Vu sur Action Vault: Danny « Blackbird » Han, l’homme qui s’occupe des relations avec la communauté de Planetside, vient de faire un tour sur les forums officiels du jeu et a répondu à de nombreuses interrogations.[–SUITE–] Empire information: I’m hoping to have some Empire information available as a link on our webpage within the next couple weeks (probably around early July).
screenshots: Actually, that’s one of the things I wanted to release as a screenshot was a bird’s eye view of portions of our larger maps. Perhaps I can do this for July’s screenshots. The downside, though, is that it’s not so impressive because you really don’t have a sense of scale, which is what’s needed to really get a sense for the bird’s eye view.
armor parallels: Well, I don’t know if you’d say the armor in PlanetSide is similar to the exo-skeleton technology the military has been researching for many years. It might be similar to a small degree, but we’re still imposing limitations so no one is performing super-human feats such as jumping out of a helicopter and landing on their feet running into battle 🙂
helmets: All players will have helmets, which are worn out in the field. When you’re back in the safety of your own city (located on the home continent of your respective Empire), the helmet will be removed and you’ll be able to see the character’s face.
slowing down vehicles and jumping out of them while in motion: The vehicle will probably come to a gradual stop. Note that only a few passenger vehicles will have open cockpits where this situation might happen.
tracking lag: We’ll probably have some type of netgraph in the final game. Right now we’re only displaying ping, but at this stage of development (which is internal testing only), we haven’t gotten around to showing packet loss to or from the servers yet.
on-foot travel across terrain: Well, actually, that’s a little slow to cross 2 kilometers in 40 minutes. I think at our normal running speed, it would take something like 5 to 10 minutes. I forget the actual numbers off hand, but keep in mind that the terrain will be built in such a way that you can’t just run a beeline to anywhere you want. Natural obstructions will force players to navigate in more roundabout ways.
inventory: Every character will have a backpack of sorts, and what you can store in that backpack will depend on the size of the item as we utilize a slot based system. What you see ON the player is what we call « quick draw » in that these weapons are available almost instantly, whereas anything else on the character (e.g. in the backpack) can only be accessed via an inventory screen.
product availability in Europe: I want to assure all our European gamers that we’re really going to do our best to make sure PlanetSide is in your hands as soon as possible. I am far from the deciding factor in how a game ships (or how much ships, or where it ships), but I do believe that massively multiplayer means global and not simply local.
bounty system: There is still a bounty hunting system that’s on our plate of things to spec out. There’s also a vendetta system, but that one’s not quite as high on our priority list.
QA testing: You do try to learn from other people’s mistakes, hoping to avoid them yourself. By the same token, we’re also not new to massively multiplayer gaming, having a lot of experience from EverQuest, of course. But yeah, I understand the frustrations of playing a game (being the first on the block, if you will) and having major issues that cause you to consider even returning it. I do hope that we’re learning and watching throughout the course of PlanetSide’s development.
