Sony Online Entertainment is bringing its massive, multiplayer RPG shooter PlanetSide 2 to the PlayStation 4, which is no small feat. The free-to-play game launched last November on PC, and gameplay revolves around thousands of players struggling for to dominate the planet Auraxis across multiple continents. We spoke with creative director Matt Higby about bringing the game to the PlayStation 4, and how it has changed since launching last year.
How long have you guys been working on the PS4 version of the game? How early did you know it would be on the PS4?
Matt Higby
We knew that we were going to be prepping it for next gen system for a long time. When we were building [the game's engine] ForgeLight, we kind of had this idea in the back of our heads ... that this was something that we were actually going to want to bring over. Back then, the PlayStation 4 was called Orbis. It was like some super secret project, but we knew a lot of the details about it. And we knew that it was something that was going to be able to run our game. So it was something that we were going to want to be able to take advantage of.
In terms of actively working on it, since around the time that we launched, we split off a couple of the engine coders and people who had been working on enhancements to go and start working on optimizing the engine to be able to be more multi-core friendly and things like that. There is actually a separate team of coders right now that we've been building up that are working on doing all of that transition stuff, and it's a lot of work.
There's a lot of engineering, kind of like plumbing work taking apart and reconstructing of the engine that needs to get done for it. That's the major thing that's been changed about the game. The engine, and some things with the UI, to make it work better on the gamepad. Other than that, they're getting PlanetSide 2.
Will it be cross platform between PC and PS4?
"The game, six months later, is very, very different than the game was at launch."
They'll be separate, but not for any technical reason, mainly for logistical reasons. Some of the ways that the PlayStation Network works are a little bit different - in terms of like currency that you use to purchase stuff, is PlayStation currency versus the Station Cash currency. And the update cadence is a little bit different. You have to go through a separate approval and QA process on the PS4, and we don't want to necessarily handcuff the PC updates to the PS4 approval process. So we want to be able to keep the servers updated separately. So we want to be able to keep the servers updated separately.
From a technical standpoint, they’re both going to be running on the same thing. We have talked about the idea of doing character interportablity between both. So potentially players who have a PC character, but decide they really want to play on the console because some of their console friends are there, might be able to drop their character on the console and play it there too.
Have you seen it yet running on the PS4?
Yeah. Yeah, we actually have. DC Universe Online is actually running on a PS4 right behind you, so we've had a PS4 devkits for a while. What we're doing right now ... so ForgeLight is a completely new engine. The game is not to the point where it's completely playable on it, but we have assets running. We can render scenes on it and things like that. And we've also started working on adjusting the UI, and we can be working with that on the PC with a controller plugged in and see how does it feel, does it work, do you interact with it well. A lot of the times the menus are kind of cumbersome, they are designed for mouse and keyboard. Those are sort of the biggest developments right now, and where we need to spend some time is on that interface and controls.
Will the game still be free-to-play?
Yes, absolutely, completely free-to-play. Really very little with the core game mechanics are changing. We are still going to have 2,000 players, it's still going to be 64 square kilometer maps, there is still going to be thousands of hours of character customization. Massive team play. All those sore of elements are all going to be there. The business model is going to remain exactly the same, and the only thing that you'll have to buy with money is going to be cosmetic items. Everything else that effects game play can be unlocked through gameplay.
We're really happy with PlanetSide 2 as a title, it works really, really well. Our biggest problem right now is just that you need to have a monster computer to be able to run it pretty well. So, it's really awesome that people will be able to buy a $399 box that's going to be able to run at maximum settings in basically perfectly controlled environments. You don't have to worry about all these different types of hardware it can support. So that's really exciting.
That reminds me, I played it a lot at launch but haven't played in awhile, and now I have a new gaming PC. I need to see how it looks now.
You know what, we are six months post-launch right now, and we're about to release our eleventh update. We took a couple of weeks off in December for the holidays after crunching. But we've maintained the cadence of updating the game basically every single two weeks with new content, bug fixes, new systems enhancements. The game, six months later, is very, very different than the game was at launch. We've improved so many different areas of the game, from user interface, to new ways for you to customize your character, and the game plays a lot better.
One of the big things we've been focusing on recently, and we're continuing to focus on, is new player experience. So people jumping into the game can more quickly figure out why this is such a cool and unique game, because that was sort of cumbersome and difficult. If you had friends, it was awesome, and you knew you could jump in and play with them. But if you were in there by yourself, sometimes it was really challenging. You had to work really hard to figure out where the fun was. Once you figured it out, and understood how it worked, it was super fun. So, building in more things to help on-ramp people into the game has been such a huge focus for us.
