From my understanding, Eternal Crusade will have gameplay elements that closely resemble that of Planetside 2. For those not aware, Planetside 2 is already dead...not even 2 years after its release. As of next week it will be down to 2 servers, from 6-7 on launch. Not only did SOE fire hundreds of employees in the past year within their own company, they have taken developers working directly on Planetside 2 & allocated them to other projects such as H1Z1/Everquest/Landmark etc. Rather than going into the plethora of obstacles & poor decisions made by SOE that led to this outcome, I would like to know what Behaviour has learned from Planetside 2 & how they intend to succeed where Planetside 2 failed.
PS2 failed because of the insanely high cost of purchasing things without $ and the chaotic fighting system that had a heavy emphasis on coordinating tank/air crafts. It is a death sentence to anyone who doesn't know what they're doing but it's really fun if you know how to play. Besides that, PS2 didn't have an overarching story or a massive fan base before it was released. EC has the privilege of having a the GW endorsement to let them use Warhammer 4ok lore and designs. If they keep with it, even the people who don't normally play MMO-style games will be initially drawn to it, then it'll just be an advertisement issue to keep a steady influx of players coming in and the game will be a success. I'm not terribly concerned about marketing yet. I'll wait until the open beta before I start worrying.
If Eternal Crusade can follow through on its promises then it will have many more mechanics that will allow for meta game to emerge. Planetside 2 only has capture the point right now. Planetside 2 has a simplified resource system that really just punishes the losing faction. I do have to say that planetside 2 is adding a massive content patch this week including continental conquest, outfit base capture/ownership and a new continent Hossin. So maybe things will start to get interesting as the console port cycle has finally started to come to an end and they start to add good content like they were promising two years ago during alpha.
IMO what they want to do that improves on PS2: 1 world wide server, this should guarantee massive fights all the time. Player missions at launch, dunno if SOE already has them in but it should have been in from the get go. More emphasis on defense. Destructible base respawns. Destructible terrain (just certain parts). More focus on infantry battles, for a long time PS2 was dominated by tanks with HE rounds or air with lolpods and liberators, probably still happens. Supply lines. And the most important, campaign objectives and a narrative tied to them, this gives us a reason to fight, this give you a reason to defend a facility instead of "I hope we loose this biolab so I can farm kills when we try to retake it". Of course all of this is just talk, we will know what they have really learned about PS2 mistakes once we play EC for a few months.
Planetside 2 didn't have any lasting power. It was fun and the battles could get truly epic but I don't see why anyone would want to play it for years *It has no story so there are zero story updates or storylines to follow. * There's no RPG progression at all so you're not developing your character at all. You're just playing a cardboard cutout of a generic soldier and if you wanted to customize your appearance in any way shape or form you had to spend money on stuff * The game barely gets any content updates. They keep releasing new guns that are basically the same as the old guns but with a few stat changes and in 2 years they've come up with 1 additional vehicle and zero new maps! It feels like only the cash shop gets any updates *It takes forever to progress in any way unless you either hack or spend money. For casual people (who make up the bulk of the cannon fodder in games like these) it'd take like a month to unlock two new guns and that would be the only new content they'd get *most importantly it didn't have any metagame so eventually you just got super bored of capping the same bases over and over again as it felt like it didn't mean anything at all I do hope the devs for Eternal Crusade can avoid some of these mistakes since they have the benefit of hindsight now.
It'll be down to 2 US servers though. Waterson and Mathersson are merging. There will be a battle on the PTS soon that'll decide which server get to keep their name after the merge. So it'll be one of those two after the merge, and Connery. Yes to this, but even if they condensed the player base down, it'll still be 4 servers, not 2. US east, US west, AU, and EU.
