If your assault rifle isn’t getting the job done, order a tank. If someone on the other team uses a bigger tank to blow up yours, respawn and hop into an airborne assault craft. If the enemy locks onto your assault craft with rocket launchers and knocks you out of the sky, switch into an Infiltrator role, apply your cloaking field to sneak into an ideal hiding spot and headshot them with a long-distance sniper shot. If that still doesn’t work, then you can respawn in a different part of PlanetSide 2’s huge open world and work to defend or expand your faction’s borders against on a different front.

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PlanetSide 2 is an open-world MMO shooter where you can zip from one side of a continent to the other with no loading screens to separate arid canyon terrain from grassy rolling hills and a dynamic day and night cycle. Continents are split into smaller zones and dotted with bases, and each base contains multiple capture points spread out across a wide area. This means locking down a base isn’t a matter of capturing and holding one single spot, but requires much more sophisticated coordination between players to defend captured nodes and hold onto spawn points while attacking those that remain under enemy control.Being able to rapidly switch your role in the field helps ensure you have the tools you need. If you need an armored personnel carrier to transport a team to a fight, you can easily spawn one on a vehicle pad, and ideally can convince a few friendly fighters to pick up tanks and air support to cover your approach and knock out any significant threats along the way.If everyone that jumps out of the personnel carrier to fight is playing the Light Assault class, you’re probably not going to have much success. Sure, you can zip around with their jetpacks to surprise enemies from behind or hop over a wall that serves as a barrier for everyone else, but your attack force won’t have longevity. You’ll want Medics supporting the front lines to heal and revive, Engineers to drop turrets and repair machines and drop ammo packs, and Heavy fighters to spearhead a push by flipping on their ability to temporarily deflect damage.This type of coordination doesn’t happen automatically. It requires frequent communication, a functioning command structure, and a willingness to ignore the allure of the headshot in order to serve the interests of your team. This is not a deathmatch style experience, and a team that’s organized will usually wipe out a team of lone wolf fighters with a full magazine and delusions of grandeur. Thankfully teaming up is pretty easy, just hit a button and you’re joined with a squad, the most basic level of formal social organization in the game.To help set directives, squads are assigned leaders. A leader tag isn’t merely an honorific – there’s an entire progression tree associated with the role, letting you set mission goals for defense and assault that are visible to other players, and unlock the ability for killed squad members to respawn on those still alive instead of having to select a distant respawn node. This can be critically important if you want to maintain offensive pressure on an enemy, as it lets you speed down from the sky in a drop pod, slam into the earth beside your squad and hop out ready to fight in a matter of seconds.Squads can also be organized into platoons to link more players together, and the most committed fighters will want to join up with Outfits, which are PlanetSide 2’s version of guilds. Leaders of an Outfit will be able to create and assign ranks for members, specify the look of Outfit weapons and vehicles so members have access to the appropriate colors, and talk through integrated voice over IP in custom channels where leaders can specify who has clearance to speak. Even if the thought of strict organization isn’t exciting to you, the missions set by other leaders can still be seen and carried out by anyone, letting you contribute to a vital piece of the war machine.The best way to fight will change depending on the base you’re assaulting and the type of terrain. There will be three general base types, but their layouts aren’t copy and pasted around the continent maps. Capture points are mixed around between locations, so while the BioLabs may look like mushroom stalks of metal capped with bunkers, pockets of forest and spawn points for flying vehicles, the experience of capturing them will never be exactly the same.The style of gameplay will also shift depending on your position with the base. If you’re right in the center, running in and out of doorways within a cluster of bunkers and laboratories, playing PlanetSide 2 feels more like a traditional first-person shooter. But head outside and you’ll need to worry about snipers camped on surrounding hills, incoming rockets and the chance that a tank could be waiting just around the corner. You may enter a building and stumble upon a massive gather of players getting set to launch an assault. Even if you’re discovered and killed, at least you’d be able to secure valuable intelligence on enemy behavior.Surprises like that serve as reminders that the scope of battle extends far beyond what you’re directly shooting at. Territory may be more valuable to you because if another faction takes it from you, it may wipe out your access to a particular vehicle or weapon type. Most of this information is easily viewable by pulling up your world map for an overview of all territory, controlling factions and associated bonuses. But there are other factors to consider as well, such as bases that may be more valuable to secure merely because of the contours of the physical landscape around them make them easier to hold.In grassy areas you’ll find generally open terrain with the occasional hills and trees to break up sight lines and provide cover. Things change in the arid areas as canyons drop through shelves of land, making it far riskier to roll through in big tank groups, as you’d be susceptible to guided rocket fire in the narrow chasms with less room for evasive maneuvers. On the plus side, those flying air vehicles will have a much harder time firing at you if you’re wedged into a canyon. Perhaps the most skilled pilots will still be able to find a way in, though, and turn your ground forces into fiery shards. Flying in PlanetSide 2 is not a simple task. Most should be able to take off and move forward and back, but when it comes to precision turning, strafing ground targets with machine guns and explosives, and tagging other targets in the air, expect to see a wide skill gap at launch. Also expect to see the rookie pilot that takes off and immediately veers left into a tree and blows up.Whatever role you decide to take on in battle, there’s a progression tree associated with it. The more you play, the more upgrades you’ll earn, from new weapons to attach to your walking mech suit, stronger rechargeable shields, flak cannons on your tank or a bolt-action rifle that requires frequent reloading but deals better damage per shot. For most upgrades, you gain an advantage by giving up another. Sony Online Entertainment calls weapon and vehicle modifications sidegrades because the development team doesn’t want a high level player to necessarily have an insurmountable statistical advantage over a totally new player. Instead, they want conflicts to be resolved mostly by superior skill and coordination instead of better gear.PlanetSide 2 is free-to-play, so SOE is making sure that every weapon and sidegrade that directly affects your character’s effectiveness in battle is purchasable with in-game funds. Without paying you’ll get access to all vehicles, classes and areas in the game. The option to pay with real money for these items will also exist, but they can be unlocked through play as well. The only real money-only items will be of a cosmetic nature. So if you really, really need horns for your helmet, you can buy them, but they won’t help you live any longer.So far play sessions with PlanetSide 2 have been promising, but without a continent map absolutely packed with players, it’s tough to get a sense of just how crazy things will get once the game goes into wide beta testing. All the right components seems to be in place for this to be an incredible online experience, but until it’s actually possible to jump into a 300 person firefight with tanks and attack planes backing up the foot soldiers, we can only guess about it will all actually work or if it’ll result in an overly chaotic mess.