Planetside 2 Launch Date

[Alex Mars]

Planetside 2 will launch on 20 November 2012.

The most important thing to know is an official launch date has now been announced, so this is not a drill. On November 20th, PlanetSide 2 will officially launch completely free to play for everyone. This means no more closed Beta, character wipes, and any of the other fun stuff associated with testing. No more do overs. Live ammunition will be issued, and you have authorization to go weapons free. Your empire’s future depends on you.

http://www.planetside2.com/news/ps2-launch-date

[Ziel]

So I had an interesting experience the other day. The most obvious mistake you could make in developing an MMOFPS would be trying to develop it as if it were an FPS (or more specifically, not accounting for the game design decisions you have to alter due to the difference between the two). I imagined such a scenario and the problems that'd arise from it, assuming such an obvious mistake would never be made.

Now as someone who's barely kept up with PS2 since just before the tech test got underway, I asked if the problems I predicted were the current problems with the game and had people agree that they were, so I'm assuming that's the mistake that they've made, which is very sad.

[Alex Mars]

Are you going to share with us the details of your prediction or do we have to guess?

[Ziel]

You have to guess.

Alright, fine.

- Death is barely an inconvenience (supposedly true since Sunderers were turned into respawn points)
- Battles consist of people charging forward without much concern
- Too many vehicles
- Fast-response outfits are barely necessary
- "Clutch moments" are rarer than in PS1

I since added "Medics are irrelevant", but apparently that was incorrect.

[Andile™]

I had guessed them all. There's another one you didn't think of.

Your turn.

[Ziel]

Lack of meta-game. Lack of long-term enjoyment (more of a disposable game).

Hell, if you thought long enough you could probably come up with a much larger list than what I came up with while making my lunch.

[VKhaun]

Lack of meta-game. Lack of long-term enjoyment (more of a disposable game).

This.

They were doing okay shooting for a mediocre sequel with game play centered entirely on controlling spawn points because of the map and installation improvements over Planetside1 and the awkward to land, vulnerably huge Galaxy transport aircraft serving as the mobile spawn point, but now that any asshole can maintain two spawn points with unrestricted placement the game completely lacks any kind of meta beneath the shooting which will only get worse as people unlock the sunderer passives for better hill climbing and speed.

Playing on the dead-simple lattice without a meta making people travel to different places, and with the sunderer/gal bringing the key vehicle targets right next to the infantry combat, the vehicles aren't used for anything else and and you just get piles of them following the infantry combat. If aircraft, anti-air vehicles, and anti-vehicle vehicles had something to fight over between bases it wouldn't feel like there were too many of them.

[Valec]

I still have no idea why they decided to make a game that was nothing like it's predecessor. I think a game more like the original Planetside would do pretty damned well these days.

[Ziel]

I still have no idea why they decided to make a game that was nothing like it's predecessor. I think a game more like the original Planetside would do pretty damned well these days.

Barely any of the devs seemed to have much experience of Planetside. Smedley probably had the most and assuming he's responsible for putting development teams together, he either should've put someone from the old Planetside team in to advise (I only know that Smokejumper still works there, but I think he plays a big part on the EQ2 team now), or personally been overseeing to make sure it was developed as an MMOFPS.

What they'd all clearly had experience of was EVE and Battlefield 3. They were both referred to quite often during early development.

[Zoobi]

[VKhaun]

Sunderers available anywhere the flash can be spawned... what... o.o

[Ziel]

I saw that earlier. That adds to the list of problems created by designing it as if it were just an FPS. I'll also be pretty disappointed in the development team if they end up with people being locked out due to all the continents being full, since we warned them about that months ago.

I feel bad criticizing the developers because they're really nice guys and they've interacted a lot with us, but they seem completely clueless. SOE had an obvious advantage in making an MMOFPS since they'd made one before, but rather than building on what was learnt from Planetside, they seem to have gone with a "feeling around in the dark" approach and now they're re-discovering things that had already been learnt from the very game they're making a sequel to (which would've been fine if they'd had enough time and money, but I'm guessing the launch date wasn't their idea, so they've wasted a lot of both.)

[VKhaun]

Hey. How does he get the circular crosshair for his guns?
I finally started PS2 up again (been playing CSGO for shooter time) and I was disappointed I couldn't figure out how to do that. I like it a lot better than the thin little white crosshair. I thought, after watching that, that I'd find some kind of crosshair/hud customization in the settings but I didn't. There was a check box to 'centralize' the hud but that didn't do it.

[Ziel]

I'm guessing it's weapon-based.

[VKhaun]

I'm guessing it's weapon-based.

That's what I was told in-game as well, but in his vid he has the same x-hair with his pistol, the chaingun, and the jackhammer.

EDIT--
No it doesn't, I'm dumb. It's the heavy weapons getting the circles. Probably shotguns will too.