FFS: Planetside 2

Funs, Frustrations, and Suggestions: Planetside 2

For the past several days I've been playing the First-Person Shooter MMO, Planetside 2, and found myself enjoying the game quite a bit. I haven't played the original Planetside, so I knew very little going into the game. Overall I find the game really fun for FPS players and worth trying out. Did I also mention that it's Free-to-Play? Here are some of my funs and frustrations with the game so far:

Fun:

• Good for hardcore and casual players
• Casual players can just go in and mindlessly kill the enemy.
• More serious players have objectives to capture for territorial conquest.
• No commitment or demand to play
• Can play for any length of time. Not necessary to dedicate a part of your day to get through content.
• No real "quests" or "content"
• No rails for your gaming experience.
• No level limits or content separating players.
• This can be stale for some players though, since it can get repetitive.
• Solid FPS gameplay
• Overall a good FPS gameplay experience, but a few aspects of it are rather frustrating, which will be elaborated below.
• Flexibility in classes
• Don't have to worry about picking the right class for you. You can freely switch and upgrade whatever aspect of your play experience you enjoy most.
• Deploy close to the action
• Running around isn't why people play FPS games, so they allow you to deploy to friendly deployed Sunderers, captured bases, and to Squad Spawn Beacons every time you respawn to get to the action faster.
• Support classes feel rewarding
• Being a medic or engineer feels rewarding due to the experience you gain from healing, reviving, repairing, or supplying ammo.
• The support medics and engineers bring allow your team to keep pressing forward without running out of health or ammo.
• Group play is encouraged
• Squads gain bonus experience for supporting each other and are easily visible with a different name color and markers on the map.
• Voice communication is built in for both general and squad-only for easier communication.
• Joining squads is as easy as pressing a single key for quick drop-in action.
• Assists and Critical Assists
• Experience reward for helping kill an enemy, with a larger reward if you deal a large amount of damage to them so you don't feel completely robbed of your kill.
• Variety in play styles
• The different classes allows for a variety of play styles, keeping it interesting
• The different weapons and upgrades for everything allows one to specialize or build towards whatever play style appeals to them

Frustrating:

• No tutorial or guidance
• You're literally dumped into the game with no clue of what's going on. Often you're dumped into the middle of enemy territory and get killed by some random enemy from who-knows where. Talk about a miserable way to be put into the game.
• You know nothing about the UI, nor do you have any help navigating it and learning how to actually get to the action.
• Bullet travel (for standard firearms)
• In such a mass-chaos game, bullet travel feels like an unnecessary layer of complexity to the game that often feels more buggy than intended.
• Latency in combination with bullet travel time can make it very difficult to lead your targets correctly and makes the expected results inconsistent.
• Bullet drop (for standard firearms)
• Another layer of complexity that feels unnecessary in a sci-fi, obviously non-realistic, game.
• Many shooters don't even have bullet drop, so it's not intuitive for players to have to account for this.
• Makes what would normally feel like a head shot only be a body shot, which can leave head shot junkies like myself to feel robbed of a perfect shot.
• ALT to toggle cursor
• Seriously, don't make the ALT key toggle the cursor on an FPS game. People ALT-Tab all the time out of games and it's irritating to have to press it again when you go inside to continue aiming your cross-hair or turn.
• Limited vision distance
• I can't count how many times someone shoots me from out of my vision distance. Enemies literally load up only if they're within a certain visible distance, but I have been killed by people beyond it.
• You may randomly run into a group of enemies in a fairly open area because you didn't see anyone there. So when you get close enough, say hello to the surprise enemies!
• Airship controls
• I can't explain how unresponsive piloting an airship feels. I know I'm certainly not the best at flight simulators, but trying to learn how to pilot an airship has been quite the challenge. I give a lot of props to those that can fly well.
• The wind-up delay on hacking/reviving/etc
• The wind-up makes it feel unresponsive, so I often find myself trying to restart the process again, even though it was just getting started the first time.
• Medic heal on corpses further than revive distance
• The green beam on medic heal has a further range when locking onto a corpse than the actual reviving distance, so it looks like it should be reviving, but you actually have to move closer.
• Friendly fire
• I don't really understand the point of having friendly fire in this game. So many people get run over by vehicles or killed by random friendly grenades, or just shot by a teammate. 
• Getting disconnected closes your game
• Loading up the game takes awhile. Why can't it just put you to the character select screen instead of closing the entire game?
• Bugs
• Engineer: When trying to repair something immediately after dropping an ammo pack, your weapon switches to your primary rifle once the pack deploys on the ground, so if you're holding down your fire button to repair something, you end up shooting your rifle.
• Sometimes healing or repairing doesn't properly credit you experience while it is ticking.

Suggestions:

• Create some on-boarding. Being thrown into the game is overwhelming and can turn away a lot of potential players.
• Add a head shot indicator
• People love head shots, so emphasize it! You only really notice if you get a head shot if you actually kill someone with it, and it rewards you the bonus experience for a head shot kill. Remember Unreal Tournament's "Head shot!" call-out? That feels awesome.
• Kill-cam
• More often than not, you have no idea what killed you or where from. It would at least be nice if the camera at least pointed you to the direction you were killed from. I am assuming they don't want an actual kill-cam that shows the person who killed you so the person's location wouldn't be given away.
• Give damage-dealt stats when you die, so you can feel better about yourself and see how much you hurt other people, or at least your killer.
• Make melee easier
• Melee is very difficult to hit with due to the small hit-area it has. Melee already takes two hits to kill. In such a large-scale FPS game, meleeing someone is one of the harder tasks, and it be more rewarding.
• Remove friendly fire, or reduce the damage of it significantly
• Remove wind-up on hacking/reviving/etc.
• Remove bullet drop and bullet travel, or at least lower the value greatly
• Give a little more specific information on the Cert upgrades/purchases so it doesn't feel so blind purchasing some of them. Especially weapons.
• Make the death animation faster. It feels too slow and sometimes it takes awhile to realize you died.