PlanetSide 2 is looking great on PlayStation 4. As promised, the PS4 version of SOE's MMO shooter was present at E3 where I had the opportunity to see a recent build and talk about the status of the game.
"Right now, we're transitioning everything that we have on PC onto the PS4," lead designer Luke Sigmund told me.
"We're not leaving out any features. It's going to be a full featured game," he continued. "We're spending the majority of time essentially redoing our UI to make it more console-centric. We're not just taking our existing screens and just slapping the X button on them. Our goal is to make this feel like it was never a PC game, like it was always a console game."
As for when PS4 players can finally expect PlanetSide 2 on PS4, Sigmund said "definitely" this year.
"The beta is probably not too far off, but it's kinda hard to say. Our biggest goal is to really just make sure the game feels right. Like when you pick up the controller and play, we want it to feel as good as all of the other console games you've been playing.
"So that takes some time. And because we're doing a completely separate UI, that also takes some time. All the time we've spent until now has been on optimization, making sure it runs really well," Sigmund said.
In my brief hands-on time with the PS4 version, it seemed to run smooth. I've never played the PC version so I can't compare the two, but controls were responsive, framte rate was solid and visually it looked good. There were some hiccups in the UI however, like certain text not being displayed and a capture point in the mini-map no appearing, so clearly there's still some work to do. I don't know about you, but I'd prefer SOE take the time to deliver a clean game then rush it out with a ton of bugs.
