This MMO shooter will defeat the ‘connotation’ that free-to-play means sucky quality. Planetside 2 has the ”visual fidelity,” the feel of a shooter and arenas supporting thousands.
The SOE big cheese reveals that up to 2,000 players can be on the same continent, where the team ”have no control over where they go.” All could attack the same base.
The free-to-play market has come a long way in proving its got the chops for quality, reckons Smedley. ”Yeah. I think three or four years ago, free-to-play had this kind of connotation that maybe the quality level wasn’t there. You are definitely seeing free-to-play games at the premier level now. I certainly feel like we’re in the leading pack on that,” he said.
”We’ve got the quality, the visual fidelity, the feel of the shooter, it’s as good as any of the top-tier titles. And those games can’t have 2,000 players playing at the same time. I don’t mean like in instances, I mean 2,000 players in the exact same continent at the exact same time. We have no control over where they go. They could all converge on one base and wreak havoc if they want to. That’s fun.” It sure sounds like especially when vehicles are involved.
There’s no launch date in sight yet as lot depends on how the beta goes: ”We are weeks away from starting the beta.”
”In terms of launch, that’s going to be determined by how the beta goes. We’ve got a ramp-up planned for the beta, we’re going to start small and ramp up very fast. And then we’ll just see how it goes. We’ve taken our time doing this right, and we want to make sure we do the beta right,” he explained.
Check out the full interview between John Smedley and VentureBeat.
