f13.net

http://john-smedley.livejournal.com/833.html


I hope it's a bit more than just "capture the next fort" this time. It better have headshots too.

Nice.

But we'll see.

No one shot kills is a staple of planetside.

I'll just quote someone who said it better:

There is only room to move up, I guess.

Fucking woot! But no headshots please.

Yes. Up. Not, for example, into a cave.

I am happy.

Lots of players + awesome graphics?  If they can get that to run smoothly, I'll be impressed.

I really can't take Smedley's journal too seriously... Planetside suffered more from neglect than anything. Don't want to place too much blame, but if you have that kind of passion for a project, I'd hope you would try harder than it looked with PS, regardless is SWG was coming down the pipe or not. I have that twinge of hope, but for the most part - vaporware.

Are they actually in touch with what it was that's "fun" in Planetside? Because if the Starship Troopers-like insertion into the battlezone is supposed to be "not fun"...  :uhrr:

I read the title and thought they were announcing an MP Dwarf Fortress.  I am Jack's massive sense of disappointment.

Hot dropping onto a tower out of a galaxy was one of my favorite things about Planetside.

I think the point is that you don't need to use 3d space as your UI to do that. I.E. instead of wasting time running around and picking up people you just select "galaxy" from your 2D UI menu and make it public[or private for your outfit/whatever] and then everyone sees that a galaxy and can click and join in. When you're full/you want to go, you just click "go" and pop you're at the warp portal and on your way to the fight.

problem with that is the fact that you can just go whenever, which reads: by yourself more often than not. Sanc and the HART worked as a controlled release of troops to the battlefield. Troops trickling into a battle is just shooting at ducks, but when you have a ton of people descending onto one area, it feels better.

I agree with the comment (http://john-smedley.livejournal.com/833.html?thread=6209#t6209) on Smed's journal entry that PS started out with a massive military sim focus and it got watered down to silly skirmishes.

Start using a menu to form groups and select your route into battle, and before you know it people will accuse your game of not really being a MMOG.

It's still an MMO but it does ruin immersion.

No. The sanctuary was used as a staging ground for major assaults. It encouraged combined arms, and teamwork, also a sense of identity with your faction.

(http://gamez.abysse.org/planetside/nc-sanctuary.jpg) (http://gotr.net/gallery/albums/userpics/10261/PSScreenShot0032.jpg)


This idea, only fuels the Zerg. The Zerg was created and came about by FPS players from others games, where no one worked together and it was all about kill stats.

The Zerg in PS was only effective as a distraction, while the organized teams came in and changed the map. Sadly, my gut reaction to his sanctuary comment is, they are going to pander to the Halflife/counterstike crowd.

bloodworth I am disheartened by your pics. Being a fellow TR, I am just going to assume you found random web pics to illustrate the point.

That point is a good one. Sanc locks, while very infrequent, were also a huge draw for my outfit when we first started. Talk of locking Solsar and Cyssor always ended up with the NOW HOSSIN mantra in which the NC would mount a full scale counter. Hacking bases was not the object at that point, it was a means to an end. Somewhere, the players and the game forgot about that. The Next PS needs that, along with keeping tradition of the 3 sides.

All this talk makes me miss PS now...god damn it

I always thought the population locks should have been done to ensure an even number of players from each side could get in.  Maybe it was this way, but it never seemed to work out correctly...

Being supported, or unsupported, was a major part of the Command tactical game play, and there were tools provided to be able to gauge how much a force was in an area, or needed. Addition of poplocks for a 1 to 1 ratio would kill all of that.

Planetside was never a session based game, and should NEVER incorporate that mode of thinking. Its was a war simulation, and a scenario. Scenarios were player emergent behavior, and encouraged.

Sony Online's Thornblad explains his 3DS Max function library and tools, a light mapper and polygon unwrapper, originally created for MMO PlanetSide. (http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3870/an_environmental_pipeline_in_.php?print=1)

Here is part of the reason plantside was never updated. Who can spot the problem?

English pls.

While I understand your point, it really hurts immersion when a players wants to join a battle and can't because the other sided organized a ZERG before the other side could react. 

1. Max scripts used that left with the artiest (He later released them to the public, and he currently works for the EQ team)
2. Bases were broken up into parts, but this was only pre-engine, post engine, bases were one single piece of geometry. So part reuse or "new base layouts" could not happen without crating the one, single piece.
3. Light maps done pre-engine (AKA The Static shadowing). (Point of note, all shadows on objects other than world, were decal/projects of an image, not calculated)
4. The direct descendant to the tribes/plantside line of engines, solved the indoor/put door BSP to exterior issue. (old BSP based games, such as quake ETC.. created the entire game level from interior editors, the sky you would see in game, was really just a wall, with a fancy shader)

This may have been the limitations of the tech at the time, and I would not fault them for any of this, however with out a major engine upgrade, and a reworking of assets and tools. Updating Planetside was next to imposable, with exception to adding more server objects..such as BFR sheds. The only real update ever done to Planetside was the creation of the battle islands, but those were entirely new maps (done int he same way) and replaced an existing continent. No new base layouts were done. I also believe Planetside never had a scripting layer, hence changes to data was difficult, as it was all in the executable, that I believe was 55Mb in size, all text.

I also realized i put this in the wrong thread.  :oh_i_see:

How are they going to get lots of people to play it if the gameplay is as simple as FPS games were 15 years ago? To have large, meaningful battles you'll need a large community of active, somewhat intelligent players.

Good luck accomplishing those two goals when your game is less complex than ROTT.

Not sure why you would consider Plantsides game play, as a "Simple FPS". Honestly, this is what I hope they do not do, make it a simple FPS like counterstrike/quake/half life. It was anything but and gave way more play options than those games did. Planetside is rather deep, if you don't stay as a field zerg grunt looking for kill counts.

Good luck creating meaningful battles period.  I would argue it's harder than ever to prevent the losing side from canceling their subs and playing some other game.

you start by keeping the THREE factions the same, VS/TR/NC which brings back the vets and renews those bloodfeuds. then the new blood comes in and hopefully watches and takes note. and all this talk made me get my vespid avatar back out of storage.

I'd say that structure of the game - taking bases and large battles and so forth - is somewhat deep, but the actual meat of the game - shooting people - is too simple to hold the attention of all but the most easily amused player. Especially when you have literally hundreds of shooter games that do shooting better.

It reminds me of that Novalogic game that had servers supporting 128 players. I forget the name of it. Supporting tons of players doesn't matter when you can't get more than a few dozen in the mix at the same time. You're better off playing a Battlefield (year) game.

The only people playing Planetside these days are hardcore or on free trials. The same kind of people who still bother playing WW2O.

.....or Planetside [Next] will be to Planetside what War was to DAOC.

Everything you thought they'd learn and make better... turns to ashes.

A small part of the gameplay was shooting people common to FPS games.  The draw of PS is everything beyond what FPS games provide.  There is nothing simple about getting +25 people together to do a specific thing in any game and PS provided more then the classic three roles.

Incidentally, for all the talk of love for Planetside and what amazing game it is and how proud they're to pull it off years ago, they still can't be bothered to give it a free trial/play tier.

"Ha. ha."

There was more to the meat of the game than most FPS, driver, air, support, stealth, hacking......

Why are any of you even the least bit excited about anything from this guy? Granted, he's not as bad as McQuaid but there is an absolute guarantee anything he's involved will will be the videogame version of getting cornholed by a well hung leper and then having to beg him for the opportunity to clean his musky pin off with little kitten-like licks. You are all tools with the memory of a goldfish.

Agree. If anything, Planetside needed more things like Sanctuaries to give players a chance to hobnob and dink around and build espirit de corps between sojurns into the battlefield.

You truly have a way with words.

I was thinking about PlanetSide Next, then I started thinking about other FPSs SOE is working on, then I started thinking about The Agency, then about exactly what happened to The Agency which has been demoed multiple times and is always apparently on the cusp of coming out. So yeah, I'll wait and see what SOE do with PSN (or PSX, because X makes everything cool) before getting too excited about the potential of well-coordinated 1000 vs 1000 battles where every player gets to be a hero.

For some reason, I have this picture of Smed being to high up the food chain to really screw things up.  You have a good point though.  It would not surprise me at all to get a double XP penalty for playing a Troll SK or something...

Smedley bought Vangard off Sigil. Position matters not went it comes to screw-ups.

If I am not mistaken, EQ and Planetside were also his purchases.

you can't say it was a bad deal without knowing how much he paid for it.

And what he got. Was it the game or the new players to up-convert into an All Access pass?


This. PS required groups, but not as rigidly as Raiding. You were going to get rolled by an organized team, but that happens in any game in any genre anyway. But with PS, you could hop in, (eventually) get to the action, and join an assault or defense in progress. And very quickly you could do so in any number of ways, from foot soldier to vehicle to engineering to flying. Best leveling system ever, letting you go broad right away rather than having, say, the Reaver cockblocked by X levels spent in the Mosquito or some such crap like that.

I don't know how sustainable it is, but still believe that had they launched with a $4.99 monthly fee, and not bludgeoned everyone with the launch day XP nerf, they'd have had a larger hill from which to descend. Then they could have bolted on whatever they needed to in order to get around the non-upgradability problems of the engine. Which is what they had to (and did do) with EQ1. Money and time solves all.

Was anything that Planetside offered ever more fun than the Battlefield 1942 Wake Island demo?

Yes, in spades. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Twyfcncurg)

Because there are many many more of them than there are of people who have ever played Planetside. He's still going to have a helluva time trying to get that crowd into a persistent world with any kind of subscription fee.

My thoughts exactly. There are some people I read from that I don't take anything they say seriously, and he's one of them.

Time spent showing Core Combat: Less than 2 seconds.  :awesome_for_real:

The game in that vid looks great, but as someone who casually tried the game in late beta and when it went free, nothing in there bears any resemblance to anything I saw in PS, which is probably why it never stuck.

Some of my fond planetside memories:

Sniper Rifle with a cone of fire similar to a machine gun.
Sniper Rifle that could hit someone multiple times in the head without a kill.
My tank exploding after hitting a small bump in the road.
Taking over enemy bases that were completely empty because they serve no purpose.

There were periods where the populations of empires would max out zones and you'd have to go fight in smaller theaters. During those times, things did indeed get that crazy.

Being in a unit helped tremendously. Planetside could be played solo, but damn this was one game where that was "doin it wrong".

Though a solo dude schlepping around would occasionally come across a pitched brigde fight. Those were pretty gnarly.

And the "Bending" - aside from the BFRs, this is what i mark in Planetside as jumping the shark. That and getting rid of Oshur and rearranging the home conts into planets? blah... That was a sense of ownership that provided many a fierce fight...some of which resembled that vid. I know on Johari, VS would not stand for Amerish to be any other color than purple, likewise for TR and Forseral and somewhat Ishundar (fuck Ceryshen) and NC Solsar and Hossin.

I concur with the horizontal leveling routine. You have access to mostly everything right out of the box, and over the course of leveing you get more shit to ADD onto. There was also that sense of choice mattering... take medic to heal yourself and others, but you take 6 years to hack a base and your armor is fucked. Take armor, save a MAX but forget rezzing anyone or trying to hack the backdoor with any speed. Even at max level there was still a sacrifice with certs. That was fine and dandy until they started bumping max level and with it more stuff available to you. I liked having to select something rather than having everything - made it so you truly needed a team...

The fights there were legendary. Spending six hours holding one tower while both of the other empires stood outside mounting assault after assault against said tower and each other is just one of the epic battles I remember from my days as an NC grunt.

I'd love for it to come back, but I'm not holding my breath.

Had some great experience both in huge battles and in small covert ops as a stealthy engineer. Once an enemy stealth engineer and I 'fought' over towers for hours, both of us hiding a supply truck and fighting indirectly through our turrets and tower defences.

I actually liked the sniping in that game. With the way the reticle closed, you had to predict your target's actions. I had no problem two shotting guys. Was a lot of fun really.

Overall, the game was only as good as the outfit you were a part of. I thought it rocked :)

To emphasize.

Technically, an unarmored player could be one shotted.

But everyone in Planetside used armor. ... Well, not everyone  (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1C2uiSGG8hM) :grin:

I really hope planet side next (if ever made) fixes this. Sadly my motivation to join a guild in an online game? zero.

Too bad for some of you solo players. I soloed during that reserve campaign and I had a blast whether I was isolated or among a zerg. Being part of a team ramped up the fun factor but the core game was good enough to be enjoyed without teaming up.

I think there may be a problem with PVP games that the tolerance for long group centric leveling has reached pretty much nil for most people as far as I can tell. But that's where you found people, made friends, and formed guilds.

I look at Aion and I think "I don't have a guild, so there's no point in joining."

They need to figure out some way to facilitate people who aren't part of a large multigame guild to get into these things.

I was part of about six outfits through my tenure in the game. I soloed probably more than I grouped and still had a fucking blast.

hear here!

http://www.quelsolaar.com/love/index.html

Well, sort of. About halfway between DF and Planetside (except PvE only).

When PS came out, a couple guys from AA:0 and PS beta formed an outfit. Since i was on summer break with no job and a ton of student loan money in the bank, I laughed summer off and played all day every day. There was not a time I was not in a squad with outfit members. You logged on and said something in chat, you had an invite and location to come to. Interestingly, as the day would ebb and flow, members would log on and off but the squad always remained at least at three. The solo part was being told to go solo ghost hack a base or attempt to flip another base with an enemy hack on it with a few minutes left. Cloaker + base full of baddies = respawn.

so yeah... never soloed - maybe that was the hook.

The thing that I liked best about PS in terms of solo vs group was that there was a very organic and natural progression from going solo at first to finding the group of people you wanted to hang with.

I started solo, but eventually joined a few pick up squads, and then, based on observation I could tell if I wanted to be part of an outfit. Sure, a few outfits didn't work out, but eventually I found one that was 'good enough'. It wasn't an awsome group of super tactical masterminds or anything, but with Vent we had a blast.

Then later on, based on months worth of play, I saw a better outfit after my first one had dissolved and joined it. This one had two or three truely gifted outfit leaders who knew how to organize a large strike force. They had clear rules about who could talk on Vent when, channels where you could only speak if you had vital tactical information where you became entirely engrossed in the tactics of the battle, knew where your peeps were within your squad, group, outfit during the duration of a battle. It allowed for an orchestrated assault that beat the enemy most of the time, even against numeric odds. That lasted for me for about 3 months. I never got back with an outfit as good.

I see your point. But i am not sure that such a staging ground couldn't be made more efficient. Supposing that you had some sort of "commander" i don't see why you could not have "force requests" present that informed everyone how much you had and when you wanted to get going and how much you wanted. If you stuck everything in the "line up" as the shots show off as a background to your 2d interface does, you should foster the same sense of identity that the inefficient 3d format does.

Make it easier to know how much you have, how much is ready, and how much is needed and you should get away from the "zerg" effect that you are trying to dissuade.

Pretty much this. We had a large outfit that actually had armor, air, infantry, spec ops groups. We would practice a different group during the off days, and have a full outfit raid on Thursdays and a 'fun raid' with themes like all air, or all transports, or Gal drops on Sunday. We had commanders communicating, and the squads would only speak tactical info. We used whispers for driver/gunner comms. Absolutely great to be a part of, and eventually lead. Some of the most fun I've had in any game, MMO or otherwise.

Slayerik, I think we were in the same outfit.