made vulnerable by having adjancency to any enemy territory, and the map layout ensures that every base links to several others. It is an even bigger issue when combined with the much shorter capture timers, usually only a couple of minutes long.
The entire base layout and capture system creates a strong incentive for players to simply attack undefended bases and not even bother defending what they have. There is always something to attack, it's easy, it's fast, and it's guaranteed experience. There is no cooldown timer after a base has been captured so you're free to just keep re-capturing instead of moving forward. The main bulk of players on all three factions, instead of fighting, simply circle each other constantly re-capturing the same bases. The glorious, crawling sweep across the face of the world has been replaced with a toilet-bowl swirl of players getting rewarded for taking the easy way out.
Moving on. Let's talk guns. Let's talk vehicles. Let's talk about what you can actually do as a player. How many ways can you shoot and move? PS2 is painfully uncreative. Of all the main weapons a player can have as any of the infantry classes, dozens of them, there is exactly one that isn't just a shotgun or rifle. The differences between them are so minute as to make them almost indistinguishable. Even the fancy-shootin' staples of FPS games are conspicuously missing. There are rocket launchers, but that's about it. No flamethrowers, no lasers, no grenade launchers, no rail guns, no actively-guided projectiles, no disabling (meaning, no flashbangs or EMP) and almost no speed modifiers. Many of these are actually steps down in complexity from PS1.
It's the same story with the vehicles. Each and every vehicle is basically just a tank or a plane. There's no more Router, one of the best base-assault gimmicks (it could teleport infantry past the enemy lines) PS1 created, no more Lodestar ferrying crucial vehicles through the air, no more giant mechs with jump jets. Even if there were more than one hovertank now, there would be little point to them since all three continents of PS2 so far have no water whatsoever. Nothing bigger than a kiddie wading pool. There isn't even any real artillery or carpet-bombing, no interdiction or siege-breaking.
The whole feel of the game seems to have been re-focused on emulating today's military. It's great for all the NRA nuts who want to shout the army chatter they've heard in the movies while shooting rifles and riding around in tanks, for the macho cretins who think it's all supposed to be one glorious victory after another, capturing uncontested bases. It's not so great if you've got the three IQ points necessary to realize it's all been done before.
Planetside 2 is simply dull. It doesn't matter what weapon you choose. It doesn't matter where you go. It doesn't matter if you capture something, since it'll be recaptured five minutes later. It's all just a petty scramble for personal gain. You roll into a base along with fifty other players and scramble to get an 'assist' on one of the half-dozen defenders then sit there for two minutes all so you can get some points to buy yourself a new gun which turns out to be the same one you have but with a slightly better rate of fire. Even a match of Team Fortress 2 has more depth.
The first Planetside is memorable as the MMOFPS game and one of the few reasonably persistent worlds ever created. PS2's creators seem to have forgotten however that in itself, this made Planetside innovative. It was the first, it was the largest. It blended various elements of existing FPS games and made liberal use of others, like multi-occupant vehicles, which even smaller games were afraid to implement. It did all this in gigantic battle lines shifting slowly across the face of continents, allowing players to help their faction grow or defend its shrinking territory through offensives which could last whole days.
While PS1 had many, many problems, most of them stemming from the outsourced expansion pack and PS2 addressed many of them, it overcompensates and oversimplifies the gameplay. Everything from the cluttered scenery and large damage-to-health ratios which reward twitch-reflexes over planning to the lack of focus on faction advancement reek of catering to the idiotic instant gratification culture.
Take base captures, for instance, which have been one of the worst issues with both iterations of the game. In PS1, players had to wait at a base for up to 15 minutes in order to get credit for capturing it. This amounted to a great deal of boredom. Bases were also linked together in a 'lattice' so that players followed a fairly predictable route from one base to the next, usually having two or three choices as to how to proceed, with smaller objectives along the way. Another criticism was that base design included many long corridors which created long stand-offs, and this supposedly didn't sit well with the instant-gratification culture. Not when they're also too cowardly (in a virtual environment, really?) to suicide-charge a reinforced position.
PS2 removed all AI-controlled base defenses, removed auto-targeting player turrets and uses base designs with easily scalable walls and many small buildings with large numbers of entrances. Even a ten-foot by ten-foot cube will always have two, and bases are littered with cubes. This makes defense much more difficult, which wouldn't be a horrible idea in itself. It is a big issue when combined with the fact that bases can be made vulnerable by having adjancency to any enemy territory, and the map layout ensures that every base links to several others. It is an even bigger issue when combined with the much shorter capture timers, usually only a couple of minutes long.
The entire base layout and capture system creates a strong incentive for players to simply attack undefended bases and not even bother defending what they have. There is always something to attack, it's easy, it's fast, and it's guaranteed experience. There is no cooldown timer after a base has been captured so you're free to just keep re-capturing instead of moving forward. The main bulk of players on all three factions, instead of fighting, simply circle each other constantly re-capturing the same bases. The glorious, crawling sweep across the face of the world has been replaced with a toilet-bowl swirl of players getting rewarded for taking the easy way out.
Moving on. Let's talk guns. Let's talk vehicles. Let's talk about what you can actually do as a player. How many ways can you shoot and move? PS2 is painfully uncreative. Of all the main weapons a player can have as any of the infantry classes, dozens of them, there is exactly one that isn't just a shotgun or rifle. The differences between them are so minute as to make them almost indistinguishable. Even the fancy-shootin' staples of FPS games are conspicuously missing. There are rocket launchers, but that's about it. No flamethrowers, no lasers, no grenade launchers, no rail guns, no actively-guided projectiles, no disabling (meaning, no flashbangs or EMP) and almost no speed modifiers. Many of these are actually steps down in complexity from PS1.
It's the same story with the vehicles. Each and every vehicle is basically just a tank or a plane. There's no more Router, one of the best base-assault gimmicks (it could teleport infantry past the enemy lines) PS1 created, no more Lodestar ferrying crucial vehicles through the air, no more giant mechs with jump jets. Even if there were more than one hovertank now, there would be little point to them since all three continents of PS2 so far have no water whatsoever. Nothing bigger than a kiddie wading pool. There isn't even any real artillery or carpet-bombing, no interdiction or siege-breaking.
The whole feel of the game seems to have been re-focused on emulating today's military. It's great for all the NRA nuts who want to shout the army chatter they've heard in the movies while shooting rifles and riding around in tanks, for the macho cretins who think it's all supposed to be one glorious victory after another, capturing uncontested bases. It's not so great if you've got the three IQ points necessary to realize it's all been done before.
Planetside 2 is simply dull. It doesn't matter what weapon you choose. It doesn't matter where you go. It doesn't matter if you capture something, since it'll be recaptured five minutes later. It's all just a petty scramble for personal gain. You roll into a base along with fifty other players and scramble to get an 'assist' on one of the half-dozen defenders then sit there for two minutes all so you can get some points to buy yourself a new gun which turns out to be the same one you have but with a slightly better rate of fire. Even a match of Team Fortress 2 has more depth.
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