Planetside 2 heading to PS4, devs optimising for AMD

MMOFPS Planetside 2 is incredibly popular with gamers around the world and it will be making its debut on consoles with the Playstation 4.

Planetside 2 is published by Sony Online Entertainment and is considered to be a first-party title, even though its free to play.

Speaking to Eurogamer at the Sony Entertainment Online conference in Las Vegas, creative director Matt Higby announced that thanks to the all-AMD hardware in the Playstation 4, the team felt they were ready to tackle larger issues in the game itself, specifically with the game’s performance on AMD hardware. Said Higby:

“Our engine sucks at that right now. We are multi-threaded, but the primary gameplay thread is very expensive. The biggest piece of engineering work that they’re doing right now, and it’s an enormous effort, is to go back through the engine and re-optimise it to be really, truly multi-threaded and break the gameplay thread up. But thankfully once they do it, AMD players who’ve been having sub-par performance on the PC will suddenly get a massive boost – just because of being able to take the engine and re-implement it as multi-threaded.

I’m very excited about that because I have a lot of friends, lots of people who are more budget minded, going for AMD processors because nine times out of ten they give a lot of bang for the buck. Where it really breaks down is on games with one really big thread. Planetside’s probably a prime example of that.”

The game’s development team told Eurogamer that although it was part of Nvidia’s “The Way Its Meant To Be Played” (TWIMTBP) games campaign, they were now working more closely with AMD thanks to the hardware inside the Playstation 4, and the experiences and techniques used on the console will also filter into development for the PC.

Higby also confirmed that the development team was looking at ways to implement cross-platform features. While there will be no cross-platform gaming, the console port could support using the same online character profiles as the code on both game clients is very similar.

The only difference game-wise would be that updates arrive a little later on the PS4, due to delays that are required to ensure that quality levels are met.

Higby explained why there can not be cross-platform gameplay between the PC and PS4 versions: “Because of the update cadence, and the additional steps you have to go through to be able to release an update on the PlayStation network, we’re not going to be able to keep our servers in sync. The console players may be a day or a week behind important patches and we can’t have that.”

Planetside 2 will be launching on the PS4 at an unconfirmed date and will be free to Playstation 4 owners. As a free-to-play title, it does not require a PS Plus subscription to take part in the online matches.