Hello PS2 players both current and hopefully the ones that have played and moved on. I want to lay out our direction moving forward for PS2.
The development team continues to work on many things at once. We have the PS4 version launching very soon here. We've had to spend time getting the codebase to merge, and yes.. that's led to some problems like we all saw with the flight controls.
I realize there are people who think that means it's all about the console versions going forward.
It isn't. We won't let it be that way because we like the PC way too much for that.
In the near term, we're adding more people to the Planetside 2 team (hopefully bringing some people back that were former team members) to help us get our development bandwidth to where we want it to be. However, we have plenty of horsepower to deliver on some amazing things this summer already.
The plan is simple - We are going to be taking Planetside 2 to where it needs to be and finally address the stuff should have already. The metagame. We will once and for all be getting the Meta to where it just has to be. That means a comprehensive change that will involve completely revamping resources, changing what territory control means and spending a lot of time giving you reasons to fight. All of this will be done in a fully transparent manner in which we actually put our internal design docs out there for your comment and feedback.
We will be moving towards a system where resources are actually going to be a fun part of the game, and you'll be able to harvest resources directly (in fact, that's how you're going to get them). and you'll be able to use them to finally get to some of the end-game things we've been wanting to do - Outfit bases on new continents (and potentially on existing ones). We're also going to be spending a lot of time to make sure capturing a facility actually matters, as well as looking at the overly-complicated capture system which can be pretty obtuse at times.
The simple problem with Planetside 2 has always been "Why are we fighting?". We intend to make the focus of the time between now and our 2.0 release in September working very hard on this core issue. We have put it off way too long, and honestly the stuff we've done up until now hasn't been enough and we know it.
The team is also committed to a much more regular update schedule on the PC. We want to be honest about only having a finite amount of resources, but a significant portion of them will be dedicated to the PC and advancing the game itself. We will absolutely be adding more resources to this team to assist in this.
We'll be making announcements about the 2.0 release in the near-term future with a lot more specifics. In addition, we have a nice surprise for you... we're also going to be adding another game mode to Planetside 2 for the first time. You can expect to be seeing that in the upcoming week on Live servers (it will be a beta of the game mode). This will actually be a game mode with a win condition! Hopefully you like it. It's meant to be the kind of thing you pop into for an hour match and then go back into the main game. Hopefully in the short term we can make it so outfits can directly compete against other outfit in this game mode. Also, we aren't charging to get into this mode. The entire reason for it is to try something new and see how we all like it as a community.
Why do this instead of just doing the Meta stuff? Simple - we are experimenting and trying something new. Before you judge, try it. It only took a small subset of the team a few weeks to put together and we hope you like it.
In the months between now and September we're going to be putting all kinds of new things into the game on a regular schedule. We're also going to be committing to doing a better job on the Roadmap. The criticism that we do a poor job updating it is something that I think is both fair and accurate and it's simply going to be done right.
So for those of you that thought Planetside 2's best days are behind it... you are going to be pleasantly surprised, but the proof has to be in what we do not in what we say.
Planetside 2 is one of our core franchises. It will be here in ten years and assuming we can make the right choices it can be 10x as big as it is right now (on the PC, not even talking about adding console users).
To those who think all we care about is the console - no, no, no. PC is our lead sku and is always going to be. We are very excited to bring PS2 to the Playstation 4. It's really fun. Our console players are every bit as important to us as our PC players, but in terms of how we develop stuff, expect the PC to be the lead sku.
Thanks for reading this, and thanks for playing Planetside 2. We're in this for the long haul and we're going to work our asses off to make sure you are too. The only way we do that is to take this game to the next level, so that's just what we're going to do.
