I AM NOW UPDATING VIA GOOGLE DOCS: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1.../edit?hl=en_US
Q: 1. Thresher?
2. You say that the offline skill training system is there to help friends keep up with each other. But, from what I understand, you still need battleranks, which dictate how many certs you can have trained, and (I think) how high your cert tree is unlocked. How does the offline skill training assist when you still need to be playing to unlock cert points/cert trees? Are battleranks relatively fast to level compared to training the certs?
3.Can we talk with enemies? I've made some very good friends with people I've fought.
4.Working off of #3, why no multiple empires per server so I can play with those friends? Empire hoppers can be balanced with restrictions on moving to a high population empire(plus it can be used to entice people to move to a low populated empire). The answer you or someone else gave is spying, but this is planetside.. Go play eve, where spies can cost you months or years of work. People can learn opsec same as in EVE.
5.How 'locked in' are the loadouts for classes? Can a medic use any infantry weapon? Can any class carry a heal tool, but they just don't get bonuses like a medic would? Many people enjoyed weird things. I've seen cloakers with advanced medic rez a gen hold before.
6.Is there a customizable inventory so you can vary how much stuff you bring? Carrying extra medkits, extra ammo, an extra gun, stacking ammo into a MAX for a gen hold?
7. Will there be a proper Infantry AA solution? Specialized AA weapons, alternate fires on AV weapons, etc?
8.MAX customization? One of my fondest wishes for maxes was a utility slot that let you pick which special you got. Jump Jets, overdrive, and shields each had pros and cons, and different situations they would be useful. A more varied MAX weapon selection also wouldn't have been amiss..
9.Thresher?
10. Will we be able to recert? I know, you want to hook people with RPG elements to get their money, but I really loved how you could mess with your certs whenever you felt like on the first week of a new alt. Could that be tied into the resource economy? Pay for redistribution of cert points? Then indecisive people like me could jump around to different things, by choosing to spend our money there, instead of on weapon upgrades.
11. Will there be a subscription? One of the things that keeps me out of PS right now is I just don't play enough to justify the $15 a month. Can you do like prepaid phones do, and buy, say, 30 hours for $15 or something(which don't expire)? Then I could hop in a few hours a month and play around when I felt like if I wasn't bigtime into the game anymore.
12. When you talked of outfit certs, you mentioned they could specialize. Would a reaver certed pilot in a reaver outfit have better reavers than a reaver pilot in a tank outfit? Or would the reaver outfit pilot just not have to cert them things for himself? Are the bonuses in addition to personal certs? Or do they replace them? Also, I'd recommend having an internal hierarchy for this. Few outfits will want to be all max/infiltrator/etc. They'd have an internal squad for this.
13. I can understand no 3rd person for infantry, but why no 3rd for vehicles? It really helped maneuvering around invincible obstacles and avoiding squishies who were apparently never taught to look both ways before crossing the courtyard. If definitely no 3rd person vehicles, can we get trackir support for the driver view?
Matt: wow.
1 - I'm not really ready to talk about exactly which vehicles will be in the game. I can say that we're carrying over many from the original. Since we're still balancing, tuning, and adding to and removing from the game, saying what will be there at launch is a good way for me to potentially disappoint folks. Threshers are pretty awesome, though.
2 - Battlerank is character based, unless you never actually participate in combat you'll be BR 20 (our current max, not necessarily our final max) long, long before you max out a skill tree. Once you're BR 20 the entire skill tree will be open to you.
3 - We're not restricting cross-empire communication currently.
4 - The current plan is to lock you to one empire per server. This isn't something that we're going to be dogmatic about, if we find compelling reasons to open it up we will.
5 - You'll see many weapons cross classes, you just won't see heavy weapons on light classes, or max weapons on heavy classes, etc. Some weapons will be more locked down than others.
6 - I answered this somewhere else, there will be the ability to customize loadouts, but it won't be an open freeform inventory.
7 - Yes, our goal is to have fully balanced Air-to-Ground, Ground-to-Air and Air-to-Air gameplay, that includes viable infantry anti-air.
8 - MAXes will be as customizable as everything else, you'll be able to select abilities, utilities, weapons, etc.
10 - I think you'll find that the base game is pretty open in what it lets you explore, the time you put in will be to specialize down those paths. Right now there's no plan to allow for recert.
11 - Can't get into business model quite yet, sorry
12 - The spirit of the design is to let you unlock some really cool, unique bonuses through outfit specialization. Here's a completely fabricated, not-actually-in-the-game-so-please-don't-expect-it-to-be-or-call-me-a-liar-when-it's-not example: Your heavy armor focused outfit can unlock the ability to use seige mode on your vanguards, now you can setup outside a base, deploy your tanks and while suffering a firing rate penalty you can attack over a greater distance with aoe bombardments. This is ability would be completely unique to NC outfits that have specialized in heavy armor.
13 - If we do allow 3rd person for vehicles it would be for maneuvering only, you wouldn't have a targeting reticle in 3rd person.
Q: One of my main concerns so far concerns the class system/inventory management. In the original PS, once you purchased the cert for something, you could use it with any other thing you wanted; i.e. you could have both have a sniper rife and a healing tool. So basically, is that sort of inventory management still going to be left up to the player, or are you going to to limit the influence on what any character can be at any given time and preset a player's load out because he wants to be "sniper" or a "medic."
Matt: Players will be more fixed into their roles in PS2. This allows us to do some really fun role-specific mechanics that if allowed to be combined would make for really broken gameplay. In a more restricted system we can let you use and see lots of really cool, unique abilities and weapons in the game.
Q: Is there still inventory/backpacks? What is the shooting mechanics like? planetside 1 had COF/cone of fire.
Is there still going to be animations for getting in and out of vehicles?
Matt: Inventory won't exist in the same way as it did in PS1. There will still be loadouts, but you won't have to manage inventory space to trade-off ammo for medkits, etc.
bullets are simulated objects, they have physics, drop over distances, travel time, etc. There is cone of fire, recoil, all that snazzy stuff.
There aren't animations for getting into or out of vehicles.