08-28-2009, 02:53 PM
I think Planetside had a lot of accidental genius in that area.
I think maybe one thing that limits the "zerg" feeling you might get in Planetside (also WW2O) is that anything you want to do, you basically can do with 1 person. Technically.
You only need 1 person to blow up a generator or destroy the spawn tubes or cap the base or cap a tower or deploy a spawn spot.
So if you could somehow slip around the zerg vs zerg warfare, you could accomplish something big. I think that was a real driving factor in the psychology of the Planetside player. "If I can just sneak in here and..." / "If I can just hide while that tank goes by, then I can..." / "If I can run up here and cap this tower before anyone notices..."
You'd die trying these things like 49 times out of 50 but the point was the potential was always there for you to do something heroic.
Even on the battlefield, not all targets were the same. So yeah, you'd go tit-for-tat for a while killing zerglings but once in a while you could blow up a tank or a flying transport or something and get a rush of "Oh yeah, I'm awesome".
WAR doesn't really have any of that. There's nothing you can do solo, so you'll never be the hero. Trying to be sneaky/solo mostly just results in your worthless death. And there's rarely that moment of "Oh yeah, I'm awesome" because the only thing there is to kill is more nameless, faceless zerglings.
So maybe the necessary elements are:
* Objectives which can be accomplished by an individual
* Objectives take some time to be accomplished, such that an individual can also interrupt it
This way the drive of zerg vs zerg is to get that individual in there to do or to interrupt the objective. Current WAR implementation means that the drive of zerg vs zerg is to simply overwhelm the enemy zerg by pure brute force, which takes away from individual creativity and accomplishment.
I think maybe one thing that limits the "zerg" feeling you might get in Planetside (also WW2O) is that anything you want to do, you basically can do with 1 person. Technically.
You only need 1 person to blow up a generator or destroy the spawn tubes or cap the base or cap a tower or deploy a spawn spot.
So if you could somehow slip around the zerg vs zerg warfare, you could accomplish something big. I think that was a real driving factor in the psychology of the Planetside player. "If I can just sneak in here and..." / "If I can just hide while that tank goes by, then I can..." / "If I can run up here and cap this tower before anyone notices..."
You'd die trying these things like 49 times out of 50 but the point was the potential was always there for you to do something heroic.
Even on the battlefield, not all targets were the same. So yeah, you'd go tit-for-tat for a while killing zerglings but once in a while you could blow up a tank or a flying transport or something and get a rush of "Oh yeah, I'm awesome".
WAR doesn't really have any of that. There's nothing you can do solo, so you'll never be the hero. Trying to be sneaky/solo mostly just results in your worthless death. And there's rarely that moment of "Oh yeah, I'm awesome" because the only thing there is to kill is more nameless, faceless zerglings.
So maybe the necessary elements are:
* Objectives which can be accomplished by an individual
* Objectives take some time to be accomplished, such that an individual can also interrupt it
This way the drive of zerg vs zerg is to get that individual in there to do or to interrupt the objective. Current WAR implementation means that the drive of zerg vs zerg is to simply overwhelm the enemy zerg by pure brute force, which takes away from individual creativity and accomplishment.