You PlanetSide suckers just got conned :o

Games
21

I think we are starting to differentiate between MMO and “game” a little too much. As far as “games” go Planetside was a dog. The entire ordeal was a Massively Multiplayer Exercise In Futility with the whole incentive of actually holding territory meaningless out of the box.

…by “game” standards, PS sucked and was incomplete out the door. I do not subscribe to these lower than the Earth’s core standards that have been normalized by the MMO genre. If you are selling a game in March then it should be at least 80% complete out of the box in March or you earn my ire. PS felt more like 40-50% complete.

You may have trouble with the difference betwen game and MMO, but don’t push your problems on us. You may ‘feel’ the game was a dog, or you may ‘feel’ PS sucked, but your opinion is worth squat, or less than squat, since you barely played PS and you haven’t played any other MMO game since Ultima. I’ve played since beta, with at least 10 to 15 other people on this board and we’ve had a good time. And whether they stuck with it or not, in every case they knew it was a.) massively multiplayer and b.) a pretty fun game (I know this for a fact because we actually chatted about it in the massively multiplayer game we were playing at the time).

When you say, “completely neutral”, all I hear is, “completely uninformed”. Please put all your 40%-50% feelings and March release and Earth’s core analogies back in your butt where they belong.

22

Have to agree with Tom & co on this one. PS is a fantastic game. I had more fun with it than I did with BF1942, and that’s a bold statement. I don’t know what was missing from the game at launch–I’d say pretty much nothing. The problem with the game wasn’t a botched or incomplete launch, but rather that there wasn’t enough new or changed content after launch to justify the monthly fee. If the game were free to play, it would be the best multiplayer shooter ever (and probably the best shooter of any kind, ATM). The problem is that asking $13 a month to play the world’s best shooter is a little much, unless you’re adding new content and gameplay all the time.

23

:lol:

24

That’s a curious statement, Mr. Module. Care to elaborate? What did you feel was missing?

Planetside certainly had some problems, but as far as being stable and feature complete, I thought it was a fantastic launch. I don’t see how it was “a dog” and “a shell of a game” by any standards.

 -Tom[/quote]

Well, for starters there was pretty much no point to taking over a base, out of the box. I don’t see why this was so difficult that it needed to be added long after the game’s launch (and from what I hear it still needs alot of work and could be so much more).

Secondly, alien technology. Where is it? There is all this talk about this alien world and how everything is based on alien techology that we found on the planet. Where are the aliens ruins? Where are the alien artifacts? Oh yeah, you need to pay for them in an expansion. If they had just stfu about the whole subplot to the Planetside conflict, this would be a non-issue.

Aside from those issues, there were and still is from what I hear from friends alot of periods of lag and bugs. The lag is one thing. That shit happens. But when it can take upwards of 20-30 minutes to get into a squad, get a Gal and find some action crashes and other issues with buggieness should be less common than what I hear about on the grapevine.

I’m sure I could think of more, but the girlfriend just arrived with ice cream and a rented copy of Mario Golf.

25

Then it’s about as worthwhile as your opinion - not so at all.

I was merely qualifying my opinion for those who would read it. I wasn’t qualifying it as superior. Sorry you read it that way.

By the basest game standards I can muster, PS was a boring, contrary experience and I do mean that with every ounce of sincerity.

I obviously hurt your feelings. My apologies. You have spent your money well, obviously.

26

I obviously hurt your feelings. My apologies.

Nah, don’t sweat it. I’m going to go run people over with my Thresher to make myself feel better. :)

27

I’m going to stick my neck out a little bit on this one (and insert words into G-M’s mouth),

I think the distinction that Gaming-Module was trying to draw out was the distinction between MMO games and “normal” (non-MMO) games.

For a MMOG, PS had a great launch and has enjoyed quite a bit of success. The gameplay is a lot of fun, it seems to scale fairly well, and it’s had a lot fewer crashes than the average MMOG (at least based on my experience – which was playing twice on the free downloadable copy. I strongly debated buying it, and decided I didn’t like it enough to give them $14 a month).

However, for those of us who don’t normally play a lot of MMOGs, the game was fairly confusing and slow to get started. Not to mention difficult to really understand unless you were going at it quite seriously (skill development and the like was not terribly intuitive – at least for me). It was also laggy and buggy compared to most offline games.

I think we as gaming consumers (rightly?) apply a different set of standards to MMOGs. There’s no doubt that they’re a different animal than traditional games, so different standards might be okay. What burns me is paying a nice chunk of change monthly and not getting constant updates and developments in terms of content. I expect the bug fixes to come for free – after all, bug fixes are issued for damn near every online (and offline) game, whether it’s massively multiplayer or not. What my $14 should buy is new content, new adventures, new gameplay, new items, etc. etc. With Planetside, I expect new weapons to pop up (and old ones to be removed) as the various sides develop new technologies (or modify alient technologies). None of that seems to be coming (at least not without an expansion).

If any non-MMO FPS had CTDs and lag like PS, we’d all be (rightly) panning the code. However, because PS is so much better than certain other disasters (read: WW2O), we’re largely willing to overlook its flaws. I don’t think G-M is too far off base to say that the technical experience with most MMOG’s is significantly worse in many respects than any decent online game. The only saving grace for MMOGs right now is the community – and for some, an online community really isn’t all that much different from playing in a clan, anyway.

And before anyone accuses me of knowing what I’m talking about, remember that I’m the guy pining away to play a few good rounds of SiN online, so…

Flame away. :wink:

28

As for putting words in my mouth, you didn’t. You hit the nail pretty much on the head, give or take a point or two. I could pan PS all day, but I think I’ll just bow out and duck into the corner and silently scold myself for posting a generic bash when the real issue is at hand.

Greedy bastard developers who are basically charging you a flat fee in the first place to be some sort of extended beta test, charging a monthly fee to “maintain the gameworld” (whatever the hell that means anymore. It’s meaning seems to shift from year to year) and then charging you another flat fee for “new content,” which apparently no longer is synonymous with, “maintaining the gameworld.”

29

“The problem with the game wasn’t a botched or incomplete launch, but rather that there wasn’t enough new or changed content after launch to justify the monthly fee. If the game were free to play, it would be the best multiplayer shooter ever (and probably the best shooter of any kind, ATM). The problem is that asking $13 a month to play the world’s best shooter is a little much, unless you’re adding new content and gameplay all the time.”

Why I didn’t stick with it. In the end they are asking you to pay $13 a month for a large scale team fortress type game. If the game had something to make it stand out more over a others like taking over a base actaully meant something. There was a way to win, a goal to work for etc etc then maybe. I just spend that time with BF1942 and save the cash.

30

Remember all the rumors about sanctuary strikes? That was supposed to be “A way to win.” I seriously doubt we’ll ever see it, though.

31

For my money, Tyjenks and DaveC getting into scrapes is a lot more interesting than all the “[Poll] Game you played when you were drunk and you thought it was awesome but then you sobered up and you loaded your savegame and realized that the game was not very good at all, and in fact you are quite disappointed and you want your money back but EB changed their policy and now your screwed” threads.

32

I’m glad I wasn’t here last week.

Maybe I should start a “thread about games that you thought you might have sucked (the thread, not the game) but didn’t get to read because you were on vacation”.

The TAGTYTYMHS(THNTG)BDGTRBYWOV thread?

33

I think if PS billed itself as more of a persisent-world Tribes and less of an MMO experience, people would being able to have more fun with it. It is annoying to see all those bases you spent all day capturing in the hands of the enemy the next time you log on. Maybe if everything reset at midnight (based on where the server is located), rather than rolling over until someone else captures it, things would be a little more intuitively twitch-like. Also, an info screen declaring which faction won for that day, with all kinds of stats, would be neato.

But, if the howling in the PS forums is any indication, it’s content that’s king, as usual, and combat as it stands now is just too generic. Not enough differentiation between bases, although geography is IMO pretty solid. I would really dig seeing some innovative and distinctive base design, in addition to much higher damage. It just takes too much ammo and time to take an enemy down. An FPS works really well when you can just mow people down. Let’s see some headshots!

34

The gap between MMO “good game” standards and non-MMO “good game” standards is pretty wide; that’s one of the big issues here in trying to figure out whether PlanetSide is a “good game.” Because judged against non-MMO shooters, it has some glaring weaknesses, including by not limited to no hit location, generic hit boxes, cone of fire mechanics that limit player skill, ZeroPing client side hit detection, occasional/system specific framerate issues, server lag, bugs, lack of focus, uneven distribution of players in proportion to the geography, and lack of purpose.

Judging it against other MMOs is hard because it’s the only FPSMMOG out there. Judged against EQ or DAoC, it has a tiny fraction of the “content,” character progression/development, and plain old “stuff.”

So how do you judge PS? Well, I start with, “Is it fun?” My answer is “hell, yes!” Next, “Is it worth what you have to pay for it?” My answer is, “um, maybe, depends.” And that’s what I’m seeing from many who are abandoning PS. It’s not that they feel the game sucks, but that they feel it isn’t worth the money, which is an entirely different kettle of fish.

I mean, I think a Mercedes is a fantastic car, but is it worth that much money? Not to me (ok, I don’t HAVE that much money, but you get the idea).

35

I thought PS was a terrific game. I’m just having more fun in SWG, and I really only feel like paying one company at a time for online gaming. Although if it was only $5, I’d probably have left it.

36

I thought PS was a terrific game. I’m just having more fun in SWG, and I really only feel like paying one company at a time for online gaming. Although if it was only $5, I’d probably have left it.

Bingo. It’s not the game, it’s the price point IMO that’s the problem. Ah well, what the hell do we know? SOE is probably raking in dough by the wheelbarrow full or something.

37

Can someone tell me why companies sell their products (50 bucks) and require you to pay more after? If they can afford people downloading their gig size games from the server in the open beta, why not now?

The sad part is people are saying “ooh 500k people, we’re cool” as if that is supposed to impressive. When you hear something like final fantasy games selling millions in one day, you don’t see SquareSoft boost around it like some prized possession.

Not saying Final Fantasy are great, I hate them. But half a million people only? Eek. After playing Everquest myself, it makes me wonder if there is a limit on how stupid people can be.

38

Companies sell the box for $50 because it makes them a substantial portion of their development cost back. It’s money up front, and not dependent on subscription retentions. It also gets the game out to people who can’t or don’t want to download oodles of stuff up front, and it satisfies people who like to have something tangible for their money.

I’m sure someone will try a premium online game with the download the client, no CD, no boxed game philosophy some time relatively soon, but I can also betcha that no company wants to be the first to try it.

39

They do it because they can, duh. People are willing to pay $50 for the game, the company wants money, there seems to be a way to make that work for everybody.

40

It’s the other way around.

That is how it used to be. Back in the days of Compuserve and GEnie, the clients were free (you even got your-per-minute billing turned off when the download was happening), and you paid by the minute to play the game.

The sea change to “pay for the box, play the game for a flat monthly fee” is really Ultima Online, and everyone switched, because that model is financially viable.

Remember that it costs a lot of money to run an MMO, plus money to fund staff for ongoing development. That leaves a relatively small amount of the per-month fee which is actually profit. If you have to make up your initial development costs out of that, you have to retain players for an awfully long time before you go into profit. If the cost of the box recoups your development costs, then you start getting a profitable revenue stream almost immediately.

–Dave