FPS General

Matt Higby, PlanetSide 2's Creative Director, has divulged some interesting PlanetSide 2 info in a recent interview with the folks at Gamesradar. In the interview, Higby discusses latency, spawn camping and what the team at Sony Online Entertainment plans to do to combat faction vs faction espionage.

On latency, it is actually Ryan Elam, Planetside 2's Technical Director, who fields the question, saying:

PlanetSide 2 draws upon over a decade worth of experience in networking, with some of the first and best coders to squeeze thousands of people in on the same spot. Using the ForgeLight™ engine, which has supported massive numbers of simultaneous users, plus the experience of some original PlanetSide coders, we will not disappoint.

 In regards to spawn camping, Higby shared some details on how PlanetSide 2's spawn system works to counteract this tactic. For those unfamiliar, spawn camping is a tactic often used by players in FPS games in which they simply determine where opposing players will be spawning and pick them off as they enter the match, usually without a chance to properly defend themselves.

PlanetSide 2 supports a spawn-on-squad and spawn-on-vehicle system which effectively negates the enemies ability to determine your spawn point. "We have a variety of spawn methods as well," said Higby. "From squad spawning to spawning on deployed vehicles...having some guys in your spawn point is rarely a game breaking situation."

One last point of interest from the interview, Higby discussed the use of smurf accounts in PlanetSide 2 to let players get inside information on opposing factions. A smurf account is essentially an alternate account used by players for a variety of reasons. In this context, we're talking about users creating a smurf account to infiltrate an opposing outfit in an effort to learn more about their tactics and relay that information to their own faction or outfit. It is essentially PlanetSide 2 espionage and Matt Higby discussed how SOE is dealing with these tactics.

It’s not something we want to promote, and while there isn’t a lot that we’ll do to prevent it we have some ideas on how we can help dissuade it. It will ultimately be up to the leaders of a given outfit who they let in.

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