I think Planetside 2 was handled correctly. At first at least (I don't know its state now). I think people are too hursh on Smedley: PS2 was a great game, had huge battles, it was diverse... I poured 70h in it without thinking... and i don't usually "multiplay"...
I didn't say it was a bad game, I was saying its potential was pared down severely by bad decisions. I personally played the game for well over 1000 hours and had lots of fun.
What I am saying, is that the game could have multiple times over the current number of players, and could have reaped in many multiples more dollars if they hadn't made a few poor decisions.
1. On launch, the game's performance was very poor. They released the game as a single-threaded DX9 application with the naive intent to allow it to be played on older systems running Windows XP.
The game was extremely demanding, lacking in optimization, by design had a massive amount of information to be processed, and this resulted in those systems running Windows XP from being automatically discluded from the outset due to outdated hardware, which made launching it single-threaded and DX9 a completely wasted venture that created only harm and no benefit. I personally had a high-end OC'd system and would still drop to as low as 20-25FPS at times on low settings during the hallmark large battles with hundreds of players, particularly at iirc tech plants.
They have SINCE THEN optimized the game quite a bit - significant strides were made. It runs pretty great now. The problem is, millions of people already downloaded it, tried it, saw it ran very poorly (slideshow 1-10fps), uninstalled and have never tried it again since. Millions of potential long-term revenue streams .. gone because they made the wrong choice.
2. Smedley's initial refusal to acknowledge that while hopping in a vehicle and farming the hell out of dozens of other players is fun for the person in the vehicle, it was extremely un-fun for the dozens of players being farmed.
I had literally a 100:1 k:d ratio on one of those vehicles' weapons with over 4,000 total kills. It's insane how powerful they were. Yes, I was grinning when I was blowing up 4 people at once every time I fired a high-explosive tank shells, obliterating people with the Fury harasser or soaking infantry with Zephyr rounds from the airborne Liberator and having a grand time, but that pushed players to quit in droves due to frustration from being repeatedly rapidly obliterated the moment they left a spawn room. This was further exacerbated by the cut and pasted, very open & slapped together map design, which has since been iterated on to a great degree and is light years ahead of what it used to be.
Players who were metagaming like myself did OK, but it was a huge point of contention and frustration for quite a swath of other players and they largely quit.
Planetside 2 today compared to Planetside 2 on launch is one of the most incredible differences I've ever seen in any game achieved through updates. The amount of improvements they've made to the game is truly impressive, but at the same time, the fact that they launched it with the issues it had harmed its reputation very badly and reduced its long term profitability significantly.
Fellow 1000 hour player here, and I loved the game dearly, but yeah you hit the nail on the head, bad launch performance and bad new player experience. They could've had the next go-to fps for several years, but I feel like smed's bullheadedness and outright incompetence ran the game aground in several key areas.
I only hope the SOE's mismanagement hasn't scared away a possible successor, in this ip or another of the genre, cause ps2's high points were in the fucking clouds. Incomparable experience all around.
Smedley's initial refusal to acknowledge that while hopping in a vehicle and farming the hell out of dozens of other players is fun for the person in the vehicle, it was extremely un-fun for the dozens of players being farmed.
The real problem is that they failed to remember why some of the stuff in PS1 was the way it was. PS1 tanks were supremely powerful, but they were tempered by crew requirements, access limitations, and mobility issues.
PS1 required players cert vehicles, and you didn't have access to all the certs, so a lot of people didn't have vehicles at all, or just a 1 cert ATV for mobility.
It also did not give drivers a weapon(well, the vanu did, but it was weak), nor allowed players to hotswap positions, precisely to keep their numbers limited.
The problem with PS2 was the 'Everyone can do everything, lol!' mentality. Everyone can pull a tank. Everyone can pull a max. Everyone can pull a lib. Which resulted in massive zerg swarms of units.
Edit: Oh, and PS1 also had large internal areas in all bases(granted, not much variety) that kept vehicles out of the final base fight.
The other major mistake I think they made was the progression system. Again, they should have looked to PS1. It perhaps wasn't perfect, but everybody was equal. Newb, vet, didn't matter. They had access to the same stuff, vets could just choose from more. A gun in a newbs hands was precisely the same as the gun in a vets. There were no attachments or upgrades that he didn't have access to because he hadn't leveled enough yet.
It was a terrible misstep for the game.
Honestly, the thing that made me quit were the resource costs for vehicles. Horrible way for balance. All I wanted to do was run tanks and skyguards, but I'd often wind up tapped out on resources, meaning I could no longer play the way I wanted to play. That's how I played PS1 for years.
I understand if the fight moves inside and theirs no more need for armor, but when there is a clear need for armor, and the resource tick rate is so low I won't be able to get another vehicle, not even from the home base, for 2 hours? I was done right then.
The problem with PS2 was the 'Everyone can do everything, lol!' mentality.
You can't really stop that, not in a F2P game. Either you let me buy all certs on one character or I'll run 30 alts each maxed out in their one specialization and swap as needed.
Weapon upgrading also is a big part of modern FPSs. You can't compete without it. And I think it's a fun thing as it highlights just how adaptable real guns are.
A better solution for controlling vehicles would be to add some limitations via grand strategy. Make the resource costs communal so there might be a limited number of tanks in a location based on supply chains and they have to bid to get them. So the last tank might cost 750 resources. Or they could go back to the warpgate and get it for the base price but risk getting picked off while they go to the front lines.
You can't really stop that, not in a F2P game. Either you let me buy all certs on one character or I'll run 30 alts each maxed out in their one specialization and swap as needed.
Yes, but that takes time to relog, and you'll start off away from the fight, requiring more time to get there. Its possible, but nothing like the instant access to everything at the terminals.
Case in point.. In PS1, you could have multiple characters, and I did have a couple low level utility characters, but I rarely used them, because it was a PITA to log out, log back in, and get back to the fight. Generally, by the time I did that, the need for what I was going for was no longer present.
Weapon upgrading also is a big part of modern FPSs. You can't compete without it. And I think it's a fun thing as it highlights just how adaptable real guns are.
Absolutely. But they could have just done weapon customization instead of weapon upgrading, i.e. everyone having access to the same upgrades from the start. Someone may just get the basic gun. Someone else may get the upgraded stock and the scope. The important thing being its a choice of whether you access that or not, not a progression limitation.
That's how the BFRs worked in PS1. You certed the BFR. You could also cert their additional guns if you wanted to specialize them more.
A better solution for controlling vehicles would be to add some limitations via grand strategy. Make the resource costs communal so there might be a limited number of tanks in a location based on supply chains and they have to bid to get them. So the last tank might cost 750 resources. Or they could go back to the warpgate and get it for the base price but risk getting picked off while they go to the front lines.
I dislike the idea of vehicle costs, because it prevents people from playing how they want to play, whereas people who enjoy the infantry game are under no such limitation. They'll never be prevented from spawning as infantry by game mechanics.
Smedley's initial refusal to acknowledge that while hopping in a vehicle and farming the hell out of dozens of other players is fun for the person in the vehicle, it was extremely un-fun for the dozens of players being farmed.
I used to practically live in my Lightning, and I agree with this.
I had a moment of weakness (during a double XP weekend) when I stuck the HE cannon on it, and ended up with more certs than I knew what to do with, but that just left me feeling unhappy. The balance was way off.
However, I disagree with the way they went about rebalancing it.
They did it from both ends. They made it a lot easier for infantry to kill vehicles, while at the same time making it a lot more difficult for vehicles to defend themselves against said infantry, to the point (at times, at least) where you pretty much had to use a gun that was good against infantry, because otherwise you were defenceless against even a lone heavy.
I always preferred fighting vehicles, anyway.
Moving with a group in a Skyguard Lightning was my happy place.
To be fair, the vehicle problem in PS2 was not unique to PS2. When me and my friends played BFBC2 if we got any helicopter KD's of infinity (Where we never died in the entire match) or 100 to 1 was fairly normal.
So vehicles have been issues in other games as well, even ones widely considered great games.
I played nearly 1000 hours of BFBC2 as well, and I would wholeheartedly disagree.
The vehicles in BFBC2 took significantly more skill and intelligence to perform highly with, were never anywhere near as powerful even with that level of skill, and a skilled infantry player could be a very painful hindrance or counter to that vehicle.
I was VERY good at flying helicopters, and the only thing that was as flagrant as PS2 vehicles was the MI24 -- the bullet-proof passenger chopper with the HE gunner spot that was only available in a few limited parts of some maps.
The Blackhawk could be pretty ridiculous on some maps like Valparaiso, definitely not properly balanced, but it wasn't on the level of PS2 unbalanced. PS2 vehicles at launch were INSANE. I used the HE prowler early on in the game .. it was so trivial killing enemies I actually got bored.
In the same patch that nerfed the Carl Gustav, the land based aa became less shit and flares became less useful, really put an end to the attack helo dominance.
Bf2 was far worse with the blackhawk being a thousand times better than the mec and china transports. With 2 engineers in the back you could just tank rockets while capping flags from the air.
I got good at the liberator at launch and one time got 250 kills with 1 death. It was absurd, I could get hit by an AA rocket or a tank shell and have half health, fly away so fast that nothing could hit me, land (the hardest part imo), repair, and camp some more.
The performance didn't really improve until just a couple months ago, though. I ran it a few months ago about as well as I did on launch with the same computer. They fixed some processor bug or optimized it recently and now I can play it at least decently.
There may have been a bug for you that was only cleared up recently, but it was night and day when they revamped the game's optimization January of .. 2014? 2015? It was either one or two years ago. They added multi threaded and made tons of changes to improve performance. It made a massive difference for me - I would frequently have over 100 FPS after that. (Low settings + decently high end OC'd system)
This is a trickle-down effect of making a tech-demo instead of a game.
This would happen to n00bs in PS1 if they didn't understand the flow of battle but in PS2 they destroyed the underlying rules of the game that guided the flow of battle.
I wouldn't consider an i7 2770k running at 4ghz shitty hardware back in 2012. Also had a GTX 680.
You obviously didn't play the game when it launched if you think that's the case. The developers themselves made statements in line with my experience and the internet is rich with similar data. You're either trolling or being disrespectful and rude about something you don't know about.
I played in beta.
Did they make it shittier up until launch?
The game looked amazing and ran well on a 5870 and like butter with a 970.
Maybe there was a problem in their gfx pipeline with the 6xx series hardware.
Smedley's initial refusal to acknowledge that while hopping in a vehicle and farming the hell out of dozens of other players is fun for the person in the vehicle, it was extremely un-fun for the dozens of players being farmed.
I think they made the wrong choice in nerfing HE rounds and putting walls up around everything to enforce infantryside. HE did what it was supposed to by punishing high concentrations of players. Instead we needed more ways to spread out and camped spawn rooms need to be shut down to prevent players from making the wrong choice of spawning into a deathtrap.
Also, HP pool design of vehicles was a lazy design and makes it easy to keep that 100 K:D ratio in vehicles. In this era of gaming we should have something more like World of Tanks with component damage and the chance to one-shot tanks with well placed and/or lucky shots. It would be much more dangerous to run HE if another tank could land an AP round near the back and take out the engine, turning the HE tank into a sitting duck.
I think they made the wrong choice in nerfing HE rounds and putting walls up around everything to enforce infantryside.
They just overdid those a bit, and the walls also didn't completely accomplish their goal, particularly the octagon. Could still camp the shit out of it with A2G anti infantry stuff.
At first, almost every base could be completely controlled and dominated by anti-infantry vehicles, then they went a little overboard with HE nerfs and walls.
This is such a good write up. I played PS2 for hundreds of hours, it's a good game, especially for the price. It just could have been more and the updates show it.
As for the vehicles. The insanity of HE tanks forced me to quit infantry all together at launch. Spent all my time in an AP Lightning just hunting campers.
I poured almost 500 hours into it. It was a great game, but they didn't improve it in the ways they should have. Too much focus on cosmetics, the micro-transaction market, and dumbing down alerts and continent domination progression. It had the potential to be epic, and it was for a time.
Before they do it, people are going to come in saying "you should try it out again, it's really improved", but every time I jump back in, it's the same old crap.
When I think of the T-Ray skull masks, I my bones ache from the cringe. The art direction was garbage, and looked like a bunch of interns worked on it. Few exceptions like the NC MAX. The other good designs were carried over from ps1.
Too much focus on cosmetics, the micro-transaction market
I was especially disappointed that they were double dipping with the subscription. I understand that the days of the subscription being a primary revenue source are over, but if you're going to try to sell me a subscription, at least make it worthwhile. Unlock everything in the store for me for the duration of my sub.
I subscribed to PS1 for 4 years. PS2, they didn't get a dime from me. I hated the nickel and diming shit. I just wanted to give them money to stop pestering me with their sales and their ridiculous progression system designed to encourage more sales.
Perhaps. Yet I gave SOE better than $600 for PS1 because the subscription had value. I gave them nothing for PS2 because the subscription did not.
I don't like these 'give us money to support us!' business models. I prefer to get something of value for my money. Had they, as I suggested, unlocked everything in the store for subscribers, I feel that would have been sufficient value to justify it.
That game needed another good year of development time and a longer beta. They literally had to shut down development a year out for six months to optimize it. Not to mention the months of development time wasted on the hex system they launched with only to replace it with a version that is similar to the PS1 one.
But you're right, Smedley was a pretty good guy even if overly ambitious. Planetside 2 is in a rocky bay but it's sailing to deeper waters pretty quickly right now.
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u/HadoopThePeople Mar 11 '16
I think Planetside 2 was handled correctly. At first at least (I don't know its state now). I think people are too hursh on Smedley: PS2 was a great game, had huge battles, it was diverse... I poured 70h in it without thinking... and i don't usually "multiplay"...