I read this article 6 years ago and..

[Chefkoch]

with Planetside 2 Beta going to start in a few weeks it feels like a dream come true.

Certainly Planetside was a gamble, and an enormous technical challenge. “Primarily the problem was scale,” Lawrence continues. “We weren’t going to have just 16 or 32 people slugging it out and treat latency as a ‘tough luck and try logging into another server’ issue. We wanted 500 people in battles.” And this is where it gets a bit technical. “There’s the famous ‘N-squared’ issue, in which logic iterates every player in a list then considers every other player for comparison. For 32 people, that’s 1024 comparisons. For 500, it’s 250,000. What was easily within your CPU budget in a 32-player environment completely falls apart with 500.”

What the game achieved in terms of latency management and server responsiveness, “no other product could do at the time, and most people still can’t do to this day.” It's not immodest of Lawrence to say, “I can still crest a hill in Planetside and see a scene of mayhem and destruction that is unparalleled in other games I play. The sense of being in the middle of a huge war, with everybody there a real person is a unique thing."

As for SOE themselves, sadly it doesn't sound like they've got any plans for a Planetside 2. “Well, to be honest, if we had a Planetside 2 sitting right here we’d have told you about it by now,” says Lawrence. “As a company and as a bunch of gamers, we remain really interested in the MMOFPS genre and want to see new product there.”

BBC Collective Source

[Luieburger]

That's from 2006 then? I was stuck in WOW back then during college. TF2 and the Orange Box was right around the corner. Man... I wish I had tried Planetside instead of SWG back in 2003.

[Chefkoch]

Originally Posted by Luieburger

That's from 2006 then? I was stuck in WOW back then during college. TF2 and the Orange Box was right around the corner. Man... I wish I had tried Planetside instead of SWG back in 2003.

The article is from 2006. Planetside 1 from 2003.

Personally i first hear from PS-1 in a Gamer Forum where they were looking for players. There was allmost no marketing at all in Germany back then.

[RedKnights]

It' hard to imagine that when the game released I was furiously overclocking my 1.4ghz Pentium 3 processor to 1.6ghz and shelling out for a Radeon 9700 XD

I think i'll end up going through a similar process today for Planetside 2, though these days I think I'll swing Nvidia XD

Luckily this game will be far better advertised, I can't go anywhere without seeing an ad for it on the internet, though I know it's probably heavily directed at me from AdChoices.

[NoDachi]

on a slightly different note, anyone remember the original Planetside1 e3 video?

[ringring]

This bit made me smile....

However, there is one major MMOFPS in development at the moment: Huxley, from Korean developer Webzen. It's set on a post-apocalyptic earth and promises a vast battle in a persistent world.

[DirtyBird]

Hasn't promoting the game come a long way.

[TheApoc]

Yea I been telling everyone, sadly most of my friends act like old men with no time they say

[SixShooter]

Originally Posted by NoDachi

on a slightly different note, anyone remember the original Planetside1 e3 video?

Planetside E3 Demo - YouTube

LMAO, what a terrible demo

[Zulthus]

The physics and certain graphics looks a lot better in this demo than they do now.

What is a Cryogenics Facility?

[Chefkoch]

Its interesting that in this version there was some kind of demage meter. Lightning tank hit for 25 health demage

[Hamma]

Interesting article!