Upon getting into PlanetSide 2, I signed up with the energy-weapon-happy Vanu Sovereignty faction and joined a beta server running one of its three 64-square-kilometer maps. There, between murders and base captures I promptly did the following stupid stuff:
Vehicle Surfing
The one-man Lightning ATV is the speediest method of zipping around the huge map on the ground. But, in a manner similar to one of the classic Battlefield 1942's most famously unrealistic features, a second player can jump aboard and ride along like a heavily armed, physics-defying hood ornament. It looks absurd, but it's also absurdly entertaining. I was also able to ride along on top of other land vehicles, such as the tanks and trucks, so I'll be surprised if the same isn't true for air vehicles (I didn't get to try that). I'm looking forward to some spectacular stunt videos of aerial acrobatics as players ride the wings of planes.
Drop Pod Kills
When you deploy, there's a great opportunity for a grand entrance to the battlefield by squashing enemies like the Wicked Witch of the East.
Getting killed by one of my three foes -- the other two factions and gravity -- meant respawning. Usually that happens at any base under my team's control, but every few minutes I was allowed to deploy directly to my squadmates' positions via a drop pod from orbit. And, as it turns out, when a car-sized pod drops on someone's head from 10,000 feet up, it leaves a mark. Control over the 10-second rapid descent is limited, but if a teammate is close enough to an enemy (particularly something large, like a tank) when you deploy, there's a great opportunity for a grand entrance to the battlefield by squashing them like the Wicked Witch of the East.Choose your surf board.
Sightseeing
Since this server "only" had 80 players, the vast majority of the territory was unoccupied, so I took a speedy Scythe plane and flew from one end to the other to check it out. This map is mostly desert, but it's full of interesting features like canyons, mountains, and bases. And as the sun set and dusk fell (showing off PlanetSide 2's full day/night cycle and impressive lighting) it got downright pretty, to the point where I crash landed because I wasn't paying attention to where I was going. Making the hike back to base on foot could've taken ages -- a fate worse than death -- so I resorted to the /suicide command so I could respawn where the action was.
I also played as most of the classes:
For my (lack of) money, the Light Assault class really seems to be the way to go. Why? One simple reason: he's the only one with jetpack privileges. That doesn't just make him the most mobile of any class, letting him quickly fly up to the highest points of the very vertically designed bases or hop over obstacles, but also making him an ideal pilot due to his unique ability to survive ejecting from any height.
I had a few good runs as the Infiltrator, some by using his stealth to hit and run enemies as they attempted to capture one of my team's bases, and some by picking off targets with the sniper rifle from on high after drop-pod deploying to the top of a building.
Whether you're a Light Assault or Max Trooper, PlanetSide 2 will give you plenty to shoot at.
I had some amazing runs of killing off enemy intruders in our base with the Heavy Assault and I predict him becoming my go-to defender class.
MAX troopers aren't really my thing -- they're extremely slow and tough to get around on foot, which led to a couple of situations where I'd spend a few minutes trudging toward the enemy base only to be intercepted and blasted by a tank. But I can picture them as devastating if a half dozen of them are deployed in the midst of an enemy base from a large transport at once, and they're fierce defenders.As an Engineer I rode along in the machine gun turret of a Magrider hovertank, picking off fools and hopping out after every big fight to patch up the armor a bit. He, like the Medic, didn't have a lot of surprises for me other than his deployable turret, but they both serve essential roles in team-based combat, so I'm glad they're here.
Finally, my winningest class: the Heavy Assault. I love how he's armed with both a standard-issue Vanu assault rifle and a homing-missile launcher that tracks both land and air vehicles, he's capable of taking out all kinds of threats -- and even defend himself with a temporary shield. (After I fell off a building and died, one of the SOE guys told me I could've used the shield to cushion my fall. After.) I had some amazing runs of killing off enemy intruders in our base with the HA and I predict him becoming my go-to defender class.
Mutually Beneficial Relationships
All of that was done with a free account. Far too many free-to-play games are in the rude habit of making gamers feel like freeloading mooches for trying to get more than a couple of hours of enjoyable play out of them. PlanetSide 2, however, has the right idea: according to Creative Director Matt Higby, not only can you competitively play PlanetSide 2 for free, but just by showing up for one of its massive 64-square-kilometer, 2,000-player wars, you'll be doing Sony Online Entertainment a favor. "Lots of MMOs spend tons and tons of money building content. You have to populate a dungeon with lots of monsters and put loot on them and f***ing make dragons s**t. We don't have to do that, because players are our content. So all those dudes who are coming in and playing for free are helping us make the game better for the dudes who do decide they want to pay money." Damn straight.
Fly free in PlanetSide 2 without worrying you'll be squashed by paying opponents.
Higby acknowledges PlanetSide 2 can't work unless it attracts an audience by being playable and fun for free.
That doesn't necessarily mean free players will be easy-to-kill fodder who live only to be hunted for sport by the monied elite. Higby, who acknowledges PlanetSide 2 can't work unless it attracts an audience by being playable and fun for free, pledges no more than a 20% power difference between the highest-level player and the lowliest, and what power-enhancing upgrades there are must be earned, not bought -- and that we won't have to grind to do it. "I've played Tribes: Ascend too. I see a lot of the complaints that people have about the amount of time it takes to unlock things as a free player as opposed to a paid player. Essentially the only real way to get stuff is to pay for it. We're absolutely not trying to do that," said Higby. He added that paid players might respawn a little quicker, but the unpaid 10-second timer I had to wait out when I (frequently) ate it was hardly an eternity. Also, SOE doesn't plan on locking free players out of any gameplay -- a liberty that allows any player to jump into any land or air vehicle at any time and promptly crash it into a building because they can be tricky to get the hang of.
PlanetSide of Legends
As a model for how to make money on a free game that doesn't let players buy power, Higby points to the current king of free-to-play. "League of Legends does this really brilliantly. You get IP points for playing the game. If you're smart, you never spend a single IP point on anything except runes, because runes give you a gameplay advantage. We have a similar thing set up with how our implants work. You can only buy implants with in-game resources because they're always a net power-add. So if you decide you want to get a sidegraded weapon [an equally powerful but tweaked version] you have to make that tradeoff." Higby says we won't have to make a lot of tough resource choices until we're spending our resource pool on upgrades for multiple classes at once, at which point he hopes we won't feel too bad about chipping in a few bucks.
I was a little surprised to hear Higby boast that PlanetSide 2 had graphical settings built in that can bring any modern PC to its knees.
I was a little surprised to hear Higby boast that PlanetSide 2 had graphical settings built in that can bring any modern PC to its knees. "We have a shadow distance setting. If you go in and crank that up to ultra or max, which aren't even available in our UI right now, it does shadow rendering for your entire view distance. Being able to have shadow rendering going out two kilometers at stencil level is something that you just can't do," he said.Ever since Crysis took a lot of hate for building in an "ultra" graphics setting that was unplayable on the gaming hardware of the time (and thus becoming the butt of the "But can it run Crysis?" gag), we haven't heard too many developers proudly talk about how our PCs can't possibly handle their game. But Higby's approach is smart: those options are only available via text commands, only to be enabled in the menu (along with uber-high-resolution, 8096x8096 textures) when GPUs catch up to SOE's future proofing in a few years. The first thing I think I'll crank up is the draw distance -- I did notice a bit of terrain pop-in as I flew over bases that I'd like to eliminate.
Who Griefs the Griefers?
The last thing that worried me about PlanetSide 2's ambitious scale is the fact that on the internet, conservative estimates put the percentage of team-killing or griefing jerks at roughly 25%. I asked Higsby how he plans on handling the fourth, unofficial troll faction, and he gave a realistic answer. "You're absolutely right: it's a huge clusterf**k when there's hundreds of players around," he said. "Between having splash-damage weapons and things like that accidents do happen, but also, intentionally, people are going to be a-holes. And in a game like this, people, especially since it's free to play, are almost encouraged to create a character on another account and go in and kill the defenders on the base they're trying to attack on a second computer or something like that."
That doesn't sound good, but Higsby says SOE will fight back with an anti-griefing system based on that of the original PlanetSide, which automatically identifies and cripples team-killers. "If they end up getting kills and get reported as a griefer, we'll very, very quickly do it," he said, with suggested punitive measures ranging from disarmament to banning them outright. "Since we're making new characters without a lot of battle experience, based on battle rank, potentially, has stiffer penalties, It'll kinda solve itself, but never completely."
Or we could just go to their houses and kick them in the junk. But anyway, what I sampled here was literally a small fraction of the size of PlanetSide 2's war, and I'm looking forward to seeing how that works when closed beta begins sometime in the next month or so. Soon, the servers begin to fill up with free players of various moral character and equal shootability.