Planetside 2 Review (sort of)

Many years ago, I was a dweeby kid who was super excited to be in my first closed beta—the original Planetside. The hype behind the game was pretty intense. I mean, an MMO FPS? Unheard of! My friends and I had planned out our entire play styles and alliances long before we even downloaded the client.

And then we actually played the game…

Now don’t get me wrong: the original Planetside had its moments. Its long, tedious, ultimately pointless moments. Victories were fleeting, but the strategy and skill involved at least made the fight occasionally worthwhile.

Fast forward nearly a decade, and I was involved in a new beta test: Planetside 2. I’ll admit, I was skeptical at first. Aside from my disappointment in the original game, I did still have a blood feud against SOE for what they did to Star Wars: Galaxies (i.e. they shit all over it).

But I was actually pleasantly surprised at Planetside 2…for a time. The big fights were epic and chaotic, the small fights were sneaky and strategic, and the weapons and vehicles were fun to use, if a little clunky and not at all bound by the laws of physics.

And I must say, the visuals were surprisingly amazing for a game of its scale. Of course, that’s assuming you have the hardware to handle it, which is few notches above what you would expect since the game engine has some pretty serious optimization issues.

Most importantly the game was fun, which usually trumps most other flaws in a game.

Unfortunately, SOE still don’t seem to have the formula down, even well over a year after the game was released. Despite multiple patches aimed at fixing graphics optimization, the game still chugs at higher settings, even on decent hardware. There are also numerous problems with textures, pop-in, and so on. Perhaps most glaring are issues with invisible enemies and difficulty distinguishing friend from foe at a distance.

But the worst problems stem from the gameplay itself. Vehicles and consumables are limited by a resource system split into three categories: air, vehicle, and infantry. Each of these pools refill by a small amount every few minutes, and the amount restored is based on the territories your faction controls.

This sounds fair and balanced in theory—until you realize that the faction who is already ahead of the others gets harder and harder to stop due to an excess of resources. In an attempt to counteract this advantage, vehicles also have cooldown timers that can be reduced with certifications, which are earned with experience. While this does prevent people from trying to go kamikaze multiple times in a tank, it really doesn't do much to restrict one faction’s ability to use brute strength in numbers to snuff out less populated factions that might otherwise be more skilled.

And therein lies the other major problem with PS2 gameplay: the zerg trumps all. It is extremely rare for a small yet skilled force to hold back the zerg. True, they might get a high number of kills and XP while the fight lasts, but they will ultimately lose their objective to superior numbers.

There’s a catch 22 on the losing side. No one likes playing against impossible odds, so a lot of people on the underpopulated factions log off, which only makes the population gap worse, which of course makes more people quit, and on and on.

Now I’ll admit that this is a difficult problem to fix. The mantra of the MMO developer is “balance,” but there’s such a thing as too much balance. For example, you would think that a lone foot soldier would be terrified of tanks. Haha, nope.

Vehicles are basically XP piñatas, and determined infantry with a mediocre level of skill can kill most solo vehicles. Infantry can die hundreds of times with little to no penalty, but a tank driver has to use up resources and wait out a cooldown timer every time they pull a vehicle.

Aircraft are even worse. True, they are far more maneuverable and have an easier time of keeping enemies at range, but they are basically made of tin and filled with gunpowder. There is also a laughable gap in skill between new pilots and the so-called “aces.” I’m a moderately skilled pilot, especially compared to players who treat aircraft as a quick ride rather than an alternate play style, but I am embarrassingly outclassed by the real pilots in PS2.

I’m not saying that this is necessarily a bad thing. If anything, I think PS2 needs more opportunities for skilled players to shine. But with the restrictiveness of the resource system and lengthy vehicle cooldowns, it is extremely difficult for new players to learn the ropes.

Now, I know I've been pretty critical of the game so far, but that doesn’t mean I don’t still enjoy it. PS2 can be a lot of fun (when you’re winning), and the fact that I’ve logged nearly 400 hours in the game is certainly a testament to its longevity.

The real issue isn’t that the game is buggy or suffering from balance or playability issues. The problem is that the game is not improving. PS2 today is not significantly better than it was in beta, and in some ways it has gotten worse.

I really hope that SOE can get their shit together because I really can’t handle holding two blood feuds against the same dev.

I haven’t even touched on the free-to-play nature of PS2, which I will briefly cover in a future post. But the TL;DR version is: It’s not too bad! You can get by perfectly fine without paying a cent, but subscribers do get a pretty significant advantage in their increased resource and XP gains. Still though, the pay-to-win factor isn't as bad as other freemium games, and the game is still worth a shot if you like large scale, objective-based FPS games.