10 Tips For A Newbie Starting Planetside 2

Welcome to Planetside 2! The Massive-Battlefield Future-Based RPG Shooter which seems to be a very pleasant mix of Shattered Galaxies meets Battlefield 3. Logged in Successful...hm... Create your character...ok... Pick your faction... done! Ooh Nice, Time to enjoy a Nice Cutscene...

What's all this talk about deployme-

Surprise Orbital Deployment! Have a nice trip~! … You probably won’t be living very long after you land… If you happen to still be alive a few seconds after landing, look for cover and assess your surroundings. You are most likely in enemy territory or on the frontlines. You were Long-Range/Drop Pod deployed. (Drop deployment occurs when you deploy from the large map from the menu.)

It’s ok. Don’t get too depressed and personal as you watch your corpse slowly fall to the ground (or fly about if you happened to get heavy rocketed in the face.) You will come to this overview screen many many many –MANY- times so you better get acquainted with it. I love this menu screen because it literally has everything you could ever need on it. Class selection, Loadouts, Certifications, Squads, and the all important Map.

Yeaaaah buddy! Classes! If you had just spawned for the first time you are probably a Light Assault, a mobile warrior with a jetpack (hell yea!). The big brother to you would be the Heavy Assault, which ditches the jetpack for armor and firepower. Your support classes are Medic (For People) and Engineers (For… Non-People?). The Infiltrator is a strange case of spy/sniper having an identity crisis (Hah!), his job is to sneak about disabling generators and increasing the cavity space in the skulls of his enemies. Finally we have the MAX. If you see a player running about with a tank’s worth of armor plates everywhere and standing straighter than an ironing board, then you have met the MAX. It is the Bigger-Bro-Papa-Alpha-Wolf-Big-Dawg’s-Dawg of the Heavy Assault; slower but more firepower and health than you can shake your puny newbie weapons at… Unfortunately for you, It is a class that must be created using resources.

Mmmhm. Resources! There are 3 Types of resources available to you, Infantry, Mechanized, and Aerospace. These are invaluable to your faction, the more resources your faction has the better they seem to do (and the happier they are overall.) Think of it this way… More resources, means more airships, more tanks, and more advanced toys for you and your entire faction to play with. You do like advanced toys than can put bigger holes in your enemies right?.. RIGHT?! That right there is your motivation for manically gunning down your enemies and capturing their facilities.

Hoppin on buildings with countless of your buddies till they become your own resource creators… Where have I heard this before? … But that’s pretty much how it’s done. Each building has its control points that need to be taken over via mass occupation. Some buildings have internal spawn points for their defenders; these are often covered by faction forcefields to avoid any cheap spawn camping. These are the same forcefields that keep enemy infantry and vehicles and their bullets out of the building.

Yep, Force Fields are faction colored for your convenience (You do remember your faction color, yes?). Forcefields only allow members of their faction to pass through. Some only allow vehicles and some are only infantry forcefields. The only way to get past these forcefields is to enter the building via gaps with the Light Infantry jet pack or to get in with the infiltrator. If you are on the invasion team and happen to get into the building, your goal is to find the generator and disable, sabotage, hack, destroy it, whatever you can to get it offline so all your buddies can all rush in to impregnate the fortress and make it your own little resource producing child.

So you and your army(You did come with a small army to capture a base… Right?) have fought through various lines of troops or simply cruised over the country-side and have made it to the doorstep of the Base/Resource Facility. In-fact! You are all sitting in-front of the force fields (Terrible Idea btw) waiting to get in. If you are a Light Infantry or an Infiltrator, get your ass in there and disable them generators. If you are an Engineer or a Medic, do your jobs, heal people, repair vehicles and MAX(s?). Don’t imagine for a second that “Oh. I’m a Heavy Assault or a MAX, I only go Pew Pew and don’t have anything supportive to do~”, YOU’RE WRONG! Defend your Medics and your Engineers, lay down some fire onto the enemy’s force field to keep them from coming out, hell, at least protect your friggen Sunderer. Without either of the above, your forces will get wrecked harder than a Chinese buffet if I’m on the bill.

SHUT! UP! RIGHT NOW... -You- sir, will respect the Sunderer and all that it provides for you and your faction. Think of the Sunderer as the unloved single mother supporting all that she can while her husband(s) the tanks and air-ships go out and get the glory with massive guns and firepower. The Sunderer does all that you could ever want from a support vehicle… She restocks your ammo, allows you to change class, change your load-out, you can re-spawn from it, gives you foot massages… hell it even allows you to put in certifications.

Murking?... Dear lord you most certainly are a “Certified” –Scrub- aren’t you? The best way I can describe this is that you don’t “Level Up” or “Gain Unlockables”… You gain certification points which you can allocate to unlock and/or upgrade various skills and weapons. You want a tank? That’s cute… EARN IT, GET A CERTIFIED PHD IN TANKOLOGY. Want to run around in a heavy mech suit and have a friggin laser shotgun? GO AND GET CERTIFIED IN MECH-SUIT LASER-SHOTGUN(OLOGY?). Certification points are earned by combat and generally being an asset to your faction. Be sure to spend Certification points to go along with your play-style as this is one of the few/only customizations you can go through to differentiate yourself from everyone else and to give yourself an edge through however you like to play.

Congratulations! You have gotten past your first learning hurdle, followed your team-mates, and hopefully proved to be of vital assistance in the capturing of your first base/resource plant… Now prepare to do it all again! First, remember those Certification points we were talking about? Well you probably just earned a few by assisting in the capture, so feel free to do that in the downtime while everyone heals up and/or prepares for the next move. Mobile armies (as most of them in the game are…) don’t stay still for very long, feel free to hitch a ride and/or move along with them to the next battle area… If you don’t feel like it or notice an area that needs defending or notice an area your faction is about to lay a smack-down on, hit up the map in the menu and re-deploy to that location (blinking locations means there is fighting going on), and fight for the glory of your faction!

I wish to welcome you to the wonderful world of Planetside 2. Happy hunting and resource capturing! Avoid the snipers, certify yourself correctly, and if you follow your army you should have a generally great time! 

I am RonjaNoku of the Vanu Sovereign, signing out.