Planetside 2 as an engine is great. The graphics are amazing. It feels great to fly the jets, or drive the tanks, and the feeling of shooting the weapons are about as good as any call of duty game.
The problem with the game is it's fundemental mechanics. In order to take a location, you must hold it for so many minutes. During the time players are waiting, the enemy team can spawn into the location as much as they like to defend it. This results in a lot of spawn camping. Almost every objective capture results in spawn camping.
I think the best solution to this problem would be to remove the timers. Allow players to capture points quicky. This would make defense tactics, and offense tactics much more realistic by forcing players to allocate their time on bases throughout the warfront instead of blobbing bases, and spawn camping for easy certs.
Another major frustration with the game is the disconnects. If you enjoy flying jets like myself, you will find yourself waiting 10-15 minutes between jets, and if you disconnect just after getting one, you are condemned to wait that entire time to get another.
This makes it difficult to learn to fly. My first couple days consisted of waiting for jet timers, spawning them, and crashing them, or worse, unintentionally flying out of bounds, and dying before I can make it back in bounds.
Planetside 2 proves the technology for massive games can work. They prove you can have massive air, land, and ground battles with existing technology. They also prove you can do it all with great graphics.
Sadly though, if you're looking for action, it's going to be hard to find outside of spawn camping objectives.
The final major drawback of this game is it's community. Almost all guilds or "outfits" in the game are massive cross-game guilds that really could care less about the individual player. I'n the last couple weeks I've played this game, I've never once found a specialist outfit. I've never even seen one within the game.
All this being said, Planetside 2 is a great engine, and it will be fun for the first couple days. Once you get into it though, you will begin to realize how big the draw backs are, and how far from realistic the game actually is. Hopefully a smarter developer will come along, and improve where the Planetside 2 team couldn't.
Until then, Planetside 2 is one of the best technology has to offer today in this genre of FPS, so we don't have much option at the moment.
