Sony Online Entertainment plans to use PlanetSide 2 engine for all games

Sony’s free-to-play FPS PlanetSide 2 is widely regarded as one of the best looking games in recent times, and according to Shacknews, Sony plans on using the same engine, named ForgeLight, for other online games developed by Sony Online Entertainment.

“Every internal product that we make from here on out will use ForgeLight,” Senior Art Director Tramell Isaac told Shacknews. “We can put 2,000 people on a server, and we can have all those guys running at 60fps. We can have upwards of 200 on screen at one time. You can’t do that with any other MMO, period. You just can’t do that. Then on top of that, you can do it with visual fidelity that’s comparable with any other first-person shooter out there.”

The engine is especially well-known for the landscapes and lighting it can generate, as seen in PlanetSide 2, while maintaining decent frame rates despite having a lot of players on the same server.

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The same engine will be used in Everquest 3, maybe

The engine isn’t without its drawbacks, however, as anyone who has played PlanetSide 2 will attest to the fact that it requires a decent computer to play. This shouldn’t be too much of a problem, according to Isaac. “The engine can be dialed down back to wherever we want to put it,” he said. “Every other game that’s made doesn’t need the visual fidelity that PlanetSide 2 does. It can be anywhere from the visual fidelity of WOW… but that’s the choice of the development team. It can be dialed back any way we want to.”

PlanetSide 2 was launched with great fanfare back in November 2012. The game is famous for its huge battles, with a lot of fights being even bigger than the ones in Battlefield 3.

While most multiplayer shooters are based on a matchmaking or server system, what sets Planetside 2 apart is the game’s single persistent world. This means that things will continue to happen even when you aren’t playing, and the next time you play, you could be logging in to a radically different world with completely different borders.

The main aim of the game is to capture territories for your faction. When creating a character, players can pick from one of three factions—the Terran Republic, the New Conglomerate, and the Vanu Sovereignty. You can set up your own loadouts as you level up and unlock more weapons. The playable classes are Light Assault, Heavy Assault, Medic, Engineer, Infiltrator and Mechanized Assault Exo-Suit (MAX).

The game is free-to-play and can be downloaded from Steam.