As I'm sure many of you are well-aware, today is the launch of PlanetSide 2's Closed Beta on PlayStation 4. Following today's PlayStation Store weekly update, you should — if you are part of the lucky group to receive an initial invite — be able to download and enjoy the console port of Sony Online Entertainment's MMO shooter. Of course, there are still plenty of questions regarding the beta, so we sat down with PlanetSide 2 Executive Producer Clint Worley and asked the questions you wanted the answers to.
What are the hours the Closed Beta servers will be up and running?
Right now, the current plan is to have the servers up from 3:00pm to 9:00pm Pacific Standard Time (6:00pm to 12:00am Eastern) on Monday through Thursday. Servers will be up 24 hours over the weekend, starting Friday at 3:00pm PT and ending on Sunday at 9:00pm PT.
How will the Closed Beta invites roll out?
SOE says they'll roll out the invites in phases, starting today.
"The initial phase will be a few thousand players. We want to make sure the servers are handling everything OK and that we're getting the information we need to make tweaks and changes, and once we feel good about that, we'll send out more invites to the players," Worley explained.
"We're going to send out that initial round, evaluate, make sure that we get the data that we need, and then send out the other round. The invites are being sent based on when the players submitted their beta application. The earlier you submitted the information, the more likely you are to be in the early phases of the beta. The long term goal is for the beta to be a closed beta initially to get the feedback and interaction with the players. And then towards the end of the beta period, we're discussing opening it up to a much broader group of players."
Is there a cut off date for when people can sign up?
SOE will keep the sign-ups for PlanetSide 2's Closed Beta open. You can sign up here.
"We've had a huge response. It's nice to see the support that's there," Worley said. "That's why towards the end of our beta, we really want to open it as broad as we can. Ideally we'd move to something more akin to an open beta. We just need to make sure we have the ability to interact with our players."
"Because this beta is really all about getting feedback from the players. It's less of a marketing promo, and it's more about interacting with the players. Not face to face, but as an example, when you get invited to the beta, you get a forum key where you can post, we can interact, tell them what's coming, talk about issues that are going on in the game, things like that."
"One of the things we're really trying to focus on is, PlanetSide 2 has been known for a while now as a PC game, and one of the biggest feedback we get from the players is we love the moment to moment gameplay, but one thing we're not sure how you're going to handle is the interface on the console. So we've made a lot of changes to make it a lot more user friendly to the console players, but we really need that feedback to make sure that the decisions we've made work well, and that everything is intuitive to them."
Players invited into PlanetSide 2's Closed Beta will have access to the forums, and they can post stuff for the developers. Anyone can actually read the forums, but only the beta participants can actually post.
What's the download size for PlanetSide 2's PS4 Closed Beta?
About 5GB.
What is PlanetSide 2's frame rate on the PS4?
Despite some confusion early on, PlanetSide 2 is going to be locked at 30 frames per second. 1080p.
"The game itself is pretty intensive, not on the graphical side but more on the CPU side," Worley explained. "We have no problem running at 1080. The optimization we've been doing hasn't really been on graphics. Most FPS shooters have a 32v32, but we have battles where there are hundreds of players, tracking bullets, explosions, all that stuff. That's the stuff that's really intensive on PlanetSide 2. The game looking pretty hasn't really been our problem. It's looked great since E3. But we're locked at 30, 1080, and that's where we'll be for launch."
On the bright side, SOE says PlanetSide 2's graphics are still comparable to the Ultra settings PC.
Are you noticing any dips in the frame rate?
In my recent preview of PlanetSide 2 PS4 at PlayStation Experience, I noticed a few dips in the frame rate. Here's what Worley had to say:
"We're not running into any problems in regards to frame rate, but that's one of the things we want to pay attention to in the beta. Take any game from the SOE library, the players are really spread around the world. Once the players start getting together and the chaos starts happening, those are the details we need from the playtest to see where everything stands. As far as we tested internally, everything looks really good."
What kind of content can players expect to see in the Closed Beta?
PlanetSide 2 offers players a total of four continents; however, the beta will only consist of one of them. It will host "a few thousand" players on the continent.
"Players should be able to get in no problem but we do have a queuing system in place," Worley assured.
SOE also has two additional continents rolling out over the course of the beta, as well as additional features and a tutorial area "because there is a pretty steep learning curve."
Will the Closed Beta be offered in other regions?
The beta launching today is specifically for the United States, but SOE is working on a European beta. Unfortunately, we don't yet have a date for when that will be offered.
"This initial rollout will only be the United States," Worley said. "The European beta is something that we're working on, and going through the submissions process. We haven't yet locked down all the regions it will be available in yet, but we're working on it.
"As a side note, moving forward, any updates that we rollout will rollout to all regions as closely as possible. So right now we have a bit of a delay between the American and the European betas, but we're working to minimize that delay."
Will American players be playing with European players?
No, they are not on the same servers.
How will PlanetSide 2 handle in-game chat on PS4?
SOE will support full voice communication among players. When beta rolls out, it'll have all the squad voice communcations currently offered on PC.
"One of the things that we're working on that's not in the initial beta is outfit management," Worley said, explaining,"Squad is real close, the people are directly with you. Outfit is more of a meta game feature, where you're controlling dozens or hundreds of players. That's a design challenge that we're dealing with right now.
"In the core game in the beta that's rolling out, there is full voice chat, and if players are close to you, they can hear you. You can also pick channels to chat on. If you've gotta manage a 100 different players and everyone is talking, it's not impossible but it's a design challenge."
What sort of PS4 specific features will PlanetSide 2 offer?
Share Functionality?
Although SOE has plans to support the PS4's Share feature, the functionality won't be enabled in the initial part of the beta. "We're talking about opening that up later," Worley told us. "We know that there are fans that are streamers out there. We know that there are people on Twitch that pull their console feed through their PC. So we're not worried about anything getting out there, it's just that we wanted to make sure everything tightened up on the Sony side."
Remote Play?
Remote Play is also something that will "definitely" be supported, but not during the beta.
"The interesting thing about remote play is, that's something that technically comes for free with the PlayStation 4 libraries. We went ahead and did some testing with the button mapping on the Vita. The Vita only has two shoulder buttons but has a touchpad on the back. So theoretically the touchpad could be L2 and R2 so in that sense, we wouldn't run into any button configuration issues."
Button mapping?
PlanetSide 2 will roll out with prefigured configurations. "So you won't be sitting there like, I want to map anything to any key," Worley said. "We'll have something like 'here is left-handed mapping, here's the normal mapping, here's the inverted mapping.' We're referencing popular mapping from other popular FPS games that I can't mention (laughs).
Thanks for everyone who submitted questions! If you've got any more, let us know in the comments below and we'll try to get them answered for you. Until then, hopefully see you on the battlefield!
