citizen059hello my name is citizenI'm from the InternetRegistered Userregular
edited March 2008
No...I couldn't remember the name at first so I started searching through clans @ planetsidestats...it was "The Lost Minions".
DeSade was the leader when I played, but it looks like he's long gone from PS, as are most of the members.
It's a shame. Even though I only played for a short time, I loved every minute of it. Those guys were awesome, I was always in awe of how good they were. ;-)
Even though I was a total newbie, they didn't seem to care. They just told me what equipment to bring, where to stand, when to shoot, and never to run...and it always seemed to work out.
demolitions is possibly one of the most fun things to do in planetside.
Whenever i'm not in my magrider and am assaulting an enemy base i will always plant boomers near their spawn tube doors so when mr. big man max suit comes out to rape everyone i just push a little red button and blow him and his buddies up.
one time i think i got like 4 guys with 1 boomer, good times
TheKoolEagle on
Mon-Fri 8:30 PM CST - 11:30 PM CST
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The_SpaniardIt's never lupinesIrvine, CaliforniaRegistered Userregular
edited March 2008
BTW, I too would like Planetside 2. But this time with sprawling cities from time to time to punctuate the vast alien forests and flatlands instead of only military instillations. I mean come on humans have to live somewhere right?
Planetside was my first MMO and I keep going back to it. Between Reserves, various limited demos, and a few re-subs (after my initial 6 month sub). The trick is that you need a team. Ideally, enough people to fill a Galaxy with a Reaver and Mosquito escort. Once you get that many people, the game really starts sizzling.
If there were a Penny Arcade Outfit to spring up, I would be all over that like white on rice. My only plea is for it to be on Emerald NC, because that's where my oldest Character:
Man, I have used the handle Trigg in ... years. And there was another dude, a really idiotic CR5 on my side with the name Trigganator who kept making global announcements about stupid shit. I would always get the hate for it. That sucked.
Also, another benefit to the NC: Their Anti-Tank weapon, the Phoenix (?), where you guide the missiles by steering via missile cam is unbelievably sweet.
HoberShort on
"Games are made out of smaller games – turtles all the way down, until you hit the game that is so trivial and stupid it isn’t deserving of the name." -Raph Koster
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The_SpaniardIt's never lupinesIrvine, CaliforniaRegistered Userregular
edited March 2008
Ok so I'm trying to check out the station trial and I'm not seeing any details on station.com, I looked at their free trial sections and it isn't listed, and after downloading and installing the client it asks me to subscribe and doesn't say anything about a trial. So what's the deal?
BTW, I too would like Planetside 2. But this time with sprawling cities from time to time to punctuate the vast alien forests and flatlands instead of only military instillations. I mean come on humans have to live somewhere right?
If I'm remembering the background story correctly, the Planetside universe was found through a black hole/worm hole or something. The TR sent scientists over to research there, which is why there are all the bio labs and what not. Those scientists eventually became the NC due to troubles with the TR, so that brought the TR over, and then the Vanu were like 'sup' and that's why they're fighting.
The TR were the Fascist rulers of Earth who found this wormhole to a new planet, Auraxis, with ten continents and a slew of ancient technology left behind by a race they dubbed the Vanu. They send their jackbooted thugs through and start colonizing as they know best: by building military bases.
Shit happens, wormhole collapses, the local TR becomes the highest authority. Two factions splinter off: the Vanu believe that we have to worship the ancient tech because it's God, or some kind of purple penis-shaped-suited crap. I never understood their ideology. The New Conglomerate is the more radical, anarchist elements, and pretty much everyone who's sick of Space Big Brother. They go to war, and the rest is history.
Except for what happened when the Core Combat expansion came out, when a giant cosmic MacGuffin caused Auraxis to split into ten separate planets, each one with one of the former continents, although they were still linked by their warp gates. Also, some planets developed subterranean caverns in which natural Vanu bases were found, which everyone immediately started fighting for, as well (natch).
All of this is from memory, so correct me please.
HoberShort on
"Games are made out of smaller games – turtles all the way down, until you hit the game that is so trivial and stupid it isn’t deserving of the name." -Raph Koster
The TR were the Fascist rulers of Earth who found this wormhole to a new planet, Auraxis, with ten continents and a slew of ancient technology left behind by a race they dubbed the Vanu. They send their jackbooted thugs through and start colonizing as they know best: by building military bases.
Shit happens, wormhole collapses, the local TR becomes the highest authority. Two factions splinter off: the Vanu believe that we have to worship the ancient tech because it's God, or some kind of purple penis-shaped-suited crap. I never understood their ideology. The New Conglomerate is the more radical, anarchist elements, and pretty much everyone who's sick of Space Big Brother. They go to war, and the rest is history.
Except for what happened when the Core Combat expansion came out, when a giant cosmic MacGuffin caused Auraxis to split into ten separate planets, each one with one of the former continents, although they were still linked by their warp gates. Also, some planets developed subterranean caverns in which natural Vanu bases were found, which everyone immediately started fighting for, as well (natch).
All of this is from memory, so correct me please.
Don't forget the BFR's ... apparently the TR (on earth) had been monitoring Auraxis through a pinprick left in the wormhole and decided to send in new designs for the bots so they could watch the 3 factions fight it out as some sort of sick test ...
I distinctly remember one time being in a base and everyone was getting ready to roll out for a major assault. Some guy was jabbering non stop, trying to get the people in tanks to organize themselves into a column, and he was roleplaying it up to the max. At first I sort of shrugged it off, thinking he was organizing 4-6 tanks, but I eventually ended up getting in the air in someones bomber and I could see that this small tank column was stretched out almost as far as I could see, in rows of three. There must have been at least 40 tanks driving off to the base we were attacking, and I was just watching them all travel in these uniform lines...
Ok so I'm trying to check out the station trial and I'm not seeing any details on station.com, I looked at their free trial sections and it isn't listed, and after downloading and installing the client it asks me to subscribe and doesn't say anything about a trial. So what's the deal?
alright, so I looked into the problem you are experiencing, Personally I just resubscribed so I didn't quite go through the same process, but one of the guys who got the trial used this http://launcher.station.sony.com/ beta launcher thing, I guess you can access the trial for planetside from there.
edit: i also totally hit cr 2 yesterday i was so happy
I've been sitting at 95% of cr 1 for about a year now
I would have got back into this a few months ago if not for the silly problems I faced with my computer's dual core processor, Vista, and DirectX 10...
Long story short, I didn't want to apply some stupid hacks to my registry just to get a lame old game like Planetside to work because Sony is too damn lazy to patch in some compatibility for newer *cough* hardware.
Still can't find the trial... any more detail? Every other game on the Station Launcher says "Try or Buy," except Planetside which only says Subscribe.
One of my most memorable gaming experiences was air-dropping out of a troop transport with a company of dudes I'd teamed up with. We all fell through the sky in drop pods and landed on the roof of the new area. It was badass.
I hope, literally, to God almighty that this same feeling is what I get when playing the 40K MMO that's currently in development.
My outfit did a hotdrop into a fiercely contested biolab once. Bailed a Sunderer (with the squad inside) out of the Lodestar, and then the squad bailed from the Sundy. Of course, all the NC troops shoot at the big troop transport while we all ran inside and blew their gen. Glorious.
I've still got my old BR20/CR4 VS guy on Emerald (unless SOE decided to delete him for whatever reason)...it's been a couple of years since I last played, and I'm wondering if I should drop back in for a look-see?
Ah, Planetside. I too have found memories of the beta... hot dropping unto some base... deploying spikes into the ground as one of those big heavy guys. What's funny was my computer was totally ill equipped to handle PS at the time, so the thought of battle was more entertaining/playable than actual battle.
Still, the music, the players, the vehicles flying off... what an atmosphere. Shamed it never took off the way they hoped.
I played this a while back and loved the concept, and even got one of my buddies to play as well. After a while I started seeing major problems.
My biggest peeve was how at peak hours there would be only one major battle going on, and you couldn't get into it because they locked out that continent due to server congestion. Rather than go other places and start other battles, everyone just sat in the base on top of the teleport pad waiting for the slim chance that the server will suddenly allow them to enter the only good battle going on.
So this thread got me thinking about what issues I did have with Planetside and, well, I was bored, so....
A lot of people complained about the FPS controls in general, saying they were clunky, inaccurate, didn't feel like a proper FPS, etc. I had major fears of these kinds of failings before Planetside came out myself but IMO I did not find this to be the case at all. It might take a tiny bit of getting used to but while I'm sure they could have been improved in many ways I never had any major issues with the controls or "feel" of game with possibly the exception of air vehicles.
I think they dropped the ball on several levels though. Spoiler'd for wall of text syndrome.
On updates...
We all love getting regular patches and new content from our monthly subscriptions right? Pretty big one for an "MMOFPS" then I think. A lot of people lost interest or burnt out in the game really quickly. If the dev team was able to put out new content on a much more regular basis I think that could have helped quite a bit in helping the game feel less stagnant. A new weapon or vehicle every month or two doesn't seem like too much to ask for nor do I really see any reason to deviate from it and start doing silly shit like Core Combat. Speaking of which...
The biggest update we did see early on, Core Combat, was an expansion no one really asked for and while the concept was cool on some levels it was mostly just a distraction from the rest of the game. The devs claimed much of the reason for it was to give the close quarters combat so many of us asked for but it failed to deliver on that for the most part and at the very least wasn't what most of us had in mind. Besides, adding more places to go really shouldn't have been a priority when 70% of the continents were empty at any given time anyway.
What little new content we did see in patches was often hugely out of balance. BFRs are a prime example as they totally fucking broke the game when they were first released IMO. Now, after much, much rebalancing, they feel *almost* like any other vehicle and I do enjoy their presence in the battlefield.
The world...
The idea of a massive, sprawling, open game map to play on is surely one of the major appeals of having an MMOFPS... But the world was amazingly empty. The fact that what few interesting landmarks the maps did have were often spots of some of the more interesting battles only served to tease us with a glimpse of what the game could be like if there was a lot more variety in the maps.
You can throw the fact that there were only a few minor variations of towers and bases in there too. Later patches that gave more purpose to these different types, probably most notably the air towers, helped a bit here, but only a little.
One of my biggest issues with the world is that it felt so damn empty, so artificial. The entirety of the maps consisted of massive, sprawling landscapes dotted with roads, bases, and towers. NOTHING ELSE. There were no NPCs, no ambient life of any sort, no cities or houses or other structures, nothing really to indicate any sort of life other than, again, roads, bases, and towers! While I feel the design choice to not have the single player elements of monsters to hunt and the like was fine, the world could have still used at least *a little* flavor.
Progress...
This is perhaps my biggest gripe. Another one of the major advantages of having an MMOFPS is the persistent world server, but ultimately other than character advancement persistence mattered very little. You could spend all day fighting battles, making massive progress sweeping across the entire globe only the wake up the next day to and find that the tide had apparently shifted and everything was pretty much back to the way it was.
Fair enough, constant shifting tides of war and all of that, the idea is sound, but after a few months of that it starts to wear on you. Sooner or later you've got to ask yourself "what am I fighting for?!" The only purpose of fighting is for the love of the fight itself, the glory. Pairing with the idea that the only persistence really involves your character's advancement, the only real way to make your mark is by your character's or outfit's (guild/clan) reputation in battle. You never *really* get to leave your mark on the battlefield.
Besides, other non MMOFPS games have thrown in persistent character development (the Battlefield series, for example.) without the need for subscription fees and the like.
Another issue with progress was the idea of "the zerg" as it quickly became known. Players could divide and conquer almost any number of places at one time governed only by the lattice system later on, yet since many battles were eventually won by numbers and massive battles were one of the big draws of the game in the first place, most of the fighting took place in a few (at the most!) giant groups rather than many smaller ones.
Unfortunately one of the biggest drives for this was that it was a great way to get kills and capture bases thus getting you a more efficient, steady flow of XP. As the player numbers dwindled this caused a lot of division amongst people I knew, as new players, or players not max level period, often *ONLY* wanted to follow the zerg rather than do whatever their outfits were doing. This was an especially big deal for me personally as I found myself enjoying the smaller engagements a hell of a lot more than the giant ones most of the time and following the zerg around felt a lot less dynamic and a lot more tedious to me the more I did it.
Again, those are just a few of the major ones. That all being said I loved the idea, and I feel like they were *very* close to pulling off an amazing, ground breaking game, yet because it wasn't *quite* there it went largely unnoticed. I'd also like to lay some blame on FPS gamers being cheap bastards unwilling to pay monthly fees but that's mostly me being a dick... ;-)
Edit: I can't spell.
Pej on
This cave leads to the inhospitable surface of the planet. There is nothing for you to see there.
I just remembered that the absolute worst thing in the world was trying to aim at things with the MAX suits, or anything that has a limited rate of turning. I'd break my wrist trying to turn a bit more to the right by frantically moving my mouse, picking it up, and repeating. A better system would've been to have two reticles: one where you're "looking", which is free to move, and one where you're aiming, which moves towards your other reticle at whatever its maximum speed was.
Garthor on
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AxenMy avatar is Excalibur.Yes, the sword.Registered Userregular
edited March 2008
So many awesome memories from Planetside. In fact I would go so far to say that I have had more awesome / epic moments in Planetside then any other MMO I have played. Be it being part of an Air Assault squad and dropping on top of an enemy base or taking part in a Harasser unit and running hit and run raids on enemy spawn points I was having fun.
I really wish either a Planetside 2 would come out or a Planetside like game.
Axen on
A Capellan's favorite sheath for any blade is your back.
Harassers were awesome. Before the Skyguard came out not a ton of people used them but I often had one specced (due to a few extra cert points...) and pretty much mastered the art of hauling ass off road and making speedy one or two man assaults on bases and towers. Of course riding with me (or pretty much anyone else) was always an adventure...
Pej on
This cave leads to the inhospitable surface of the planet. There is nothing for you to see there.
i have been complimented on several occasions about my ability to find enemy mine fields in the middle of nowhere with my magrider.
theres normally a lot of me screaming happening as well when i'm driving
Combat engineering was probably the most fun cert in the game. I tried dropping it a few times to clear up points for a different spec but I could never live without it for more than a recert cycle. Was always good times setting up defense in advance or as people were leaving a cap and then watching kills pop up for you while you're off doing something else.
(Same reason I play demo in TF2.. defense while playing offense ftw.)
Still can't find the trial... any more detail? Every other game on the Station Launcher says "Try or Buy," except Planetside which only says Subscribe.
Hey Tyler, we should play planetside again. It will be fun!
Instead of tossing your outfit into the meatgrinder to attack/defend like you're a bloodthirsty World War 1 general or Zerg cerebrate, you do this:
-Don't defend a sieged city, break up into 10 man strike teams and disrupt enemy supply lines by blowing generators via hotdrop and deep strike so they can't get their heavy vehicles.
They usually only send onesies and twosies to fix blown gens and a 10-man team can cut them down easy. Cut down a few lone repairmen, then load up and hit another when a big relief force comes, pulling attackers off of your sieged allies.
-When attacking, forget human wave assaults, MAX crashes, ect. Either do the above to break-down their defenses indirectly, or just go to an open continent and hit the undefended stuff, drawing off reinforcements that would be headed to the siege.
Good units look at the zergling ebb and flow and affect it indirectly.
Like how Space Marines in Warhammer 40K hit high-value and lightly defended sites in lightning strikes, hopping into their thunderhawks to hit another site, and leave the trench warfare to the bullet sponges of the Imperial Guard.
The main problem with Planetside is that anyone could eventually hit CR5 and gain access to global comms. Couple that with armchair generals thinking they can order non CR5's how to play the game ... recipe for disaster.
One of my most memorable gaming experiences was air-dropping out of a troop transport with a company of dudes I'd teamed up with. We all fell through the sky in drop pods and landed on the roof of the new area. It was badass.
There is nothing more badass than a pod drop into a battlezone. Nothing.
I think he meant dropping out of a Galaxy using a grav-chute, not coming down in a pod from orbit.
Although yes, walking out of a drop pod guns blazing was an amazing experience.
God I loved Galaxy drops. By random chance, I ended up in a rather small, but dedicated crew of madmen and all around awesome dudes. Our specialty was perfectly timing our drops from the Gal onto the roof of spawn towers that were proving a little tricky for our groundpounders to take. I would usually end up going through the door first in my Shotgun Wielding power armor (MAX?) after our weasely hacker opened the door for us. There are few moments in gaming that compare to catching a bunch of grenade spamming Terran MAXes with their backs turned, engineers oblivious, and their feet anchored. Oh, the bloodbaths.
Our pilot was a god amongst men. He flew that giant bird like it was a fighter, and knew, everytime, exactly when to yell at us to bail out for a hot drop. Good times. Good times.
So SOE is merging the two American servers, Markov and Emerald. May 20 if you didn't know. Until then though, if you payed for a subscription at some point, you get to play free till the 20th, 18 days.
Guess it will be fun to play till Age of Conan or something. 8-)
So SOE is merging the two American servers, Markov and Emerald. May 20 if you didn't know. Until then though, if you payed for a subscription at some point, you get to play free till the 20th, 18 days.
Guess it will be fun to play till Age of Conan or something. 8-)
Which coincidently is just enough time for me to have fun with it before I get bored again. Woo!
Axen on
A Capellan's favorite sheath for any blade is your back.
I am CaoCow on Emerald, BR 25. Used to play with the goons in VS but haven't seen anybody in some time. I have Advanced BFR so I can have you turret gun in my huge walking death robot (although not so much "death" since the series of nerfs to them).
Yeah, I didn't mean to imply I had been playing in, erm, a while
I'd like to get in but the fucking goddamned launchpad won't bring up the login/password screen; it just plays a Windows message beep and sits there with a white outline of the PS launchpad in the background, taking up about 40-49% of CPU resources in the interim.
Station Launcher gives me "An unknown error has occurred" when I attempt to download the game through that. Assuming I can actually get the cockmongling client downloaded I'll be in game tonight.
Edit: Works fine for Pirates of the Burning Sea. Apparently they don't want people playing Planetside? I guess your best bet to download a semi-updated client would be this link:
Ya I had a similar problem too. I ended up downloading the SOE launchpad beta, It searched for the Planetside folder and started updating. Loaded up fine after that.
Game is downloaded and installed if anyone would like to come out to plaaay :whistle:
Edit: Since this is a new page, character name is CaoCow on Emerald, Vanu. Also much lols are being had at the prospect of jacking vehicles WITH PEOPLE INSIDE THEM with the new hacking skills and cruising around with a STEALTH AIR TRANSPORT (Phantasm).
Typhaeon on
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AxenMy avatar is Excalibur.Yes, the sword.Registered Userregular
Planetside was so much fun when I was really being played. I've played the other FPS's, and while their fun, nothing gave you the massive melees rolling across the terrain. I still talk about it with fondness with my friends.
Favorite experience. I was playing TR defending a base in heavy woods. Heavy enough to force the armor on to the roads, and thanks to some heavy mining, completely out of the fight. Also made it nearly impossible for the flyers to get in, so it was pretty much a infantry battle. The VS (then the NC) would park a AMS out of sight, and try to walk their way up to the base. Great infantry fight.. but I had the buggy cert. It was fast enough and agile enough to drive around the trees and not get caught up. Got a pair of outfit-mates in it, and just ran up and down the enemy lines causing absolute havoc for 30 minutes or more.
Why planetside dropped off
-The zerg was the fight. It wasn't about getting exp, but if it was just small group vs small group, there were better games to play. The massive fights were what made planetside, but they were to hard to find. Usually it was only one or two, and odds are that continent was cap-locked. So you'd log in, hoping to get that good fight, but usually it was just crap.
-So many individual weapons/vechiles were absolute crap. The one that stands out the most is the vanu buggy... was nearly impossible to do anything but bounce around the terrain spastically, while your gunner just randomly fired shells.
-MMOs need expansions, but PS was kinda caught in a catch 22. They needed the world to be fairly small in order to force the good fights, but Core Combat expanded the space, and just spread out the fights even worse.
-Core Combat changed the core gameplay too much and not enough at the same time. Most of the new weapons/vechiles were dumb, and the prime PS gameplay was open field battles, which were impossible in the caves. I went down their a few times, just got confused, and was frustrated because I had bought an expansion which just wasn't any fun.
-Hacking. The surgiles exploiting the prediction code was the worse. They let a certain combination of certs/implants move faster than the engine could accurately predict, and they'd just warp all over the map until they blasted you with a shotgun at point blank range. PvP games are absolutely destroyed when people can exploit the engine.
I'll try the trail though.
Kerdos on
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AxenMy avatar is Excalibur.Yes, the sword.Registered Userregular
edited May 2008
Okay I am in. What server should I pick and faction.
edit- Oh snap. My game is running likes its on crack! How do I fix this?
Axen on
A Capellan's favorite sheath for any blade is your back.
Posts
DeSade was the leader when I played, but it looks like he's long gone from PS, as are most of the members.
It's a shame. Even though I only played for a short time, I loved every minute of it. Those guys were awesome, I was always in awe of how good they were. ;-)
Even though I was a total newbie, they didn't seem to care. They just told me what equipment to bring, where to stand, when to shoot, and never to run...and it always seemed to work out.
Whenever i'm not in my magrider and am assaulting an enemy base i will always plant boomers near their spawn tube doors so when mr. big man max suit comes out to rape everyone i just push a little red button and blow him and his buddies up.
one time i think i got like 4 guys with 1 boomer, good times
Planetside was my first MMO and I keep going back to it. Between Reserves, various limited demos, and a few re-subs (after my initial 6 month sub). The trick is that you need a team. Ideally, enough people to fill a Galaxy with a Reaver and Mosquito escort. Once you get that many people, the game really starts sizzling.
If there were a Penny Arcade Outfit to spring up, I would be all over that like white on rice. My only plea is for it to be on Emerald NC, because that's where my oldest Character:
Man, I have used the handle Trigg in ... years. And there was another dude, a really idiotic CR5 on my side with the name Trigganator who kept making global announcements about stupid shit. I would always get the hate for it. That sucked.
Also, another benefit to the NC: Their Anti-Tank weapon, the Phoenix (?), where you guide the missiles by steering via missile cam is unbelievably sweet.
If I'm remembering the background story correctly, the Planetside universe was found through a black hole/worm hole or something. The TR sent scientists over to research there, which is why there are all the bio labs and what not. Those scientists eventually became the NC due to troubles with the TR, so that brought the TR over, and then the Vanu were like 'sup' and that's why they're fighting.
I think.
EDIT: I was close, kind of. Thanks HoberShort.
SteamID: FronWewq
Battle.net: Orange#1845
3DS Friend Code: 1289-9498-5797
The TR were the Fascist rulers of Earth who found this wormhole to a new planet, Auraxis, with ten continents and a slew of ancient technology left behind by a race they dubbed the Vanu. They send their jackbooted thugs through and start colonizing as they know best: by building military bases.
Shit happens, wormhole collapses, the local TR becomes the highest authority. Two factions splinter off: the Vanu believe that we have to worship the ancient tech because it's God, or some kind of purple penis-shaped-suited crap. I never understood their ideology. The New Conglomerate is the more radical, anarchist elements, and pretty much everyone who's sick of Space Big Brother. They go to war, and the rest is history.
Except for what happened when the Core Combat expansion came out, when a giant cosmic MacGuffin caused Auraxis to split into ten separate planets, each one with one of the former continents, although they were still linked by their warp gates. Also, some planets developed subterranean caverns in which natural Vanu bases were found, which everyone immediately started fighting for, as well (natch).
All of this is from memory, so correct me please.
Don't forget the BFR's ... apparently the TR (on earth) had been monitoring Auraxis through a pinprick left in the wormhole and decided to send in new designs for the bots so they could watch the 3 factions fight it out as some sort of sick test ...
It brought a tear to my eye.
alright, so I looked into the problem you are experiencing, Personally I just resubscribed so I didn't quite go through the same process, but one of the guys who got the trial used this http://launcher.station.sony.com/ beta launcher thing, I guess you can access the trial for planetside from there.
edit: i also totally hit cr 2 yesterday
i was so happy
I've been sitting at 95% of cr 1 for about a year now
Long story short, I didn't want to apply some stupid hacks to my registry just to get a lame old game like Planetside to work because Sony is too damn lazy to patch in some compatibility for newer *cough* hardware.
I had a BR 18 guy, TR, on Markov.
SteamID: FronWewq
Battle.net: Orange#1845
3DS Friend Code: 1289-9498-5797
I hope, literally, to God almighty that this same feeling is what I get when playing the 40K MMO that's currently in development.
Margaret Thatcher
I've still got my old BR20/CR4 VS guy on Emerald (unless SOE decided to delete him for whatever reason)...it's been a couple of years since I last played, and I'm wondering if I should drop back in for a look-see?
Still, the music, the players, the vehicles flying off... what an atmosphere. Shamed it never took off the way they hoped.
My biggest peeve was how at peak hours there would be only one major battle going on, and you couldn't get into it because they locked out that continent due to server congestion. Rather than go other places and start other battles, everyone just sat in the base on top of the teleport pad waiting for the slim chance that the server will suddenly allow them to enter the only good battle going on.
A lot of people complained about the FPS controls in general, saying they were clunky, inaccurate, didn't feel like a proper FPS, etc. I had major fears of these kinds of failings before Planetside came out myself but IMO I did not find this to be the case at all. It might take a tiny bit of getting used to but while I'm sure they could have been improved in many ways I never had any major issues with the controls or "feel" of game with possibly the exception of air vehicles.
I think they dropped the ball on several levels though. Spoiler'd for wall of text syndrome.
We all love getting regular patches and new content from our monthly subscriptions right? Pretty big one for an "MMOFPS" then I think. A lot of people lost interest or burnt out in the game really quickly. If the dev team was able to put out new content on a much more regular basis I think that could have helped quite a bit in helping the game feel less stagnant. A new weapon or vehicle every month or two doesn't seem like too much to ask for nor do I really see any reason to deviate from it and start doing silly shit like Core Combat. Speaking of which...
The biggest update we did see early on, Core Combat, was an expansion no one really asked for and while the concept was cool on some levels it was mostly just a distraction from the rest of the game. The devs claimed much of the reason for it was to give the close quarters combat so many of us asked for but it failed to deliver on that for the most part and at the very least wasn't what most of us had in mind.
What little new content we did see in patches was often hugely out of balance. BFRs are a prime example as they totally fucking broke the game when they were first released IMO. Now, after much, much rebalancing, they feel *almost* like any other vehicle and I do enjoy their presence in the battlefield.
The world...
The idea of a massive, sprawling, open game map to play on is surely one of the major appeals of having an MMOFPS... But the world was amazingly empty. The fact that what few interesting landmarks the maps did have were often spots of some of the more interesting battles only served to tease us with a glimpse of what the game could be like if there was a lot more variety in the maps.
You can throw the fact that there were only a few minor variations of towers and bases in there too. Later patches that gave more purpose to these different types, probably most notably the air towers, helped a bit here, but only a little.
One of my biggest issues with the world is that it felt so damn empty, so artificial. The entirety of the maps consisted of massive, sprawling landscapes dotted with roads, bases, and towers. NOTHING ELSE. There were no NPCs, no ambient life of any sort, no cities or houses or other structures, nothing really to indicate any sort of life other than, again, roads, bases, and towers! While I feel the design choice to not have the single player elements of monsters to hunt and the like was fine, the world could have still used at least *a little* flavor.
Progress...
This is perhaps my biggest gripe. Another one of the major advantages of having an MMOFPS is the persistent world server, but ultimately other than character advancement persistence mattered very little. You could spend all day fighting battles, making massive progress sweeping across the entire globe only the wake up the next day to and find that the tide had apparently shifted and everything was pretty much back to the way it was.
Fair enough, constant shifting tides of war and all of that, the idea is sound, but after a few months of that it starts to wear on you. Sooner or later you've got to ask yourself "what am I fighting for?!" The only purpose of fighting is for the love of the fight itself, the glory. Pairing with the idea that the only persistence really involves your character's advancement, the only real way to make your mark is by your character's or outfit's (guild/clan) reputation in battle. You never *really* get to leave your mark on the battlefield.
Besides, other non MMOFPS games have thrown in persistent character development (the Battlefield series, for example.) without the need for subscription fees and the like.
Another issue with progress was the idea of "the zerg" as it quickly became known. Players could divide and conquer almost any number of places at one time governed only by the lattice system later on, yet since many battles were eventually won by numbers and massive battles were one of the big draws of the game in the first place, most of the fighting took place in a few (at the most!) giant groups rather than many smaller ones.
Unfortunately one of the biggest drives for this was that it was a great way to get kills and capture bases thus getting you a more efficient, steady flow of XP. As the player numbers dwindled this caused a lot of division amongst people I knew, as new players, or players not max level period, often *ONLY* wanted to follow the zerg rather than do whatever their outfits were doing. This was an especially big deal for me personally as I found myself enjoying the smaller engagements a hell of a lot more than the giant ones most of the time and following the zerg around felt a lot less dynamic and a lot more tedious to me the more I did it.
Again, those are just a few of the major ones. That all being said I loved the idea, and I feel like they were *very* close to pulling off an amazing, ground breaking game, yet because it wasn't *quite* there it went largely unnoticed. I'd also like to lay some blame on FPS gamers being cheap bastards unwilling to pay monthly fees but that's mostly me being a dick... ;-)
Edit: I can't spell.
I really wish either a Planetside 2 would come out or a Planetside like game.
Combat engineering was probably the most fun cert in the game. I tried dropping it a few times to clear up points for a different spec but I could never live without it for more than a recert cycle. Was always good times setting up defense in advance or as people were leaving a cap and then watching kills pop up for you while you're off doing something else.
(Same reason I play demo in TF2.. defense while playing offense ftw.)
Hey Tyler, we should play planetside again. It will be fun!
Instead of tossing your outfit into the meatgrinder to attack/defend like you're a bloodthirsty World War 1 general or Zerg cerebrate, you do this:
-Don't defend a sieged city, break up into 10 man strike teams and disrupt enemy supply lines by blowing generators via hotdrop and deep strike so they can't get their heavy vehicles.
They usually only send onesies and twosies to fix blown gens and a 10-man team can cut them down easy. Cut down a few lone repairmen, then load up and hit another when a big relief force comes, pulling attackers off of your sieged allies.
-When attacking, forget human wave assaults, MAX crashes, ect. Either do the above to break-down their defenses indirectly, or just go to an open continent and hit the undefended stuff, drawing off reinforcements that would be headed to the siege.
Good units look at the zergling ebb and flow and affect it indirectly.
Like how Space Marines in Warhammer 40K hit high-value and lightly defended sites in lightning strikes, hopping into their thunderhawks to hit another site, and leave the trench warfare to the bullet sponges of the Imperial Guard.
Margaret Thatcher
God I loved Galaxy drops. By random chance, I ended up in a rather small, but dedicated crew of madmen and all around awesome dudes. Our specialty was perfectly timing our drops from the Gal onto the roof of spawn towers that were proving a little tricky for our groundpounders to take. I would usually end up going through the door first in my Shotgun Wielding power armor (MAX?) after our weasely hacker opened the door for us. There are few moments in gaming that compare to catching a bunch of grenade spamming Terran MAXes with their backs turned, engineers oblivious, and their feet anchored. Oh, the bloodbaths.
Our pilot was a god amongst men. He flew that giant bird like it was a fighter, and knew, everytime, exactly when to yell at us to bail out for a hot drop. Good times. Good times.
Guess it will be fun to play till Age of Conan or something. 8-)
Twitter
Which coincidently is just enough time for me to have fun with it before I get bored again. Woo!
Go Vanu.
Uhuh, sure you would know if people have been on or not. (They haven't been.
I'm Reily on Emerald lvl 15 engineer/anti-vehicle.
GS 4 lyfe
I'd like to get in but the fucking goddamned launchpad won't bring up the login/password screen; it just plays a Windows message beep and sits there with a white outline of the PS launchpad in the background, taking up about 40-49% of CPU resources in the interim.
Station Launcher gives me "An unknown error has occurred" when I attempt to download the game through that. Assuming I can actually get the cockmongling client downloaded I'll be in game tonight.
Edit: Works fine for Pirates of the Burning Sea. Apparently they don't want people playing Planetside? I guess your best bet to download a semi-updated client would be this link:
http://www.gamershell.com/download_13116.shtml
Edit: Since this is a new page, character name is CaoCow on Emerald, Vanu. Also much lols are being had at the prospect of jacking vehicles WITH PEOPLE INSIDE THEM with the new hacking skills and cruising around with a STEALTH AIR TRANSPORT (Phantasm).
I am about to finish my download. Though I think I will have a large patch or two to download.
Favorite experience. I was playing TR defending a base in heavy woods. Heavy enough to force the armor on to the roads, and thanks to some heavy mining, completely out of the fight. Also made it nearly impossible for the flyers to get in, so it was pretty much a infantry battle. The VS (then the NC) would park a AMS out of sight, and try to walk their way up to the base. Great infantry fight.. but I had the buggy cert. It was fast enough and agile enough to drive around the trees and not get caught up. Got a pair of outfit-mates in it, and just ran up and down the enemy lines causing absolute havoc for 30 minutes or more.
Why planetside dropped off
-The zerg was the fight. It wasn't about getting exp, but if it was just small group vs small group, there were better games to play. The massive fights were what made planetside, but they were to hard to find. Usually it was only one or two, and odds are that continent was cap-locked. So you'd log in, hoping to get that good fight, but usually it was just crap.
-So many individual weapons/vechiles were absolute crap. The one that stands out the most is the vanu buggy... was nearly impossible to do anything but bounce around the terrain spastically, while your gunner just randomly fired shells.
-MMOs need expansions, but PS was kinda caught in a catch 22. They needed the world to be fairly small in order to force the good fights, but Core Combat expanded the space, and just spread out the fights even worse.
-Core Combat changed the core gameplay too much and not enough at the same time. Most of the new weapons/vechiles were dumb, and the prime PS gameplay was open field battles, which were impossible in the caves. I went down their a few times, just got confused, and was frustrated because I had bought an expansion which just wasn't any fun.
-Hacking. The surgiles exploiting the prediction code was the worse. They let a certain combination of certs/implants move faster than the engine could accurately predict, and they'd just warp all over the map until they blasted you with a shotgun at point blank range. PvP games are absolutely destroyed when people can exploit the engine.
I'll try the trail though.
edit- Oh snap. My game is running likes its on crack! How do I fix this?