User blog comment:Luperza/Brasil, PlanetSide 2 and Things/@comment-24083923-20131025114342

''Abstract: PlanetSide 2's infantry combat is fun at close range and frustrating at long range because of the game's level design and weapon performance. It should offer something for everyone, but it caters to twitch-skill players and ignores accuracy-focused players. ''

PlanetSide 2's gameplay is unbalanced with weight on close range. The game's locales encourage infantry to engage at close range and leave long-range fights to the armor and air forces, and the infantry weapons that the developers intended for long-range use are terrible in that role and mediocre in other circumstances.

The developers have created terrain in PlanetSide 2 that leads to a clear combat progression. Your faction's armor column or air force traverses the distance between two outposts, and the opposing faction fields armor, air and defensive emplacements to slow your force's advance. Then, in the event that your faction's forces make it to the outpost, your infantry spawns from the closest AMS bus and begins to engage enemy infantry within the tightly-packed confines of the buildings, where vehicles are less effective.

I'd like to see more variety and rebalance the scales so that long-range infantry combat is about as common and just as viable as short-range infantry combat. This means more large complexes with vertical interiors, wide, enclosed courtyards and long, multi-tiered overpasses with roadblocks. The bases I imagine have wide distances between cover or objectives and offer minimal access to vehicles.

Improving the infantry weapons that the developers built for those situations is just as important. The damage drop-off for battle rifles happens much too quickly, their damage is poor overall and their recoil is too great to be effective in their intended role. The same goes for semi-automatic scout rifles and even the sniper rifles to some extent. Just as bad, the long-range automatic weapons (like the Razor GD-23 carbine, the NS-11 assault rifle and the T16 Rhino LMG) feature similar issues with damage drop-off and the apparent recoil increases disproportionately when players equip them with 3.4X or 4X scopes (to say nothing of the 6X scopes, which are entirely nonviable beyond sniper rifles—a fact your game usage statistics will bear out).

Fixing these issues is important to me because I prefer gameplay that rewards accuracy more than that which prioritizes twitch FPS skills and close-range dancing ability. PlanetSide 2 is a big game and it tries to offer a combined arms experience with something for everyone, but it currently discourages good long-range infantry combat, and I feel it should be doing better.