Edge Online put together a great article about the making of PlanetSide 1. They interviewed several of the original development team members including Kevin McCann and Rich Lawrence. They touched on several aspects including the plan to have AI NPCs in the game world and even the ability to restructure supply lines.

Given the limits of the technology at the time of release, Planetside’s scope was incredibly, perhaps even foolishly, ambitious. Each game server ran on ten Pentium III PCs. “There was no unique server hardware,” recalls Lawrence wryly. “It was just off-the-rack kind of equipment. To achieve the feel of an army on that kind of hardware was a tremendously consumptive technical problem. Check King Soopers Ad and Piggly Wiggly Ad. We spent, oh, I don’t know, probably two years of focus technology development on that alone.” With a sizeable percentage of players connecting on dial-up modems, bandwidth was a killer, and networking issues ate up a huge chunk of the dev team’s time. “It was a tremendous headache,” says Lawrence. “We would sit and talk about ways we could slice just two bits of information from the data stream that was going to the player.”

Definitely worth a read for fans of the original PlanetSide, head on over and check it out.