Planetside 2 PS4 Will Show Less Concurrent Players Than PC; No Word On Release Date

Remember Planetside 2 PS4? It’s still coming, rest assured. Yesterday, Sony Online Entertainment demonstrated the console version on Twitch, and today Creative Director Matthew Higby talked in a long interview with Eurogamer about Planetside 2 PS4, among other things.

Let’s tackle the real bad news first: Higby admitted that he doesn’t really know when Planetside 2 PS4 will be released at the moment, reiterating that they had issues porting the UI on console, as we previously reported.

I wish I knew. I know a target, but I don’t know the exact day. The reason is, as much as it sounds like we’re blowing smoke, we’re working hard to release a game that feels like a full-on console experience and not just a port. So it’s taken us quite a long time to re-jigger our user interface and our controls. There’s a lot that needs to get done.

If we were an FPS it would be easy for us to just take what we have right now, convert our half-a-dozen or so UI screens and be on the console. But we’re an MMOFPS and we don’t have half-a-dozen UI screens. We have dozens of UI screens and they all need to work well on the console. They all have a lot of depth and complexity, as you would imagine an MMO user interface does. All that now needs to work on a console controller. It needs to be navigatable. It needs to be intuitive. That’s been a really large design process, and we’ve done a lot of iteration to try and make it right.

But our goal is at the end of the day to have our launch on the PS4 feel like a great PS4 native console game, not just a PC port. So it’s taking a while.

He then confirmed that the beta phase should start before the end of the year, and more details on this will be released at the PlayStation Experience event.

Right now our intention is for a beta at that time. We will have some more info about those plans at the PlayStation Experience event on 6th and 7th December.

Now onto the mildly negative news - Planetside 2 PS4 will probably show less concurrent players than PC, although most gamers won’t even notice that.

Right now we have per map limits of about 1200 players. Per server there are four continents. So you can have about 3600 to 4800 players on a single server depending on what the continent locking situation looks like on that server, since we do lock continents to focus players onto different continents. [On PS4] our goal is to get as close as possible to doing that. But the number of players is something we’re probably going to have to look hard at as we work on our final optimisation passes. That’s something that might get lowered.

The good news is, the way we lower players wouldn’t necessarily mean there are fewer total players fighting on the map at once. But it might mean your client’s awareness of all the players around you might cut down. So if you’re in a huge fight and there are 300 players around, we already have a bunch of heuristics that slice that number of players down and show you the ones that are relevant to you on a moment to moment basis. On the PS4 those constraints might need to be a little tighter.

Hopefully, if we do our jobs right, that won’t even be perceptible to you. We already have this culling we do for players in the PC game. Unless you’re in the biggest of the big fights, you don’t really notice players popping in and out as the culling algorithm regulates how many characters are being sent to your client at once.

So hopefully on the PS4, although we’ll probably have a more constrained number of players on-screen at once, the gameplay won’t have much of an impact, so you won’t even notice.

As someone who spent some time on the PC version, though, Planetside 2 remains a unique experience, even if it’s not for everyone. Luckily, the game will be Free-To-Play, so you’ll be able to evaluate it as long as you like. How much are you still excited for it, PS4 gamers? Tell us below!