Sony Online Entertainment Unveils PlanetSide 2, Beta To Come

Sony Online Entertainment has unveiled PlanetSide 2, a follow-up to the original first-person shooter MMO that first launched in 2003. It was already known that Sony was working on a sequel to PlanetSide, as it cancelled work on the long-awaited The Agency in March to focus on the upcoming MMO. Now details regarding the game have been released. A FAQ section on the official PlanetSide 2 boasts "Battles [that] take place not between dozens of troops, but thousands; with air and ground vehicles slugging it out alongside squads of troops." The game features an online persistent war between different factions of players, skill trees to unlock, multiple different roles and a "free-form class-based system." The overall story follows three factions -- Terran Republic, New Conglomerate and Vanu Sovereignty -- as each vies to take control of the planet through pushing back the opposition and shifting the balance of power in their favor. SOE also notes that there will be both air and land-based vehicles for players to take control of during combat. The company also said that the game runs on SOE's Forgelight MMO engine, and utilizes Nvidia's PhysX for PlanetSide 2's physics engine. No details regarding the business model for the game are given, nor is any kind of release date set. However, it is stated that the game will receive a beta period at some point.