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Helldivers 2 support studio Toadman Interactive to shut offices in Sweden and Norway – some positions at developer's Berlin office also at risk
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- Published
- Sep 2 2024
- Word count
- 209 words
This is the same studio that entirely took over continued support and development of Planetside 2 from Daybreak Games, though that's a much more niche title than the ones they have listed in the article. For the tiny handful of active Planetside 2 players that use Tildes, sorry but unless they sell the IP to someone that actually cares about reviving it, I think the game is actually done for this time.
Oh wow, I never realized how few people still played Planetside 2. It looks like, since July 2023, it hasn't had more than 2000 active players.
I remember checking the game out years ago and having a decent time. Having so many players in a single match made for some interesting and memorable moments, kind of like Battlefield, but even more chaotic.
Are community servers a thing for that game?
I'm gonna be honest, maintaining 5% (30K -> ~1500) of the original steam playerbase 12 years later seems kind of impressive to me.
I have nothing to compare it to. I have no basis for that statement.
The issue is that since PS2 is a persistent-world MMOFPS that tends to focus on large battles, only having 1500 players spread across 5 servers worldwide is a huge issue.
Every server (or rather, a "continent," and there are 2-3 out of 5 active at once usually), I think, is able to support about that many players. And when a single server has that many players during primetime, that's when the game really shines. There can be large battles of 100+ vs 100+ (vs 100+), mid-size battles of like 48 vs 48, and then small battles of like 12 vs 12. There's something for everyone. And it's very dynamic; a small 12v12 at a base can scale up in seconds or minutes. But if there are only 200-300 players on a server, spread across 3 factions...It's hard to generate those dynamics. Ok, maybe there's one big battle on the map, but if you're not into that, then all you can do is "ghost-cap," taking undefended territories, with the hopes of generating a fight. It's boring. Or there are several small skirmishes, but you really like the biggest fights; tough luck.
For many years now, there've been requests to merge the two US-based servers. I think the same has been asked of the two EU-based severs. Because the population issues have been present for awhile and only getting worse. But at this point, merging the servers is only just a band aid. How long before the single US server is down to a few hundred at primetime? And merging all into one I think is impossible due to physics: latency.
For some reason, the game's news updates keep showing up in my Steam feed, so that's probably why I thought it was more popular than it actually is. Like, it's 30,000 all-time peak player count is also just way lower than I would have thought. Clearly my radar on this subject is defective though, considering Star Wars: The Old Republic has a similar all-time peak of 34,000. Or Garry's Mod, a game that's regularly on sale for so cheap it might as well be free, and feels infinitely more "present in gaming history" or whatever than Planetside 2, only peaked at 74,000. I figured that would have been way higher too.
I think the reason for my "defective radar" is that, for some mind-boggling reason, the original Insurgency game from 2014 peaked at 121,000.
Sadly, as one of the tiny handful of active Planetside 2 players on Tildes, there are no community servers. Existing servers have been dwindling and merging once they get too small, leading to a handful of servers with players from wide geographic areas and questionable ping, since a server in Boston might need to host Californian players to even have a decent fight.
If the game gets shut down, and the assets become available, maybe someday they can crop up, similar to how Planetside 1 got the Planetside Forever fan project, but it doesn't seem likely.
The real tragedy here is that in the 12 years since Planetside 2's release, there has been nearly zero competition in the MMOFPS genre. Battlefield can scratch some of the itch, but no other game has the sheer scale.
Nah, there's no community servers. Daybreak just had a handful of servers to support a few different regions and a bunch of those already got merged due to declining player numbers. There aren't any real alternatives to Planetside either, since it already seems like black magic for this game to support 1000+ players on the same map in a shooter and still manage to maintain acceptable latency, so those server costs are probably eating up almost all the money they'd be making from subscriptions.
I don't play anymore -- haven't played in over a year -- but right away I was thought, "didn't they just take over development of Planetside2?"
This game just cannot catch a break. 12yrs and this game has always felt like it's always just circling the drain. Even at the start, it was worrisome at times.
If Eve Online developer CCP (owned by Pearl Abyss) wasn't such a shitshow on its own, I'd wish for them to take over Planetside 2 and somehow integrate the universes in some manner. I know there's a fair amount of player crossover between those two games.