PlanetSide 2 – The Update and roadmap

by Dawnshift · 3rd February 2013

The development team at PlanetSide 2 (SOE), deserve a big thanks for the awesome work they have done and if I had the address I’d send them candy. Anyways, the content patch went live last night (European time). The SMGs (Sub machine guns), new spawn room system/layout and improvements in performance is something we all been looking for. But that’s not all, no there’s a lot more.

Friday Januari the 25th SOE published their 6 month roadmap for PlanetSide 2 for everyone to see. This type of actions are what a community loves, not to mention that SOE has the possibility to screen/view what the players think about the upcoming changes or add additional content before they need to publish it. Brilliant! Here is the link to the roadmap: http://www.planetside2.com/roadmap

Ultimate Empire showdown

The same day as the roadmap was released there was the Friday Night Ops event, Ultimate Empire Showdown. I was too tired to watch the stream (local time 2:00 am) so I watched it the next morning with a nice cup of coffee. The broadcast was horrible in many ways. Don’t get me wrong, the content and people were great but the sound problems and missing intro speeches (TotalBiscuit) and so on made it look a bit too annoying for me to stay focused. I hope they write a script and hire someone to direct it next time because it really has potential. Those are minor things and if you just want to see gaming action and the people around it you’ll be fine, but it did bother me, a lot.
http://www.planetside2.com/ultimate-empire-showdown

But I’m glad the event happened, it shows a lot of heart from the company (SOE). Not that many large AAA game titles have the passion to create player events, hand out their plans and make the players feel like they are part of the process. Kudos! Below you can find the patch notes for January. At the bottom of the pages, some screenshots and links.
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The patch, January edition

Spawn Room Tunnel System
In our ongoing effort to mitigate spawn camping, we are planning on adding some spawn room tunnel networks to provide additional escape paths. The current plan is to add these to all Tech Plants and Amp Stations.

Rendering Distance Based on Threat
We want to mitigate the impact of render distance on enemies that are a direct threat. For example, anyone that pilots air vehicles can probably attest to how lame it is to get shot down by AA players that didn’t render because of the distances involved. We want to make sure that doesn’t happen.

Tower Redesign
The layout of towers would be altered to include more shields and an additional exit from the spawn room. The hope is to make spawn camping in the towers a more difficult proposition.

More secure spawn rooms at small outposts
This entails adding more windows and doors, as well as a canopy to protect against aircraft. This should make spawn camping more difficult and will be present across all small outposts.

Experience Incentives
The idea behind this Incentive system is that higher “priority” targets are worth more experience than others. So killing someone on a wicked kill streak nets you more XP than killing someone right as they spawn.

For example, perhaps something like this:

Spawn Kill 25xp
This is a newly spawned player alive for less than seconds.
Kill 100xp
This is a player who has lived for more than 30 seconds and has accrued less than 500 unbuffed xp without dying.
Priority Kill 150xp
This is a Player who has lived for more than 30 seconds and has accrued more than 1000 unbuffed xp and less than 2000 unbuffed xp without dying.
High Priority Kill 300xp
This is a Player who has lived for more than 30 seconds and has accrued more than 2000 unbuffed xp without dying

When an enemy is spotted, we mayd add a visual indicator to show the relative target “priority” This status would be inherited by any vehicle the player owns

Defender Only Jump Pads
In an effort to help support general defense at facilities, we’re exploring the idea of having the jump pads which allow players to quickly traverse the walls only be usable by the Empire in control of the facility. The current plan is to roll this out to all of the Tech Plant and some specific Biolab walls.

Experience Source Display Improvements
We want to display the total Experience bonus percentage rewarded whenever you get the applicable experience.

Currently this would show as a small popup next to your Cert point display right above the Minimap.
This would add up elements like:

Population Bonus
Membership Bonus
Defense Bonus (We might actually just display the defense bonus as a static value in the facility panel above the minimap all the time)

Squad Boosts
Personal Boosts

In addition, we want to show a progress bar over your certification points to give a better visual indicator of how close you are to earning your next cert point.

SMGs
We’d like to add a new weapon type, the Submachine Gun (SMG), to the game.

The current plan is to make them accessible to all classes outside of the MAX
Stats on the individual weapons will vary slightly to account for Empire and specialization differences, but currently the goal is to have the SMG look something like this:
Pros

Excels in Close Quarters Combat
Top end Rate of Fire
Low Time To Kill

Cons

Significant drop off in effectiveness at medium and long range
Limited magazine size

Window Plugs
We’re making windows all across Auraxis’ bases and facilities smaller, so it should be tougher for tanks and planes to shoot into buildings.

Creating “No Deploy” zones for AMS equipped Sunderers
We are currently discussing mechanics which would allow designers to designate areas within a base or facility that Sunderers cannot deploy in. The initial use of this ability will be to disallow Sunderer deployment in Tower Vehicle Bays, but that can expand if we discover other problematic areas.

New signs, which I think are the wrong way. Left shows down and right shows up according to the folks on PlanetSide.

Player Invincibility on Spawn
Getting killed right as you spawn in is not fun. One of the things we can do to try and reduce frustration on that front is to add a very brief period of invulnerability to a player in that situation.

The goal would be to only allow players to get their bearings and maybe start to make a break for cover – taking any actions like firing a weapon would remove the invulnerability even if the default timer had not yet expired.

***UPDATE***
Hey everyone, thanks for taking the time to call out your concerns with this feature. For the January implementation, we want to make sure this is dialed back to the point that it should really just be keeping you from getting killed while you’re still on a loading screen – somewhere under one second.

We can tune it down to nothing or up to a longer duration if the need presents itself, but initially we’ll shoot for this to have a very small impact outside of making sure you’re actually in control of your character before you get killed.

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Also a big thanks to PurrfectStorm (Game Designer at SOE) who handed out on Twitter some custom LevelCap decals that can be used in-game.