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

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.