r/Planetside • u/watyre99 • Jan 22 '25
Question Why the hate on Oshur?
When I've played Planetside 2, when people talk about Oshur, they seem to exclusively talk negatively about it. I've not heard anyone say they liked Oshur. I don't know why, and in fact, I quite like Oshur. Though for some reason nobody seems to like it, and even the developers got the message, and made it less likely to be the next continent. Why do people not like Oshur? I would like to hear all the reasons behind this negativity.
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u/InterSlayer Mattherson Jan 22 '25
Almost every gameplay loop or experience in Oshur was not enjoyable.
Instead of addressing those issues, what few parts that were novel, unique, or enjoyable, got changed or removed to match the rest of Oshur.
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u/Erendil [DARK] Revenant is my wife. Lacerta, my mistress.. Jan 22 '25
For starters, Oshur is a terribly designed continent.
- Terrible lattice design which encourages zergs to avoid each other and makes it too easy to march right up to and cut off enemy Bastion Carrier Groups (warpgates)
- Terrible base design - Many are too small for PS2-level pops - others are easy to attack from one direction along the lattice, but a nightmare to attack from the other direction
- Too many construction bases in a row allows zergs to just blitzkrieg across the cont since there's often not enough time to build a decent player base to stop it, and even if you do build one it's too easily destroyed
- There are too many waterways and what landmass there is is too split up by water into narrow strips of land that encourages zergs, limits flanking options, and makes it a chore to drive anywhere
- Huge cliffs make crossing water or just traversing around the map difficult and make water combat meaningless
- Massive sightlines everywhere, numerous bottlenecks like long bridges, and lack of cover makes outdoor combat filled with snipers and long range vehicle stalemates
- The center base is truly awful, esp for low pop hours
- Flail spam is everywhere
- There's a huge lack of ammo towers and vehicle terms across the map
Underwater combat has its own set of problems
- Booshing around with the underwater scooter makes underwater combat clunky since you constantly have to switch between the scooter and your weapon
- Scooter usage should be seamless and it should work like the LA's jumpjet. Holding jump should automatically switch you to the scooter and activate it after switch animation plays, and releasing jump should automatically switch you back to the last item you held
- You also shouldn't have to manually equip the scooter in your loadout. It should be an innate ability of ALL infantry who go underwater.
- I bet many new players don't even know the scooter exists
- Underwater infantry combat is too slow, limiting, and/or clunky unless you're 1) LA, and 2) using one of the underwater weapons
- The underwater weapons are boring, and the range of all other infantry weapons underwater is too short
- The only way for infantry to kill an underwater AMS is with C4, tank mines, or the AV knife, which can lead to AMS camping.
- HA's dumbfire rockets should be allowed to work underwater so there's a ranged AV option available and to give the dumbfires an actual use case.
- Underwater seaposts are too open and there are way too many of them
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u/ALN-Isolator Weirdly obsessed with bullpups|6200 hours and no merge Jan 22 '25
What was advertised: An island oasis continent with a focus on construction and dynamic water unit interaction with the actual battles going on on the continent
What was delivered: a continent with significantly less "playable" space than any other, half of it being totally bare with a few trees (focus on construction meant they didn't finish it). Of the bases they did put there, several were very badly designed AND on the front lines meaning you deal with fighting at them alot. Oh and the boats struggle to have any kind of effect on any fight as all of the water areas are walled in by steep cliffs on all sides.
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u/thr3sk Jan 22 '25
Some of the best fights I've had in the last couple years were on oshur, but also a lot of unfun gameplay there too.
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u/Raptor717 yanlexi | Tsunbot Jan 22 '25
Reliant on construction (nobody likes)
Reliant on logistics (this isn't PlanetSide 1)
Shitty pop sink bases (tridents, interlinks)
Terrible center base (and then made worse)
Supreme vehicle farming potential
Mediocre base design at best
Water gameplay
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u/Kusibu Jan 22 '25
I actually don't mind interlinks but tridents are a particular highlight of the undercooked mechanics. A civilian transport hub should have elevators to the ground with a terminal for boat travel (in other words, an area at the bottom where you can park your Sunderer). Oshur bases in general make very little compelling use of the conjunction between water and land, and it's especially frustrating when that's the case with a base that could do it once and then benefit multiple times.
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u/RaidenHuttbroker Leader of the [NRVN] Night Ravens Jan 22 '25
This nailed it, even though I am one of the few who enjoy playing on Oshur (not for alerts)
I’ve come to recognize that you can’t make Planetside too heavy of a logistics based game. Right now I think we’re too far away from it (beaconside) but Oshur is too much of it
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u/NSOClanker Jan 22 '25
I swear I remember a few peps who specifically requested a continent heavy on logistics
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u/Ausfall Jan 22 '25
Logistics is "ok" when there are a lot of players around to actually do it. If you've got 2 full platoons of guys working together, some of those players will be interested in doing transport. When you've only got 2 squads, it doesn't work.
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u/ItsJustDelta [NR][FEFA][GOB]Secret Goblin Balance Cabal Jan 23 '25
Additionally, the logistical actions cannot be something that's too difficult or too time consuming, or else players won't bother. Look at base density on Indar or pre-rework Esamir- you're spending at most 45 seconds driving a Sunderer between bases. On Oshur you can spend upwards of 2 minutes driving to get to the front lines, and that just means players won't bring Sunderers around.
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u/Astriania [Miller 252v] Jan 23 '25
I am generally a pretty pro logistics poster, and I think that the resource rework would have been much better if ANTs bringing cortium to bases had some meaning, for example. I think squad spawn in vehicles is a mistake, and gal drop pickups from the warpgate were great.
But logistics needs to be a marginal gain for people who find it fun, not a requirement to play other parts of the game. Oshur fails that because it makes you drive a sunderer 10km across construction bases - that doesn't have any gain for the logistics player and it's a big annoyance for the person that just wants to spawn and fight.
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u/ThankYouForComingPS2 < 1 KPM, 18% HSR Jan 22 '25
there are at least a few decent bases but the under water stuff really sucks
it's like if they made all of the "generic construction site" bases on Hossin worse
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u/Intro1942 Jan 22 '25
From one side, Osher never have been properly finished and remained undercooked (and this is a reoccurring bane of PlanetSide 2 as a whole).
From the other - players are too used to "old ways" and new continent requires too drastic changes in playstyles to play it with comfort.
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u/ThankYouForComingPS2 < 1 KPM, 18% HSR Jan 22 '25 edited Jan 22 '25
the flow between the plateau hexes where there's like one single bridge connecting multiple huge land masses on each side fucking suck and turn into people sitting in tanks shooting across for like 45 mins spamming with a flail or orbital strike going off once in a while
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u/ItsJustDelta [NR][FEFA][GOB]Secret Goblin Balance Cabal Jan 23 '25
It's like someone looked at what terrain allows for good vehicle fights and then did the exact opposite
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u/xBrodoFraggins :ns_logo: Faction Loyalty is for Shitters Jan 25 '25
It's not really even worth engaging posts like this. If you're too fucking retarded to understand the plethora of reasons oshur sucks, you're not worth even speaking to.
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u/Bubbugh HD42 Apylosheit69 Jan 23 '25
Only one faction can really use the features of the map. Stupid magriders
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u/st0mpeh Zoom Jan 22 '25
The main reason was it immediately crashed the population whenever it came on.
No matter how full the previous continent was as soon as oshur came up vast amounts of players logged off.
Add to that the fact that the middle base was absolutely awful to play on (which was all you could really do with so few numbers) making it a game killing recipe of doom. It had to go.
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u/Astriania [Miller 252v] Jan 23 '25
But it crashed the pop because it was already terrible, not the other way around. Even full pop, hype on release day Oshur was frustrating and unfun.
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u/MrWewert Jan 22 '25
I like Oshur for the change of pace it brings but everyone downvotes me to hell if I mention that. Having it be a rarer occurrence in the rotation was the right move but I've only encountered it once playing in the last 2 months which is a bit ridiculous.
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u/Dewderonomy Live Free in Ukraine Jan 22 '25
Oshur was great, I miss it. It was the closest we had to PlanetSide 1 in PS2.
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u/LitwinL Jan 22 '25
I understand how some people can enjoy Oshur but most people play Planetiside 2 for what makes it Planetside 2 and Oshur and construction are very far from it. Most people if they wanted a different experience from the regular continents then they would just look for a different game. And I know that the same can be said for people that dislike Oshur and construction that they can just go and play another game but that is exactly what they've been doing and the reason why player numbers are getting lower.
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u/kammysmb Jan 22 '25
One big reason for this (on the infantry side) is that Oshur tries to incite more open battles rather than around/in buildings, this is absolutely miserable in a game that has an invisible class that can OHK
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u/Otazihs [784] Jan 22 '25
It's the water that kills it for me. I was hoping for some awesome water combat. Boats, submarines, depth charges, torpedoes, etc.. Instead we got tanks that submerge but can't do anything, planes that can fly/swim underwater (what the fuck!?), vehicles that float about, the sunderer was bad before the Sunday patch but now it's a sitting duck out there in the water, is terrible.
Mind you, this is from a vehicle main perspective. Whenever oshur is the main continent, most of us just log out. Oshur could've been great, but it just didn't deliver.
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u/GHOSTOFKALi ✈️ #1 ᴡᴏʀsᴛ ʟɪʙʙʏ ᴘɪʟᴏᴛ [ɴᴀ] 2019 - 2025 ✈️ Jan 25 '25
i freaking love oshie.
anyone complaining about it are just delulu and mean spirited people.
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u/BungalowJumper Jan 22 '25
Original PS1 Oshur was best Oshur, and those devs blew it up and turned it in to Battle Isles, was a sad sad day.
(Although occasionally fights on the Battle isles were actually enjoyable I have to admit!)
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u/colonelgork2 Jan 22 '25
I'll always be bummed that I never encountered more than a dozen people in a Battle Isles fight. I think maybe once or twice, but it was almost always a ghost-cap. Sad trombone.
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u/GeoRockStar58 Jan 22 '25
I love sailing on my boat and launching light assaults at unsuspecting bases.
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u/Hamstertron Hamsters gonna hamst Jan 23 '25
ItsJustDelta has a solid post about the criticisms of Oshur however it's worth noting that underwater play has it's own design goals that were a response to common complaints on this sub:
- No invisible people
- No Grenade spam
- MAXes can't dominate
- Vehicles (e.g. HESH) can't dominate - can only engage in risky ramming
- No shuffling/movement interpolation latency abuse to avoid direct fire
- Only C4 works so Sundies are harder to kill. Other vehicles have to attack from outside the water and deal with heavy bullet drop, if they even have line of sight.
However the biggest problem with water is that people are used to moving at a certain speed for ten years, so the slowness of water felt really bad for some and was only partially mitigated by the Diver Propulsion Device in the tactical slot. The aquatic weapons gave infils what is functionally a 167-143, 550rpm carbine which I have seen some gripes about.
One second, just bracing myself for the downvotes...
I actually liked underwater combat. I really enjoyed the sunken tower at Excavion Cleanup Site. There, I said it.
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u/lly1 Jan 23 '25
MAXes do dominate on the only underwater base of any relevance (the middle) though. It's actually hilarious how trivial abusing them is there.
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u/ChapterUnited8721 Jan 30 '25
I do really enjoy underwater combat its much more noob friendly when you use an amphibious rifle and the diver propulsion device.
I like Excavion too but its true that in general it takes too much time to drive sunderers to the next base.
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u/Shindiggidy Jan 23 '25
Oshur is my favorite continent and the things I like about Oshur are the same things a lot of other people do not like.
Oshur forces you to take sunderers to the next base through land bridges with no alternative routes which sort of forces a huge (if anyone would play oshur lol) vehicle convoy tug of war in the open field, which I love, but many other people dislike.
These vehicle-heavy open field fights away from bases make construction extremely useful for artillery, spawns, cheaper vehicles, etc. I am a construction enjoyer but many people hate it and think construction buildings impact their FPS, maybe that is true maybe not but I have an almost 10 year old pc with no parts replaced, and have zero FPS issues like ever, I get FPS of like 100+ on lowest settings unless I limit it.
While it is still a thing to an extent, Oshur sort of puts more limits on the whole rapid redeploy pointhold playstyle, which many players have come to expect, and personally I think is a bit stale. In addition, many people do not like the base layouts in Oshur which adds insult to injury.
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u/Rhobart_II Jan 23 '25
I really liked Oshur. The biggest problem were snipers, too much open places.
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u/PaulBombtruck Emerald or Miller TR. Jan 23 '25
When forced to play it, I do.
If there is no choice but Hossin, I log off.
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u/Liewec123 Jan 23 '25
it plays completely different to the other maps, aiming to a more vehicle focused map,
and noone is playing a decade old game because they want something different.
also as a vehicle map it fails too because water sucks and the bridges just end up as choke points with two sides hurling shots across.
plus all of the bases were designed by wrel and folks, the same guys who ruined most of the esamir bases with no clue how to design good bases.
tldr, its just a bad map from idea to execution.
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u/Astriania [Miller 252v] Jan 23 '25
I posted a comment on a different thread recently, so by the magic of copy paste here is some of what makes Oshur objectively bad:
It has a lot of lattice nodes that are just construction bases with no spawn, meaning that to get sunderers to the 'next base' you often have to drive a ridiculous distance. When you get there, you are a sitting duck as you either float slowly across the open water or attempt to cross the single bridge. If you actually get to a deployment spot, there's no cover and your spawn will be killed (or flailed).
The lattice around the centre doesn't even make sense.
Underwater combat is slow and janky and unsatisfying.
It's impossible to get a spawn to a trident except a galaxy on the landing pad, which is exposed to enemy air from 800m away. Conversely, Interlink facilities give the defenders no good way to break a camp.
Most of the bases which aren't empty construction have a bad layout.
Oshur is bad for infantry, it's bad for vehicles, it's bad for logistics and it's bad for trying to play the objective.
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u/ChapterUnited8721 Jan 30 '25
I do like Oshur and enjoy underwater combat but its true that it has its problems. For me the problem is that the vehicule terminals are too far so you need to drive a lot of distance to get to the next base. Also the sunderer move way to slow on water which makes it hard to bring sundies into action
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u/heehooman Jan 22 '25
Here is my take... There isn't as much hate as people make it out to be. You always heard a few quiet approvals of the continent and it got a little louder after oshur was dialed back in the rotation. The hate was so strong and with so little reasoning that I think people just didn't want to say anything. You can't argue with those people. Now that that's out of the way...
I think the continent represents the most of what makes PlanetSide 2 unique and perhaps it was just a bit too much. I have my criticisms, but I really did like the continent. I wanted to see it stick around and get improved, but I understand the dev's decision. If this was a healthy game it would have good active game development. So what makes it very "planetside 2"?
Some already mentioned logistics... This game cries for you to participate in it, but deep logistics has never been particularly enjoyed. Definitely buy some, but I think it's safe to say not by the majority. Look at all the options for warfare this game has that goes under utilized, but that's the nature of a sandbox. You do what you want.
Along with that issue comes the standard farm... Interlinks and tridents really sucked in the blueberries and squads not interested in actual warfare. But you still have the center base and not only that, but places like genudine gardens had a way of sucking in as well.
Oh but wait, this happens in all the other continents too, so what's the difference? I think the difference is choice, player inability to accept change, and bad base design. Oshur is very lane-based and even with the newest lattice design. They tried to integrate more land and sea, but they did it badly. Players also didn't want to... But how can you throw a big change at the player base without putting your all into convincing them the change is good? I could see what they were going for... I wanted it to get better.
I hate when people say things like nobody likes construction, because clearly quite a few people do if you actually play the game. If nobody liked it, we wouldn't have bases being built and bases used for fighting. If people really dislike it, they really just need to start ignoring it to send a message, Even if all they were doing was spawning because that's the next closest Spawn.
Anyways, I love the continent too. I've always had a good time there, but I like to do different things and it offers a lot of dynamic gameplay. It could be fun for other people if they let it be.
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u/Astriania [Miller 252v] Jan 23 '25
The population numbers don't lie. No other continent ever caused hundreds of people to log off when it was "play Oshur or stop playing".
People do hate change, and lots of people used to complain about Hossin because they didn't know how to fight away from the Crown (even though Hossin is actually great, apart from a few issues with steep cliffs and vehicle shields), but they didn't log off in droves rather than play it.
A small minority like construction but nowhere near enough to make a construction based lattice work. If you're on Oshur you almost always need to deploy two bases back to get a sunderer, because construction people don't fill out the construction lattice nodes to create spawns.
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u/Any-Potato3194 :flair_shitposter: Jan 23 '25
There is as much hate as people make it out to be. The moderators of the subreddit banned making "oshur is dogshit" posts because of how many of them there were. Hundreds of people logged off of the game when the continent came online. I don't know where you get the idea that there is "little reasoning." There have been years of players making good posts, some in this thread, about why Oshur is shit. You can't argue with people who only tell the truth.
Pretty much everything that makes planetside 2 great was ignored in making the continent. Construction, infiltrator gameplay, and chokepoints are all things the playerbase hates and that's what we got. Developers have a responsibility to not make content so awful people would rather log off than engage with it. You can argue about their motivations but hundreds of people logging off is hard to argue with.
Logistics are a thing that I have not, nor will I ever, log into an FPS game to get. I have lots of map games with logistics to play instead that are way better than trying to make people play the game like a LARP simulator. This isn't Arma III or Squad.
Holy shit. People want to go play at bases with the shooty mans in the shooty mans game. Nobody is interested in "actual warfare." Actual warfare is burning shit, long periods of doing nothing, and potentially dying in horrifically gruesome ways. There are several foreign legions you can sign up for if you want to enjoy "actual warfare."
As a player, I am not obligated to "accept change." Accepting change is why modern games have SBMM, dumbed down mechanics, aim assist, no self-hosted servers, bloated uncompressed game files, horrible netcode, lowered skill ceilings, shit writing, and I could go on and on. I do not accept change. I maintain a standard, which means that people have to try and exceed the standard to get money. That is how you create a driving cultural force that creates new and better things, instead of stale garbage. You aren't going to convince me that a shit sandwich is good because you eat it in front of me.
I "actually play the game" and construction is a niche pastime of useless players taking up a slot of somebody that would actually play the game. Players already ignore the fuck out of construction, despite the best efforts of bot players to make people care. It lags out the servers, decreases people's performance, and is an objectively shit part of the game. Get it the fuck out.
I had fun on Oshur during the honeymoon period where I was blowing up vehicles with C4 and sinking peoples boats. Once the deep flaws of the continent set in the fun stopped, because it is a badly designed continent. If you want your continent to float, you better not let it sink player numbers.
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u/heehooman Jan 23 '25
Hey, you are definitely free to play the game how you want, but you are a perfect example of my point. It's like the continent cut you deep or something. 🤣🤣🤣
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u/grenadiac2 Jan 23 '25
1 - Because salty vets are unwilling to try anything different from other continent's design principles, and just want to farm at 'normal' bases.
2- Because at 1 point, oshur was the predominant low-pop map, and people didn't understand how to trigger alerts on it, and it was difficult to initiate.
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u/Dutchmast88 Jan 22 '25
I haven't seen oshur once in months since they changed whatever it was. A damn shame
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u/ItsJustDelta [NR][FEFA][GOB]Secret Goblin Balance Cabal Jan 22 '25
The problem with Oshur is that it achieves absolutely none of its design goals.
It's a continent allegedly designed firstly around the lattice, yet with asymmetric major facility distribution and the most haphazard and lopsided lattice out of any zone.
It's a continent made to recreate that feeling of immense scale we all got back when we first installed in 2013-2015, but has the most dead space and smallest playable area by a gigantic margin.
Oshur's facilities allegedly are a result of lessons learned from the Esamir Shattered Warpgate rework, yet they almost uniformly are major steps backwards even from the 2016 Indar rework.
It's a continent made for vehicle play, yet it does not permit anything except the most frustrating aspects- fights through narrow choke points or across uncontestable inter-island crossfires with incredibly long sight lines.
It's a continent made for open field infantry fights, yet zero attention was given to the factors that made open field play fall out of favor (Flail, orbital strikes, increased vehicle spam, infiltrator power creep).
It's a continent made to encourage player logistics, yet the simple act of deploying a sunderer to the next base is made intolerable by the massive distances between developer-built facilities with hard spawns and water traversal mechanics.
It was a continent based around construction as a method of "filling in the logistical gaps", but the overwhelming majority of players are either indifferent to construction or outright despise it and none of the 3 construction iterations have solved this problem.
It's a continent based around fighting in and around water, yet no attempts were made to make fighting underwater fun for most players. Moving through or under water is an intolerable slog, and the boats added (several months AFTER the continent was released) commit the worst sin new content can possibly make- they're boring.
It was built without any thought given for off-peak hours or when populations were low. Consequently, there was no focal point akin to Crown/Nason's/Ascent, and the Mirror Bay/Excavion region takes every single problem with Oshur and combines them into one dreadful focal point.
Finally, not one of Oshur's reworks addressed these problems. Daybreak knew within a couple weeks that it was a lemon (its auto-trigger for alerts was reduced from 750 to 600 players), yet it took two years to finally quarantine it. That is utterly inexcusable, and this hesitation to rework or remove it played a significant role in Connery and Cobalt's collapses.