PlanetSide 2's Matt Higby on balancing, netcode and defection

Planetside 2 - minigun man

PlanetSide 2's creative director Matt Higby must be the most interviewed man on the planet. It seems that he spends more time being interviewed than he does working on the game. Maybe he's interviewed when he's driving to work, or while he's having a bath.

The latest people who've joined the mile-long queue to interview Higby are our megachums over at GamesRadar, and he actually said a few things he hasn't said in his billions of hours of previous interviews.

Speaking of the balance between in-game skills and player skill, Higby reckons that: “Our mandate has always been to ensure that fights come down to player skill, not cert points spent or weapons unlocked. In general, this means that our unlocks offer tradeoffs, rather than straight advantages.”

Higby also commented on the netcode of the game, which is the important science bit that makes bullets actually hit people. “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,” Higby said. “Using the ForgeLight engine, which has supported massive numbers of simultaneous users, plus the experience of some original PlanetSide coders, we will not disappoint.”

Finally, Higby let GamesRadar know about defection in the game - or the lack thereof. You won't be able to switch sides midway through a game, but you will “be able to create multiple characters (on different servers) to check out the other factions.”

GamesRadar's also taken an exclusive in-depth look at the game's Lightning tank, calling it “the perfect vehicle for the kind of Rambo-esque commando that wants to go out on his own.” This is also the only PlanetSide 2 article on the entire internet that doesn't include a quote from Matt Higby.

Latest in MMO
Concept art of WoW's upcoming player housing system, showing a warm homestead with a welcoming figure in shade.
WoW flexes its MMO player housing system in a new blog post, and it really might just beat FF14's dated furniture placement into the dirt
Orithopter shooting down another in Dune
Dune: Awakening confirms air-to-air combat in ornithopters
Defiance players
A dead MMO that launched with a now-cancelled TV show in 2013 is coming back 4 years after servers were shut down
Gallywix wears an uneasy smile as he's confronted by Xal'atath in WoW: The War Within.
World of Warcraft guild uses exploits to get world 'first' on the game's new raid, gets banned, puts its name backwards and does it again
A World of Warcraft dwarf and human character standing in front of the entrance to a delve dungeon
WoW's nerfed its poor Delve companion into a dwarf-shaped crater after his tank spec made them too easy, and people aren't happy
EVE Frontier promo image - Omo
EVE Online studio CCP Games hires former Iceland Central Bank economist for its crypto game, because nothing says 'fun' like 'removing currency controls and fostering emergent value systems'
Latest in News
New art of Harry and Kim from Disco Elysium, with Harry holding a lit molotov cocktail.
Despite Disco Elysium Mobile aiming to 'captivate the TikTok user,' it looks surprisingly decent—but it's still insulting to Disco's ousted creators
Flag of Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabia buys Pokémon GO maker for $3.5 billion with a 'B'
Vice President, Games at Netflix Mike Verdu speaks onstage during TechCrunch Disrupt 2022 on October 18, 2022 in San Francisco, California
4 short months after saying 'We'll have to adapt and change', Netflix's AI games VP adapts and changes into a person who isn't working there anymore
Performers acting as zombies are seen on a train coach during the "Train to Apocalypse" event as part of the Pandora Box Artmire Festival 2024 held to attract commuters to ride the city's rapid transit system LRT (light rapid transit), in Jakarta on July 11, 2024. (Photo by BAY ISMOYO / AFP) (Photo by BAY ISMOYO/AFP via Getty Images)
Venerable browser-based MMO Urban Dead is closing this week after a 20-year run, not with a bang but with a whimper
A hunter hefts a massive Mega Barrel Bomb in Monster Hunter Wilds.
Monster Hunter Wilds players can't stop blowing themselves to smithereens with its rollable barrel bombs
A selection of games in the 2025 Steam Spring Sale
The Steam Spring Sale 2025 is here