I've put in about 100-150 hours in to Planetside 2 since its release but throughout my playtime all I could feel is that SOE, the guys behind the game, had almost no idea what exactly they wanted to do with it. And so, despite loving the game, I ended up quitting because all I've seen were nerfs and terrible design decisions such as putting up 10 meter tall walls around every base so each fight took place in the same two corridors.

Thankfully, after SOE separated from Sony and created Daybreak Games there was quite a big reshuffling of staff and a lot of the old Planetside 2 bigwigs got swapped out with fresh faces who instantly got to work on fixing the issues years of negligence have caused. 

Given what their recent test realm patch contains it seems they are far more in tune with the community than the old team ever was and for the first time in over year I'm excited for Planetside 2 again.

The upcoming patch, which is currently going through public testing, will bring with it base building, resource gathering, a re-balance to many of the forgotten items, revamped Indar and improved squad/team management. Here's a brief overview of what to expect once it finally releases:

The resource gathering and base building are both related to the "new" vehicle, the ANT. I used new in quotation marks there because its actually a vehicle that is quite famous from its Planetside 1 days where it fulfilled the same role, that of a resupply/builder vehicle.

Its still undergoing testing so these things might change but as of right now its capable of harvesting energy/resources from various minerals in the field and then transporting them to whatever base needs a hand with rebuilding or fortifying defenses. An interesting idea for sure because given that the ANT has to physically transport these resources it is going to be a prime target for sneaky tank pilots, like myself, which then means people will have to run escorts for their resource-carrying ANTS and thus a whole new metagame is born.

Here's a couple of developer-filmed videos from the test realm just briefly showcasing what the ANT can do. Video 1, Video 2.

The ANT and some Tiberium crystals in the background

The central portions of Indar, including its most famous base, The Crown, are getting a rework in order to fit better with the new base building system. Smaller and useless bases are being removed in favor of allowing players to build their own fortifications and terminals there rather than simply having a couple of boxes in the middle of nowhere.

Details on this Indar rework aren't fully known yet but its an area where most of the Planetside 2 stalemates occur given how impossible it can be to sometimes assault these places so any change that might even remotely address this is a welcome one.

Squad management is finally getting a much needed rework after the community has been ranting about how bad it is for over two years now. But rather than simply complain allow me to say that the new system is really intuitive and easy to use. Instead of constantly shuffling through menus most actions can now be done while looking at the world map simply by right clicking a player and then inviting them to your squad, assigning them to different firing teams and so on.

Overall these are rather "minor" changes but to anyone that ever tried to organize any amount of people in Planetside 2 these are a godsend and will greatly reduce the amount of boring menu-fiddling you needed to do if you wanted to be a commander.

You can take a look at how the new squad system and fire teams will operate in this video.

You can't even begin to imagine how much joy this image brings me

Finally, there are plenty of balance and quality-of-life changes in the works as well but those are too numerous for me to simply list out so if you're interested in the details head over to the PTR patch notes.

That's the short version of this patch. There are some other features that are still in question whether they will arrive or not so I chose to not list them here but you can easily find them in the Planetside 2 forums. Even if they get delayed for a couple of months this is still the biggest patch Planetside 2 has ever received and certainly the most important one as well so I have to say that despite my anger with how the game has been managed before I'm now very much so interested in Planetside 2 again.

Here's to hoping this patch ends up working out.