Great ideas, and genuinely huge... but it is a meat feast. Perhaps more an issue with start up community, but still...
As far as some of the hype goes:
Learning Curve is Steep = True
Quite steep. But not because it lacks explanations within sub menus and is a game design by any stretch. ETQW was a genuinely difficult game to learn because the mechanics were truly complex. This on the other hand... it's hard to get the hang of simply because you have little opportunity to really explore the feel of the game properly. An offline tutorial map for both infantry and vehicle training is sorely needed. Tribes: Ascend has a mode where you can not only learn the different classes at your leisure but can play with any as-yet-locked weapons to see if they're worth unlocking.
Free2Play = Sort of
There is a subscription model in place to enable the use of XP boosters and so on. The in-game currency that is used to generate and spend on items and upgrades for the most part are also pretty much within a pay-2-win setup. Look through the store area yourself, then take note of how slow (if at all) you earn any currency to spend in your first few hours of the game. I'm not talking about resource points that generate based on faction progress/activity.. those are temporary things you buy, like a tank to spawn with, or the MAX class... die and you have to wait for the 15 minute or so cooldown to buy another. Resource point expenditure overall seems like a cool mechanic to avoid vehicle spamiture.
Massive Battles = True
Yes the continents offer massive terrain and a variety of installations to fight over. So big that you hit a loading screen each time you have to respawn... that can get annoying when the meatfest aspect of the game grinds out through the respawn system so often.
AWESOME Battles = False
Perhaps this is due to the game just being launched, but the battles are far from awesome. If you played Savage 1 during its hey day you'll remember there were community made maps there were massive, and we had those 128 player battles... and this was during the days where many of us still had dial up connections. A game where melee was one of many important combat mechanics. Even in those massive Savage 1 battles there was always a distinct focus and obsession with tactics. Everyone came to know the tactical strengths and weaknesses inside a map... PS2 is largely a run-&-gun affair with most players just logging in to fight where clusters of people are. Generally speaking most people don't even really know what they're fighting for, they're just fighting cause the enemy is holding a point, which means killzone.
Despite having a local server in australia, there was still plenty of lag on my end. I'm confident my connection is a good one, I pay enough for it through Internode, yet there was enough of a pattern of very tiny lag spikes to limit responsiveness in the game. Enemies and allies warping from occasion... this makes team killing an inevitable affair.
There are 4 things I came to dislike about this game, and ultimately made me uninstall with every intention of never trying it again no matter how the community may/will improve with time.
1 - Terrain: Your 3 continents are distinctly different. Ice, Desert, Jungle/Forest... yet the terrain within a continent feels generic. Login and spawn whereever the current battle is raging and there is nothing distinct about it that you can think instantly "choke points HERE, blind spots are HERE. etc" Perhaps this is a limitation of such a massive landscape, massive player latency coding, and the average expectation of player hardware "runability"... but it's very difficult to get your bearings... and even more so to develop a desire to care where you are.
2 - Meatfest: Most installations and whatever the hell it is we were all fighting for... there are no real tactics involved in the design of these areas. As far as I was able to experience, this game is designed for mass slaughter. I tried analysing the possibility of where on a certain installation an organised squad of organised players could perform a surgical strike and succeed. Tactics tend to be overwhelm a generally exposed base that is comprised of X number of demountable structures, or those gigantic towering things... and the entry points to what you attack in those is just a bloody mess of head on fighting. No real back entrances to cover (I think there was 1 portal point that was internal, but again it turns into a meatfest choke point), no ways to flank... just singular entrances where everyone camps trying to... you know what, it is exactly the concept of WW1 trench warefare. Meatfest fighting to gain inches. The down side is there's a 3rd faction in this game that can just come up while you're side is focused on trying to get, completely annihilating all that effort your faction was putting into gaining those inches -> Spawn Point Lost -> new installation/whatever that everyone is suddenly defending or heading out from.
3 - Vehicles: Handling is atrocious. It's going to take some tweaking to get them right, but as it stands on release, they are pretty bad. They're not the worst ever made in a game that's for sure, but they are neither fluid or skill based. They all handle like bricks with an eccentric set of mechanics designed more to induce difficulty rather than embrace natural skill. The airborne vehicles in particular have a strange feel to them. Very arcadey is probably the best way of describing it, and it reminded me of the horrible mouse/keyboard responsiveness of BF2 aircraft. I could have hooked up my flight sim joystick for this, but I couldn't justify going to that effort.
4 - Pay 2 Win: And it's there. The amount of times I spawned and died almost instantly with 1 to 3 bullets/hits causing my death most of the time. I found that very confusing compared to the multiple bursts I had to put into an enemy of the same or lesser class (in terms of armour and HP). People one or 2 levels higher than me and they clearly were touting armour and weapon upgrades (with enhancements/mods). I wasn't even close to buying a first, cheapest upgrade item from the store at level 5, yet getting to 5 I saw people playing levels 3 to 10 with fully customised toons. That means they had already spent money. The 7+ guys during the first 2 days, I'm betting they all came from the beta, so I'd expect to die quick shameful deaths to them, but no. Does it make it impossible to fight back and grossly unbalanced? Not really, but sometimes it makes you wonder why you have to try so hard when your stacked up enemy just payed his way into superior firepower.
The meatfest and slight pay-2-win nature of the game didn't leave me satisfied with this game at all. If I want quick and bloody deaths where real tactics and strategy are always secondary to brute head one firepower.... I'd might as well get the latest CoD and at least have the satisfaction of unlocking every weapon and attachment somewhat fast than the retarded kids in the same matches just because of twitch skill (and depending on those trademark random insta-death spawns).
Planetside 2 was too much like hitting my head against a brick wall. It seemed like it has the potential to be a seriously cool war game, but the only way that could be at all possible is if everyone were to treat it as say a World of Warcraft raid. Everyone would have to know how to use the classes they opt to play, know their role in the squad they're in, as well as how to cooperate with the force around them... and at least have enough of an idea how to wing it while following the lead of a "majority" of players that do know the nuts and bolts of the raid/objective/whatever they're going after. In that respect, like a real war, it would live up to being an awesome game.
But when you're trying desperately to join a choke point and make a contribution, even pop off a few clean kills... and a variety of players on your team keep running back and forth infront of your sites resulting in as many TKs as enemy kills... which isn't that many kills anyway since the amount of explosive spam creates a slight lag effect at the choke point to make it easy to die and hard-er to kill.... that ain't awesome.
For this game to really succeed it needs a very well thought out singleplayer tutorial. This is one of the few occassions where a singleplay campaign really can be justified as a tutorial. Maybe 2 or 3 levels. Otherwise the meatfest will go on forever. I didn't play Planetside 1 but it's obvious it holds such fond memories with those that did BECAUSE it was subscriber based... meaning you paid, so you made an effort to learn how to play properly. Free-2-Play sequel? Seriously, how many of these cheapskates that are on the battlefield just because it's FREE are going to make the effort to learn?
It ain't gonna happen, not in my opinion anyway.
And even with the tutorials in place, the game still lacks a directional mechanic. Something to point players in the right direction... even for experienced players just logging in to quickly join the fray and know what's going on. You have to really study that map and even then you have no indication of how the battle has turned up to this point, why your faction is doing what it's doing beyond the obvious "you have to capture or defend this" mechanic... no idea if you were pushed back or... etc.
My real scores would be
Intentions of the game, potential, mechanics and so on = 9
Reality of how it plays out being F2P = 4
Tribes: Ascend still holds the crown as F2P done right AND manages to be one of the most competitively satisfying shooters at the moment.