Planetside 2 could get personal progression system to add long term goals

The economy of war is an important thing. Probably more important than the economy of Planetside 2, which is a sci-fi video game about war. Luckily, as a PC gaming website, we don't have to worry about importance - leaving us free to pursue news about lasers and robots. In a Q&A with the community on Reddit's r/Planetside , PS2's creative director Matt Higby revealed plans for personal progression system that would provide customisation that went beyond certificates.

"This is a tough design challenge," Higby wrote. "We want to provide meaningful character customization, long term goals and maintain a fair environment for new players who aren't 'geared out', as well as not having too severe of a 'grind'. Right now the cert system is basically THE thing we have to provide for that, which is problematic. At a certain point people will run out of things to unlock, we're not trying to run a non-stop gear treadmill game.

"One thing we're working on is adding additional personal progression systems that aren't tied to gear or player power - this will allow us to provide those long term 'reach' goals without having to either price new players out of important gear, make a punishingly steep grind for advanced upgrades or continuously inflate the number of upgrades at the end of the treadmill like most MMO games do."

First, though, the team will continue work on their OMFG optimisation update, the second part of which is due this month.

"OMFG Pt. 2 is coming in mid-december," Higby announced. "It's primarily optimization updates, not as extensive as the first update, but it also will have substantial balance updates.

"1) population balance shifts around quite a bit, but it's generally in the right ballpark right now on most servers. We have a couple ideas for addressing some issues (like players swapping characters to win alerts, etc), but they're still a bit nascent to discuss right now. This is one of the problems we talk about almost every day around here.

"2) 1 year from now I see us confident in the basic game and making serious progress on "growing" the game beyond it's current boundaries. 2 years, 5 years? Tough to say! We definitely have a lot of ideas for long term features, but we want to make the future direction of the game something that players have a lot of say in."

Head over to the full Q&A to see some more in-depth discussions of upcoming changes and systems.

Thanks, Massively .

Phil has been writing for PC Gamer for nearly a decade, starting out as a freelance writer covering everything from free games to MMOs. He eventually joined full-time as a news writer, before moving to the magazine to review immersive sims, RPGs and Hitman games. Now he leads PC Gamer's UK team, but still sometimes finds the time to write about his ongoing obsessions with Destiny 2, GTA Online and Apex Legends. When he's not levelling up battle passes, he's checking out the latest tactics game or dipping back into Guild Wars 2. He's largely responsible for the whole Tub Geralt thing, but still isn't sorry.