Yes, yes, I know I'm late to the party on this one. (Funny thing, for the longest time I thought people were talking about Lost Planet 2 - shut up, it sounds kind of similar - and kept wondering why they were bothering.)
In a nutshell, Planetside 2 is a free-to-play FPS-MMO with vehicles. Think Battlefield if you had persistent maps 20x as big with hundreds of players.
It's one of those games that's pretty dodgy when it doesn't work, but utterly glorious when it does. If you play on your own and just run around looking for things to shoot at you will find yourself in a rather mediocre FPS with unremarkable gameplay, a rather cluttered interface, some confusing mechanics and nothing much going for it except a cool sense of scale. However, if you join a player platoon/squad with active leaders and plenty of communication going on... well, then that's when the glorious happens.
I recently spent several hours as part of a platoon of 40-50 players intent on conquering an entire server. Some of the things I got to do in those few hours included:
- Loading up in a 12-seater transport plane, whereupon our pilot flew us over an enemy control point. We then dropped on them from above. Clad in a heavy exosuit, I landed right in the middle of a squad of very surprised enemies and proceeded to lay waste to them with a scattergun and grenade launcher.
- Participating in blitzkrieg-style penetrating attack as part of an armoured column. We then got cut off and had to spearhead our way out with help from an air support squad.
- When faced with capturing a heavily defended base that was making mincemeat of our attacking forces, me and several squadmates used light assault troopers with jetpacks to take the roof. The squad leader then planted a beacon on the roof, allowing infiltrators and heavy assault to land in orbital drop pods. The infiltrators hacked the bases defense turrets while the heavies led a surprise top-down assault to sandwich the defenders.
When this game clicks, it fucking clicks.
My one major complaint is the unlock/upgrade system. (If you've played Tribes: Ascend then I can just say, "Basically that.") The game is free to play and makes it's money by selling premium memberships, experience gain boosters and in-game currency with which to purchase unlocks. To it's credit, it manages to avoid the pay-to-win problem. Most (but not quite all) of the purchasable items are "side-grades" with trade-offs to be considered rather than strict upgrades and the default equipment is generally sufficient. Everything can also be purchases with XP earned in-game, the only things exclusive to the people who pay are the cosmetic items. Someone who drops a lot of cash on the game will have a lot more toys to play with, but they won't be be noticeably stronger. There are hard upgrades available for just about everything, but those are unlocked with XP only.
However, the prices are just plain ridiculous. Unlocking a single weapon works out to about $7.00 of hard, real-world currency or 5-10 hours worth of XP, depending on how good and/or lucky you are.
On the other hand, I've already started throwing cash at the game, so mission bloody accomplished on their part I guess.
In a nutshell, Planetside 2 is a free-to-play FPS-MMO with vehicles. Think Battlefield if you had persistent maps 20x as big with hundreds of players.
It's one of those games that's pretty dodgy when it doesn't work, but utterly glorious when it does. If you play on your own and just run around looking for things to shoot at you will find yourself in a rather mediocre FPS with unremarkable gameplay, a rather cluttered interface, some confusing mechanics and nothing much going for it except a cool sense of scale. However, if you join a player platoon/squad with active leaders and plenty of communication going on... well, then that's when the glorious happens.
I recently spent several hours as part of a platoon of 40-50 players intent on conquering an entire server. Some of the things I got to do in those few hours included:
- Loading up in a 12-seater transport plane, whereupon our pilot flew us over an enemy control point. We then dropped on them from above. Clad in a heavy exosuit, I landed right in the middle of a squad of very surprised enemies and proceeded to lay waste to them with a scattergun and grenade launcher.
- Participating in blitzkrieg-style penetrating attack as part of an armoured column. We then got cut off and had to spearhead our way out with help from an air support squad.
- When faced with capturing a heavily defended base that was making mincemeat of our attacking forces, me and several squadmates used light assault troopers with jetpacks to take the roof. The squad leader then planted a beacon on the roof, allowing infiltrators and heavy assault to land in orbital drop pods. The infiltrators hacked the bases defense turrets while the heavies led a surprise top-down assault to sandwich the defenders.
When this game clicks, it fucking clicks.
My one major complaint is the unlock/upgrade system. (If you've played Tribes: Ascend then I can just say, "Basically that.") The game is free to play and makes it's money by selling premium memberships, experience gain boosters and in-game currency with which to purchase unlocks. To it's credit, it manages to avoid the pay-to-win problem. Most (but not quite all) of the purchasable items are "side-grades" with trade-offs to be considered rather than strict upgrades and the default equipment is generally sufficient. Everything can also be purchases with XP earned in-game, the only things exclusive to the people who pay are the cosmetic items. Someone who drops a lot of cash on the game will have a lot more toys to play with, but they won't be be noticeably stronger. There are hard upgrades available for just about everything, but those are unlocked with XP only.
However, the prices are just plain ridiculous. Unlocking a single weapon works out to about $7.00 of hard, real-world currency or 5-10 hours worth of XP, depending on how good and/or lucky you are.
On the other hand, I've already started throwing cash at the game, so mission bloody accomplished on their part I guess.
