They are releasing A LOT of information out and create a lot of hype. Creating hype a year before release is bad for PR as they won't be able to sustain it long term and people might burn out before the game is released.

JGE comes to mind.

I wouldn't be surprised if we get beta end of the year, with release in Q1 2012.

Err, JGE is the wrong example there.

You know what i mean with "the blackout", right? The period of time where we got absolutly ZERO information. Before the blackout, right before it really started, Netdevil had a playtest, resulting in a few more bugs that needs to be squashed, but in a overall happy audience. Devs where happy, Emmisarys where happy, random playtesters where happy. From that point on, it would have been just a month or two at max to go get beta out.
But then, Gazzilion came, and forced them to redo pretty much everything.


That litterally is impossible for Planetside 2. Means beta is not that far away, and im pretty sure they are aiming for a christmas release.

So why is everyone convinced that beta won't start for half a year? Once they implement weapons and get a continent finished they can start testing vehicle, weapon, air balance in beta.

They don't need to finish everything to start testing.

So why is everyone convinced that beta won't start for half a year? Once they implement weapons and get a continent finished they can start testing vehicle, weapon, air balance in beta.

They don't need to finish everything to start testing.

It's better to expect the beta to be out in 6 months and be pleased that it's early than expect it to be out in 6 weeks and go into a RAAAAAAAAAAAAAGE when it doesn't.

Its not just that.

In a traditional MMO, you put the systems in place and then add content to use those systems.
In planetside, you just need the systems, as the players themself are the content.

And from what we've seen in the trailers only one set of armor and a handful of classes have been completed, and 3 vehicles and 6-7 weapons. Although I know they won't want to reveal everything right now, I doubt the entire game is polished up yet, they only just switched to the new engine recently. They've done some awesome work to get this far already!

They are going to want to have at least all the weapons, classes and vehicles working and in the game, I was one of the earliest testers of 'SWTOR' and even then all the classes were in and fleshed out, the story was done, many of the maps were fully made etc etc and that game isn't coming out for another year and that testing was nearly a year ago!

Yep, and they were only partially in, it was in a very basic state.

Higby said that was the 1st time members of his team had seen it.