Found a Beta invite in my old email account I used back when I was playing PlanetSide 1. Also read that the NDA had been lifted so thought I'd share my experience with my first night. Downloaded the client (on my horrendously slow 3mb broadband, should get fibre upgrade soonish thankfully) and installed last night. Now my computer is getting dated graphics card wise (2 x 5850) but didn't think it would struggle with this game given how admirably it deals with Battlefield 3. 1920x1200 with everything turned to max and options like "Fog shadows" turned on. 32 fps as a rough average. Dropped settings down to medium and got a more respectable 50+. I have to say though, for a Free2play they are going to be expecting people to have some fairly expensive graphics cards to play at full details. Seems a little counter-intuitive.
Anyway, onto Gameplay. Game felt immediately familiar having played quite a lot of PlanetSide 1. But one of the first noticeable changes (other than the GPU requirement) was that of scale. Even the smallest outposts in this game almost reminded me of the bigger bases in PS1. A good change is the design of the bases wasn't as constricted feeling as in the first game. No winding corridor mazes with the base. A lot more open stairwells and courtyards making for interesting fire fights across floors. Opening up the opportunity for flanking movements from Light Assault players with jet packs or those dropping in from aircraft above.
I started with the Faction I played with originally the Vanu Sovereignty, and even though I had fond memories of their energy weapons (and mowing down infantry in my Magrider hover tank) I quickly encountered the old downside of slow moving projectiles leading to quite a learning curve with trying to lead targets to actually hit anything. Balance between classes seemed to have been rehashed quite a bit. In the first game an anti-infantry specification Max unit camped in a base defending a capture point was something hard to get by. Had to almost rely on Heavy Assaults with rocket launchers to take one out. Now it seems that infantry have a bit more of a chance vs a Max, perhaps trying to encourage more teamplay. Found myself playing as a Max a few times and finding a nice engineer friend to keep me patches up as we defending one such capture point.
Teamplay was a mixed bag but mostly due to the fact I found the beta social functions a bit clunky. Added a player I teamed up with in a tank to my friends list but everytime I tried to select his name and choose "Send message" from the right click context menu I was presented with a squad view. Even changed my settings to "Auto join squad" but didn't appear to be much in the way of squads to join. Possibly just a time of day/population issue. It is after all only my first evening of playing and no doubt a lot of the issues could be down to "User error". Needless to say it kept me playing for about 3 hours. Add in some more social aspects, guilds(aka Outfits), squads and getting together with groups of friends to assault the enemy outposts from ground and air could be providing me with many hours of fun in the future...