Planetside 2

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Planetside 2 preview[/b]
Martin Davies at 10:00am December 4 2011
PlanetSide 2 has really nice clouds. As they bubble up over the rust red mesas of the Indra continent they occlude the sun, casting undulating shadows in realtime and leaking ghostly, shimmering rays. If you care to hop into an aircraft and point your nose up, you can lose yourself in the fogbank – which may be a hazard or a blessing depending on who’s chasing you.

All this may seem like a minor frill for a game that otherwise sells itself on big gun battles, but it goes to the core of PlanetSide 2’s remit, and spells out its vital difference from other claimants to the MMOFPS title, such as Dust 514. As creative director Matt Higby puts it, “We’re not just building a shooter, we’re building a world.”

This would sound like puff if it weren’t true. Like the original game, PlanetSide 2 is set on an open world of sprawling, diverse continents. This is the planet Auraxis, contested by the game’s three violently opposed factions. And that planet is there for more than just scene-setting – it’s as much a weapon as any sidearm. The terrain may look fresh from Mother Nature’s oven, but it’s been attentively tweaked to break lines of sight, to allow for cover and clever tactics.

'Ha, they'll never find me down here.'
“One of our largest development efforts on this project has been hand crafting every single area of those eight-by-eight kilometre continents,” Matt tells me. “To make sure that everywhere you’re playing, from a wilderness area to a really dense facility area, all feel like they’re custom created to support gameplay. And different types of gameplay: if I’m out in that wilderness area, depending on the availability of cover, the type of terrain, then it might be a field day for air vehicles, somewhere air vehicles can shine. But if there’s a lot of cover, a lot of places where infantry can pop out and fire a rocket, then suddenly it becomes a little bit more balanced.”

With a full day-night cycle, new strategies emerge: as the Terran Republic mass to deliver a 200-man hammerblow to a Vanu Sovereignty facility, they might scale an escarpment under cover of dark, flashlights off to give as little sign of their presence as possible. Then, as the rosy fingers of dawn stretch over the hillside to their backs, the soldiers follow the light washing down upon dazzled Vanu guards. Nor is this some canned Call of Duty skirmish, exactingly recycled with every victory – the target has been selected as part of a global strategy, hundreds upon hundreds of players self-organising to determine the time and angle of attack. Squad leaders pinpoint immediate objectives, focusing fire on a troublesome turret or rushing the barrier shield generator to allow aerial bombardment, while dedicated tank guilds roll in to breach the Vanu strongpoint’s courtyard. A spec’d up Galaxy dropship acts as a mobile spawn point, spewing out reinforcements as allied Mosquitoes zip and weave in the skies, dogfighting with the defenders’ Scythes.

The Vanu commanders will be hurriedly reacting to the assault, too, highlighting the battlezone as a high priority mission for all of their factionmates to see, manoeuvring and plotting, interpreting the repercussions of their loss or victory in the context of an ever-changing frontline. Since capture-time on an objective is based on the amount of peripheral real-estate that is claimed by your faction, real battlefield strategy emerges: pincer movements and encirclements become important ways to shore up a major assault and deny the enemy an easy recapture. The choice of targets may be influenced by the resources they contain. A plentiful supply of metal, nanites, or auraxium enables factions to deploy upgrades, their function varying for each of the three empires.

Vehicles are also highly customisable.
Denial is as important as acquisition, Matt tells me. “If the Vanu is attacking you and they have railguns on their mag riders, and they are fucking you up, then you know you need to capture auraxium and deplete their reserves.”

But as a mere grunt, that high-level strategy is another’s concern – on the ground you are one gun among hundreds, crashing against the walls of a vast facility whose three courtyards are themselves each the size of a Modern Warfare multiplayer level. Energy beams lance out from the defenders and rocketry spirals after targets through the still-dark sky, leaving a trail of smoke that sears bright in the HDR glow of the rising sun.

PlanetSide 2 does big and it does beautiful. To some extent it has to in order to overcome the dual stigma of being both an MMO and a free-to-play game, neither of which are famed for their glitzy production qualities.

“For me it’s all about seeing the game as an FPS – and that’s it,” says senior art director Tramell ‘T.Ray’ Isaac. “When we were working on [cancelled SOE game] The Agency, one of the comments we got a lot was, ‘It looks pretty good for an MMO.’ And that ‘for an MMO’ should not even be in the equation for me. People should look at it and see that it’s got the same level of quality as every other FPS on the market.”

PlanetSide 2 succeeds on that account, and then some – but does it play like an FPS, too? The old PlanetSide’s combat was muddied by unseen dice-rolls, not to mention creaking on 2003’s hardware specs and squeaking awkwardly through the internet’s tiny, tiny pipes. Not so now, says Matt. Not only has technology caught up with the original game’s forward-thinking vision, but the devs have a keener idea of what makes a satisfying run-and-gun experience. Bullets go pretty much where you fire them and the guns are not only lethal but feel it, too.

“The impact of weapons needs to be felt not just by the guy getting shot but also by the guy who’s doing the firing,” Matt says. “I think that gets missed a lot. There’s a lot that goes into it – audio, animation, ambient effects on the screen. In MMOs you don’t usually spend a lot of time trying to think about what it feels to cast a spell in first-person – you look at the effect of the spell on the person who’s getting hit. But we’re an FPS first, and we’re always striving to be the best possible FPS we can be.”

There’s another hurdle: the game has to feel fair, despite the MMO-style character advancement and the customisation system for its six classes, along with their many weapons and vehicles. Not to mention the distinct tactical and strategic difference enforced by your choice of faction. It’s one hell of a balancing act, but Matt’s keen that new or non-paying players never feel they are outclassed in battle by the equipment of their veteran foes. You don’t pay for power in PlanetSide 2. Mictrotransaction upgrades simply re-specialise your class, or unlock different combat options, all of which are available through playing the game and queuing up skills to be trained passively over time: much as players already do in EVE Online.

“You can really spec out in different ways,” Matt says. “You can spec out the Infiltrator class to be a really sneaky gadgety, sabotage-focused guy, and bring a bunch of C4 and motion detectors and sneak behind enemy lines, stab people and blow up their tanks. Or you could spec him to be a dedicated wilderness sniper character.

Not everyone's cut out for command, so you can 'unfollow' twits like Twitter accounts.
“We have six different infantry classes,” Matt continues, as he uses a debug command to unlock the camera, swooping in on character models to show the astonishing, and quite possibly needless, level of detail.

“Light assault is basically the ‘glass cannon’ character. He can do the most damage the quickest. He’s very agile, but it’s also very vulnerable. Because he can get to places very quickly, he can overextend himself very easily and if he doesn’t have support backing him up he can get crushed.” Matt moves the camera along. “This is our engineer. He can place barriers and gun turrets, and repair vehicles. But he can do a lot of offensive stuff on top of that. Our gun turrets aren’t automated, they require a player to actually man them. And then the engineer can go throw mines down and destroy vehicles

“Our heavy assault character again has a dualistic role: he can either be very much an anti-infantry character or very much an anti-vehicle character. You can go play a medic and not really focus on being a combatant, but medics can be very much an in-your-face infantry fighter, too. MAX [mechsuited soldiers] are definitely making a comeback. Unlike PlanetSide 1 where there was a specific MAX for each role, our MAX is configurable, so that you can put an anti-infantry weapon on one arm and an anti-vehicle weapon on another arm. Like everything else we’re allowing for a really wide range of customisation with each one of these classes.”

You’re never class-locked in PlanetSide 2, either. Equipment terminals let you leap instantly into another class’s skin, and then there are the vehicles too, which the devs essentially treat as extra classes. They’re just as customisable: a Mosquito can be loaded-out for aerial combat, or air-to-ground as the situation demands.

Every shot looks like a classic '70s SF paperback.
Some of this customisation comes from the equipment and weaponry – guns are modular and nearly every bit can be swapped out and replaced, altering the weapon’s range, rate of fire, sound, scope, capacity, or even the shape of its muzzle flash, while rebalancing other variables to ensure no all-round advantage. But a lot of a player’s abilities also come from skills they can train or buy – certificates to use vehicles and aircraft are an obvious one, but there are also more subtle boons: an ability to allow players to spawn on you as squad leader, or inside your dropship. Every compartment of the game has its own skill-tree, it seems, from pilots to squad leaders, commanders and the factions themselves.

The scale of the world, and the battles in it, is breathtaking enough. But the challenge of balancing the complex weave of variables, and fitting it all into a robust MMO social framework, is as colossal a task as you are likely to see in game development. This could be why there aren’t that many open-world MMOFPS knocking about. The reason that SOE have done it, and no one else, comes down to the gradual accumulation of tech and expertise over the eight years since PlanetSide 1. During that time they’ve developed and iterated upon Forge Light – a suite of backend magic that not only spits out PlanetSide 2’s dizzying landscapes and player numbers, but also holds together the servers and communication infrastructure of the game.

Despite this technology on hand, PlanetSide 2 remains a huge undertaking, but one that SOE hope will be pay off over many years – after all, PlanetSide 1’s servers still ring to the sound of gunfire today, nearly a decade after release. The developers have a huge number of features they plan to add to the game, post-release, from the ability for players to drop and construct their own bases, to the addition of AI wildlife, or possibly an AI faction. All of which will be decided with a good deal of consultation with the players themselves. For all its stunning draw distances and vast landscapes swarming with legion after legion of soldiers, PlanetSide 2 isn’t just about a being a big game, it’s all about the long game too.

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MMORPG.com:
While I'm sure it's too early to make any definitive estimates, what is the ideal battle size you're hoping to accomplish in PS2? Are we looking at 100 v 100, 500 v 500... or even 1000 v 1000? Will there be incentives for fighting in bigger fights as opposed to smaller fights? If so, what will be the driving motivation to start up new skirmishes?

Matt Higby:

Our goal right now is to support combat with thousands of players. The incentive to fight in larger fights is more targets and more mayhem, which is always fun.

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I feel like I know Matt Higby. PlanetSide 2’s creative director lives half a planet away from me in San Diego, where he’s currently helming development on SOE’s second shot at the MMOFPS. But he once flew Reavers for the New Conglomerate in PlanetSide. He piloted a gunship, screaming through the sky over hundred-man battles. He rained rockets down on enemy tanks, he lanced snipers with his chaingun. He’s me, in a suntan and a nicer suit.

The Reaver, PlanetSide’s air-to-ground dominator, remains in PlanetSide 2. Most of the original vehicles and weapons are returning in spruced-up form. But where I once had to survive hours of combat before I’d earned a battle rank sufficient to be handed the keys to my very own Reaver, PlanetSide 2 will let me jump into any of my faction’s vehicle seats from my first minute in the game.

At least, that’s Matt’s plan: the eventual beta launch may change that. “We may say, ‘Hey, you know what? you have to have a certain amount of time in the Lightning before you’re able to use a Vanguard.’” The Lightning is PlanetSide 2’s light tank; the Vanguard the New Conglomerate’s trundling behemoth, armed with a 10ft-long cannon. This progression handily illustrates PlanetSide 2’s new skill tree system.

Learn how to attach a massive cannon to your tank while you wash up.
“The Vanguard has a ton of unlocks: different side-graded weapons that allow me to do things situationally. I might want a flak cannon on top because there’s a lot of aircraft in my area of combat. A new Vanguard driver won’t necessarily have access to all the different kinds of armour and countermeasures – all the different kinds of telemetry and radar systems that someone who’s been playing a Vanguard for a really long time has unlocked.”

I ask Matt how much time it would take before I felt totally comfortable strapped back into my Reaver. He counted it out as 10 hours, that time giving me a wide range of unlocks – enough to be dangerous in most situations in my one chosen steed.

But upgrades don’t have to be earned with timeclock stamping: players who don’t check in every day will be able to climb the same ability ladders as their more diligent friends. Pick one of PlanetSide 2’s skills and it’ll be queued to learn. Log off, and you’ll continue studying how to attach longer range scopes to your Bolt-Driver sniper rifle, get better at hacking enemy vehicles, or another one of the game’s multitude of skills.

'Be vewy, vewy quiet, we're hunting Weavers!'
Players who are online during their skill studies will see them unlock faster, but there are more immediate rewards for those keen to invigorate their learning process, as Matt confirms: “You’re able to shortcut your skills by burning resources.”

Resources themselves are earned by engaging in battle against the two oppositional empires: capture an area on one of the game’s continents and you’ll gain resources. Matt explains further: “You’ll also gain resources while your empire holds that territory. So if you are a member of an empire and own 50% of a continent, you will gain resources just for playing on that continent all the time, even if you’re not capturing anything new. You can use those resources for doing things like upgrading your weapons, getting new weapons from an equipment terminal, or buying things from the store.”

PlanetSide 2 will be free-to-play, and the store will offer items for Sony’s magical pixie version of real money: Station Cash. But Matt is adamant the game’s model won’t be ‘pay to win’. Items that are only purchasable with Station Cash – not resources – will just be cosmetic.[/b] Core to this approach is the idea of side-grades: things players can unlock that don’t conclusively better their lot on the battlefield, but specialise their abilities.

We really, really want a Reaver for Christmas.
Choice is built into the game at all levels, meaning players can quickly swap their focus on the battlefield without extracurricular menu tinkering. [b]“Maybe I want to have a scope on my Cycler: I can go up to an equipment terminal and swap out my old weapon for the new one. That might incur some resource cost with it – we’re still balancing exactly where we want the resource drain to be in the game. Similarly, if I want my Magrider tank to have an AA flak gun on the top of it, I can bolt it on when I’m dead on the respawn screen.”

SOE plans to include a subscription model for those who fancy access to what Matt calls ‘premium features’, but I’m already sold on the idea of sticking with my chosen vehicle for the long haul. I relied on my Reaver in PlanetSide, and grew into the cockpit until it became a part of me. I was unhappy with my feet on the ground in Auraxis. The idea of plugging months’ worth of advancement into my Reaver, earning cannons and rockets and countermeasures and targeting systems (and all the things I wished I could tinker with back in 2003), is a prospect that thrills me like little else in gaming. Having known PlanetSide, Matt understands me. Now I know PlanetSide 2, I think you’ll understand my excitement too.

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Nanite Systems was once a small company with a singular focus on Nanotechnology. With advances in technology allowing their nanites to do everything from mining to manufacturing Nanite Systems has become the single largest of Auraxis’ civilian corporations. Rather than siding with any one of the three empires battling for control of the planet, Nanite Systems provides services, weapons and vehicles to each equally. Well built and utilitarian, the Nanite Systems common pool vehicles are utilized in a variety of battlefield situations: the Sunderer and Galaxy are the primary supply and transport vehicles used by each empire, dedicated combat vehicles like the Lightning and Liberator gunship help round out the empire’s military forces and the Quad provides a fast transport and strike craft.



Quad

For soldiers looking to get from point A to point B rapidly, the Quad fits the bill. It has the highest top speed of any ground vehicle and is easy to acquire. The only downside is that it is not very tough, relying on its amazing speed and agility as its defense. In a battlefield where men cannot permanently die, military commanders have seen value in the quad as a flanking vehicle and have created options for several front mounted weapons.

Planetside 2: Trailer for Partnership with The9

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Liberator

The Liberator is an armored gunship capable of wreaking havoc on ground forces. The primary weapon on the Liberator is a downward facing gun emplacement operated by a passenger. This emplacement has several different options such as an armor devastating 150mm cannon or a shredding 30mm Gatling gun. The pilot also operates a fixed forward nose cannon. While less effective than the primary weapon, the pilots weapon can engage from a farther distance and both weapons used in conjunction can be even more devastating. While it has medium armor the Liberator is slow and particularly vulnerable to enemy air superiority fighters.

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Sunderer

The Sunderer is a massive 12 man armored truck designed to break through or "sunder" an enemy’s defensive line and deliver troops safely to a strategic location behind enemy lines. Its heavy armor allows the Sunderer to withstand large amounts of focused enemy fire giving it a much longer life expectancy. Its powerful engine and heavy mass also allows it to push almost any other vehicle out of its way, including tanks. Finally, the Sunderer has several support capabilities supplying medical supplies to troops and ammo to troops and vehicles.

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Galaxy

The Galaxy is truly a sight to behold. It is a heavily armored air transport that can fly into enemy air space and drop up to 12 soldiers, making this vehicle an invaluable strategic asset. The Galaxy is equipped with the innovative "Hot Drop" system which automatically encapsulates any soldier or MAX unit that bails out with a protective barrier that slows their fall. This system removes the bulkiness and complications of using parachutes. The Galaxy can also be deployed into a forward base when landed. When deployed, respawn tubes and equipment terminals become active, creating a forward staging and fall back point for infantry. Additionally, the four weapon systems on the Galaxy can still be operated while deployed, giving it some static defenses.

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The Terran Republic Weapons - The Repeater Pistol

Repeater Pistol



The Repeater Pistol is the standard side-arm of the Terran Republic soldiers, it features a 3 round burst capability and a 15 round magazine capacity that allows it to quickly and effectively take down enemies.

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TERRAN REPUBLIC WEAPONS - THE MINI CHAINGUN

Mini Chaingun



The Mini Chaingun's high rate of fire and belt-fed ammunition system makes it the strongest close range weapon in the Terran Republic's arsenal. This extreme effectiveness comes at high weight cost though, making reinforced power armor a must for wielding it efficiently.

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Op woensdag 7 maart 2012 19:29 schreef Fir3fly het volgende:
Elke keer als dit topic omhoog komt in MyAT wil ik er wel op klikken maar doe ik het niet omdat het inladen een eeuw duurt .