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Click here to go to the next VIP post in this thread.   Old 2012-10-08, 11:52 PM   [Ignore Me] #35
Malorn
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PlanetSide 2
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Re: Joining the PS2 Team


Originally Posted by Rolfski View Post
My question to you: Besides PS what other games do you like to play? COD/BF style shooters? MMO's? Strategy perhaps? Name a few titles you enjoyed. Are you on console platform as well?
I've mostly played Shooters, RPGs, and strategy games for the last fifteen years or so.

For shooters, I was an old UT player, Quake, then into the newer shooters. I was big into Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat, and Natural Selection (really enjoyed NS and its blend of RTS & FPS). Then the BF Games. I never got into COD much. Really enjoyed BF2142 and BFBC2.

Early college I was horribly addicted to EverQuest and Super Puzzle Fighter 2 Turbo. WoW of course off and on. Dark Age of Camelot is one I kept coming back to. Warhammer. Rift. I played EVE Online quite a bit in GoonSwarm. It was amazing seeing how effective that group was and coming off my small/elite viewpoint in PlanetSide I saw the value of casting a wide net and having a larger mass. It's one of the things that led me to try out the Enclave in Rift.

Strategy games - Starcraft of course, Age of Empires was one of my all time favorites. I like all of the Civilization games and was playing Gods and Kings just prior to PS2 beta.

I generally like anything that is strategy, shooter, and RPG. One thing I enjoyed about PS is that it is a great shooter with a larger strategy element and some mild RPG elements.

I haven't played consoles in a long time because once you go mouse/keyboard it's hard to go back. Strategy games, RPGs, and shooters are all better to play on Mouse/keyboard than on a console. But I enjoyed the old school metroid, metal gear, final fantasy, and of course puzzle fighter console games.

Btw: In case you're familiar with shooters like BF3, consider the following idea for your map designing assignment. One, big particular map in that game (Caspian Border) has proven to be working extremely well for all sorts of combat because of design principles like:
-infantry centric in the middle: relatively close bases, good infantry cover.
-vehicle oriented on the outside: wide open & exposed, more spaced out bases.

I'm not sure if such an idea would work on a PS 2 continent scale but at least I would be very excited to test out such a continent design as it would be a welcome deviation from the standard travel distances, deploy, travel distances, deploy -routine we mostly see in the current game.

Btw, I used to be a colleague of you (Microsoft Netherlands)
Cool! MSFT is a big company, the diversity and integrity it has is awesome!

I've spent a lot of time staring at Indar over the past few weeks watching how it behaves, being in and among it, seeing where the fun fights are. I don't want to go into all the aspects, but I understand what you mean about Caspain Border. There was a BF3 blog a while back talking about how they designed one of their new maps around the idea of balancing the infantry vs vehicle combat. I found that very informative about how to create the right balance. That one is here:
http://blogs.battlefield.com/2012/07...t-bf-map-ever/

There was another one specifically on Caspian here:
http://blogs.battlefield.com/2012/08...aspian-border/

I find these very insightful reads and agree with the idea that some places are better suited for infantry and others vehicles. BFBC2 had Atacama Desert that was a marvelous blend of these two. I think PS2 naturally has this sort of balance in between the outposts, depending on outpost type. Outpost distance and terrain changes that balance. I'm curious to see how Esamir plays out since they are further apart and how it compares to the Crown where the outposts are closer together.

So outpost density, outpost distance, outpost type, population density/funneling and terrain of course are the big levers that control the experience. Its not easy to get that right, but I think fun maps from the BF Games (Karkand, Atacama, Caspain, etc) can teach a lot about creating the right experience that people enjoy and creates variety.
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