Goin' Up! PlanetSide 2 Adds Base-Building

Construction arrived in PlanetSide 2 [official site] this week, letting players build their own little bases. If you've been hoping to build a quiet little get-away spot, put up a shed, set out a few lawn chairs, fire up the barbie... yeah, that won't happen. Especially given the sort of people pootling around, tooled up and looking for trouble. No, this is warconstruction, letting players build little warbases as waroutposts and even to help contribute victory points to the free-to-play MMOFPS's wareffort.

It all starts with an Advanced Nanite Transport, a four-man vehicle which can harvest minerals from nodes. Deploying the ANT opens up construction menus, which lets folks build walls, bunkers, mannable anti-infantry turrets, silos, and building-fixing repair modules. Fancier structures which are initially locked to players include anti-bombardment shields, garages, one-way shield walls, more types of turret, and modules granting turrets AI to fire by themselves.

Then there's the HIVE, which can generate Victory Points. The closer they're deployed to enemy Warp Gates, the more VPs they generate. Each faction has a limited number of the cores needed to power HIVEs but can smash enemy HIVEs to steal the cores, so I imagine jostling for good HIVE deployment spots and trying to take them down might spark all sorts of scraps.

PlanetSide 2 is free-to-play, available through its own client or Steam.

But hey, why read my recap construction when you could watch player 'Wrel' showing it off? He certainly knows far more than ol' muggins here.

Ta to reader 'gritz' for the tip.