Battleangel

OK. I’ve had time to play around some more. The game is intriguing, almost TOO intriguing if you ask me. I mean the first thing you notice is how far away everything is and how little you can do. Before you can get to drive a vehicle for example you have to gain experience points. Alongside with these points you get an opportunity to level up in different fields. The problem is that it takes a while. Not overly long but long enough that some people might loose interest.
And if you are going to level up reasonably fast you need to join a squad (or whatever they call them). That way you can have different players around to do different tasks. For a loner like myself this game becomes tricky. Almost unplayable.
It would be interesting to play on a masterserver where all these restraints have been removed. Where the gameplay was more like Battlefield and Tribes. Maybe less players, smaller maps, more action.

Some things I noticed .. good and bad …

Voice Communication: This feature was added pretty late in the beta as far as I understand it. I haven’t tried it myself but I have been (briefly) part of a squad and have been taking vocal commands. Pretty nifty even if I had trouble hearing sometimes. The end result is often linked to the quality of the microphone rather than the bandwidth so .. The mic can be also be set for voice activation if you’d like. I must try these settings some day since I have a spanking new headset to play around with. It sure beats typing away at a keyboard. And it’s great that it is built-in from the start so that you don’t have to fiddle around with extra applications outside of Planetside. Especially since the game itself refuses to leave focus once it has been initialized. No Alt-Tab. No minimizing. No nothing.

LAG: Not good. Probably the biggest problem. It’s sometimes hard to tell from jerky graphics and I would really need to play the game offline to tell what is what. As long as you stay in Sanctuary things are pretty ok, but once you join the fray the lag really starts to show. This is not mainly because of the game itself, or the amount of players, but because the servers are in the US. The ping times rarely go under 200ms which is not good to begin with.
Sony claimed they were going to launch at least one server in Amsterdam when the game launched and I hope this will help us Europeans. MMORPGs on american servers are impossible using the current internet infrastructure. It doesn’t matter how you tweak the game. The physical constraints are just to much in the way.

Hardware Req: Not overly extreme. Except on the memory side perhaps. You basically NEED 512 MB RAM. And about 1 GB of SWAP. I tried it with 256 MB SWAP (I had lowered the setting because of the stupid install) and the game exited after 10 minutes or so. 1024 MB RAM would be nice.

Random thoughts: Hmmm. I keep comparing this to Tribes for some reason but Planetside is very different. More advanced. More realistic. A bit less fun to play. Unless you really get into this squad stuff.
I mean, take the weapons and ammo thing for example. With the “Agile” armor (which is the second worst from what I understand) you can carry something like 200 bullets and an assault weapon. And hopefully two medkits. You also have some crappy tool for hacking terminals (useless) and a pistol that is pretty much useless. The assault rifle has clips of 30 bullets and need to be reloaded after that. Trust me, 200 bullets do not last very long. And you don’t have much time to do any real damage. This is a seriously boring element of the game. Even when you go into VR weapons training you find that there are no good weapons and you never have enough ammo. Point is I want my Tribes Spinefuser back. Or a goddamn real weapon that you can kill ppl with and don’t have to run 10 min back to base to get more ammo.
Instead of having fun you get killed by some jerk in a big ass armor that has levelled up to be able to carry a bit more effective weapons. They still suck but at least they are bigger than what you’re carrying.
On several occasions I have found myself in strategic situations and been able to do nothing. Once I spotted a pilot who had landed behind a hill and exited his vehicle to do repairs (which means he must be pretty levelled to begin with). I approached him from the rear and when I got close enough I opened fire with my pea shooter (assault rifle). Guess what. He didn’t care. He just took cover behind the ship, entered, lifted off and blasted my ass to hell. My point is that there are no strategic opportunities. No fun. No action. Just bare facts. You can not attack a ship no matter how cunning and sneaky you are. You need a squad. Or a big fat armor. Or a ship of your own. Realistic in a way. But REALLY boring. Where is my SAM launcher? RPG? Railgun? Anything?
Maybe it would more fun if you had quick classes as in Battlefield for example. No levels. Just quick action. On the other hand I have to admit that SOE has created a very complex MMORPG and that I might be missing the point here. Maybe MMORPGs simply aren’t for me.

The main problem with Planetside remains. It takes a while to get used to. Instant action doesn’t exist in this universe. It is full of constraints that must be overcome. Too close to real life - will this be the downfall of Planetside? Or am I just grumpy because I get my ass shot off all the time?

To be continued …