Planetside was the only MMO's back in the day that held my attention for longer than a month, I have fond memories of that game and had a lot of fun. Now I'm ecstatic that Planetside 2 is now out, and FREE above all things, that's just awesome!
But things have changed. The game is 10x better than the original, but I am a different gamer now. I can't play twitch FPS games anymore, it just doesn't work, so being on the front lines for a while and failing to kick ass leads me to re-finding my niche in this game. I started out wanting mouse + keyboard to work, but my right hand is useless, I can't use it to control the mouse or sitting on the keyboard, both are way to painful after a minute or two.
So I had to resort back to my trusty gamepad, but aiming is now out the window, I can only get in the way on the front lines. But wait I can be an engineer and repair things! Yay! After a while I got the gist of it, and even being on the TR side the confusing HUD color scheme is starting to make sense. I'm now right behind the front lines keeping MAXs, vehicles, turrets and generators repaired as much as possible, and I'm doing pretty decent at level 10 with lots of certs unlocked in the engineer track. If I want to get into the fight then I look for the closest turret, either on a vehicle or in a base or my own (engineers can deploy their own machine gun turret).
Now I'm looking to expand my usage and become a pilot. Even though PS2 supports controllers, their sensitivity is way off and doesn't feel right, all the good pilots out their use keyboard + mouse, controllers just don't work. And I've confirmed this; I broke out my Attack 3 flightstick but it just doesn't work well, hard to control and hard to maneuver, there's just too many buttons and movements that you need that can't be binded on a single joystick.
After that I went back to my gamepad, and tried several different key schemes to try and get good controls and I think I may have finally found something decent. I mapped my left analogue to yaw L/R, Pitch U/D and right analogue to Roll L/R, Pitch U/D. This has turned out to be pretty good, I've managed to skim surfaces and make pretty decent close maneuvers without hitting anything and I even managed to get my first few kills on my first round with this setup. Fire and Afterburn mapped to R1 and R2, and Ascend and Descend to L1 and L2. I can only get better with this, so it will just take some practice.
When making quick turns and small short adjustments, a combination of movements to both analogue sticks gives me a wide range of control. I can move both of them and fire afterburners to get out of dangerous situations, and move the left individually to make small adjustments while adjusting roll with the right to put me on target. It's still not as accurate as mouse+keyboard, but it's got potential to be decent enough to be competitive.
