First serious blog post! Took me a while.

I want to begin by thanking @Lost for giving me his spare Planetside 2 Beta key.

A little introduction for those who are unfamiliar with this game.

Planetside 2 is an MMOFPS, and a sequel to Planetside. Unlike many shooter out there, where you play in small-scale matches, you play in a single huge map where thousand of players (approximately 2000 per server) fight for its control on lan or on air with a variety of vehicles such as tanks or dropships

There are 3 factions for you to choose, each one with it's own background, strenght and weaknesses :

The Terran Republic : An authoritarian government that leverages military might to maintain strict control over the colonial citizens. They have rapid fire weapons but they don't do as much damage as the others. They wear red and black armor.

The New Conglomerate : A rebel group that split apart from the Terran Republic. Their weapons have much higher punch but they fire slower. They sport blue and yellow armor

The Vanu Sovereignty : A cult that believes that with alien technology humanity can truly evolve to the next level and they have incorporated it into their arsenals, so they have energy weapons and have a higher level of tech in their vehicles. They are colored purple and cyan.

After finishing the download , I started the game up. I'm presented with a nice character creation

screen where you can choose which one of the 3 factions you want to play as and a distinctive tune for each one of them. Having played as the New Conglomerate (Viva la revolution!) back in Planetside 1 , I decided to play as them for old times sake.

With my character created, I'm dropped right into the battlefield. Well, not exactly , as I'm in our homebase miles away from the actual front. The graphics of the game are great for a F2P game, the characters are well modeled and the textures on the surfaces look very good. I'm not a person who cares about graphics much, but I'm sure everyone will be happy with the work SOE did.

Now that I'm still in the safety of the base, It's the perfect time to learn the controls since there's no actual tutorial. They're pretty much your standard FPS controls : WASD to move, Mouse to aim, Ctrl to crouch...

After that, I quickly look around and find an equipment station. Time to check out the different classes.

There are 6 differents classes. 3 offensive classes (Light Assault, Heavy Assault, MAX) and 3 support classes (Combat Medic, Engineer, Inflitrator). Each one of them is self- explanatory except the MAX but I'll give a short description anyway.

Light Assault is the default soldier class, he's the class you start as, and he's got a jetpack.

Heavy Assault is the shock trooper, he's got more armor than your average Light Assailt and packs quite a punch with his machinegun. His special ability is creating a shield around himself.

The Infiltrator is your sniper. His special ability is a cloaking device.

Combat Medic. Self explanatory. He can heal teammates and revive them.

The Engineer can repair vehicles, terminals and MAX units.

The MAX is essentially a guy in a power armor that can be armed with Anti-Air, Anti-Vehicle, Anti-Infantry weapons and can only be repaired with the engineer.

As for the customisation, you can change your appearance from your helmet to your boots , change your loadout , and customise your vehicles with different weapons and camouflage. All the aesthetic things will be buyable from the SOE store as well as a variety of guns.

After that you would want to coordinate an assault with your squadmates. But if you want to jump right into the action, like myself, there's this cool feature that allows you to go to one of the maps hotspots. There's a limit though, you have to wait a couple of minutes before using this feature again. This

Upon landing , my smooth 40-60 FPS on non combat zone (with setting on high) suffered a radical drop to 5-10 FPS. That was a surprise for me because it had never happened before. I can play Battlefield 3 on medium perfectly with a 30-40 FPS. I lowered the settings to medium, restarted the game and went to the same hotspot. Sadly, the FPS was still the same.

So what did I do? I went forum lurking and found 2 interesting things : one, the game is poorly optimzed. Second, my PC is CPU-Bound, meaning my CPU sucks and I'll probably have to change it before the game melts it down.

I wasn't going to give up easily so I turned all the graphics to their lowest value. This time the FPS stayed at around 15 in the heat of battle. Decent enough to play.

This time around I didn't spawn at the home base but rather at a frontline outpost that was being attacked by both the Vanu and the Terrans. With my fellow soldiers, we began to hold the line atop a huge structure agaisnt the incoming waves of enemies as the bullets flew all over the place and the opposing air force destroyed our turrets while our own aircrafts tried to dodge the oncoming missiles and the AA fire. Droppods and Dropships continously filled the sky, bringing new soldiers to the battle .It felt like being on a movie. Needless to say, I didn't get any kills. I just continually sprayed ammo everywhere. I was more interested in seeing the action than participating in it.

Finally, after several minutes of non-stop fighting (and not getting any kills from my part). We managed to repel the enemy invaders with heavy casualties.

Time to switch servers and allegiance. I played this time on a scarcely populated server as the Terran.

I joined a tank squad in their mission to capture territories This time I got a hold of some of the vehicles available. I followed them in a Quad bike which goes pretty fast but you can easily lose its control. We captured some territories without any resistance, then I hoped into a Dropship as one of the gunners , raining down covering fire to our attacking troops (It reminded me of the AC-130 scene from COD 4) and providing defense to the ship when needed. Finally, luck wasn't on our side and we've got completely annihilated when returning home to get resupplied.

I'm not going to make this thing any longer. In conlusion I can assure this game is great and its got the potential to become a huge hit . The combat feels dynamic and the mix of massive infantry combat and massive vehicle combat creates some amazing combat scenes. I recommend everyone to play the game once it comes out or atleast try to get yourself into the beta.

TL;DR : It's awesome!

Feel free to point any mispelling and verbal errors.