It’s late Friday afternoon, Daybreak’s favorite time for dropping bad news, and here it is: PlanetSide Arena’s PC launch is being delayed until summer 2019.
“After much consideration, we’ve decided to postpone the current PC-only release date and launch simultaneously across PC and PlayStation 4 this summer,” the studio wrote this evening. “We’ve always envisioned PlanetSide Arena as a way for players to experience the epic gameplay of the PlanetSide universe, through fast-paced, combined arms combat and massive-scale multiplayer modes. We believe that delivering the most polished version of PlanetSide Arena that meets these expectations, on both platforms, outweighs any other consideration.”
In an interesting twist, the studio says it’s refunding all existing pre-orders for the game, but it does promise to continuing the beta program throughout the remainder of winter and spring.
MMO players will recall that PlanetSide Arena was announced as a massive-scale battle royale title in December with an original launch date of January 29th, though five days before that planned release, it announced a delay to March 26th. This will mark the game’s second public delay.
The PlanetSide Arena team has revised PC launch plans to release alongside PlayStation 4 in Summer 2019, and will hone in on more massive-scale, arena-based modes: https://t.co/LuLyfq6cd0 pic.twitter.com/BHodZxsPoU
— PlanetSide Arena (@PlanetSideArena) February 15, 2019
Offering refunds to everyone now = they are changing the game as it is presently.
Pushing back launch to summer to coincide with Ps4 = they have concerns of player numbers as seen in the beta tests.
Player feedback complaining about lag and 15-20 min wait times to find a match. Daybreak should’ve just bought Lawbreakers and just re-launched it for better results.
Can this company ever release anything?
Sure.
New P2W items in their cash stores is what they are best at.
Translation Apex Legends came out for free and it’s way better than our game that you paid cash for via pre-order. :D
I wonder whether their refund of preorders had anything to do with a tentative release date? I seem to recall there’s something legally required that you have to ship within a certain timeframe if you say “Spring 2019” for example. I seem to remember this in a discussion about WoW expansion launch date announcements.
I think the refunds are a combination of the game likely going free to play as well as the fact that at least some of the money was going toward the founders season battle pass, which they mentioned in the press release sent out but not in the actual announcement has been cancelled as part of this release change.
For anyone that cares, here’s a perspective from a Planetside “vet”. With over 3000 hours played in PS2 I can pretty much consider it my favourite game, so initially I was pretty hyped to learn that DayBreak were going to invest more into the Planetside franchise.
Anyway PS:A announced, dates set, beta comes along etc.. but the whole thing just seems far too odd; there’s next to no communication with the players and next to no hype or marketting anywhere. All this considering the game is supposed to be releasing in a few weeks. The amount of animosity from the Planetside community was pretty unreal; this was not setting a good impression for the game at all.
When I finally get into the beta, I played probably about 10 games of solos and one game of teams (teams of threes). I really do not care at all for BR’s so for me it was more about just testing out the systems and seeing how they compare to PS2’s. Gunplay, movement etc.. are fine but he game was a mess. People were crashing on the menu left, right and center, there was no leave game option after you had been eliminated (initially I thought I had to watch until the end) and nothing to do in the lobby while you’re waiting for a match (no target dummies or anything to shoot at).
To make matters worse, the game had completely missed out on the one thing that makes Planetside special in the first place: Scale. In PS2 I’m pretty much always locked in fights with over a hundred people. Sometimes there’s over 200 and the amount of bullets and tank shells flying around is insane, death comes fast but respawning is just as fast so you’re always in the action. In PS:A I was wandering around a massive map looking for someone to shoot for ages and it just not feel like Planetside to me at all. Apex Legends comes out of nowhere and steals what little thunder PS:A had and even DayBreak knew at that point that the game would be dead on arrival, the box price just being the final nail in the coffin.
Most of us are grateful that Apex Legends came along when it did though because now DayBreak are going to have to make the game into more of a Planetside experience if they want it to survive. As a small scale BR game, Planetside:Arena definitely cannot compete with the heavyweights; but as a massive scale f2p TDM/CTF/BR game, I’m sure it will do pretty well for itself.
I don’t know that Daybreak will be around much longer. I feel bad for their employees as this is something that’s inevitably going to go South, tits-up, or however you wish to describe the cataclysmic end of a company. Certainly doesn’t look healthy.
Still, that might not be entirely a bad thing. It seems like the developers have been placed on increasingly creatively bankrupt projects or doing maintenance on those few still running at best. With Everquest II having been canned, the last glimmer of anything original has faded away.
And if they do end up facing their end, that might mean that their IPs could potentially go to better companies, or to the community instead. I know there are plenty of people who’d love to see the return of many IPs that both SOE and Daybreak have killed off.
Long time SOE fans though knew that all that Smeddling would never pay dividends, he was really bad at managing. Not quite Bondi Beach or Telltale Games bad, but certainly close enough.
Daybreak bought something already broken and defeated in SOE, so I’m not sure there was much that could’ve been done to resurrect the ancient titan even if they had any such interest in doing so.
I can’t imagine that Daybreak isn’t on its last legs. Hopefully its employees and IPs will find better homes elsewhere. A history of gross mismanagement so acutely unwavering in its stubbornness is a speeding bullet train on a sole, lonely track to desolation.
Good ol’ Apex Legends raining on Daybreak’s parade.
Apex has went the right direction. Class based BR is where the genre is going forward. So much better than the mincraft BR direction that Fortnite looked to be taking it.
Hopefully DBG took notice and is changing tho gs up.
Schlag, you never disappoint!
I feel this to be some viscous cycle game devs are placing themselves?