One of their biggest tasks has been ”hand crafting every single area” of those massive slabs of land. Players can expect huge battles, like 200 vs. 30.
“We have enormous, enormous gameplay space,” said Planetside 2 creative director, Matt Higby. “One of our largest development efforts on this project has been hand crafting every single area of those eight-by-eight kilometre continents.”
The size of a single continent would be all of Ubisoft’s Far Cry 2 map, and even Bethesda’s Oblivion and Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas are dwarfed. The number of continents that make up Auraxis is unknown but each will be littered with stuff.
Higby described one courtyard area, one of many such environments in the world, as being the size of an entire ”Modern Warfare level”. The huge spaces are great for a flood of players to cross and do battle. Designers have had shape bases around this idea.
”You’re going to be fighting in battles sometimes when it’s 200 people fighting against 30 people because there’s only 30 people defending that base and then suddenly 200 people log in from the other group and go do it,” explained the SOE creative director.
“If you use the right tactics and you do things the right way you can still have fun and enjoy yourself as a group of 20 people defending against an onslaught, but that’s something we have to take into account when we do our level design, so we’ve been spending a lot of time whiteboxing bases, figuring out what we want specific areas to look like.”
Planetside 2 is yet to be dated by Sony Online.
