Planetside 2 Optimization Patch
I remember a phenomenon from Eve Online. Eve has a major patch released twice a year, every six months. About a month before the release, sometimes less, a lot of the players stop playing. They know what is in the patch and don’t want to play “the old game” in anticipation of something new being just around the corner.
Right, now, Planetside 2 is experiencing just that. The optimization patch. Some holy grail patch that is supposed to make everyone run at 60+ FPS while fragging away at their favorite Bio Lab or Amp Station. The patch, at least most of it, is on the Planetside 2 Public Test Server. While there are considerable performance boosts to be had, it is not going to be the end-all-be-all patch of Planetside 2. It won’t be the defining moment. From the testing I have done, players with CPU-bottlenecked computers will get a huge boost out of The Complete Guide to Better Planetside 2 Performance hosted here at TheLoneGamers.com.
Here’s what we will get out of it: Better framerates, especially for those on older hardware. They may not get 60 FPS, but they will at least be more playable than they were pre-patch. It’s something to be grateful for. I’m definitely looking forward to being able to be more competitive. CQC is tough for me because of poor framerates as my computer churns out only 10-20 FPS in the majority of CQC engagements. I’m praying for at least 30 and hopefully mid 40s on my aging gaming computer.
And that’s really what everyone is waiting for, whether they know it or not: more competitive everybody in Planetside 2. And with that comes more players and a slower attrition rate to hopefully keep Planetside 2 an active game for years to come.
But what about Hossin?
It’s a huge question being asked by a lot of players on a daily basis when I play. I know it was supposed to be out in October but it hasn’t come out. I’m not on the development team, nor do I work for Sony in anyway, but if you really think about the timeline of everything, I feel that the developers pushed Hossin out to the masses on the public test server and realized that the game wasn’t optimized for what they hoped to accomplish. Reason being: development of Hossin and talk of its development nearly came to a stop the moment that they started focusing on the optimization pass. It’s a reasonable assumption, at least. We’ll see Hossin released either with the Optimization Patch or shortly after.
In the end, the patch will come out when it comes out. I’d rather see a fully completed optimization patch to bring the optimization chapter to a close. By watching the OMFG video series on YouTube one can see that they are doing just that. The developers are working hard on every aspect of optimization by working on engine improvements, level/map optimization and even texture optimization. They are working on the big things at the engine and all of those tiny little optimizations that eat up 5% more resources than they should. Hopefully, this will be it, the final optimization patch needed because if that is the case, the development team can focus all of their time on new content, which is something the player community has been begging for.