Tramell Ray Isaac and Matt Higby talk to ZAM about everything from player tutorials to player owned motherships for PS2.

As outlined by John Smedley in the SOE Live keynote — and in the interview I did with him — it is emergent gameplay, the ability to make players the creators of content, which is the future of games produced by SOE. It was clear to Isaac and Higby that PlanetSide 2 is the frontrunner in that venture:

Higby: “When we’re talking about allowing people to build their own bases, I think that is a very team oriented thing. You, as an outfit, are going to be able to pool your resources to build this stuff up. SWG did a phenomenal job with this back in the day, having player cities where the different player groups came together. I was actually in GoonSquad back in SWG and we had a massive city, which was incredible.

The idea of the PlanetSide 2 implementation of the same thing is that it’s similar, but it’s competitive. So if their guys want to come crush it, they can. There’s a challenge there on how much time and effort goes into building up this sandcastle that someone can come kick over with very little effort.

If we can get the balance right then it becomes a very cool thing where as an outfit, yeah you care about the overall battle on the world, but this is your own turf and if it comes under pressure you get back there to defend it as quickly as you can.

I think that really reinforces human nature. As soon as something happens to you, you care so much more.”

Isaac: “When you have 50 people versus 10 people it’s all about the tactics at that point, because you can take out large numbers with a small group that is very organized. When you can actually pull that off, that’s a story that will never go away.

It goes to the ability of the game to create scenarios that are incomparable.”

Speaking to Isaac and Higby, the sense of ambition and the range of ideas that are being set in motion is palpable. As an example, Higby talked of one possible plan – and by possible, I mean it might never happen – for the incredibly cool idea of player owned motherships:

“As an outfit you can spend a lot of resources on creating a mothership, set up defenses for it and you can field it on a continent, but if you do field it on a continent then it’s vulnerable to attack. You get other benefits for it, like you can do orbital strikes from it, you can drop pod anywhere on a map from it. But people can take a galaxy and fly it up and it will say “Do you want to attack Sturmgrenadier’s home base?” and if they do, then all the people on Sturmgrenadier are thinking “We need to defend our ship.”

So that’s a more instanced approach to base building, but what we really want to do is put it in the world, instancing is a very easy way of solving complex problems in persistent massively multiplayer games.  But it also breaks down the feeling of playing in a shared, persistent world by doing that. It’s like so many other things; if we can find out how to solve the negatives and have it exist in a persistent world it creates a much better experience for everybody. It feels more connected, more live, more real.”

The beta is ongoing right now so jump in to find out just how real it feels, before the launch of PlanetSide 2 on November 20. Also keep an eye on the ZAM twitch page for plenty of exciting new PS2 related content, coming soon.

Scott "Jarimor" Hawkes, Editor in Chief