Reply With QuotePretty much nobody who worked on the original Planetside is still at Sony, which might be why they are asking the Planetside players to design the new game for them.
I'm not too hopeful any good will come of this.
Pretty much nobody who worked on the original Planetside is still at Sony, which might be why they are asking the Planetside players to design the new game for them.
I'm not too hopeful any good will come of this.
Actually they are just sending out a survey to see what people would want to see in Planetside 2 (how many factions, etc.). If there really is going to be a PS2, I am there on day one. Planetside was a great game despite its flaws, and in its heyday provided a game experience I've never seen matched before or since. I bought Section 8 the other day because Ben Sones told me it came as close to Planetside as any game he'd seen recently. Good enough for me.
Here's hoping for The Grind Revisted.
Last edited by Rywill; 09-26-2009 at 11:37 AM.
The heavy lifting so far as design is concerned is already done with the original. if they build on that then it should be fine.Originally Posted by Coca Cola Zero
I fully agree Planetside was a great and underappreciated game, I'm just saying that none of that says anything about Planetside 2 (if one ever gets released), because it will be by an entirely different team.
I disagree. As much as I loved Planetside back when it was new, I wouldn't play a game that was just Planetside with a new graphics engine.
The genre has evolved a great deal since Planetside and any new Planetside game would need to take at least some of the external evolution and incorporate it into its new design to get me to play again. It is harder than people think for developers to intelligently incorporate new ideas into an old design even if (perhaps especially if) they aren't working from a blank slate. Maybe Planetside 2 is real and Sony will assemble a great team and the game will be awesome, but really it will be an unknown value until they actually build and show something since it won't be by the same people as the last game.
oh no, I didn't mean to imply just a visual upgrade, but, there are many aspects of Planetside that work well and that the core players will expect. Building upon THAT and knowing what worked and didn't in the original is a huge advantage.
I wonder if Sony would try the same pricing model on a new Planetside. Would the microtransaction model of something like their own Free Realms work better than a flat monthly fee? The main reason I ask is it seems the old $15/month fee probably wouldn't fly as well as it did six years ago when there's so many "free" class-based shooters out there.
They could decide to make it PS3-exclusive, too...
If you're making a game for the "Core Planetside Players", you're aiming to fail, because there's like 20 of those people left, and they'll hate anything you make called Planetside.
The key points of Planetside that would need to be replicated:
1) Huge maps
2) Large changes in scenery
3) Large variety of vehicles
4) Very distinct factions
5) Science-Fiction Setting
Things that need to change:
1) The focus of the game needs to be more general -- and less about running through terrain on the way to the identi-base that needs to be capped.
Things which would need much discussion:
1) Changing the game into a more classical FPS. Planetside was never the tightest of shooters, but I think it worked well. Neither FPS skill NOR in-game skill created inbalance, and low-ping-bastards didn't have a huge leg up on everyone. Making it a BF2142-style shooter might make that not work.
2) The pace could be a little slow, but it's hard to know how much of that was due to population dynamics.
It is kind of ironic, because soe has done nothing but hurt planetside over the years from what i've seen as someone who watched it from the outside. The game by all accounts is basically on life support, just barely, with only the most needed support to keep it alive. Bugs and cheats are either not fixed or fixed very slowly. Blatant cheaters allowed to roam free. No content development.
I played it when it was released, but stopped playing due to population problems (as with any multiplayer fps, the game needs a high population density to be fun). A number of times since i quit i thought about playing again, but things like forums full of people complaining about soe not doing anything to support the game and some bad expansions (please fire the person who had the great idea to add mechs to an infantry focused game, please) always kept me from committing again. It is for these reasons i don't hold much faith in a good sequel. The game just seems to get worse with each new expansion and soe doesn't seem to have even a skeleton crew working on planetside as it is.
Planetside is also one of the few mmos to step outside the predefined mold and not be bad beyond belief.
Xpav: planetside really didn't have much running through terrain. Even the most green soldier with absolutely no training in vehicles could get a vehicle to drive around and if you joined a group, chances are someone could fly one of the big transport ships which would have you anywhere pretty fast. Not to mention if you were in a vehicle going anywhere hot, it probably wouldn't be very "boring" for long. Generally when i remember being in someone's galaxy transport, i'd be manning a turret trying to keep enemy aircraft away or doing my best to keep ground forces pinned down. I'd say the bigger problem was that the game could have used better ways to encourage large scale base battles or even overland (ie not in bases) battles. The big battles were loads of fun, when you couldn't find one to get to, that wasn't so fun.
You know, despite that there wasn't supposed to be much running around in terrain on Planetside, I remember doing a lot of it. I don't know if that's because it was so tedious that it overwhelmed some of my good memories, or what.
Yes. One of the best times I remember was a base defense turning back into a massive overland attack. You could feel yourself being part of a large advance front.I'd say the bigger problem was that the game could have used better ways to encourage large scale base battles or even overland (ie not in bases) battles. The big battles were loads of fun, when you couldn't find one to get to, that wasn't so fun.
The mechs were dumb. So were the caverns and alien crap.
The biggest fault of Planetside is its inability to scale properly for all numbers of players. Too few players turns it into a slow version of BF1942. Too many players would result in stalemates in a few common places on the map (HELLO STUPID BRIDGE ON CYSSOR).
The really dumb thing was that ridiculous alien artillery.
Some of the larger Battlefield maps are essentially what Planetside should be all about. Think of that as your "battle zone", and the world would be a dozen or more of those seamlessly connected together. You'd have similar scale of vehicles, but also a few vehicles to transport you between battle zones.
Being an MMO, you start off with generalized people and as you "level up" you earn specialization. The ability to pilot more vehicles, to use more specialized weapons, etc. Again, battlefield almost sorta has this (and so does COD4, for that matter). You just need to broaden it out from those games. Maybe do things like provide several stages of vehicle/weapon training that lets you do things like handle the aircraft better, reload faster, etc.
I had a lot of fun in Planetside, but I also got tired of the way there seemed to be one "type" of battle objective. Making different battle zones have different gameplay objectives would be nice. This zone is capture-and-hold, that one is destroy/defend the core, this other one is CTF (but it's bomb-running or something that fits into the fiction), and so on.
As XPav said, the real challenge with a truly MMO shooter is scaling. What do you do if there are only 20 people in this area? What do you do when it's 200? It's going to take some clever design to either make it fun over that range, or to steer people to "right-sized" battles. The latter is probably the way to go. When an area gets too "hot" you need to incentivize players going somewhere else, and so too with areas that are dead. And you need to do this not through relatively obtuse rewards like XP scaling or something, but in something big and loud and clear enough that even total newbies will naturally gravitate toward battle areas that have just the right number of people for maximum fun, and are very clearly led out of areas that are too crowded or too empty.
That's a really tough order. Nobody's gotten that right yet. The solution most games do is to simply have lots of servers running lots of maps and they leave it up to you to find a good one. In an open world MMO you don't really have that luxury.
I really loved those stalemates though myself, especially the bridge ones where it was basically a futuristic reenactment of D Day, one side just rushing in to fire.
The only time i remember running outside of bases was when my ride got destroyed (most of the time this meant i died, unless an aircraft destroyed my little one man vehicle and i managed to hide on foot) or was i trying to stealthily get somewhere that would be impossible going full speed on in a vehicle.
I do so miss the golden days of planetside. You're 100% right on what killed planetside. It is hard to really scale the world though in a mmo. They also were going for a frontlines type situation where you would fight to liberate planets/areas/whatever they were called. Maybe if the areas were just smaller. I'd love to see another well done mmofps with rpg elements (elements meaning supporting the fps gameplay, not instead of it).
One thing that might help with scaling is stealing a page from Section 8. Spawn dynamic mini-missions in underused areas and send notification to X number of squads on each side about it. Get a feel for what percentage of people usually go, and you can hopefully have some sort of rough incentive system that will bring people in when an area gets too empty, or draw them away when it gets too crowded. Have those missions convey some reasonable individual bonus (XP or whatever) as well as some help for your side, as in Section 8.
Hopefully they keep the bombers. I such a great time flying bombing missions with one or two friends. There was something for everyone to do and it was a team effort to keep the bomber in the air.
Same for tanks.
Viva Le Vanguard!
I really liked everything there was to do in PS, the biggest thing that bothered me was just how pointless all your efforts turned out being. It was great fun to spend hours taking a planet but 8 hours later, what was the point? While you slept, everything changed. While you worked, everything changed. When you logged back in, there was no discernible sign that anything you'd done before had had any effect. It was still plenty of fun at the micro level though.
I probably did a fair bit of running around but I usually subject myself to that willingly. My most vivid memories of PS are stuff like driving a Vangard around (and surviving a harrowing fall down into the volcano in the center of that one world) and driving the Thunderer and Aurora around.
What is the point of winning a round of Battlefield or Section 8 eight hours later? I heard this complaint a lot, and never really got it. People would be like "I went to sleep, and when I woke up my base had been retaken!" and I'm thinking so what? You play Battlefield and as soon as you take your last objective the entire map is reset. There's definitely a different mindset among the playerbase because it's a persistent world. But surely people realize that the game wouldn't work if everyone's gains were somehow "locked in." You permanently advance your character, but it's pretty hard to imagine a game where you permanently conquer a base.
One thing that might have helped, though, is if the battle lines weren't so fluid. They ended up fixing a big part of that with the Lattice, but I think people still felt like there was no overall cohesion to each faction's position.
Yeah, all mmos are like that. You might defeat "Grand Duke Badass" in god knows what instance in wow, but next week he will there again holding your loot and the only thing that has changed from the week before is that a few more people have "Magically reinforced plate mail bikinis of Greater Justice".
Last edited by Murbella; 09-26-2009 at 09:59 PM.
In fact, it makes far more sense in Planetside than it does in Battlefield; in the latter, the map is just forcibly reset by some invisible hand. In Planetside, someone came and took that base back. Hell, there might well have been a huge fight over it - you're not the only soldier in the war!
Base capturing was just about complex enough, I think. No need for anything more than the lattice link. The LLU runs never seemed to work as distinct objectives, because stopping an LLU was extremely unlikely so really it all came back to hacking the base again.
I love the balance between vehicles and people; armour is essential outdoors but it's inside bases where the game-changing events occur. The side that resorts to foot-zerging is the side that loses, generally.
It's got a great set-up for the game context, too. No nanotechnology-forged weaponry can ever overcome the greatest weapon the Vanu deployed on Auraxis: immortality.
But individual guilds have a sense of progress nonetheless. They measure themselves by the bosses they've managed to kill.
For the record, I was driving that Vanguard off the cliff and you were gunning :O. I have a very distinct "OH SHIT!!" memory as I realized the angle I had taken had caused me to lose traction and the cliff was RIGHT THERE. I got ribbed about my little girl scream over Vent for weeks after that.
You could do this sort of thing in PS2 by having outfits get achievements for base and continent captures and various other combat accomplishments. If they went really full-featured you could have an outfit page that would list the achievements and which guildies were online to accomplish it. That would give me a big sense of accomplishment.
Couldn't you do sort of the same thing in planetside by talking about how many people you've killed or based captured? Planetside wasn't exactly the standard rpg progression (more levels didn't automatically make you more powerful, mostly just gave you more options) anyway so i don't think it really needed an exact measure of raid progression like wow where you can say "oh i've downed 8 bosses in The Swamp of Feral Justice, but you've downed 9 so you're better than me."
Could also be done by having server events. Every week or so the game or admins could put out a server wide call to all sides to do/get something in an area, with the winners getting a medal ("Defended beer resupply transport: 9/27/09") and some small temporary (to keep them coming back, while also not giving a stacking advantage that could eventually be overpowered) advantage, like +10% health.
I still have this screenshot of the best AMS parking job, ever. I think Greg Williams was responsible for this one. What a terrifying Galaxy pilot he was!
I get what you are saying, but I think that's mostly a matter of minor features. The genre still has a long way to go to catch up to the Planetside concept as a whole. It's still my favorite online shooter ever, and I've never played any game that's really much like it.
Seriously.
"Magmower on the left, swing around so I can get guns on him."
"I see him."
"Turn the other way. You need to put the ship sideways to him so I can shoot him."
"Standby to engage."
"I can't shoot him if you're pointed right at him. And you need to slow down."
"Oh, my eyes have seen the glory of the COMING OF THE LORD --"
"What the-- Jesus, slow down!"
"BRACE FOR IMPACT!!"
Following the link above:
How much does a Magmower run for these days? $1? $2?Some of the questions included in the survey were "How many Factions should there be" and "What do you think of Micro Transactions".
What I think of microtransactions depends a whole lot on what's being sold. In a competitive game like Planetside, I'm perfectly fine with microtransactions for aesthetic stuff, like armor paint jobs or what have you. I'm not at all okay with microtransactions for gameplay-affecting items.
$2 to charter a galaxy ride to an enemy base?
I don't know what they could really do micro transactions (MT) with though. If they had it so you had to pay a MT to access an area, it probably wouldn't work because as everyone knows, there is a critical mass of players that needs to be maintained in an area for the game to be fun so you probably don't want to separate players. I'd imagine it would be stuff like new weapons or vehicles, but even then, it couldn't be really key stuff that is required to be effective or people would feel like they HAD to have it to play at all (ie you can't use a MAX suit unless you pay $5).
I imagine it will be more like, 'For $5 you get a MAX suit that's fancier and prettier and better in some noteworthy-but-difficult-to-numerically-quantify way.' Or possibly $5 gets you a longer health bar, or more powerful ammo, for a period of time.
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