Sony Online Entertainment’s smash hit PlanetSide 2 saw a lot of enthusiasm among fans when it first arrived on the PC last year. Now to add more fire to the excitement, the game has been confirmed to arrive on Sony’s upcoming next generation console, the PlayStation 4. However, that doesn’t mean that the game will arrive with the option of cross platform play between the PS4 and PC versions of the game, as expected by many.
Recently, at the SOE Live event in Las Vegas, Matt Higby, creative director of PlanetSide 2, confirmed with Eurogamer that all PC content patches will appear on the PS4 with a slight delay for authenticating approval. This delay means that cross-platform play won’t be possible between PC and PS4.
"Because of the update cadence, and the additional steps you have to go through to be able to release an update on the PlayStation network, we're not going to be able to keep our servers in sync, so you won't be able to just play with the same people," Higby explained. "They might be a week behind in terms of patching, or a day behind or whatever it ends up being, and we can't really have that."
But at least Higby had some good news. "But we're also talking about having character portability, so a PC character, you could transfer it to PlayStation 4, and then back. The character format's the same on both, it's just purely a matter of the server updates."
So, even though Sony has made both the patching and updating process for games on the PlayStation 4 as easy as humanly possible, the content still needs an official clearance from the platform holder. This means that updates for games can never arrive simultaneously with the PC versions of those games – unless the PC version updates are held back for a while.
Additionally, Higby admitted that developing for the PS4, in some regards, is easier than for the PC because it's a fixed platform. "To engineer the game for the PS4 is a lot easier because you have a consistent set of hardware that you're optimizing against. It really is a challenge to optimize high-end PC games to be able to work on the pantheon of hardware that's available to players nowadays, it's just insane.”
“The PS4 is a much more consistent, stable platform for us to be able to develop for. The big challenge with the PS4 is its AMD chip, and it really, heavily relies on multi-threading. We have the exact same kind of Achilles heel on the PC too. People who have AMD chips have a disadvantage, because a single core on an AMD chip doesn't really have as much horsepower and they really require you to kind of spread the load out across multiple cores to be able to take full advantage of the AMD processors,” he added.
An official release date for PlanetSide 2 on the PS4 is yet to be revealed.