PlanetSide 2 is getting a new progression system know as 'Directives' later this week, and they'll bring more than just bragging rights. According to the notes for a huge patch releasing on Tuesday, the Directives will unlock 'exclusive' Auraxium prestige weapons and decorative items, so that you can easily flaunt your Directive Tree progress to all and sundry.

The system will support all roles, and in some cases will even apply retrospectively, according to this recent post from Sony Online Entertainment. More details on Directives will release when the patch goes live on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, the patch will bring sweeping changes to how resources are managed. Formerly split into three distinct categories, resources will now be consolidated into one category, Nanites. These will replace all other resources and can accrue at 60 per minute.

Full details on the changes and fixes are over on the PlanetSide 2 forum. It follows a major expansion in June which introduced the new Hossin continent, as well as Continent Locking.

 

By Sterling Hammer

PlanetSide 2 is two years old in November, and has changed a lot. In constant contact with the community, SOE have reformed the economy, restructured Auraxis' vast planetary bases, redesigned the UI, and even added entire continents, like the long-awaited Hossin swampland. PlanetSide has a proud legacy, but PS2 has evolved into something unique a free-to-play game that supports multiplayer warfare on a startling scale. If you haven't played since launch, it's time for another visit.

Accessibility upgrades

PlanetSide 2 is about combined arms and persistent warfare on a massive scale. Co-ordinated squads, platoons and outfits can have a profound impact on the territorial layout of PS2's maps, but it's a daunting prospect for new players. Accessibility was one of PlanetSide 2's main issues at launch, and two years since release has been spent making the game easier for new players to pick up, so they can get into fights as quickly as possible. Some of these changes are immediately obvious to those who have been playing since launch while others are a bit more subtle.

The certification system, which dictates access to guns and new skills, was given a complete overhaul to make it less confusing. Now each class has specific certifications (of which, there are fewer), which are conveniently listed under the class in the redesigned UI. Vehicles have received the same treatment.

The tutorial is another good addition. It gives players a quick overview that explain how to use terminals, weapons and vehicles. The virtual reality training area can help you learn the ropes without hundreds of your enemies brutally ending your practice session. It s also a great way to try out new weapons without having to dodge hostile fire, and before investing precious Station Cash.



Level and map redesign

If you haven't played since day one, you'll find a vastly different base-design mentality from the game's original cookie-cutter structures. The development team has made multiple passes on Indar and most recently Amerish to bring more varied terrain base-design to the game, which encourages more interesting battles. Underground tunnels were added to the game to add additional exits from Spawn rooms. Many outposts were redesigned from the ground up so that some are better for infantry fights, and less susceptible to air attacks. Hossin was released with the disclaimer that much of what has been learned on Indar, Esamir and Amerish has not yet been implemented on Hossin, so expect lots more tweaking in the coming months.

Community-driven features

PlanetSide 2 is Sony Online Entertainment's first serious foray into community-driven development. Many features of the game are a direct result of player feedback, delivered via Twitter, Reddit and community fan sites. You could even meet the development team face to face and give your feedback if you wanted to at SOE Live, their yearly community event.

The death screen is a direct result of that feedback. When original alpha footage was shown, the community was not happy with a killcam in PlanetSide. The dev team replaced it with a display of stats about your session and your killer, complete with a shot of your killer s customized avatar. The team is also working on a new resource system, championed by player-turned-developer, which aims to bring some of the original mechanics of PlanetSide to the game.

SOE has found this development approach so successful that it's using it for H1Z1, and Landmark. Frequent development sessions on Twitch and development participation on Reddit have become the norm. The team even took a suggestion for a feature and developed it in one day on Twitch, from development meetings all the way up to the final implementation of the feature in-game. You can tune in to the PlanetSide 2 Twitch channel and see the developers create bases and artwork for the game live, and give direct feedback as they go.



The state of Auraxis

With the accessibility updates in place, the development team has started to shift their focus onto PS2's seasoned elite. Hence the addition of Hossin, a swamp continent with large, lush, trees and the potential for more interesting ground-air interaction. Light assault troops can scale trees, and aircraft have to swerve around large crops of vegetation to make effective ground-attacks.

This update also brings 'continent locking.' One empire can now 'lock' a continent by owning at least 94% of the territory or winning an in-game alert. This kicks the other two empires off, and claims the continent for the winning empire, granting bonuses for the duration of a lock. Warp gate rotation is another great update. To help keep the game dynamic and interesting, ownership of the warp gates that serve as the main base for each faction can change hands, causing a massive scramble as armies adjust the the new position of their home base.

The Hossin update also brings several new features for Outfits (PS2's player-formed armies), including a much needed in-game recruitment system, outfit decals which will one day be customizable, and outfit base capture where the highest scoring outfit during a base capture gets in-game credit, and their decals displayed on the base.

Ultimately, PS2 simply feels better than it once did. It really comes into its own when you play with a group of organized people, but there's still plenty of room for lone combatants. If you haven t ever played PS2, or decided to take a break, now is the time to go back and check out the vast number of changes that have been made since release. The majority have been for the better, and as a result PlanetSide 2 is a much more fun and polished experience, with less downtime, and more opportunity to battle huge enemy armies.

It's a double-whammy of weather news, courtesy of SOE's John Smedley. The studio's CEO dropped falling facts across Twitter last night, showing a series of snow-covered landscapes from the upcoming H1Z1. In addition, Smedley revealed that weather effects are being planned for Planetside 2.

yeah. snow too. also weather is coming to PS2 as well as H1Z1 pic.twitter.com/3LIUJ5ph41— John Smedley (@j_smedley) June 30, 2014

Soon after, Smedley confirmed via a reply that, in H1Z1, they "are going to make it so the elements matter" implying that the snow will have an effect on a character's survival. It's not yet known how weather will be implemented in Planetside 2, however, and whether or not it will be a purely aesthetic element.

Planetside 2 recently received a major update, finally adding the swamplands of Hossin to the game. H1Z1, meanwhile, was further detailed in a new E3 trailer.

You can see the rest of Smedley's snow-swept H1Z1 screenshots below.

Two years in development, the Hossin continent is now accessible in PlanetSide 2 thanks to a major update available now. Originally scheduled for an April 2013 launch, Hossin is a swampy, infantry-oriented map which should please fans of mud and shades of brown. It also boasts an Interlink Facility and 80 new bases in a brand new biome.
That s not all the new update introduces: the long demanded Continent Locking feature has been switched on, allowing empires to conquer whole swathes of the game world. There are several caveats to this: only two Continents can be locked down at a once, so when a third is locked the first will open again. Continent Benefits have changed too, with early rewards of +25 XP offered to encourage play on Hossin. Meanwhile, outfit recruitment has been beefed up, with the freedom to customise outfit uniforms should you wish to look fancier than others. Your decal will also display on any captured base.

There's a catch though: the Continent isn't quite finished. PlanetSide 2 creative director Matt Higby explains that it's in working order, but that finetuning would have taken an additional three months. Higby justifies the 'Early Expedition' approach as a way to complete the maps with the input of the playerbase, which makes sense considering the iterative approach SOE has taken to the other continents.

"There isn't any other way to say it except to say that Hossin is not finished," he said. "If we wanted to 'finish' Hossin without sacrificing the quality level we've established, it would probably be three months before it was ready to go live - we don't want to wait that long, and we don't think you want to either."

You can read Higby's full statement here. There s also a loong list of bug fixes, which you can read among the full patch notes on the official PlanetSide 2 forum.

Back in April, SOE launched an All Access subscription service designed to unify membership across SOE's free-to-play games including Planetside 2, DC Universe Online and Everquest 2, as well as the upcoming Everquest Next, Landmark and H1Z1. In Europe, though, it's a less attractive offer. SOE's EU portfolio is more fragmented, as their existing games are managed and distributed by ProSiebenSat.1 Games.

That soon won't be the case. SOE and ProSiebenSat.1 have today announced that, going forward, all ProSiebenSat.1 accounts for SOE games must be migrated to Sony's service. For EU players of Planetside 2, DC Universe Online and Everquest 2, existing accounts must be transferred from July 1st in order to keep playing. In addition, SOE have removed their region lock, so new accounts can be created directly on their system.

"We constantly review community feedback via all channels and want to thank you for your ongoing dialog," write SOE and ProSiebenSat.1 in a joint statement. "On or about July 1, 2014, we will offer PSG players the opportunity to migrate their existing accounts to SOE account management, in order to continue playing SOE games. All earned status, characters and in-game coin will transfer with the account."

Payment details and personal information won't be transferred, and so will have to be re-entered on the new SOE version of transferred accounts. For those currently using both services, however, SOE say they are unable to merge the two accounts.

PSG account holders will have until September 28th to migrate their account.

H1Z1 is SOE s next game, and the confluence of the Planetside 2 engine and the zombie survival setting has a shot of adding an interesting amount of depth to the walking-dead genre. Jimmy Whisenhunt, senior designer on H1Z1, came by the live Twitch stream show at E3 to talk more about the game s goals and SOE s devotion to involving the community in the development process.



The big question surrounding H1Z1 is how it will be different from the massively successful mod-turned-standalone project DayZ. It s a survival MMO, Whisenhunt says immediately. It s an MMO in a way that s persistent. It s huge, it s massive. We re starting with 64 square kilometers and we ll be growing from that. We re starting in an area that is kind of middle America, looks kind of Northwesternish with trees and rolling hills.

SOE has earned a lot of praise for their open development style, and Whisenhunt reiterated that it is a conscious, deliberate choice. The team checks the H1Z1 subreddit daily, and many feature requests and design decisions are influenced directly from the community. A free-look system, for example, was a widely requested feature, and Whisenhunt just got word that free-look was implemented after he started traveling to Los Angeles for the show.

We re on the forgelight engine, and we re leveraging a lot of what we learned on Planetside 2, he says. We have a lot of ability to do whatever we want with vehicles, but right now we re starting with a four-door, four-wheel drive offroader.



H1Z1 will also distinguish itself by the behavior and quantity of its titular undead.

We re leveraging our world in a new way, he says. We ve shown a little bit of the hoards, and we can support more zombies than a player could kill in his entire life Zombies are attracted to not just sight, but they can smell you. As you move around the world and change what you re doing, you re going to change where the zombies are. We also have livestock, as you can see, and the animals aren t just for food though they are for that. We had an instance down at the booth where you saw a deer come busting out of the wood, and when they re running like that they re spooked. Behind the deer come twenty zombies, and they re chasing the deer.

Like Planetside 2 before it, H1Z1 will be a free-to-play game with microtransactions, but Whisenhunt insists that nothing you can buy with real money will have an affect on gameplay. Evan got a chance to spend some time with the game a couple of weeks ago, and you can read his impressions here. As always, catch up on all of our E3 coverage by visiting this page.

SOE has embraced an extremely transparent, open style of development with H1Z1. After suddenly revealing the game just a few weeks ago with a live demo (and following that with additional, extended livestream gameplay demos, including one where the game s barricading feature was built live for viewers in one day), SOE invited press to play the game for the first time today in Santa Monica, CA as many members of the media are in town for pre-E3 appointments.

I spent about 20 minutes creeping and fleeing my way through H1Z1 s open world. I found it barren and mostly uninteresting, but that s kind of to be expected at this early, pre-alpha stage. H1Z1 is a few steps beyond a tech demo right now, a loose test of how zombies and PvP get along with SOE s excellent Forgelight engine, the tech that powers PlanetSide 2 and Landmark. Melee is a bit buggy, zombies often clipped through another as a single mushed-together mass, only a small number of items seem to be implemented, and the world is seemingly only populated with wolves, deer, zombies, and other players.

My experiences were very rudimentary as a result. Running from zombies. Chopping down a tree. Walking through deserted factories. Building a campfire. The latter was simple and intuitive, a good sign for H1Z1 s ambitious goal to let players build objects and structures within its open world. At this stage it s clear that H1Z1 will benefit a lot from the work done on Landmark and PlanetSide 2; I m hoping the latter s vehicle tech finds a good home in H1Z1. It s a nice detail to see that tall trees, for example, fall when you cleave them, and that wood-gathering isn t some abstract menu exercise, as it was in the early days of DayZ.



H1Z1 s map is modeled after everywhere America, but more specifically it s meant to resemble Oregon. At this stage it s a series of valleys, bridges, unkempt infrastructure, and thin forests. Something I m hoping to see in a future build is heavy vegetation and grass that invites hiding and trap-laying. It ll be interesting to see whether Forgelight can render grass at a long distance to conceal players, something that DayZ doesn t necessarily do a great job of.

The pre-alpha inventory was easy enough to navigate and craft items through, again, clearly helped by SOE s long history of making MMOs and building such interfaces. This same menu housed the health, stamina, hunger, and hydration meters, which I was told all influence one another. If your hunger and hydration are good, you ll recover stamina. If they re all at zero, your stamina meter will erode over time, and then eventually start eating into your health.

I ll have an interview going up this week that digs into some deeper questions on H1Z1 s game systems, but for now I m at least encouraged by how easy player movement feels and that its basic parts are up and running. It s tough to judge the game at this stage because so much of its design, even as it approaches an Early Access pre-alpha release, is still being determined by the game s team of 30-something developers and its community. SOE emphasized that H1Z1 will be a hardcore survival game, but I m curious and slightly concerned about how that s going to intersect with H1Z1 s building system for housing and lesser structures.



One interesting fact I came away with was that zombies will perceive smell in the form of heatmap activity in addition to using their eyes and ears. In other words, if you build an isolated community in the wilderness, you shouldn t be completely safe and separated from zombies. I like the idea of a survival game that allows for player-created, semi-permanent communities to spring up but that has an organic, systems-driven way of getting zombies to interact with players in those areas.

This demo didn t give me too much to go on, but my gut tells me that H1Z1 will probably end up playing like a DayZ that s driven less by the fidelity of Arma 2 s world and weapon ballistics and more by crafting, building, and player-generated content. H1Z1 does, of course, bear a strong resemblance to DayZ right now (to the extent that the wave and surrender/hands up emotes are bound to the same keys), but I think that familiarity is actually an asset (in terms of how quickly H1Z1 feels natural when you sit down to play it). I m happy to see SOE not be too bashful about similarities as long as it brings its own spirit and vision to the game and recognizes that DayZ has a long list of flaws that don t need to be duplicated.

A final note: SOE told me that they want the game to be bigger than PlanetSide 2 in terms of scale, so what player capacity H1Z1 will be able to accommodate is a huge unanswered question that could potentially have a significant impact on the playing experience. Look for more specific notes about the game s systems in the Q&A I ll be posting soon.

As reported earlier this year, SOE are today launching their revised All Access Pass. It's a unified service that, for $15 per month, gives subscribers "top-tier" membership across all SOE games. As part of the transfer, individual subscriptions are being dropped; meaning Planetside 1 is now free-to-play. Or will be, at least, once they finish their maintenance period.

Currently, the All Access membership covers EverQuest, EverQuest II, DC Universe Online, PlanetSide 2, Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, and will include EverQuest Next, Landmark and H1Z1 when they launch. There are caveats to that list, though, as revealed in SOE's lengthy FAQ.

"Your DC Universe Online and PlanetSide 2 accounts will remain with ProSiebenSat.1 Games and will not be transferred over," explains the FAQ. "You will not be able to start new characters in DCUO or PS2 on your SOE All Access account for these games." For players in the EU (including the UK), that's a big deal. PlanetSide 2 and DCUO are arguably SOE's biggest draws at least until the release of Everquest Next and Landmark. That they're not included for subscribers in ProSiebenSat.1's territory makes for a far less attractive package.

For more on the All Access Pass, head to SOE's subscription micro-site. At least, do when it's back online.

SOE's Player Studio program allows players to earn money submitting new EverQuest or Planetside items for consideration by each game's developers. It comes from the same set of ideas as Valve's Steam Workshop - the notion that any body of players has enough talent within it to substantially expand a game if given the chance, and that this expansion can be tied to economic incentives that benefit everybody.

Player Studio hasn't quite hit Steam Workshop numbers yet. Nobody's posting six-figure salaries for making Planetside 2 hats. But it's growing - this video posted by the Planetside 2 team last month talks to creators who are making thousands of dollars through the system.

Player Studio is currently restricted to players in North America, but this is going to change. At an EverQuest Next Landmark event in London on Monday SOE announced that Player Studio would be available in Canada, Germany, France and the UK "on or before" the 31st of May. More countries will follow as SOE navigates the labyrinthine tax laws involved in paying players for their contributions.

Player Studio could end up being huge, particularly when it's incorporated into Landmark - a game that doesn't require you to learn external tools to make saleable new things. At the moment, though, the fact that it's a smaller program is one of its strengths. As competition in the Steam Workshop gets more intense, it's harder for new creators to to get noticed - and even less feasible for Valve to take a curatorial role in ensuring that only good stuff makes it to the top. I admire the way that SOE have been working directly with their community with Player Studio so far, and hope they keep it up as the program grows.

Virtual reality, SteamOS, fiber broadband, 4K displays, holodecks (you know, maybe) the next five years of PC gaming will radically transform our immortal hobby. What new experiences will the PC games of the near future provide? How will technology surprise us? This April at PAX East 2014, we'll look into that glowing future with the innovators and PC gaming stakeholders shaping it.

"The (Incredible) Future of PC Gaming" panel will be in the Albatross Theater and livestreamed to the world at 12 p.m. Eastern time on Friday, April 11th. Moderator and PC Gamer US Editor-in-Chief Evan Lahti will be joined by Oculus VR Founder Palmer Luckey, PlanetSide 2 Creative Director Matt Higby, Nvidia Director of Technical Marketing Tom Petersen, and Cloud Imperium Games Founder/Star Citizen creator Chris Roberts.

The panel will discuss the topics above and more, concluding with an audience Q&A. We'll remind you again as it approaches in the meantime, watch our panel from PAX Prime 2013, which featured Chris Taylor, Jon Mavor, Dean Hall, and Chris Roberts.

Courtesy of ASUS, we're also giving away a top-of-the-line ASUS G750JM gaming laptop during the panel. Be there for a chance to win.

LIVESTREAM: watch the panel live on "PAX EAST 2" at http://www.twitch.tv/event/pax.

Click here for a rundown of all of our events at PAX East.