Planetside 2 PS4 Quick Thoughts

There is no NDA from what I have found and looked into, so here's some of my impressions.

I've played a ton of PS2 on PC, since the beta there, actually. The opportunity to check out the early stages of the title once more has been pretty exciting.

The big thing is, it works. A Dual Shock 4 is capable of playing PS2. That said, it's also not really great at it. Big surprise.

Part of the issue comes from questionable mapping. Class abilities are on L1, L2 aims down the sights, R2 fires, and R1 brings up a voice menu that you navigate with the right thumbstick. That's where you choose what voice chat channel you want to be speaking in, or select something like "need ammo/health".

If you want to toss out a grenade, you hit both L1 and R1 at the same time. Doing this while moving and aiming is cumbersome as fuck.

On PC, class abilities sometimes have logical "shortcuts". For example, the Light Assault uses a jetpack for his ability. As a result, you don't need to actually use the key for abilities to boost around, you can just double tap the space bar. On PS4, tapping X twice doesn't do anything. You have to hit L1. I'm not sure if it just isn't implemented yet or if the intentionally left out these shortcuts, but I know I'd like to be able to use them.

The flight controls by default are also an absolute mess, and I found myself dead within seconds. A quick look at the settings revealed a "easy flight mode", which I enabled, and the vertical flight was disabled by default. I'll see if that makes things better tonight when the servers go up again.

The spawning interface is a lot less cluttered, but feels like it's showing me less information. I understand why they would try to redesign menus for the console release, but being able to easily see where shit is going down is pretty vital to enjoying yourself in PS2, and right now, the game doesn't easily distinguish what areas have conflict aside from the basic pie chart.

Planetside 2 on PS4 seems like it's on the right track, but I don't expect anyone already invested in the PC release to jump ship over it.