THE GOOD – What I Liked

• It runs through Steam, and uses the SOE account system (conveniently the same that EQ2 uses).
• Free-to-play!

• Combat hotspots are an unorganized chaos of gunfire and cries for medics.
• Weaponry seems to look like Mass Effect stuff, and the whole thing feels a lot like Halo.
• Lag isn’t too much of an issue, at least for me.
• Jetpacks.

• View/draw distances (especially terrain).
• Playing in the daylight.

• Each continent has a different landscape theme.
• Purple!
• Dropping a guy right after he gets revived, and killing his medic friend too.

THE BAD – What Frustrated Me

• Server queues made even more annoying by SOE’s ad campaign for “membership” to PS2.
• Nighttime.

• Everything feels kind of futile.  Spawn, shoot, die.
• People teleporting or blinking around instead of running smoothly.
• In-game help/explanations seem to be almost non-existent.
• Hard to tell if certain things are bugs, issues due to the huge number of people playing, or my own misunderstandings.

• I can’t be a mech-soldier in a supersuit all the time.
• “Instant-Action” deployment seems to not work a lot of the time.

• Too much vehicular combat for my tastes.
• Teammates running into friendly firing lanes.

• Terrible textures.  I guess they’re needed to keep framerates high, but still.  Damn.
• No gore.
• Whenever I quit, Windows says “Planetside 2 has stopped working.”

THE UGLY – Random Tidbits

• I did not play the original Planetside.
• I forgot it was coming out until yesterday.

• As I medic, I would see men die in all directions, and futilely revive them all, one by one, only to see them die again quickly.
• My aim is terrible.

• Six-hour download/install time sucked.
• Feels like Battlefield, but to a huge scale.  I didn’t enjoy Battlefield a whole lot.

• The recoil feels weird.
• Futuristic warfare, yet these guns have ironsights, magazines, and other facets that would probably be the first aspects on weaponry to be improved.
• This would be perfect if it was a World War II setting.
• Borderlands felt more like an MMOFPS than this does.  This is just a TDM/Conquest mode large-scale.

Whenever I see “PS2,” I think of the PlayStation 2.  And overall, I think I’d rather play that.

Updates:

• I don’t play WoW anymore.  That ship has sailed.  I love the game to death, but just cannot play it.
• cRPG is still tops.  HOLY CRAP POLESTUN HAS BEEN GONE AND LIFE IS GOOD.
• War of the Roses is out.  I have played a little.  It’s really cool.
• My PS3 is a Blu-Ray player and Netflix machine.  Games?  What are games?
• Diablo III has not been touched in a while.  I miss it, but cannot devote time to it.

These posts will get more interesting, I promise.

Stay tuned.

A huge part of this frustration is tiredness.  I’ve been up late/early the past few days, so I get annoyed easily with my mistakes in melee.

Another part of this is my attempts to play a 1-hander/shielder with 6 WPF in one-handed weapons.  It isn’t easy.

Polestun is really driving me mad.  So are heavy strength builds.  Both are tough to fight, and usually cause my annihilation swiftly.

Horse archery is great, because I can forget about melee.  While I am sure this isn’t helping my melee skills, I do not really care.  This game is shifting for me, from a win-the-game to a tell-a-story.  It inspires me to think, to write, to imagine.  To goof off with swords and axes and armour.

My only two sources of pain as a horse archer are horse crossbowmen and teammates.

Horse crossbowmen have pretty much every advantage over horse archers except firing speed.  That, too, is nullified, as they can usually ride more maneuverable horses and have easier times dodging and shooting.

For some reason (maybe inherent hatred towards the class), I (or my horse) get teamwounded more often as a horse archer than any other class I’ve played, even more than one-handed cavalry, where I would regularly barrel into clashing infantry.  This is particularly troublesome because my horse is essentially my lifebar as a horse archer.  Without the mount, I’m a slow archer who hits for far less damage than an average dedicated foot archer.

Another great facet about horse archery is I can annoy and possibly neutralize the lancer cavalry who kill a sizeable portion of my team (including valuable archers) within 45 seconds of a round starting.  People need to pay attention, stick to polearmers, stick to cover.  I can also shoot up the “Hollywood Heroes,” as I call them.  The two-handed-sword strength-stacking people who are too dense to carry a shield.  Two of these monsters can wipe out a large portion of my team, but two decent archers can tear these people apart.  As a horse archer, I can shoot them and run them over at incredibly inopportune times (such as when they are swinging at a teammate).  If these players took shields they would be much more dangerous.  I suppose that in all the movies, though, none of the protagonists get killed by a horsearcher who rides circles around them, shooting them full of arrows.

It is easier to complain about ranged and not carry a shield than to lose a few points in Ironflesh and block the arrows with two Shield skill.

My, this post came out bitter.

In other news, I have not played WoW for about a week.  Too much cRPG I think.  Soon, I will return.  Soon.

I have also started playing Neverwinter Nights.  I picked up a bundle of NWN and NWN2 with all the expansions for $20 a few months ago.  Finally started playing it.  Neat game, lots of content.  I am playing a “recommended” Human Fighter, with a longsword and shield.