Tag: Planetside Arena

Surprise! Planetside Arena Has Been Cancelled


In a business decision that even Michael Pachter could have correctly predicted, Daybreak Game Company has announced that Planetside Arena will go to the big recycling bin in the sky. It’s the same recycling bin that Everquest Next resides in.

Planetside Arena is a battle royale spinoff of the similarly titled Planetside 2, and launched this year to what can be described as more-than-unanimously negative reception. In addition to rather low review scores, Planetside Arena almost immediately suffered from a radical drop in player count; down into the single digits just a few months after coming out. For a game that relies on 12-man squads, it was literally unplayable.

The Planetside Arena servers will be playable until January 10, 2020 for the three people who still log in to check their cosmetics. Those who invested any real money in the game will see their purchases refunded by Steam after the game shuts down.

The full announcement has been posted below for your pleasure. Post and FAQ available on the official website.

Hello Everyone,

After careful consideration, we’ve made the difficult decision to shut down PlanetSide Arena servers.

While our team set out with an ambitious vision for a game that combined the massive-scale combat and camaraderie of PlanetSide through a diverse collection of new game modes, it has become clear after several months in Early Access that our population levels make it impossible to sustain the gameplay experience we envisioned.

As a result, PlanetSide Arena will formally shut down servers on January 10th, 2020 at 5:00 PM (PST). We are actively working with Steam to ensure that all players who made purchases during Early Access will automatically receive a full refund to their Steam Wallet after servers shut down in January.

Thank you again for your loyalty and support during Beta and Early Access. Your feedback was invaluable, and your enduring passion for PlanetSide remains the bedrock our community is built upon. As painful as it is to close this chapter so quickly, we remain deeply committed to this franchise, and look forward to continuing this journey through the PlanetSide Universe with all of you.

Andy Sites
Executive Producer, PlanetSide Franchise

Planetside Arena: The Launchpad For Daybreak’s Next Catastrophe


Is it time for Daybreak to give up on the ghost on Planetside Arena? It was time when someone at Daybreak said “let’s make our next game a Planetside battle royale title.”

At any given moment, there are more people browsing MMO Fallout than there are playing Planetside Arena, which really isn’t saying much since the 24 hour peak for the title was 12 people. Under normal circumstances I might use this space to say “I feel bad for Daybreak,” but it’s hard to considering that the idea of a Planetside-themed battle royale game is something that was pretty much universally mocked and rejected by the community long before Planetside Arena was even announced. Hell, you can probably go back to well before the concept was even in the pre-production stages by Daybreak and find people mockingly predicting that Daybreak would hastily shove out another battle royale game while their existing title in H1Z1 was already floundering.

But Planetside: Arena isn’t just a big disappointment, it is the launching pad through which Daybreak plans to fire off its next disaster: Planetside 3.

Granted, this theory assumes that Daybreak will survive long enough or have the capacity to develop a whole new game. Planetside 3 as Daybreak stands now will be a disaster, and I will eat a Little Caesar’s pizza if Planetside 3 launches and is somehow a big hit. For charity. Planetside 2 isn’t totally dead, but it isn’t doing great. The Steam version seems to hold around a thousand players during the good hours and while there are battles to be had on the game world, as pared down as it is a lot of the world is just dead. Quiet, nobody there, outposts clean for the picking.

So what does Daybreak want to do with Planetside 3? Outside of fracturing the community, they envision a future where there is a full-fledged galactic war in an expansive galaxy. That’s right, taking the stragglers from Planetside 2 as well as some stragglers and throwing them into an even larger room where they can run around and not really collide with one another. From a technical standpoint the idea of players having battles on a giant galaxy-sized world is impressive. Unfortunately as I said with 2019’s battle royale games boasting 1,000 players per server, your technology is completely worthless if there is nobody actually filling those servers.

Thankfully I moonlight as an unpaid consultant (assuming appreciation is a currency), and I’m willing to offer my two dollars. Foremost, if Daybreak is going to create this massive world, they need to fill it with living things. Am I saying that Daybreak should go the Fortnite route and populate the maps with somewhat intelligent bots? Not really. I’m suggesting to look back at titles like Titanfall or Tabula Rasa, games that threw in grunts for players to shoot at and feel like they were still contributing to the group even if they weren’t that great at the PvP side of the game.

Let’s take the same scenario twice: I’m rolling around taking bases off in the middle of bumfudge nowhere in Planetside 3. I come up on a small base, there are no players there. I stroll around the empty base for about ten minutes and take over the control nodes, take over the base, I’m friggin bored. Now take the same scenario; I roll up on a base and there are guards present. They’re not really difficult to kill because they’re not as smart as real players, but it does prolong the encounter and I actually have to do something other than notice how empty the game world is. I might even get careless and die once or twice. As I take over the base I’m gaining experience, maybe unlocking something for my gun, and the boring busy work feels a little less boring and the world feels more alive.

Just a thought, I could be completely wrong.

Planetside 3 Is Surely Happening, Says Daybreak


Planetside 3 is absolutely happening, says developer who suffered at least four rounds of substantive layoffs over the past two years. With Planetside 2 chugging along and Planetside Arena floundering and virtually dead in the water, Daybreak is ready to talk Planetside 3. In a post on the official website, executive producer Andy Sites noted that the studio views Planetside Arena as a stepping stone to Planetside 3 which will feature very different gameplay mechanics than Planetside 2.

So when we think about what the PlanetSide 3 experience needs to be, we know that there are incredibly high expectations from all of you. PlanetSide Arena is intended to be the stepping stone to PlanetSide 3, which we envision expanding from the current battlefields of Auraxis, to full-fledged galactic war with empires exploring, colonizing and conquering one another within an expansive galaxy. We envision PlanetSide Arena as a way to allow us to link present day PlanetSide 2 and PlanetSide 3 story lines, as well as providing an opportunity to try out new features, styles of play, etc.

We’ll see about that.

Source: Planetside 2

Planetside Arena Virtually Unplayable; Pop Drops Under 50


Planetside Arena needs a miracle.

What started out as a bad launch has now turned into an unmitigated disaster, as Planetside Arena’s population numbers are starting to drift consistently below the 50 player line making the game effectively unplayable. Planetside Arena is a battle royale spinoff to Daybreak’s Planetside franchise (go figure) and promises matches with up to 300 players on squads of 12. Well, theoretically it does.

In reality the game is virtually unplayable at this point as populations have hit a level where it may be impossible to actually start a game due to a lack of people. Planetside Arena fills out squads by 12 which means that if you don’t have 24 people, you’re going to have one squad of 12 and probably one squad of five. It doesn’t make for a fun match, and that assumes you’ll even be able to cross the minimal threshold to get a match going.

This makes Planetside Arena Daybreak’s least popular product on Steam, considering Planetside 2 can still hit over two thousand at peak hours, even the Everquest games hit over 100, and Z1 Battle Royale can still occasionally break 1,000. And that’s not counting the people playing off-Steam.

Considering that Daybreak just laid off a bunch of people from the Planetside team and there is apparently almost nobody left, it might be a good idea to skip this one.

Planetside Arena Already Adjusting For Low Population Matches


Planetside Arena Squads mode can handle up to 300 people per match, but at the rate the game is going Daybreak Game Company can only hope that the entire population of the game hits half that number. In the few weeks since the Planetside battle royale spinoff launched, the game’s population has plummeted and is continuing to drop. As a result, players are finding themselves in a massive arena built for 1,000 with not a lot of things to shoot at.

Thankfully Daybreak is on the case. This week’s update has brought with it changes to how the pain field works and where players drop in low population matches:

In order to escalate squad engagement more quickly during low-population times, we’ve made several adjustments to the location Squads drop in and pain field behavior. During lower population matches, Squads will deploy closer to the initial safe zone and in proximity to other Squads.  In addition, depending on match population thresholds being met, the time between phases and speed at which the pain field moves will vary – the lower the population, the shorter the wait times between phases and faster the pain field migration.

More update details on the official website.

Column: Planetside Arena and the Friday Night Whatevers


It’s Friday night! I’m playing a few rounds of H1Z1 to get my anger on before throwing my Gamefly rental of Batman vs. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for a good weekend film to watch.

I’m going to tell you my wonderful readers what I told Daybreak before Planetside Arena launched into Early Access this week: It’s a neat concept that definitely has something going for it, but your biggest struggle is going to be convincing people to play it. What I didn’t tell them because I didn’t want to seem to blunt or immediately burn bridges with the new PR people (the old ones stopped talking to me) is that they have an uphill battle for two reasons: First, they are Daybreak Game Company. Second, it’s a free to play battle royale game.

I’ll be frank; Daybreak Game Company doesn’t have a great reputation as far as battle royale games go considering how badly they managed to mess up Z1 Battle Royale and H1Z1 and grasp failure from the hands of market dominance in both cases. There are a lot of people still very angry about Daybreak’s continued mismanagement of the PS4 H1Z1 and I should know. I’m one of them. Expect an H1Z1 season 5 roundup at some point in the future. Actually Daybreak doesn’t have a great reputation period. It just seems like large swaths of people that they’ve come across have come away feeling burned in one way or another. Everquest players, Planetside players, H1Z1 players, the ones hanging on to those games that shut down like ten years ago. All of them. Daybreak couldn’t have a lower public perception if John Smedley was still employed and inviting people to DDOS the servers again.

Second; it’s a free to play battle royale game in a market full to the brim. Sure, Planetside Arena has massive battles with upwards of 300 people. Is it filling them up? Nah. We’re in the opening Friday night and the game is having trouble keeping above 700 people concurrently. There are over 1,300 people playing Planetside 2, nearly double the amount in Planetside Arena and one of those games is seven years old while the other should be getting its early access launch rush. Over on the Twitch side of things, Planetside Arena has 434 viewers as of this publishing. You know what has more? H1Z1. So people aren’t playing and they aren’t really interested in watching and again, we’re in weekend #1.

And ultimately Planetside Arena isn’t even that bad of a game, which is why I’m sitting here typing about it at nearly 1am on a Saturday when I could be doing weekend stuff like sleeping. My big fear with Planetside Arena is that it would release to a shrug and a “whatever,” and that appears to be exactly what is happening. Who knows, maybe Daybreak can pull it around and convince people to actually play the game. They haven’t managed it with the streamers, but after all this is just weekend #1 and who ever said you only get one chance at a launch?

Oh right.

Planetside Arena Launches On Steam


Planetside Arena is here. The battle royale spinoff by Daybreak Game Company launched today, September 19, 2019 and is available completely free to play.

Early Access launches with squad mode (12 player teams) and teams mode (3 players per team) with matches up to 300 players. The main call of Planetside Arena, the gargantuan massive clash mode, will be available in Q2 2020 when the game fully launches and will feature matches of up to 1,000 people. Hopefully the Daybreak team can keep the ball rolling until that time.

Check it out at the link below.

Source: Steam

[Video] Planetside Arena Footage


Daybreak Game Company this week released new footage of Planetside Arena. The footage features Squads, a massive game mode pitting teams of up to 12 players in matches with up to 300 people.

Planetside Arena goes into early access on September 19.

Planetside Arena Isn’t Dead After All, Early Access Coming September 19


Planetside Arena isn’t dead. After six months of complete silence, Daybreak Game Company has announced that the title will be entering early access on September 19. Daybreak posted a new dev blog noting that the early launch will contain a squads mode (12 players per squad) and teams (3 players) in 300-person matches, as well as three classes and an extensive motor pool of vehicles. More content of course will be released after this initial launch period. Naturally.

We’ve always thought of PlanetSide as an evolving saga that will eventually escalate beyond Auraxis to interstellar war, and PlanetSide Arena is where it will start. Expanded factions, new weapons and vehicles, battles on distant alien planets (and the space in between) are all part of our vision.

Over the next year we will begin to explore a future that will see an evolution of the empires and introduce new ways to wage all-out planetary warfare, filled with new game modes and classic favorites reimagined, all at a scale that can only be created through a PlanetSide experience.

For more information, check out the official website.

Planetside Arena To Launch March 26


Planetside Arena will launch on March 26, Daybreak Game Company announced in a news post circulated today.

Initially set for launch in early 2019, Planetside Arena will now feature an exclusive Founders season to get the “most dedicated” fans in before launch. Before the full game goes live, however, Daybreak is still gearing up for the first closed beta starting on January 30 with specific server times coming later this week. The founder’s season meanwhile will begin on Febuary 20, 2019 and will feature exclusive items that can only be obtained during this season of the battle pass. Those who preorder will receive immediate access to the founder’s season and battle pass.

More information can be found at the official website.