It’s a free to play Massively Online Shooter. The combat areas are huge, and support hundreds to thousands of players on at the same time battling it out with futuristic weapons and vehicles.
I purposely kept myself in the dark about the game and the Beta to try it and be surprised by it (hopefully positively) one it came out. So if anyoen in the know wants to chime in with thoughts, please do!
It should be available for download on Steam soon!
Anyone going to try it?
I’ve been playing in Beta.
It’s damned fun.
Played the last week or so of beta. It’s not bad, more of an update than a brand new game. If you stick to the free game it is the usual F2P gring to gain new weapons and add-ons. But unlike MWO you can still have a wide range of equipment from the get go.
I would recommend finding a squad/outfit to join asap. It’s a lot more fun fighting with a bunch of others than lone-wolfing it.
I’ve been waiting years for this game. The original Planetside had a scope unlike any game I had ever played, with hundreds of people as infantry, land and air units making coordinated attacks on each other. Truly massive, basically created the MMOFPS genre by itself.
Planetside 2 beta has been fun so far, lots of changes, they’ve been updating nonstop. I suspect the game will keep changing quite a bit over the next 6 months, I’m hoping for more of a metagame to be developed allowing outfits to own territory. As was said above, find people to play with, the game shines in a group.
I’ve been playing heavily the last month of beta, and I’d definitely recommend it. It’ll still be a little raw around the edges on release, and it requires a really beefy system to run at acceptable shooter standards, but it’s pretty engaging.
I’ll dissent from the “find an organized group to play with” thread. My experience was that the bulk of people seeking out groups were doing so to try to mask pretty severe deficiencies in their own play, and the majority of my organized-group experiences wound up being less effective, more frustrating, and less coordinated than the organic pick-up action that you find pretty much anywhere on the front lines. Picture 27 bad tank commanders simultaneously trying to squeeze their chunky vehicles through a narrow pass, while those in the lead are trying to back through the same pass away from enemy fire, and you’ll get a decent summary of the problem 
I think a casual player who doesn’t have the time to devote to being picky about an outfit would be better served by not even bothering. It doesn’t matter what you’re doing in the game, the scale of it is such that you will never be “lone wolf” anywhere. You don’t need to organize to have teammates to run with.
I think organized play is pretty much the way to go – with the right people at least. See this twitch stream. Every time X got on his stream he got more than a full platoon’s worth of people on and played general. They absolutely steamrolled everything (until they came up against a similar stream run by one of the devs, then it was a pretty epic, drawn out stalemate) and it was a blast to watch (though I didn’t play much). It was also orders of magnitude more effective than disorganized play was too.
I’d be a lot more enthusiastic about it if they’d just let me buy the fucking game. F2P is a scourge on the existance of gaming. But I’ll definitely give it a go.
The F2P grind in this one is looking to be particularly bad, too. The last week of beta saw them increase the time cost of things by up to 2000%. It’s a bit worrying, because they’ve priced some core gameplay mechanics (like any effective surface-to-air capability) so high that they’ll be rare, when the metagame was balanced around them being readily available.
That’s an awesome way to deliberately ruin what could be a good game. The only F2P I can possibly support is where buyable stuff is strictly cosmetic - and quite frankly, given how much people spend on fucking hats and LoL skins and shit, it’s perfectly viable to support a game that way.
How much would the battlefield games suck if you had to say “Shit, this helicopter is raping us, I need someone to hop in that AAA vehicle… hey, did anyone unlock the AAA vehicle for $4.99? We need help here! Okay, whatever, hop in a jet. Oh, no one has the $9.99 Jet starter package? Fuck.”
I don’t know whether to hate the companies that make this shit, or the fact that apparently it’s a successful business model and fucking retarded people won’t pay a dime to actually buy a game, but once they’re in they’ll start spending money.
It’s only really the persistent world that makes it bad, I think. In LoL it works because you’ll probably have enough in-game money to buy most of the heroes as you’re getting better at the game. And at the lower levels it’s much less important that you play every hero. So the learning curve kind of balances itself out with newbies having fewer heroes to play, and getting a bigger arsenal as they become more competent and familiar with game mechanics.
Planetside is somewhat different because everybody is contributing to the battle in a single game world. Every unlock isn’t standalone, it’s a way to bolster your team’s forces. This makes newbies even more of a liability than they already are because veterans have to deal with not only newbies who can’t aim or don’t know the maps, but also those that simply don’t have the equipment to react to the situation at hand.
It’s not that gating important content behind a paywall OR in-game currency that’s bad. It’s that new players can actively drag down advanced players with it. Like I said, it works fine in LoL where newbies get paired with newbies and it really doesn’t matter if you don’t have a billion heroes unlocked.
free to play is the future of gaming, better get used to it.
in the case of planetside, you can get some weapons faster by buying them or you can earn them within the game, nothing is pay only. so i would not call it pay to win personally.
and they brought prices back down again some on friday, we have yet to see what they will be at launch today. you realize that any shortage will be temporary, within a month most people will have access to what they want.
I’m happy when F2P monetizes cosmetic improvements, and even classes/builds are fine too, as long as the defaults are viable as well. In other words, those classes should represent optional ways to play, not better ways to play (like the heroes in LoL).
Blacklight does a decent job of this, where you can spend a few bucks to unlock a few classes you enjoy playing, but those classes are just different builds to enjoy, not necessarily superior to the other builds.
And regardless of pay for or not, I hate unlock systems in which incredibly important , absolutely necessary abilities are locked behind a grind.
The difference in viability of a newbie solider in Battlefield 3, for example compared to someone with a class completely unlocked is HUGE. I don’t mind some difference in the way the veteran can deploy power, but sometimes it’s ridiculous.
To give you a D&D analogy, sometimes it feels like a 1st level character running around with level 20’s. I mean, there’s no chance. for example, try lasting in a helicopter more than 3 seconds if you don’t have the countermeasures unlock. I would prefer starting out with something like a level 10 and the veteran being a level 20. The difference can be felt, but it’s not overwhelming.
A big chunk of people bought the beta promotion, which got you early access to the beta and 4000 Station Cash ($40 worth). Cash prices look like they’ll be anywhere from $5 to $15 for substantial unlocks, but if they’re one-time unlocks that’s probably not too bad a deal.
Also, from what I understand Station Cash is frequently on sale, so there’ll be opportunities to buy it at a 2-to-1 or 3-to-1 discount.
Lastly, they are offering a $15/month subscription model, which offers a few in-game perks as well as a monthly stipend of 500 Station Cash.
For what it’s worth, I don’t believe unlocks are absolutely vitally necessary. The basic loadouts you’re given access to in the game are more than enough to fight effectively (I admit I don’t know what they’ve been doing recently with anti-air weaponry). The Heavy Assault loadout, which I’ve been playing with primarily, starts you with a perfectly lethal assault rifle and anti-armor cannon. You’re given enough firepower to kill a tank if you’re good enough to avoid incoming fire, and enough rifle ammo to kill a squad before you need to resupply. Upgrades to individual weapons are very earnable in-game, but even then skill is the primary deciding factor on how lethal you are, and upgrades only assist.
i would consider the defaults in Planetside very viable, i don’t think most of the unlocks are really much of an upgrade. one of the few exceptions, as Mekhazzio pointed out, is the ground to air missile which need to be unlocked. but all of the starting weapons are viable, you get immediate access to tanks and fighters, etc. imho you can function quite well as a noob, veterans have more of an advantage just from knowing the ins-and-outs of the game.
This is one of the things that I think PS2 is doing very well compared to the original PS. In PS, basic infantry weapons were pretty fucking useless; you had to go to the specialty weapons to really start earning kills. In PS2, the basic weapons are very, very lethal, and have advantages that purchasable weapons may not. I feel like I can actually hold my own with what you start with.
On that note, if you liked Lightnings in PS1, they’re even better in PS2. They’re fast, and their firepower has been upgraded. You do need to purchase upgrade turrets to really get the most out of the Lightning, but even the basic cannon is great against infantry and a useful support weapon against armor. I’ve taken out Vanguards with the base Lightning simply because I was moving too quickly for the main cannon to track, although I’ll admit that’s not a frequent occurrence.
Okay, so you have to pick one of three factions. I think you can only have one soldier per faction per game server, although I’m not sure on that.
I don’t really know which faction would be best for us, but someone has to get the ball rolling to coordinate if we want to play together. We can play different factions on different servers later.
So to get rolling, if you want to start playing together, pick the Terran Republic Faction, and the Genudine server (US West). Go to the social tab, and add friend SenorBeef. Contact me on steam too. I’ll get us organized and playing together.
Also, we’ll be using our mumble server.
Now I don’t know how the balance works or the xp grind or all that long term stuff, but my immediate visceral reaction is this game is fucking awesome. This may have the best aesthetic of all time - it really feels like you’re part of a huge sci-fi battle. Reminds me of the war flashbacks from Firefly.
Planetside is absolutely amazing at capturing that feel, and 2 does it way better than 1. You know you’re in a damn war.
Can’t even make an account on the EU side of things - stuck at Connecting or getting Bad Gateway errors. It’s not my first MMO launch day so I’m not really surprised, but it’s always annoying. Maybe after work when it is 3 am CET it actually works.
Huh, so it seems the Steam version does not work for EU people at all. Makes you wonder how many terabytes of bandwith got wasted tonight. I was going to give it a try, but since they gave the EU side of things to some inept company and are handling the communication this badly, I think I’ll pass.