I am guilty of never playing the Planetside games or even looking into them but the shots of this in the HR PC thread is just mindblowing. Is it easy enough to just jump in? Also what should I expect gameplay wise? What would you compare it to?
Your first impression of the game will most likely be of a terrifying, confusing clusterfuck of players assaulting or defending a large base. Your only hints to what to do will be a bunch of tiny icons on a minimap that sometimes flash and sometimes change, with no indication whether that is good or bad.
It'll still be fun, though.
Sony has some tutorial videos up that might help, although they leave out a lot of really basic stuff. I'm sure someone has written up a better starter guide but without getting too long-winded, here's my suggestions:
1. Go to the map screen and see which bases are being heavily fought over - they'll be listed under 'instant action'. Bio labs, tech plants, and amp stations are all the big ones and give nice exp bonuses when captured. You capture faster when the area is surrounded by bases which your team owns, indicated by color. You capture bases by standing on the capture point for a while, simple stuff but some bases have multiple points. The 2/2 or 6/6 at the top denotes the number of people on the point and max number of people that can affect point capture.
To get to the base, if there is a 'DEPLOY' icon on the hexagon you can click that and drop pod in like an ODST. You can control the pod, but it has a cooldown so you can only do it once every like 10-15 minutes or something. Alternatively you can 'redeploy' which will let you choose a spawn point near where you were after a short waiting period. Finally you can just run out of the warpgate, spawn a vehicle and drive to your destination - right click on the map and place a waypoint so you can see where you want to go. I suggest following roads unless you wanna get stuck...T is third person view which might help.
Oh also you could spawn an aircraft, but you will likely crash horribly the first time. The flying controls take getting used to...spacebar is your friend.
2. When you get to one of those bases, the minimap will show various objectives. Press H to expand it - the shield icons with pictures of tanks and lines on them denote generators that power shields you need to bring down. The icon on the generator will correspond to the shield in question, if you look at the shield itself it'll have one on there. If you're attacking you want to bring down these generators by holding E on them and making sure they blow up...don't stand next to em when they do. If you're defending, you want to either repair them as an engineer or stop people from doing that.
3. Resources are a personal pool of resources that let you buy things like grenades/regen kits/max suits (infantry resources), aircraft, and vehicles. You get some deposited on your character every few minutes based on the territory your team holds. You spawn vehicles at vehicle terminals, aircraft at terminals with a plane icon, etc. Certain vehicles are only available if you own tech plants (main battle tanks) and some terminals can only spawn limited types of vehicle/aircraft.
there's lots more to know but these are the things that would have been most helpful to me when starting out.
I think cont locks and more islands will be a good step towards that.
