PlanetSide

PlanetSide is a massively-multiplayer online first-person-shooter video game published by Sony Online Entertainment and released on May 20, 2003.

PlanetSide chronicles the efforts of three factions as they fight for territorial control over ten different continents on the planet Auraxis. Players take on the role of individual soldiers fighting for one of the three factions within the game, and can specialize in various fields such as combat vehicle crewman, infantry, invisible infiltrator or a variety of combat support roles such as combat medic or combat engineer. The game is played primarily in a first person perspective, with the option of third-person.

Unlike most shooting games, in which small-scale matches take place in essentially an instanced map, PlanetSide battles can involve hundreds of players in a single fight. PlanetSide battles concern control over territory and strategic points, and can cause repercussions to all three factions. To date, PlanetSide remains one of the few MMOFPS games ever created. A sequel, PlanetSide 2, was released in November, 2012. On January 24, 2014 Sony Online Entertainment announced that the game was going to be free-to-play in April 2014. The game was officially launched as free to play with microtransactions available, on April 29, after several delays.

PlanetSide 2

PlanetSide 2 is a free-to-play massively multiplayer online first-person shooter published by Daybreak Game Company and released on November 20, 2012. It is a sequel of PlanetSide which originally was released in 2003. Officially announced on July 7, 2011 at the Sony Fan Fair, the second installment used a new game engine, supported thousands of players in continuous large scale conflict, and featured in-game integration with Twitch.tv. As in the first PlanetSide, PlanetSide 2 chronicles the efforts of three factions as they fight for territorial control of the planet Auraxis.PlanetSide 2 was released for the PlayStation 4 in North America on June 23, 2015.PlanetSide 2 holds the Guinness World Record for the biggest first-person shooter battle with 1158 players in a single battle.

Gameplay

PlanetSide 2 is a re-imagining of PlanetSide, featuring the same world and factions, and taking place at roughly the same time period. As in the previous game, it features territory control in an open-world, large battles featuring up to 2000 players per continent on foot or in land/air vehicles. The territory system differs greatly from that of the original, being more free-form and based on a hexagonal territory control system. Former SOE (now DGC) has been taking into account balance issues from the first game. As stated by creative director Matthew Higby, they reward combatants on lower population empires through mechanics such as proportionally increased advancement rates and resources to aid the balance of overall empire saturation on each server as much as possible without force-restricting players from being able to play with their friends.