The dev team made a lot of tweaks in order to boost performance when things get crowded

Jun 12, 2014 11:23 GMT  ·  By

PlanetSide 2, Sony Online Entetainment's free-to-play massively multiplayer online first-person shooter, is preparing to make the leap to the PlayStation 4.

Given that the game has some pretty snazzy visuals on the PC, there are many wondering how the transition to Sony's next-gen computer entertainment system, the PlayStation 4, will pan out.

"We are running at 1080p [on the PS4] and our goal is always going to be 60fps but because of the scale of PlanetSide 2 we are going to see more fluctuations than a lot of order games do. In a battlefield we can get like 64 vs. 64 but in PlanetSide 2 we can have 100′s versus 100′s so that might bring about some frame rate dips," Luke Sigmund, PlanetSide 2's lead designer, told at E3.

He went on to say that, although the framerate was likely to drop, it would hold at least at the 30 frames per second threshold, letting everyone know that the development team had a number of parameters that they could tweak in order to control and improve performance.

"We have a lot of heuristics in the background that control things like the number of players that you see on the screen. So we can tone all that down and we can make sure that we are always at a playable frame rate," Sigmund said.

Working on the PlayStation 4 also allows them to carry out a lot more hardware-specific optimizations, since they only need to worry about a single set of specifications, without the need to think about supporting a wide range of different video cards.

"An awesome thing about the PlayStation 4 is that we know exactly what everyone hardware's [specification] is, so we can optimize around that but on the PC we have a hundred different video cards," Sigmund revealed.

Sony Online Entertainments aims to deliver a level of visual fidelity that is the equivalent of the Ultra graphics quality setting on PC, which sounds like a lofty goal, considering that there already is much better hardware than the Sony platform will be stuck with.

That being said, the specificity of the hardware is likely to mitigate the gap in raw performance, in the near to mid future at least, through code optimization, and the latest games on the 8-year-old PS3 are solid proof of that.

Sony has announced that PlanetSide 2 will be coming to the PlayStation 4 console, stating that, although there is no release window yet, the game will land sooner rather than later.

Additionally, the game will not require a PlayStation Plus subscription in order for its players to enjoy multiplayer action, just like the console's other free-to-play titles, such as Warframe.