Seems that it's not just a case of the lights being on but no-one being home:
OGRank: Planetside: what is coming in the near future
A small heads-up, and "we're not dead!" shout out from the Planetside Development team, detailing some of the upcoming development work we, the ever-dwindling members of the three Auraxian armies can expect some patch day soon. It's a good list, particularly from my perspective, since my, frankly abysmal, FPS Skillz often tend to drive me toward the tactical planning and forethought of Combat Engineering for my kills, so any new toys there will probably be be something I'll use, and often.
These aren't especially new or stunning developments, mind you, and pretty much every thing mentioned there has been in the pipeline for over a year now:
Van Hemlock: The Tour of Duty
Hard to say how I feel about it all to be honest. On the one hand, I've always felt that Planetside is a bit of a chess-game, with well known 'pieces' and 'board'. Almost every type of unit has a counter of some description, and the balancing of these has been the core focus of all PS development since day one. Nowadays, I'm sure there are still quirks, but on the whole, most guns, vehicles, implants and certifications are
reasonably fair now, when compared against the others. Everyone screams when their personal favourite isn't as godly as they'd like, but on the whole, life seems equally sweet, and fraught for most people in there now.
It was exactly this kind of balance that was so comprehensively destabilised when they suddenly added four new cave battlefields, three new energy infantry energy weapons, a teleporter truck, long-range artillery and floating armoured turret hoverbike one patch day (Core Combat Expansion), and then again when they casually dropped in nine super-shogun mega-battlezor mecha stompey robots on a whim during 'Aftershock'. It's taken over a year to get those anywhere near balanced, and took a massive AV buff, and the removal of three of the robots entirely.
So change, in this context especially, is something to fear. Any new CE equipment is, with the best will in the world, likely to go in to the game massively over/under powered, probably full of exploitable unforeseen behaviours and generally make most players' Planetside a very confusing place for quite some months.
On the other hand, it's clear the game needs
something new, to blow the cobwebs out, and entice disaffected, or simply drained, previous players into having another look. To my surprise, off the back of one single 'I wonder how it's getting on' drop-in session, I'm now finding myself drawn to it on a more regular basis again, with two or three sessions since I last posted about it. It's fun for now, and I do even seem to be getting slightly better.
My current 'best' weapon was a bit unexpected. I'd picked up Special Assault with vengeful dreams of setting fire to the WHOLE WORLD with green plasma burney death, using the Thumper, but soon found that it was the Rocklet Rifle I was getting the most out of. It's a six-shot weapon that fires 'Rocklets'...a kind of half sized bazooka round with explosive tip. Slow flight time, but a good straight trajectory, a very good maximum range, surprising pinpoint accuracy, and the ability to significantly damage soft or hard targets indiscriminately, in a surprisingly low number of hits. Alternate fire mode rapid-fires all six shots in a wider scatter pattern, good for those panickey moments facing MAX suits or Tanks, which I tend to do a lot (panic, that is), and the Rifle can even be stuffed with Frag Grenades instead, turning into an Anti-Air Flak launcher. Truly a weapon for all occasions, provided you can get used to how it handles.
I think I may be doing just that, and last session saw me somewhere around 23/38 K/D. Still suckey, true, but getting better!
What was a bit surprising though, and somewhat alarming too, was that over my last few sessions, each empire I was on consistently failed to achieve a single Empire Lock during prime time, showing that my first look wasn't just a blip, and these days, on Werner at least, there are typically less than 133 players on a team, peak. Basic maths and assumptions dictate there are now less than 1200 players playing Planetside, in total, (three teams per server, three servers) at prime time now, which is a bit sobering. Making perhaps 6000 subscribers, applying The Rule of Five, although how many of those are Reserves (Free Trial), or on the Station Access Pass (Get PS for free in addition to the games they
really wanted) is anyone's guess.
Last time I checked, the biggest forum thread was a typically heated player debate on whether all three remaining servers, Emerald, Markov and Werner, should be merged, which would leave PS with one server from an original five. (The Europeans were quite vocally against, which is understandable, with as much as 150ms extra ping time to reach Emerald from my house, compared to Werner.) The last dev communications, prior to the above announcement, were an impassioned 'tell your friends about us!' campaign, and bizarrely enough, an anagram contest.
I have one: I SPELT A END
Still, definitely going to enjoy it while it lasts, and if they seem to think they have the spare time, effort and money to continue development for the title, perhaps we'll get a good run out of it yet! Personally, I doubt new kinds of landmine will reverse the tide completely, but certainly might slow it down somewhat...