PlanetSide Universe - View Single Post - Improvement: Better Footholds, Continent Locks, and Longer Term Persistence
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Old 2012-04-15, 04:21 PM   [Ignore Me] #4
Xyntech
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Re: Better Footholds, Continent Locks, and Longer Term Persistence


Clearly having 3 continents at the start wont work for this idea, but presumably we will be getting more continents and locations over time. I'm hoping at least 1 or 2 new continents a year.

Planetside 1 fostered a strong sense of pride in ones home continents, which I think would be a worthy thing to carry over into PS2.

Having the footholds be impermanent would add a layer of choice, being able to decide which continents you wanted to be your home continents. It would also add a much stronger sense of accomplishment when retaking a lost continent, since you would be reestablishing your foothold itself, not just pushing out from your sanctuary warpgate.

This is a much longer term idea though. I think sticking to 3 continents for the life of the game would be really terrible, so I think it's safe to assume that we will either get more continents or the game will be mostly dead within a few years. What happens when we have 6 continents instead of 3? A single foothold for each empire on each of the 6 continents? I think the foothold idea is a good solution for when there are only 3 continents, but it will be far worse of a solution once there is more room to breath.

Continent locking isn't essential to the idea either. Replace cont locking with having it take an extra long time to cap any bases not touching a broadcast warpgate for a little while after capping the continent.

I like the direction you are going with your ideas in that thread Malorn. In actuality, I don't see much conflict between most of our ideas between the two threads. For example, the VS could have the foothold on a continent from a previous total victory, but the TR could be currently dominating a majority of the territory and be the ones who are gaining the continental benefit. Maybe the VS still got some additional homefield advantages of some kind, but not the major benefit.

My biggest concern is not with continent locks. My biggest concern is with fostering that sense of propriety which helped make many PS1 battles so fierce, as well as adding as many longer term goals and persistent elements to the battlefield as possible. Obviously there are a ton of problems with a "win" scenario, but having as many parts of the battlefield that are slower to change from moment to moment as possible will certainly make the game feel a lot more persistent. Nothing would be permanent, but you would have something to look at each time you logged in and say 'hey, we still hold X continent,' or 'nice, got a new continental benefit' or 'wtf, how did we lose that one? At least we still have Y and Z.'
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