I played around a bit earlier and one thing I had a lot of fun with was when it went dark because it was night time. There was a lot of death and destruction in a very little amount of time.
Okay, so if we’re going to change factions, we need to make that decision quickly before we invest heavily in one faction.
The best gist of the differences, as I understand them.
TR - sort of the middle of the road generic shooter class. Good infantry weapons, medium damage, high rate of fire, good for spraying people dead. Prowler heavy tank is the best anti-infantry tank but not as good against other enemy tanks. Mosquito medium aircraft is the fastest of the bunch so it can pick its own fights, but not the most manueverable. Their aesthetic is sort of fascistic and militaristic.
Vanu - Energy weapons have no bullet drop but the damage drops off faster with range, their tank is a hovercraft and can strafe, their aircraft is the most manueverable of the bunch. Weapons are low recoil, low damage, high spread, high rate of fire. They get a lot of exploding orb and other weird weapons. Their aesthetic is high tech and alienophile.
NC - their infantry weapons hit hard, fire slowly, and have a lot of recoil. So if you start the battle, you can inflict a lot of damage fast. Their weapons have no damage falloff. Their vehicles are slower and more heavily armored and pack a punch. Their aesthetic is sort of rebel independent libertarian capitalist types.
You only unlock things on a per-character basis, so if we’re going to switch factions, it should be done early before we’ve invested much. I’m going to try the other factions to see how they feel (you need to start a character on a different server, as you can only have one faction per server) and I suggest you guys do the same.
If you’re going to try out different factions with us, make your NC on Helios and your Vanu on Connery.
This looks fun and I’ll bite, though I don’t have much gaming time nowadays.
I played for a couple of hours tonight and it is indeed a blast. Chaotic as all get out but fun. Managed to get 18 certs, so I should be able to max out my TR medic in about 7,000 years.
Alright, I’m hooked. I’m gonna be playing the shit out of this game. So I went ahead and subscribed as a premium member. If you do a monthly sub, it’s $15/mo and you start with a 25% resource generaton, experience, and passive cert generation bonus and every month you get 5% more up to 50%. Or if you preorder, you get a discount ($13/mo 3 months, $12/mo 6 months, $10/mo 1 year) and you also get what would be the last month’s bonus instantly, so for 3 months you’d be at 35%, 6 months+ 50%. You also get $5 worth in game cash per month, priority queueing, and like a month advance chance to buy new shop items.
So, since I would’ve wanted to pay $60+$15 per month for this game as an MMO model, I figure what the hell, I’ll get the 6 month package. 50% bonus helps reduce the grindiness of it considerably.
If you’re gonna play a decent bit, this seems way more cost effective than buying the overpriced unlocks individually, and having certs is more flexible than station points anyway, because a lot of upgrades are cert-only.
So yeah, if you want to throw money at the game, the premium member subscription is your best bet.
I think you’re right. I won’t be around today, for some reason, but I’ll see you lot on Friday.
So far I’m finding that NC is the high skill - high payoff faction and Vanu the low skill - low payoff. A bit like the AK47 vs the P90 in Counterstrike; if you were a newbie, the AK47 was likely too difficult to use and you were better off with the P90 but a skilled player could do wonders with an AK47. Vanu is like the P90 and NC like the AK47.
What are the best ways you’ve found to use the classes? I’m finding that light assault can be quite good in areas where the jet pack allows you to take the enemy by surprise.
So far I like the NC infantry play the most, but I need to try more. Not sure how the factional aircraft compare. The NC vanguard feels more like a tank - very heavy armor, force shield use ability like the heavy armor class - feels sort of like an M1A2 - a big, mean tank destroyer that fears nothing on the battlefield.
Vanu I was kind of dissapointed. I was hoping their weapons felt significantly different because they’re energy weapons - but it fires so rapidly it feels a lot like playing the other classes firing assault rifles. It’d be cooler if they had a slower ROF, bigger damage, and more accurate shots I think - like a recharging laser weapon, rather than the assault rifle with laser-tracers that it feels like now.
I need to play more but as of now I’m leaning towards the NC. Please guys give everything a try - if we want to play together we’ll have to come to a consensus on faction.
Just as a reminder to anyone new:
Make your Terran Republic character on server Genudine
Make your New Conglomerate character on Helios
Make your Vanu character on Connery
You can only play 1 faction on every server so it’s best if we coordinate so we can play together. Not sure what our main will be, but might as well align our character/servers now.
Add me as your friend and I’ll get you into the SDMB outfit on each server, which is like a guild.
On Genudine I’m SenorBeef
On Connery I’m TechnoBeef
On Helios (NC is the libertarian/corporatist faction) I’m SpaceAmericaFCKYEAH
Feel free to get a theme going with me on Helios. I need a SpaceCheney and SpaceRumsfeld or whatever you can come up with. Whenever I do something awesome like run someone over in my tank, I yell out on local/proximity chat “SPACE AMERICA, FUCK YEAH!” or “Yeah! Rumsfeld!”
I might pick it up, but I have to know - can you play in China? (I mean China proper, not cough cough certain provinces of it.)
downloading now. Look for GoKartMozart soon.
I’m PurportedPorcupine in Helios, PreoccupiedPorcupine in Connery and PacifistPorcupine in Genudine.
Finally got this to work and it is a surprising amount of fun even for somebody like me who isn’t all that great and hasn’t played a ton of multiplayer FPS games before. Been mostly playing Medic and Engineer because I love doing support stuff but I’ve managed to get a few kills too. Honestly, I thought I’d try it out for 30 min and look around a bit, then uninstall, but I’ve already played 7 hours.
I wasn’t really aware of Planetside 1 during the years it was really active and I regret that, since it was probably pretty awesome. But having 2 is a nice chance to get back in the genre.
I was talking last night about mmo games that aren’t WoW-style MMORPGs. As early as 1995* we had Air Warrior, in which you flew a WW2 plane over a large virtual territory and actually had real simulated combat - you’d fly your plane with actual controls, shoot your enemy with actual aim - as opposed to the standard MMO world where you aren’t really attached to it, where you hit TAB 1 1 1 2 1 1 2 TAB 1 1 2 1 1 2 rather than actually move and aim like a non-MMO game.
So it makes me wonder where the hell are all the MMO games where you actually run around and shoot (or stab or fly or whatever) rather than a very obstructed WoW type world where instead you hit ability buttons? Is there a term for this? Seems like there should be.
It’s a genre massively underserved, and if we had it as early as 1995, we certainly shouldn’t only have a handful of games that do it now.
Anyway, more people should add me to your friends list on our servers as per post 70, so I can invite you to the SDMB outfits.
- Edit: Apparently they had a wireframe monochrome version of Air Warrior as early as 1986 where you still existed together as part of a real virtual world, dogfighting. I wish we had a new version of the MMO Flight Sim - aces high is outdated and extremely difficult for newcomers.
Incidentally, if you do want to buy Station Cash for this game, they occasionally have a 2 for 1 (or rarely a 3 for 1) deal. Actually, for black friday they’re doing a 2 for 1.
Apparently Walmart sells 2000 point cards (normally $20) for $15, and if you redeem the card on black friday you still get the 2x bonus, so you get 4000 sc for $15.
My TR on Genudine is Wildchild.
My NC on Helios is Angeleyes.
My Vanu on Connery is Xenophile.
The game is definitely fun. I started out playing Terran Republic. I’ve given up. My brain can’t handle shooting characters in blue armor with red icons but not shooting characters in red armor with blue icons.
I did much better with New Conglomerate–that’s my preference. I’ve been doing Engineer and some Medic classes. Engineer is my favorite. I love deployable turrets and fixing my vehicles.
So, played a bit with my Vanu and NC guys, and on both realms basically the whole map is almost red and the whole 2 hours consisted of getting our asses kicked repeatedly. 2-3% xp/resource buff doesn’t seem much if you aren’t getting any xp in the first place. I thought having some mechanism to prevent one faction steamrolling everything was usual in games like this - I mean, wouldn’t the other faction players either migrate to their other characters or just log out in disgust and never return otherwise?
Mostly just curious, but I have to admit I was having a lot less fun than when I played before and the factions seemed more balanced. I’m wondering if some big gaming forum decided that TR’s guns are the best and the Internet hive mind is reacting by going all red. Or maybe my 2 EU servers are an anomaly, I dunno.
What classes have people been playing?
I’ve found that I like both the light assault and medic. Medic because, well, medics are awesome. With the light assault I’m really liking the mobility offered. It’s so easy to get up walls and stuff.
We’ve firmly settled on TR as a main faction. It’s pretty ridiculous and greedy that unlocks don’t carry over from one character to another, but that means you have to really focus on one, it’s not viable to build up 3 different ones. Maybe to a limited extent… maybe you mostly play TR but you love the magrider, so I guess it may be worth playing vanu sometimes and then putting all your cert unlocks into the magrider.
Had a lot of fun last night. I think we had 9 or 10 of us all on in the squad. Best fight was at Snake Ravine Lookout, a small outpost near Allatum biolab on Indar. TR had controlled 2/3rds of the map but both Vanu and NC were pushing back on us hard. Their pushes met up at Snake Ravine. We had no heavy vehicles to spawn from there, and we were getting a massive armored assault on both sides by both enemy factions, but we managed to hold the place using only infantry and a little air support for over an hour.
I love those big open fights even more than the close in city fights. Trying to find cover in open areas, seeing tanks really manuever and fire at longer range, the fights just look great.
A lot of funny stuff too, especially with the liberators.