Planetside 2’s beta non-disclosure agreement has lifted, so it’s time to provide my personal experience and take on the game. It’s a beta, only a beta, so we’re not going to be overly critical here.
I personally play as the New Conglomerate, a rag-tag batch of rebels with hard hitting guns. My personal experiences with the game have been many, and mostly positive.
- I hate Maxes. A Max is an armored suit and I hate the damned things because they soak up bullets and usually kill me with their heavy firepower. Apparently there has been some balancing discussion about them, so here’s my suggestion: paint them all bright pink so the other classes can see them coming and gun them down from afar.
- My favorite class thus far is the heavy infantry. My main character is fitted out with a laser scope on his rifle, which I swap out for night vision after dark. The night vision is good for finding enemies, but it’s a little too distracting for me to shoot from.
- The graphics are really nice and apparently can scale beyond what current-gen PCs are capable of. Obviously I’ve not seen that in action – since I don’t have a magic future-computer – but that’s a nice touch.
- When teamwork comes together it’s a beautiful thing. However, there’s little random grouping (from my experience) and joining a random squad usually at best nets you four people that you can spawn on when you die. Impromptu teamwork seems rare.
- Vehicles are a fun to drive but easy to either wreck (the flying ones) or get stuck (the land ones). Obviously there’s a skill level needed for both so I recommend practicing in a one-person ride before you grab a Galaxy or something and kill 9 other people.
- Like in Battlefield 3, snipers love me – I’m always getting picked off. I still feel singled out a lot of the time in combat, but here I can pick another front to fight on if a particular area is frustrating me.
- Here’s a random tidbit: I’ve played on both the European server and the US ones and I swear the European server hates me with a passion. I think there’s some kind of Trans-Atlantic glitch since I have a kill/death ratio of under .100 on that server while my k/d is around .800 on my side of the Atlantic. I’ll empty entire clips into those… beasts from my east and they’ll wait, blink, and then one-shot me. I’m calling bullshit on that.
…ok, maybe it’s not quite that bad but I’m still not playing there anymore. I’m taking my bombs and staying home, thank you very much.
In short I like the game and am looking forwards to it’s full release, with it’s full certification system for customizing my avatar.
Alphasim out.