PlanetSide 2 Beta

http://ds.reddit.com/r/Planetside/comments/wju1y/a_ps1_beta_testers_impressions_of_ps2_after/

I was at the SOE community event yesterday for nearly the whole time. The build we played was called the beta build on the beta server, and was purportedly 5 days old. First of all, the game is awesome. The world looks great (night time especially) and the gameplay has solid fundamentals. For any of you that were there I played as "Jesus" under NC in the game.

However, I don't believe they are ready to open up the game to a larger audience just yet. My very first spawn, I got stuck in a wall. It apparently happens when you spawn at the same time as someone else. I had the game crash to desktop on me twice throughout the day. I also saw a lot of what looked like network lag, which shouldn't have happened because we were on a LAN. These are all minor issues that I'm sure will be sorted out quickly, though.

I briefly played light assault, medic, and engie. Light assault didn't seem that great compared to heavy. The jet pack was ok, but I don't think it was worth it. Medic is good at healing and reviving. One of the devs said you can get healing and reviving grenades later on. I was surprised with the range on the engie's carbine. I got some surprising long range kills with the gauss carbine. I also put an IRNV scope on it, which turns everything red hot.

I mostly played heavy assault during my game time. Heavy assault has a 200 round LMG, a pistol, and a anti armor rocket launcher. There was no jackhammer, lasher, chaingun in the game at this stage yet. I had a lot of success killing with the LMG. Recoil wasn't bad at all and I was able to fire full auto at medium range and reliably win gunfights 1v1. The rocket launcher takes 2-3 hits to kill a max and maybe twice that to kill a tank. So teamwork is a must going up against tanks.

I also spent a lot of time driving a lightning and a vanguard. The vanguard is great, the highlight of my day was when I went on a ten kill streak in a vanguard and had three devs behind me cheering me on as I racked up the kills. Note that any infantry that isn't a MAX can drive a tank. The main cannon one shots infantry and takes 3 shots to kill a max (I would prefer two here). Though a roadkill is instant death for any max or infantry. The lighting fires a 6 round shell magazine. It's a fast little tank too. Very formidable if you can hit while moving at top speed. To spawn a vehicle you spend one of three resources. A vanguard costs 120 of one of them and has a 900 second cooldown before you can spawn another one, so you do need to take care of the one you got once you get it. The lightning cost 80 of a different resource and was on a 700 second cooldown. I browsed the store page they had up and there were implants that reduced the cool down of vehicles to 5 minutes.

As far as the store goes, the prices were high, but I believe those are only placeholders as of now. It was around 400-700 station cash for guns (which could also be bought for 20000 in game credits). My character was 4 hours old at the end of the day and I hadn't even earned 2000 in game credits. So, that needs to be tweaked majorly before release one way or another. There were many gun sidegrades in the store so balance might be an issue with such a large amount of weapons.

The fighting was mostly centered around Hvar. There are 6 points that make up the base that are all captured independently. Any infantry can cap the points (not MAXes). Simply walk up to the node and hold use down. They do capture faster with more people using it. With the small amount of people on the server it was hard to hold points for any length of time. It was mostly just capture point ring-around-the-rosy going on. Yet, I can tell that with some teamplay and coordination things will play out better. It was hard to get too much teamplay going, since we were only playing 30 minutes at a time.

Final thoughts, the game is shaping up really nicely. They need a bit more time before they can let some masses in though. I can't wait to get back into the action! Ask any questions and I'll try my best to answer.