Creative Director Matt Higby talks about porting to console, fixing problems on PC and more.

Those who have pre-ordered Sony’s next-generation console have even more reason to celebrate, with the news that PlanetSide 2 will be heading to the PlayStation 4. There’s no promise that SOE’s flagship MMOFPS will be ready for the console’s launch on November 15 (29 in Europe), but it will contain everything currently in the PC version.

When I spoke to creative director Matt Higby in a roundtable discussion at Gamescom, he was upbeat about the move, promising that it will look as good as a PC on the highest settings. While there won’t be any cross-platform play, Higby also suggested that we might see a facility to transfer characters from PC to PS4 servers and vice versa, all in the name of helping us play with friends.

“We’re not doing it [cross-platform play], but the main reason is logistical. When you’re releasing something on the PlayStation Network, it goes through a different level of QA from SCEE and SCEA. We can’t guarantee that our PC and PS4 servers will be on the same version all the time, so that means we can’t have characters jumping back and forth or playing on the same servers.”

While the PS4 version is still in the pipeline, the PC version has already clocked over five million users. On August 16, European publisher ProsiebenSat.1 took the unusual step of launching a retail version. Priced at €10, the box contains codes for that amount in store currency, along with exclusive items and useful boosts. It also contains a DVD, saving 8GB of download time for those suffering with low-quality internet.

Perfecting the PC Version

In the nine months since launch PlanetSide 2 has gone through 14 game updates, covering everything from weapon balance to map layout. Now, the team is taking stock, focusing heavily on optimising that PC experience.

“We feel we’re at a point now where we’re not feature complete, but the game is in a good enough state where we can sit where we’re at right now and still have a very solid game, and concentrate on optimization. Whereas, at launch, we knew we had some major things to do, like adding a tutorial, adding VR zones, adding more contextual things like vehicle and continent stuff.”

My instincts would normally run counter to this – fresh content is supposedly what keeps an MMO player in the game. For Higby, the feedback he’s getting from leaving players tells a different story. “When we look at churn, when we look at players starting and quitting the game, the number one reason by orders of magnitude is performance.”

“When I play the game, I play a lot. The reasons why I log out and stop playing for the day are when I’m frustrated because it crashed, or I was in the middle of a big fight and I lagged when I should have killed this dude really easily, or for whatever reason my game glitches and somebody else came in and killed me. Those are really frustrating issues and, beyond any sort of new content being added, fixing those gives us a platform for us to continue to develop on.”

The other big bugbear for players currently is population imbalance. Jumping on to a server only to face constant overwhelming numbers from an opposing faction can get pretty old, pretty quickly. I asked Higby if there was a magic bullet for solving these, or if it needs a more subtle approach. He started by describing why some of the more common suggestions he hears just won’t work.

“Some people bring up ‘why not just remove the ability for people to create a character of a certain faction on that server?’ Well, if you’re getting your friend to play and you can’t get him to play with you, that sucks right?”

“A lot of the time, people ask ‘why not stop allowing people to switch characters on the same account?’ The only people who are affected by us limiting your ability to have characters on different empires on the same server, are people who pay us money. Because anybody who’s a free player can create multiple accounts, and switch between them as they want.

“The people who spend money are sharing items across all their characters, and now they’re limited on being able to play on the same account. It doesn’t even solve the problem. I’ve looked at the data, I know the people who are switching accounts – a lot of people do switch accounts to switch their characters around. It wouldn’t do anything to solve the problem, it would just inconvenience people who are already helping us pay for development of the game.”

So what is the solution? For Higby, part of it involves the XP bonuses that empires get for being underpopulated. Instead of getting a flat XP bonus no matter who we kill, a bounty type reward would be offered for taking out the over-populated empire. “Ideally, that makes it so that more people are concentrating on fighting the overpopulated faction, and getting a better bonus for fighting against the overpopulated faction, instead of just getting a flat bonus for being underpopulated.”

Higby also suggested a change to the alert system; an occasional objective that rewards the winning empire with bonus XP. Currently, the dominant empire would usually flood into the map containing the objective, clinching it easily through sheer weight of numbers. His idea is to link the amount needed to win an objective to each empire’s population, handicapping large overpopulations with a much higher target to reach. “That would prevent people swapping over to the faction that’s winning at the end to get the most XP because, if a bunch of people did it, that empire wouldn’t be winning the alert anymore.”

He also added that “those are really difficult for us to get right, because they’re something that’s very easy for other people to exploit and take advantage of. To me, the population issues, particularly on certain servers where the populations are really out of whack, are one of the biggest problems for us to solve from a design perspective.”

The Console Challenge

The PC optimization that Higby described is also likely to benefit PlayStation 4 owners when the console arrives in November. Although ostensibly based around a PC-like architecture, the team at SOE still has a significant amount of work to get the best out of the box.

“It’s challenging for us, because one of the things our game does very poorly, and one of the things that we need to optimize, is multi-threading. Our game is multi-threaded – we do support multiple cores – but we have a main gameplay thread which is much longer. When you have a very expensive thread, even if you have bunch of other little ones, you’re always bound by the most expensive thread. So we need to split the gameplay thread into two or three other threads.

“AMD architecture really relies on balanced processing across all the different cores to be able to take the most advantage of it. Because the PS4 is an AMD based system, the amount of optimization we need to do to get it to work on there is very important.”

When asked if the touchpad on the PlayStation 4’s DualShock 4 controller would be used in PlanetSide 2, Higby confessed that it has actually been incredibly helpful with their current development. “The touchpad specifically, we’re using a lot right now because our UI isn’t very console-friendly yet. One of the biggest differences that you’re going to see when you’re playing on the PlayStation version is going to be the user interface. Aside from that, you’re going to get the full PlanetSide 2 experience.

“We’re not having fewer players on the server, we’re not allowing you to have fewer vehicles. There are still going to be 64 kilometer square maps.  If you went to the website right now, downloaded the game, turned the settings up to maximum and played it, that’s what the PS4 version is going to be.”

When releasing a game on a new platform, there’s always a question about exclusive content. Although nothing has been decided yet, Higby was clear that we’re unlikely to see any unique weapons, vehicles or maps in the PlayStation 4 version. Any special content would likely be limited to camo and decals.

That said, all Player Studio content would make it over to the PlayStation 4, providing fan-creators with an even wider audience for their work. Higby also mentioned that “It’s actually very cool, because our art director will look at a screenshot, mark on it, and send it back to them. For a lot of these guys who may be high school kids or out of work game artists or who knows, but they’re actually getting a chance to really understand the production cycle for creating assets, which I think is really neat from a mentoring point of view.”

As we wrapped up the session, we pushed Higby for a release date on the PlayStation 4 edition. Smiling, he wouldn’t commit, but he did offer this assurance: “We want to be on there as soon as possible, but we want to be there when it’s perfect and ready to go. For us there’s not a rush, because there’s not any competition on the horizon at all. There’s nothing that really does what we do.

“The original PlanetSide came out in 2003. When we started talking about PlanetSide 2 there was an enormous fan base already. If you got bit by that, nothing else has come along to scratch that itch in ten years. I don’t see a lot of other ones on the horizon, and that’s a testament to the very specific skillset and technical knowledge that’s required to make a game with this scope.

“We’re so far ahead, in terms of engineering, networking understanding, server infrastructure understanding, of where a lot of other companies are at. The Forgelight 2 engine that we created specifically for PlanetSide 2 is a very advanced piece of technology that, for us, we’re not worried about any competition coming up any time soon.”

I wish Higby the very best of luck. As someone eagerly anticipating the PlayStation 4 myself, I can’t wait to see what the team delivers.

Gareth “Gazimoff” Harmer, Senior Contributing Editor

Follow me on Twitter @Gazimoff