PlanetSide 2 Hossin update finally released
Two years in the making - but it's not finished yet.
The Hossin update for online first-person shooter PlanetSide 2 has finally been released.
Hossin, two years in the making, was released overnight as part of the game's latest update.
However, despite it being live in the game now, Hossin is incomplete.
In a post on the PlanetSide website creative director Matt Higby said all the Hossin bases aren't quite where the team wants them to be, and so they will be improved over time based on player feedback.
About 50 per cent of the bases on Hossin are done to the point that Sony Online Entertainment is satisfied with the quality level.
About 25 per cent of the bases are first pass. And another 25 per cent are bases which are more or less staging areas. "We expect these bases to function correctly, provide all the necessary utilities to make the game work - they're just not 100 per cent up to our standards of level design quality quite yet - essentially they feel more like the bases on Indar than the bases on Amerish," Higby explained.
Hossin has been hotly anticipated by the PlanetSide 2 community for years now. So, what took so long?
"Along the way, we've figured out that creating a 'good' outpost in PlanetSide 2 takes about 2-3 weeks of level design, art playtesting and iteration time minimally, per outpost," Higby explained.
"Multiply that by 80 or so, and you'll get a good idea of how much work is required for a high-quality continent."
And so, Hossin is out now, but it is not finished, by Higby's own admission.
"If we wanted to 'finish' Hossin without sacrificing the quality level we've established, it would probably be three months before it was ready to go live," he said.
"We don't want to wait that long, and we don't think you want to either."
The upshot is that SOE considers Hossin to be a beta, or Early Expedition continent. "The continent will be fully functional, but the content is not 100 per cent complete."
Meanwhile, the update adds continent locking, allowing empires to lock out spawning on a continent by controlling every point on the map.
