Planetside 2 is set to release sometime soon on the PS4 and the question on all the eager lips is how the game will look and if it will play comparably to its PC counterpart.
During an extensive interview with Eurogamer, Planetside 2’s Matt Higby revealed some details that may leave fans drooling, especially those who relish the chance to engage in some cross-platform play with their PC buddies. When asked if cross-platform play is possible, Higby revealed that is most certainly is, going on to explain that the team are currently using cross-play to test the game’s servers.
From a technical standpoint it can absolutely happen. In fact we’re playing on the PS4 client against our live servers right now. We have people running around on our live PC servers using PS4s to test and debug, to look at real PlanetSide fights on the PS4 client instead of just simulated ones. So from a technical point of view it’s absolutely possible.
However, not all is rosy. Whilst it is technically possible, Higby explains why it’s not going to happen.
From a business and logistics point of view it’s probably never going to happen. It has to do with platform exclusivity. People don’t necessarily want to be able to take a character you’ve spent money on on the PC and bring that character onto the PS4 without having spent money on the PS4.
He also explained that Planetside 2 might have fewer players per server but players not even notice the difference, though he did go on to say that it’s something they are looking into, so nothing is definite at this time.
Right now we have per map limits of about 1200 players[on PC]. 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.
So basically, even if Planetside 2 on PS4 did have fewer players, chances are you wouldn’t even realise it. Cracking stuff!
Looking forward to Planetside 2 on PS4? Or are you happy enough with the PC version? Let us know down below.