This week, Sony Online Entertainment celebrated the two-year anniversary of PlanetSide 2 on PC. While we're all eagerly awaiting the release of the PS4 version, there's still plenty to look forward to with the PS4 version. Sitting down with creative director Matt Higby, we asked him about the past, present, and future of PlanetSide 2 on PC.
GameZone: A two year anniversary is quite an accomplishment, could you give us an overview of where the game is, and is it currently at the point where you guys wanted it to be.
Matt Higby, PlanetSide 2 Creative Director: Yeah, it's been two years, an exciting two years. Very gratifying. Just fun for us to be able to see things like players creating videos and showing off works of art essentially that they're creating using our game. All the feedback we get from our community, seeing our players do things like organized tournaments and leagues, all these things starting to hit their stride. In terms of features and where we're at with building the game, a lot of that time has been spent making fixes to the base game, as well as adding new features. I think we have gotten the game to where we want it to be, in terms of things like infantry balance, moment to moment gameplay, air balance, and ground balance, I think we're in the most solid place we've ever been right now. I think that's the cornerstone of making an MMOFPS work, is making sure the moment to moment is extremely good, and it's best right now that it's ever been.
In terms of other MMO game systems, we still have a lot more room to grow and a lot of years to add. So there's no end to the amount of content we want to add to the game. We have a backlog that has dozens of different weapons and vehicles and content like that, that we're waiting to work on. We're two years in, but it still in a lot of ways, feels like day one. A game like this is never truly finished.
GZ: The last major update was the Hossin update, but that was launched as a beta correct?
MH: Yeah, so we're taking the same steps with the way we've released that continent, with a lot of other areas of the game, which is we can get it done quicker with the players' help. With Hossin, we released before a lot of people on the team thought it was ready to go live, but we really rapidly were able to iterate and update bases, and get the map to the point where it is now. In fact, just last week we removed the Early Expedition tag and now it's officially a full live continent. That doesn't mean it's finished, we're still going back and doing fixes to older content as well.
In terms of feedback towards these early releases, looking at various forums, some of them can be relentless, how would you guys respond to those types of criticisms?
We can only control what we can control. In terms of getting feedback from players, the results of the positive feedback is always worth it as opposed to the negative feedback. We definitely couldn't develop this game without community feedback. It's sort of a tax you have to pay having to develop this game, having to deal with negative feedback. It's easier to ignore irrationally negative comments, instead of like 'Hey, here are some rational reasons why I'm dissatisfied.'
GZ: Is the player base where you want it to be? Do you find it harder to attract newer players?
MH:I think there's a couple things going on. One, a lot of our players have played the game for thousands of hours. A lot of our higher end and advanced player, they're playing an FPS game for hundreds, if not literally thousands of hours and at a certain point, it's hard to keep somebody entertained beyond that threshold. Especially for an action or FPS game. There's new competition coming out on a month by month basis that are new and shiny, so it's tough to keep those guys engaged in the same way. But, it's really cool to see for our game, when we release a new piece of content or gameplay feature, we see a massive re-engagement of players. People who might have been gone for a couple of months, but then they come back when we introduce new content. Typically, when we add something new, we count on those people jumping back in and bolstering those numbers.
In terms of our overall population, it ebbs and flows. And when we have long periods of mostly small updates, bug fixes, adding a few items, but no real ground breaking massive features, we'll definitely see our numbers go down for a bit. But when we release a new feature, we expect it to pop up.
GZ: For PC players that might be worried that your attention is diverted more to the PlayStation 4 version, what would you say to them to ease their minds?
MH:Right now, the way the team is structured, a majority of the team is working on building the game itself. Then we have a smaller team that is essentially 'porting' the game to the PS4. I say porting, but we're really trying to make sure that the biggest features, which are the user interface and the controls are custom built for the PS4 and not just a port. In terms of game content, game optimization and bug fixes, a 100% of our attention is going into the PC product because the PC game is going to be, except for the user interface, the PS4 game. So we're trying to get as much stuff cleaned up and finalized. That's why we've had so many quality of life and bug smashing updates the last couple of months, because we wanted to put the game in the best possible place when we launch on the PS4. But guess what, that's beneficial to the PC too, and it's beneficial to them first, well before the PS4 is even in beta.
I can definitely understand the people looking from the outside would say 'Hey you know what, the amount of PC content coming out has slowed down' which is true, and that's because we're at the end of the year, and the last couple of updates of the year are generally bug fixes and optimization updates. We try to get the large updates out early on. In general, there hasn't really been a reduction in capacity due to the PS4. There's always a lot of skepticism about motives and I think that we've gotten a lot of goodwill from our community by being as open and honest about what we're doing, especially when we're screwing things up and doing things that players don't want us to be doing.
GZ: If I remember correctly, in a recent livestream, you showed off the PS4 UI and said that some of that will be applied to the PC version. Does that mean updates will be in tandem or how can we expect that to work?
MH:We're not doing something like making the PC game look like the PS4 game, or making the PC and PS4 game the same, they'll still have unique UI and controls, but some of the things we've been innovating on the PS4 UI side, are things we all agreed to get moved over to the PC side to clean up some of the old UI. In a lot of ways the UI we have in the game right now is very much the first iteration when we launched. We just didn't go back and touch it because it was working fine for what it did and we wanted to spend that time on building forward progress; adding things like the Directive System, Outfit Recruitment.
But now on the PS4, we're trying to refresh all the UI screens. A really good example is our character create screen. It's one of our oldest pieces of UI in the game, and it's one of the first things players see when they log in to the game, so the quality is in a lot of ways influenced by what this very early, almost prototypical, user interface looks like. So if we can get things like the character create ported over back to the PC, that would be great. What we won't be doing is taking interfaces designed to work with a controller and porting to the PC and then having a confusing and difficult to interact with interface because we wanted to bring a console UI over. That's definitely something that we won't be doing.
GZ: In one or a few words, describe PlanetSide 2's plans for 2015 and then elaborate a bit on that.
MH: In as few words as possible, expanding beyond the core experience.
The last two years we've been really solidifying the core gameplay, making sure that moment to moment gameplay on the continental level and a base level works well and feels good. Beyond that, I think the promise of PlanetSide is the massive strategic gameplay, so when we capture this base we're going to get this benefit and we can leverage it against these players. Those things are kind of missing right now, because we've been so focused on the moment to moment gameplay. Even in some cases removing some strategic gameplay that was hampering our gameplay, like our resource system. We felt like the way our resources were set up added a lot of strategic gameplay but it also clouded our basic gameplay, and it was confusing and added a barrier to our moment to moment gameplay. In 2015, I'm interested in adding some of those strategic elements that influences that moment to moment gameplay but isn't hindered by or slowed down by it.
I'm looking forward to expanding the mission system, which adds the ability for squads to create good fights and objectives, and especially for players who were less experienced. Things like facility benefits is huge, and we're missing some of those things right now, so in 2015 we want to focus on those additions.
These are things that players have been asking us for and rightfully so, they're the thing that keep the game exciting beyond your mastery of the moment to moment. So if a player masters the moment to moment gameplay, there is very little to keep them engaged beyond personal achievement and teamwork. So what we want to do is create this new mastery of the strategic game that's on top of it. It's a tall order for sure, and making sure we can do that without adversely impacting the moment to moment gameplay is challenging.
Closing out the interview, we did ask Higby about a release date for PlanetSide 2 on PS4. While he couldn't give us one at the time, he later revealed on the anniversary livestream that a beta date for PS2 on PS4 will be announced at PlayStation Experience next month. We'll be in attendance at the event and let you know what we hear. In the meantime, leave a comment below or any questions you'd like us to ask Matt Higby when we chat later about the PS4 version.
