Whenever I discuss of lattice and battle flow, as I did last week in Density, two things always come up: 1) The glorious days of the Hex system, and 2) Many bases don't handle lattice well, specifically small (single cap point) outposts. Then typically some suggestions follow. In this post, I'm not going to really push any point here, I just want to clarify history as best I remember it and inform readers how the overall continent flow and level design evolved from Beta through to the present.
I want to preface all of this. I was not on the team before Beta, though I have had many discussions with developers who were, and I played the game since Beta. I joined the team in late-Beta (October, 2012), where I learned a lot more about why things are the way they are, and how it came to be. I was then on the team for the following two years with a lot of knowledge about how and why the changes came about. Devs on the team are free to correct me of anything I may have wrong here. :)
The Hex System
Before we talk about the level design, you need to understand how the flow was expected to be, because the level design was built to support the flow. Knowing this is important to know why the bases are the way they are.Early Hex
The original flow plan of PlanetSide 2 was known as the Hex System, because every territory was divided up into a cluster of hexagons that bordered one another. There was no lattice or any rules governing capture. You could capture any territory you could get to and interact with the capture point. However, the time it took to capture the territory depended on how many adjacent hexes you had. It was a ticket based capture system where adjacent territories awarded you a flat amount of tickets based on what % of the territory border was friendly. To get the remaining tickets, you had to sit on the capture point for possibly a long time, and/or go take other territories. You always had to sit on the capture point at least a little bit, even if you owned all territory around it.
Here's an image of the hex system from this time (I believe this is post-adjacency rule, which I'll discuss later):
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| Hex System on Indar - Beta -> May, 2013 |
A key part of this hex system is that players were free to attack whatever territory they wanted to, but places where they had no adjacency would take a lot longer to capture and be a lot quicker for the enemy to re-capture. This was intended to dissuade such capture, as it was not efficient. Also, territory not connected to your warpgate did not produce passive resources. More on resources shortly...
The main flow objective of the Hex system was that all major large fighting occurred over the large facilities - the Tech Plants, Bio Labs, and Amp Stations. That's where the big fights were to be, and those facilities were large, with satellite spawns to help facilitate the battle. It was intended that these large structures would be the focal point of combat on the continent. That's one reason the structures were so massive - the size of the structure was intended to draw you to it, and to make it easy to locate from a distance so you know where the big battle was.
The small outposts were intended to be quickly-captured territories, fought over by smaller forces - half a squad, maybe two squads, but they weren't intended to be something hundreds of people fought at. Think of these like capture points in a Battlefield Conquest map - they're basically flag poles around a few buildings in the middle of nowhere. That's what a Small Outpost was originally intended to be. They had no spawn rooms. They had no vehicle terminals. They were a capture point with some small cover.
The Large outposts were meant to provide some medium-level fighting and be more resource rich, and be able to spawn vehicles to help with pushes. Along with the Satellites and the large facilities, these are the only places outside warpgates where you could get vehicles.
This is the context for how the Hex system was intended to work: big fights always happening at the large facilities, small skirmishes happening over the surrounding territories to assist in the capture of the big facility, and to provide resources for the empire. Large outposts served as sort of logistcal checkpoints between the large facilities meant to tide you over until you reached one of the satellites where you could further press into the big objective.
This was supported by Galaxies being spawn points. Newer Planetside players might be a bit bewildered by that concept, but in early Beta, the Galaxy was the mobile spawn, not the Sunderer. It was the intent of the Galaxy to skip over all the small outposts and initiate combat over the large facilities. Your galaxy would give you a spawn point, along with your squad beacon, at least until you could capture the satellite and then have a more stable spawn.
The final piece to this model is the motivation - why do players fight at the big facilities? Why do they take the small outposts, other than to make capture of other territories faster? The answer to that is Resources.
Resources
In the above picture you can also see Pre-Nanite resources in the far-right map panel, which are Aerospace, Mechanical, and Infantry resources Each hex region had a resource value associated with it that, when captured and connected to a friendly warpgate, would grant the owning empire that amount of resoruces every N minutes (5 min, IIRC, but its not important). In addition, you also collected resources by fighting in a region. Every X or so XP you generated gave you Y resource of the type the region produced. The important takeaway is that if you wanted more aerospace resources, you go and fight in an Aerospace region, and/or you go capture more Aerospace resource regions to generate more of that resource passively. Same for the other resources.
The key thing to understand is that these resources were intended to be a big motivator to why people fight in particular areas. You take small territories around a big facility to gain more resources with which to wage war, and to help capture that facility and other nearby territories. You take the big territory to gain Auraxium.
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| Indar, PlanetSide2 Alpha, early 2012 |
First Contact
On paper, this system actually seems pretty sound. I was fairly optimistic of it at the time, archived everything said about it, and even did a lot of analysis and math to try to figure out how it worked . That was 2012, long before we actually got to play Beta several months later. But even then I noticed some problems with it, illustrated in that post, which I then tried to solve. (Those posts and many others probably helped me get my job as a designer later that year. :)
But more interestingly, the system had some problems when beta came and we got to see it in action. Unfortunately beta forums were wiped long ago, so some of my feedback there is lost, but there were some significant issues.
Players were not drawn to the big bases. They fought there, but not because they were motivated, but because that was one of the few places there were spawn points. At the time, the only hard spawns were Large Outposts (towers), the big facilities and their satellites, and the warpgate. Other than that you had deployed galaxies and squad spawn beacons, which were both soft spawns (easily killed).
Resources felt passive, so actively going out and acquiring them or trying to deny them didn't work. I wrote a lot about this too.
The rich got richer & the poor got poorer. I saw this one coming, but there was no mitigation.The more resources you had, the less you cared about them, and the more vehicles you could spam, and the inverse was also true. Once you got pushed back you had so few resources you couldn't mount an effective counter-attack. This in itself pretty much rendered the resource motivator null.
It took alot of Auraxium to get anything, and Auraxium was later removed from the game and cert points used to purchase instead. It made sense - certs were more universally accessible, and Auraxium had a yuuuge fatal problem once Esamir came into existence, and that was its passive earning. Empires would ignore each other, capture a continent, and then sit on it and passively earn Auraxium from all of the facilities. That was a much easier way to earn Auraxium than actually fighting for it. It turned out that the resource motivator fell flat on its face when multiple continents were involved and it interacted with the Rich get Richer problem. For a time in Beta, Auraxium actually caused the game to grind to a very boring halt as two empires sat on Indar and Esamir and the third tried in futility to break into one of those (they were split of course and had no resources, so they couldn't push in). The game moved to a state of deadlock, and that caused Auraxium to be removed.
But with Auraxium's removal so too went one of the primary motivators to fight at the large facilities. Now you just needed certs to unlock things, and so you could fight anywhere and earn those. So you fought at the places that got you the most certs (i.e. The Crown). What started as a seemingly good idea on paper unraveled like a Christmas sweater.
When players captured a territory, they didn't skip over to the next large facility, they moved to the next thing they saw, and then fought there, until they happened to come across another large facility. This is what created The Crown phenomena. It was the only hard spawn between Dahaka, Allatum, and Zurvan, it was defensible, and it was fun. People ignored everything else because a crown fight was actual fun. Go back and look at the first picture I posted in this blog. Look at the NC. They were losing every territory except one - the Crown, because the Crown was fun to fight at, and all the other stuff wasn't. Whack-a-mole wasn't fun. But the Crown? Guaranteed fight!
The capture system was a reverse ticket race, meant to simulate a Battlefield Conquest-type situation where you have a ticket count and when it reaches a certain point, you win (instead of enemy losing when they hit 0). All it takes to start the race is one person to start a capture, and then the territory is locked into finishing the race. This was a frustrating mechanic, but all tied to the territory-around-you-helps-you-cap-faster system.
Defending territory could only happen at a large facility or large outpost because those had the spawn points, but even then you couldn't always spawn at every one of them, and it wasn't obvious when you needed to go defend.
And another big problem was the Galaxy. It was not a good spawn point for a sustained battle - too big of a target, too easily killed, and too expensive in resources to constantly supply a front. Worse, the nature of the flying galaxy basically meant all ground forces were obsolete. Tanks holding a choke point? No problem, just fly over it and capture the territory behind them.
When there was a decent sized force that came across another, unless it was The Crown, they basically skirmished for a few minutes and went another direction, gobbling up territory for the static 500 xp for a base capture, because that was perceived as the fastest and surest way to unlock certs. I remember standing around at a base with a ring of engineers all standing on each other's ammo boxes firing a pistol shot and reloading to generate more XP for certs while waiting for empty bases to capture. Yep, that was actually PlanetSide 2 for a while.
The original plan of the Hex system simply did not survive first contact with players, who moved from territory to territory seeking the path of least resistance, and only found meaningful fights at Towers. And in its worst form, you had fully captured continents with players sitting around doing nothing collecting Auraxium. To be fair to the devs, I dont' think anyone expected it could be that bad, but it was a disaster.
Adjustments to Hex
Of course they're not going to scrap the Hex system overnight. Too much was invested, too many systems were built around it, and they didn't have the manpower to change it, and the release deadlines were around the corner. There was no ability to build a new system, they had to first try to fix the existing one and make it work.
A great beta tester noticed the problem with the galaxy and wrote about how the spawn point would fit much better on a Sunderer than a Galaxy. The dev team agreed with that tester, and about halfway through Beta the Sunderer replaced the Galaxy as the primary deployable spawn vehicle. The results were incredible and very positive. Battles sprung up all over the place and they were much easier to sustain. More importantly, ground forces were now relevant, and terrain chokepoints became strategically useful. Apart from infiltrators hacking an equipment terminal and pulling out a sunderer, you could actually prevent the enemy from passing you, at least in significant numbers. There were of course ways around it, but it was a big step.
I also proposed a series of changes, many of which were actually implemented (I was still not a dev at this time, but it wasn't long after before I was). The most significant were the addition of Spawn Rooms to all Small Outposts, Vehicle Terminals to all small outposts, and the Adjacency rule.
Having spawn room at small outposts now made it possible to have a fight at a small outpost, rather than just a ghost cap. It meant you didn't need to have a galaxy or sunderer or squad spawn beacon to have any hope of defending one, and most importantly, it meant you could spawn into it to defend it when it was attacked. This was a hugely positive change, but the spawn rooms soon created another problem that already existed somewhat at some of the other bases, but was mitigated by having spawn rooms tied to capture points (that had its own problems too). In this new model, the spawn room stuck around so defenders could use it to respond and create or sustain a fight over a capture point. The problem then was that the attackers would swarm those spawn shacks and it was pretty brutal. Many were also in the open, easily camped by vehicles.
Vehicle terminals at the small outposts meant you could use them to pull Sunderers to initiate an attack or at least move to the next base rather than running on foot. All around good change. However, the tax on level design just with these two changes was pretty significant - a lot more thought needed to into a small outpost now. What was once just a flagpole and a few buildings now needed to have spawn protection, vehicle terminals in accessible locations, and protection against vehicle spam. Most outposts were not ready for this, and the manpower to make these adjustments was yuuuuuge.
The Adjacency rule was a simple rule that meant you couldn't capture territory unless you had a friendly adjacent territory to it. Just one edge of a hex of a region was enough, but it meant that the amount of territory vulnerable to capture shrunk dramatically. If you were reading the Density article from last week, you would recognize that reducing the vulnerable territory is a type of density increase. This helped stabilize the front lines quite a lot, and combined with the Sunderer and other changes above helped create actual battle lines in PS2. It wasn't great yet, but it was a lot better than it used to be.
With this also came the "reinforcements needed" spawn option, that helped players go to a friendly base that needed defenders. This helped fights grow rapidly. It was not without its own problems, but overall it was a great addition to the game and helped create, grow, and respond to fights.
All of these adjustments I would say saved the launch of PS2. If it had launched how it played in beta it would have absolutely cratered and been a complete disaster. These adjustments all together made PlanetSide 2 much more fun.
Legacy
The significant part of this is that through beta, the entire design of the Hex system was altered to adjust to how players actually played the game. Large Facilities were no longer the focal point because of Auraxium - they instead had large resource values attached to them. That really wasn't significant as long as you had one of each type. Small outposts gained in significance dramatically because that's how players tended to use them. Players didn't skip over huge chunks of territory to attack a large base, they instead flowed from one base to the next, fighting the enemy as they were encountered. And with adjacency the ghost capping problem was greatly reduced. This all had the effect of creating for the first time in PS2, a "front" where battle lines were drawn and the empires clashed.
It was not all great - I'd say it went from what was a '1' on a 10 scale to about a 4 or a 5, but as far as patching up an otherwise catastrophic failure goes, it was a pretty darn good job in a short time. As I recall this is about where PS2 was when it launched in November, 2012. There were many more changes to be had in World design in the following six months, but those are posts all their own.
This is the height of the Hex system, fondly remembered by many, and the system under which a great many players fought under for the better part of 6-months to a year (Indar's Hex ended the following May, with Esamir and Amerish following several months after).
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| Indar, Early 2013 |
Many players remember this era of PS2 fondly, because they felt they had the freedom to go just about anywhere and do just about anything. And that's an important feeling to remember, because Planetside 2 is a persistent open world game, and that's one of its big selling points. This system did play into that a bit more. However, that does not mean it was good for the gameplay of most players, which is ultimately why it was removed. But that is a tale for another day.
Those were the good ol' days.
ReplyDeleteIs there going to be anymore development in Planetside 2, or is it now just a cash cow for Daybreak, as they prepare to sell the 1, 2, and 3 year anniversary packs again?