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Rob Zacny

Episode 196: Grunt's Eye View

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Rob is joined by Shawn Andrich, Evan Lahti, and Phill Cameron to talk about Planetside 2 and the past and future of the large-scale shooter. At what point does the scale start to turn a shooter into a strategy game, and does Planetside hit that level? Everyone suspects that Planetside would be more strategic if only there were a commander role, and Rob and Shawn are reminded of the old Battlezone games. Evan is impressed by how diverse the experiences and battlefields are in Planetside 2, but everyone has doubts about the F2P economy and the progression system. The group also talk about the ArmA series and Natural Selection 2's blend of RTS and FPS.

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An interesting discussion on a slightly left field subject for 3MA. As an old school Battlefield player it's a shame i don't miss the commander role more than I do after it disappeared in BF2142. BF2 was an exceptional game when someone had that commander role, knew what they were doing and the squads were prepared to listen to them. If the other team were doing the same....... I've never really had an only experience to better that at playing wargames, it's such a shame it used to happen so rarely. Of course you can be tactical at a squad level in BF3, but I always think its very telling that BF3 can be "won" by a single squad with half an idea of what they are doing, while everyone else around them run about like headless chickens.

I never played battlezone but it does sound worth checking out. As does natural selection too. Planetside just sounds like a larger scale BF to me, with some poor F2P microtransactions tacked on to the side of it.

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"A larger scale BF to me" - Yeah, but scale matters after a point. It's the difference between a skirmish and a battle, or a racing game that can support eight cars as opposed to one featuring a field of 32. The added scale changes the experience substantially. I wouldn't underestimate it.

I do think Planetside has a ways to go in solving team and faction coordination issues, much as the Battlefield series does. It's sad that multiplayer FPS designers basically have to approach their design expecting that most players will be playing in isolation from one another. But PS2 has some interesting organizational elements that I hope come into their own over time. A commander role, however, seems like a good idea for games like this.

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I would say that BF3 does capture some of the feeling of "war!" With some of the maps - Caspian Border and Kharg Island are the 2 maps that spring to mind, especially if you are on the 64 player PC versions. At least some of the problem in BF3 is the constant need to get XP to reach the next unlock. The points system certain does its best to encourage squad play but to be honest just spamming out ammo or medical drops is often enough to wrack up the points.

Scales does matter clearly, I guess it's the point where the nature of playing video games over comes the nature of effective warfare - far too many people who'd rather play solo than co-ordinate. Given the success of games like left 4 dead 2, I'm sort of surprised that there hasn't been a FPS prepared to do more to force the issue of playing as a squad or team rather than just catering to those who'd rather just be snipers.

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Having finally got a chance to put some time in with Planetside 2 I feels like I finally get where Rob was coming from in picking this topic. He keeps threatening to do a show on the Take Command series and in a strange way I feel this covers the same sort of ground.

What Planetside 2 does really well for those of us thinking critically about strategy games is to highlight the way we take certain things for granted.

In so many of the strategy games I play I am often gifted with perfect control of the units I command, they don't disobey, misunderstand, and it rare even for them to simply underpowered, and they don't spontaneous wander off on their own accord, or attack entirely different targets from those that I desire them to.

All in all they are utterly different from the troops that any budding Planetside 2 commander has at his disposal. His Reputation, Charisma, and Powers of Persuasion and his knowledge of those he has to work with are all the tools that he has, and they are far more important than any grand strategic plan.

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The Battlezone remakes were awesome, didn't really try out BZ 1 yet (only the first levels) but watched my younger brother play BZ 2 a lot and played some missions myself. I think this mixture of RTS and action hasn't been done in a similar fashion afterwards. BTW, regarding Carrier Command, there's a similar game called Hostile Waters - Antaeus Rising from 2001 made by Rage Software that's available on gog.com. It's story based though, but it's also a vehicular action/ RTS mixture, and your base is a carrier ship like in Carrier Command. You should give that one a try, it's been recently re-released. About Arma 2: You should have at least mentioned all the other games in the series, especially Operation Flashpoint, which had a far better singleplayer mode than any of those newer titles in the series, and it also became pretty tactics/strategy based later in the game. And regarding the addons: I think guerilla warfare has never been modelled in an FPS more realistically than in OpF Resistance.

Hehe, another thing not related to this topic: The Red Turn DLC for Unity of Command is gonna be awesome. I'm a beta tester on it, and the NDA has been lifted due to release (probably tomorrow). Have told the guys at 2X2 via messages that they should ask for an interview on 3MA (but they said they don't have time at the moment, but maybe it's possible after release). The campaign seems to be even better and longer than the two campaigns in the main game.

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