For those PS1 vets considering whether or not to play PS2, all I can say is that you should try it out for free before making your mind up on whether to keep playing.  It is not in any way, shape or form a continuation of PS1.  It is a completely new game that simply has a few dozen names copied and pasted onto it from PS1.  They are banking on name recognition to bring veterans back and banking on a huge marketing campaign and eSports to bring a new crowd to the game.  If you're expecting a strategic MMOFPS where the point of the game is territory control, then please play the game to see for yourself, but you're probably going to be sorely disappointed.

• TTK is absurdly high compared to PS1.  Whereas PS1 was a strategic game of taking and holding bases, PS2 is a straight up frag fest.  Most guns kill in under one second, and some guns kill in less time than that.  It's mostly a game of who-sees-who-first.  Gone are the epic gun battles of shooting and maneuvering to outmatch your opponent.  The vast majority of the time if you're taking damage and you don't see whose shooting you, then it's already over.  That's ok though, cause the spawn timer is exactly the same every time.  No more dynamic spawn timers where you take longer to respawn if you're dying a lot.

• Vehicles require no cert investment to use.  This means that any character at any time can pull any vehicle from a vehicle terminal.  This has lead to, what some players call, Vehicleside 2.  Infantry, for the most part, are simply XP pinatas for vehicles.  Sure there's a vehicle resource system, but it's laughable.  There are two vehicle resources, so even if you don't have enough to pull a tank, then just pull an ESF until you can pull a tank again.  There's only one infantry resource, however, so if you buy a bunch of grenades and still need some C4, well then too effing bad, but you can pull a vehicle so it doesn't really matter anyhow.

• No lattice system.  Bases aren't linked by any system at all.  You can simply walk up to any base in any part of the map and start "hacking" it.  Because of this, few people bother defending bases at all.  Most continents are filled with groups of people actively avoiding each other and just ghost capping bases for XP and certs.

• Very few people play for the tactical game.  Most people are only interested in two things: Certs and K/D ratio.  As long as they're earning cerst and have a high K/D, then everything is good.  Those same people will abandon you in a heartbeat against superior odds due to the fact that dying a lot will hurt their precious stats.  Rare are the days of a handful of people trying to hold off a platoon.

• Second, the areas of a base which you need to defend the most aren't inside the base, they are outside.  In order to keep the shields up on your base, you have to run outside of it to defend/repair the generators that power the shields.  So basically, another excuse to die repeatedly to vehicles.

• Base design is an absolute joke.  First off, spawn rooms at all but one type of base are merely vehicle xp pinatas.  You spawn, you look out the door and there's 20 aircraft hovering and 50 tanks with their guns aimed at the spawn door.  You can go out the door and feed them xp or you can hit the redeploy button and fight elsewhere.  Whereas PS1 placed all of the spawn rooms deep inside the bases, PS2 puts them outside of the base with the only option being run out in front of a bazillion vehicles to try to get to where they are capping your base.

• Hackers.  There is no dedicated hacker anymore except for infiltrators which have a mostly useless option of hacking terminals and gun turrets.  This has extremely limited utility, and only the squishiest class in the game can use it.  Gone are the days of needing a hacker just to get inside of a base and then needing a hacker to actually.. hack the base.  Now you hack a base by standing next to a pole until it changes colors.

• Cloaking, btw, is a complete joke.  You're 100% completely visible to all but people playing the game on the lowest settings.  See that walking puddle of water?  yeah?  Shoot it.  Even sitting completely still you stick out like an orange in a basket of apples.  Hey, that floating puddle of water shouldn't be there... oh yeah, just a cloaker.  Not only that, but they have added persistent bullet trails to sniper rifles AND you can't fire while cloaked.  So every time you shoot a sniper rifle you have to uncloak, oh and btw, I'm hiding right where the persistent bullet trail leads back to.  Hey, yeah, I'm up here, you can just spray this area with machine gun fire now.  Thanks.

• Engineers have been hacked off at the knees.  The only type of CE that an engineer can carry that other clasess can't are vehicle mines, and even then you can only carry and place two which makes them mostly useless unless you know exactly where the vehicle is going to be coming from.  Other than that they have access to claymores and C4, but then so do several other classes.  Also, they are the only class that can use the repair tool.  Did I forget to mention that part?  Yeah, you can't just cert into healing or repair anymore and carry those tools around in your backpack, now they are class specific which also locks you into specific weapons.

• Gone are the days of CE'ing a base with your engie.  You can deploy two claymores and two tank mines and then you're done.  Not only that, but they have absurdly high resource costs attached to them, so don't use too many.  No boomers, no motion detectors, no turrets... well I take it back you get a crappy deployable turret that you can fire manually, but it does shit damage and the COF is bigger than an elephant, you're better off firing your personal weapon.

• Inventory.  There isn't one.  You don't get to pick your loadout anymore.  Gone are the days of packing whatever you want into your backpack, you don't even have a backpack anymore.  You only get to pick from an extremely limited amount of weapons for your character, and those limits are determined by your class.  Yes, you heard me right, it's a class based game now.

• Classes determine everything.  You can play any class you want, but you can only change classes at a infantry terminal and your class determines what weapons you can use.  No more certing into heavy armor and using an assault rifle.  If you pick the heavy assault class, your choice of weapons is machine gun or another machine gun that looks exactly the same but has slightly different stats.

• There is literally no point to taking bases with the sole exception of taking tech plants for the ability to use main battle tanks.  Even then, once you secure, say, a tech plant and you roll out to take the next base, then chances are extremely good that they will "back cap" the tech plant while you're not there to defend it.  There is literally no locking of any kind.  Take a base, move on, check the map.. oh they took it back.  The game is literally a giant whack-a-mole fest where you're running around trying to take territory and simultaneously trying to keep territory you took from being ghost capped while you're not there.

• To illustrate my last bullet even further; the only base on three maps that has constant 24/7 fighting isn't even a base.  It's a tower on top of a mountain.  Why do people fight there 24/7?  Because it's the only base in the entire game that's easily defensible against vehicles.  Vehicles have limited approach options and are easily destroyed while trying to approach.  It's the only spot on three maps where infantry matters more than vehicles due to the ridiculously easy access to all vehicles in the game.

• Cert gain is absurd.  Especially for free players.  You're looking at a few solid days of playing the game just to buy another gun.  Want to have 25% more health?  About two weeks of grinding certs.  Oh and that cert doesn't carry over to other classes, so if you want 25% more health on all the classes that you like playing, then go ahead and just be ready to grind just for that one thing for a solid month, unless you play 6-8 hours a day maybe.  The cert point doubles with a six month sub and doubles again if you buy 5 dollar a week boosts.  So 15 dollars a month sub fee, plus 20 dollars a month for boosts, just to earn certs at the quickest possible rate.  Yeah, that sounds about SOE to me.

TL;DR for the ADD kiddies:  The most important argument I'm making here is that PS1 was a strategic, thinking persons MMOFPS. PS2, by virtue of it's NAME, should have been an upgraded version of PS1 with major graphical improvements, removal of components that didn't work (BFR's) and tweaking systems that did work but not up to modern standards (Weapons that feel real when fired). This should be a strategic MMOFPS where the point of the game is territory control between three competing factions. Instead we have a frag fest. No one really cares what color any particular map is currently as long as their K/D ratio is high.

'We control Amerish!"
"That's great noob, too bad your KDR is trash. Go back to WoW."
"But our team just took the whole continent while you myopically farmed at one base..."
"Durr hurrr," *licks window while trying to bite left ear off* "Yeah, but my stats are better, so you're garbage"

.... and that's PS2 in a nutshell for me. I realize that a lot of people do enjoy this game (I'm not knocking them for it either, you can't help what you enjoy playing), but I really wish it hadn't been called Planetside 2, so that one day I could hope and dream about having a real sequel to an awesome game.

I have to agree with pretty much all of that, although on the vehicle front I will at least add that I don't mind the tanks...they are almost balanced at least...it's the airpower that is grotesque...gunships tank more damage than tanks to bring down lol

I wouldn't be bothering with it, but it's hard to beat free...but it gets less fun each session

 

This game is so cool, I wish I didn't suck at shooters D:

Originally posted by h0urg1ass

For those PS1 vets considering whether or not to play PS2, all I can say is that you should try it out for free before making your mind up on whether to keep playing.  It is not in any way, shape or form a continuation of PS1.  It is a completely new game that simply has a few dozen names copied and pasted onto it from PS1.  They are banking on name recognition to bring veterans back and banking on a huge marketing campaign and eSports to bring a new crowd to the game.  If you're expecting a strategic MMOFPS where the point of the game is territory control, then please play the game to see for yourself, but you're probably going to be sorely disappointed.

• TTK is absurdly high compared to PS1.  Whereas PS1 was a strategic game of taking and holding bases, PS2 is a straight up frag fest.  Most guns kill in under one second, and some guns kill in less time than that.  It's mostly a game of who-sees-who-first.  Gone are the epic gun battles of shooting and maneuvering to outmatch your opponent.  The vast majority of the time if you're taking damage and you don't see whose shooting you, then it's already over.  That's ok though, cause the spawn timer is exactly the same every time.  No more dynamic spawn timers where you take longer to respawn if you're dying a lot.

 

• Vehicles require no cert investment to use.  This means that any character at any time can pull any vehicle from a vehicle terminal.  This has lead to, what some players call, Vehicleside 2.  Infantry, for the most part, are simply XP pinatas for vehicles.  Sure there's a vehicle resource system, but it's laughable.  There are two vehicle resources, so even if you don't have enough to pull a tank, then just pull an ESF until you can pull a tank again.  There's only one infantry resource, however, so if you buy a bunch of grenades and still need some C4, well then too effing bad, but you can pull a vehicle so it doesn't really matter anyhow.

 

• No lattice system.  Bases aren't linked by any system at all.  You can simply walk up to any base in any part of the map and start "hacking" it.  Because of this, few people bother defending bases at all.  Most continents are filled with groups of people actively avoiding each other and just ghost capping bases for XP and certs.

 

• Very few people play for the tactical game.  Most people are only interested in two things: Certs and K/D ratio.  As long as they're earning cerst and have a high K/D, then everything is good.  Those same people will abandon you in a heartbeat against superior odds due to the fact that dying a lot will hurt their precious stats.  Rare are the days of a handful of people trying to hold off a platoon.

 

• Second, the areas of a base which you need to defend the most aren't inside the base, they are outside.  In order to keep the shields up on your base, you have to run outside of it to defend/repair the generators that power the shields.  So basically, another excuse to die repeatedly to vehicles.

 

• Base design is an absolute joke.  First off, spawn rooms at all but one type of base are merely vehicle xp pinatas.  You spawn, you look out the door and there's 20 aircraft hovering and 50 tanks with their guns aimed at the spawn door.  You can go out the door and feed them xp or you can hit the redeploy button and fight elsewhere.  Whereas PS1 placed all of the spawn rooms deep inside the bases, PS2 puts them outside of the base with the only option being run out in front of a bazillion vehicles to try to get to where they are capping your base.

 

• Hackers.  There is no dedicated hacker anymore except for infiltrators which have a mostly useless option of hacking terminals and gun turrets.  This has extremely limited utility, and only the squishiest class in the game can use it.  Gone are the days of needing a hacker just to get inside of a base and then needing a hacker to actually.. hack the base.  Now you hack a base by standing next to a pole until it changes colors.

 

• Cloaking, btw, is a complete joke.  You're 100% completely visible to all but people playing the game on the lowest settings.  See that walking puddle of water?  yeah?  Shoot it.  Even sitting completely still you stick out like an orange in a basket of apples.  Hey, that floating puddle of water shouldn't be there... oh yeah, just a cloaker.  Not only that, but they have added persistent bullet trails to sniper rifles AND you can't fire while cloaked.  So every time you shoot a sniper rifle you have to uncloak, oh and btw, I'm hiding right where the persistent bullet trail leads back to.  Hey, yeah, I'm up here, you can just spray this area with machine gun fire now.  Thanks.

 

• Engineers have been hacked off at the knees.  The only type of CE that an engineer can carry that other clasess can't are vehicle mines, and even then you can only carry and place two which makes them mostly useless unless you know exactly where the vehicle is going to be coming from.  Other than that they have access to claymores and C4, but then so do several other classes.  Also, they are the only class that can use the repair tool.  Did I forget to mention that part?  Yeah, you can't just cert into healing or repair anymore and carry those tools around in your backpack, now they are class specific which also locks you into specific weapons.

 

• Gone are the days of CE'ing a base with your engie.  You can deploy two claymores and two tank mines and then you're done.  Not only that, but they have absurdly high resource costs attached to them, so don't use too many.  No boomers, no motion detectors, no turrets... well I take it back you get a crappy deployable turret that you can fire manually, but it does shit damage and the COF is bigger than an elephant, you're better off firing your personal weapon.

 

• Inventory.  There isn't one.  You don't get to pick your loadout anymore.  Gone are the days of packing whatever you want into your backpack, you don't even have a backpack anymore.  You only get to pick from an extremely limited amount of weapons for your character, and those limits are determined by your class.  Yes, you heard me right, it's a class based game now.

 

• Classes determine everything.  You can play any class you want, but you can only change classes at a infantry terminal and your class determines what weapons you can use.  No more certing into heavy armor and using an assault rifle.  If you pick the heavy assault class, your choice of weapons is machine gun or another machine gun that looks exactly the same but has slightly different stats.

 

• There is literally no point to taking bases with the sole exception of taking tech plants for the ability to use main battle tanks.  Even then, once you secure, say, a tech plant and you roll out to take the next base, then chances are extremely good that they will "back cap" the tech plant while you're not there to defend it.  There is literally no locking of any kind.  Take a base, move on, check the map.. oh they took it back.  The game is literally a giant whack-a-mole fest where you're running around trying to take territory and simultaneously trying to keep territory you took from being ghost capped while you're not there.

 

• To illustrate my last bullet even further; the only base on three maps that has constant 24/7 fighting isn't even a base.  It's a tower on top of a mountain.  Why do people fight there 24/7?  Because it's the only base in the entire game that's easily defensible against vehicles.  Vehicles have limited approach options and are easily destroyed while trying to approach.  It's the only spot on three maps where infantry matters more than vehicles due to the ridiculously easy access to all vehicles in the game.

 

• Cert gain is absurd.  Especially for free players.  You're looking at a few solid days of playing the game just to buy another gun.  Want to have 25% more health?  About two weeks of grinding certs.  Oh and that cert doesn't carry over to other classes, so if you want 25% more health on all the classes that you like playing, then go ahead and just be ready to grind just for that one thing for a solid month, unless you play 6-8 hours a day maybe.  The cert point doubles with a six month sub and doubles again if you buy 5 dollar a week boosts.  So 15 dollars a month sub fee, plus 20 dollars a month for boosts, just to earn certs at the quickest possible rate.  Yeah, that sounds about SOE to me.

 

TL;DR for the ADD kiddies:  The most important argument I'm making here is that PS1 was a strategic, thinking persons MMOFPS. PS2, by virtue of it's NAME, should have been an upgraded version of PS1 with major graphical improvements, removal of components that didn't work (BFR's) and tweaking systems that did work but not up to modern standards (Weapons that feel real when fired). This should be a strategic MMOFPS where the point of the game is territory control between three competing factions. Instead we have a frag fest. No one really cares what color any particular map is currently as long as their K/D ratio is high.

'We control Amerish!"
"That's great noob, too bad your KDR is trash. Go back to WoW."
"But our team just took the whole continent while you myopically farmed at one base..."
"Durr hurrr," *licks window while trying to bite left ear off* "Yeah, but my stats are better, so you're garbage"

.... and that's PS2 in a nutshell for me. I realize that a lot of people do enjoy this game (I'm not knocking them for it either, you can't help what you enjoy playing), but I really wish it hadn't been called Planetside 2, so that one day I could hope and dream about having a real sequel to an awesome game.

Sheesh, why didn't you just put this up to begin with...

Some of this is correct and some of it is not.  A lot of it I don't agree with such as Infantry being xp pinata's for vehicles and being a game of who see's who first.  Maybe if you are new to the game and/or don't run with a team or outfit.  Or regarding not having infantry resources for C4 etc, you can stockpile up to 40 of each.  If you don't use your infantry resources and let them sit at the max, well, that's poor preparation.  But since some of that is opinion I'll just address the inaccuracies here.

Actually on looking through this again, almost half of this information is incorrect and I don't really feel like taking the time to go through and write it up.  So just in case this post puts doubt in some people, realize that alot of this is from a jaded perspective and some of it outright incorrect.

 

 

Really good write up.  Bravo <a data-cke-saved-href="http://www.mmorpg.com/profile.cfm/username/h0urg1ass" href="http://www.mmorpg.com/profile.cfm/username/h0urg1ass" title="View information about h0urg1ass" suhlink"="">h0urg1ass!

I have to say the most frustrating thing for me is how dominant Vehicles are.  I don't like vehicles.  I'd rather shoot a gun then ride in a vehicle anytime.

Yep, the OP pretty much said exactly what I said in my blog regarding this game and how it is not anything like PS1 except maybe in name. 

http://www.mmorpg.com/blogs/Teala/012013/24424_Planetside-2-A-quarter-the-game-Planetside-1-was

This entire thing needs to be taken with a grain of salt. Statements made range from, "eeh you could say that." to "Now your just about lying." 

 

Pride is the only thing PS2 has going for outside of the EPIC battles. Epic battles for the sake of gets old eventually. Not much meaningful (like most shooters) outside of trying to be #1, good luck at that btw.

You mean the TTK is low compared to ps1, not high, i guess.

Well its not as good as the first....

But its still the best large scale pvp game in bloody years

You really hit the nail on the head here. A few things you said though were incorrect as they've been changed since release but  for the majority it is spot on. Just wait for PS1 to go free to play in June guys. Hopefully they won't screw that up..

The OP and others are correct about this game, I cannot even begin to tell you how dissapointed I am in this piece of crap.

Sure it was a success at the start where everyone ran to go pay and play it.  But now people are seeing it for what it is.

 

I spend more time on the forums or over here looking for something else to play then I do in Hackerside/VehicleSide/Indarside or whatever else you want to call this Planetside wanna be.

 

But this is what you get when the lead developer is a  Everquack2 / SWG dev.  Because we all know how much of a success those two titles were...

 

This game has about as much depth as Kim Kardashian.

As a big fan of PS1, I really felt completely disappointed in PS2, even more so than I did when EQ2 came out which was a complete letdown for me.

I still playEQ1 and fire up PS1 occasionally, the sequels so far have not been for me at all.

Completely agree with all of the OPs points. And I never played PS1 so there's no nostalgia influence here.

Played PS1 for ages, in its time, at least before they ruined it with BFR's and the underground caverns, it was pretty revolutionary, and a really good MMOFPS, its just a shame that PS2 didnt really improve on the bits that worked in PS1, and just seemed to dumb down the gameplay, have to agree with the OP tbh as there is so much not in the game, that was in PS1, that it bears little if any relation to the previous game, hopefully the game will improve over time, but at the moment, i doubt whether the game will be running a year from now, F2P or not. Having said that though, i am currently playing it, although for how long, is very debateable, it wouldnt take all that much to move on to another game

I concur OP...and since it's a F2P I smirk everytime I read a PS2 thread. ;-)

 

I enjoyed it for about 2 weeks before the vehicle spam was enough for me to uninstall.

The OPs window comment at the bottom made me laugh. It reminded me of that scene in Super Troopes: "These snozberries taste like snozberries."

OT: That's disapponting to hear. I was hoping to try the game out eventually but from what has been stated so far from other threads and such, I might pass on it . . . damn it all.

Originally posted by BlueTiger33

I concur OP...and since it's a F2P I smirk everytime I read a PS2 thread. ;-)

 

I enjoyed it for about 2 weeks before the vehicle spam was enough for me to uninstall.

 

 

OMG the vehicle spam is horrible!  I swear you can not move 4 feet with out getting spammed to death by some vehicles weapons or even run over....

I swear the should just have it where you Avatar is a tank or plane with eyes and lips instead of a person...

 

 

Lots of great feedback in here. I would highly recommend voicing some of these over on the PlanetSide 2 Roadmap and forums. 

We're trying our best to listen to what the community has to say and working with you all to create a game that is tacticle, fun and easy for new players to understand. We have some big things coming this month that should help with the new player experience (and even more futher down the road), but there are lot of things that are still in the works that you can help us create. :) 

As I stated before, I'll be checking these forums every now and then, but I highly recommend going over there. Your voice does matter. I would suggest refraining from rude tone/language. =P 

I read through the road map and there is great stuff coming down the pipe. Once continent locking is in place I will be back on. I got a little burned out, but that was because I was playing stupid long hours every day.