Hubby and I both received beta invitations late this morning to PlanetSide 2. After eagerly downloading and installing the client, I’m sad to report my first impression is less than positive.
Zero character customization, you get a choice of five faces to choose from and all five are grainy and look like something drawn by a four-year-old with talent. So now you have your drone, can’t even call them soldiers because there is absolutely no difference between the guys on your left and the guys on your right, and you are thrust into the world. There is no tutorial, no brief introduction on what to do or where to go. You are just suddenly spawned in the middle of some military base with no clue on what to do next.
Being overwhelmed I played around with the User Interface trying to see if I had missed something. Nope, I hadn’t missed anything but I could immediate join any squad I clicked on. Knowing how badly I tend to suck at shooters, especially when I haven’t played one in a long time, I refrained from joining a squad.
Instead, I went to the new wikia that was released last week. The wall of text was helpful but frustrating but it at least gave me somewhat of a clue. Still far from comfortable, I valiantly tried again. Logged-in and promptly got frustrated. Part of that is my own lack of confidence with first person shooters, part of it is the general attitude of those that play first person shooters to those that are less than elite players, and the last part was just great disappointment with Sony.
Every SOE game I’ve ever played has had an introductory tutorial. It allows you to get familiar with controls, interfaces, and mechanics. For some unfathomable reason, SOE has failed to include an introductory tutorial of any kind. Let’s be blunt, not many people are going to be willing to stop game play and rush out to a wikia page to learn how to play a shooter. As a result, when the game goes live on November 20th, I can imagine epic postings of friendly fire massacres, forum postings furious at the frustrating user interface, and the horrible graphics.
I’ll give the game another go before it is out of beta, but right now, I’m so very thankful we didn’t buy two Alpha Squad packages this weekend.
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