Vision Document

April 2021 2023

Still a work in Progress

Introduction

Over the past few years I have been entertaining the question of "What if I was in charge of Planetside?", pondering what my priorities would be and how I would layer in changes to PS2 to get the desired result. See below my imagined first letter to the community explaining my vision for the future of the game if I was given the reins. 

The Letter

Well met!

[INSERT PERSONAL INTRODUCTION HERE]

My vision for the immediate future of the game hinges around 3 core aspects:

1. Battle flow

2. Teamwork

3. Integration

Battle flow is my primary focus because it is frankly broken; a new player defends a base and then wonders where everyone else has disappeared to as they redeploy to another fight. They then perhaps figure out how to pull a vehicle (or worse, walk) to travel to the next base, likely getting taken out on the way by an errant ANT or ESF. What we need is for fights to flow naturally between the bases, with objectives moving between to pull fights into the field. This aspect is my primary focus; to remove the automatic hitting of the redeployment key after the last enemy spawn dies. To achieve this we will be implementing mobile objectives that travel between territories thereby taking the fight out into the field naturally.

Teamwork is everything in an MMO, as without it players simply do not play for as long. To that end more should be done to embrace teamwork - using it not only to improve squads and organisation but relying on it for the new player experience and dynamic content. Coordination has been a major focus of my concepts over the years and I want to rebuild this aspect of the game; layering it to provide support for both those players in outfits and not, new players and old, leaders and followers. I also really, really want to get rid of the deafening silence that follows "Who wants squad lead?" in voice comms.

My last core aspect is integration, aiming to reduce the complexity of the different systems which achieve the same result. For example a simplification of the dozen or so manageable personal resources or the various ways the war asset and construction system step on each others toes. I also lump in interactions between different aspects of the game into this category, including those between infantry, MAXs and vehicles.  To this end I want to specialise vehicles types to specific roles (for example, ESFs will lose most of their air to ground ability) instead of allowng them to be jack of all trades. MAXs will be gated behind population imbalance requirements for individual territories instead of being able to be pulled at any time by individuals even when they are winning.