Planetside 2 Is Adding Base-Building

Daybreak Game Company's Planetside 2 will be updated to include the ability to build your own bases. It's a basic feature at the moment but they plan on expanding it to be a lot bigger, more robust and very detailed with future updates.

PC Gamer covered the new update that was detailed on a lengthy hour long live-stream of the new feature. You can see it in action starting at the eight minute mark in the video embed below.

Daybreak has a procedural base building setup that allows players to set down a core, construct walls, place down turrets, a bunker and prefabricated structures. According to the live-stream they plan on introducing Planetside 2 players to more structures, more prefab material and more ways to upgrade and defend their bases. This definitely adds a lot to the game's appeal because previously it was just a standard, giant team deathmatch battle where people would kill, take over a base and then rinse and repeat.

With the addition of base building in Planetside 2 it now gives players personal investment into structures they build, especially given that these bases that have cores there are victory points generated from them. There's an actual reason to get in there and control a base or destroy it's core.

According to the developers, it's possible to destroy the core by first knocking off its shield. Once the shield is down then players must directly fire on the core itself to destroy it. The interesting thing about it is that the structure of the core can be attacked anywhere to knock the shield off, but to destroy the construct the energy core itself must be destroyed. So technically, depending on where the core is placed, players can use airstrikes to weaken the shield and then send in a ground team to coordinate an attack and take the core out itself with a direct attack on it.

The whole energy core element adds a nice meta-layer to the game where players will be very active in how they choose to place down structures, defend structures and organize their efforts as a team to attack and defend player-made bases.

This emergent element will also play a large role in extending the replayability of Planetside 2, because as Daybreak begins to add more prefabricated structures players will have more options and ways to customize their base and grow their installations.

The only thing they need to make sure they add is the ability to eventually break through base structures with heavy artillery, it would really give tanks and heavy APCs a reason to use on the battlefield outside of just being transportation or bombardments for spawn points.

For now, the base building will only be available in limited kits on the test servers until they stabilize the feature in Planetside 2. If all goes as planned the full release of the base building will become available sometime later in 2016. Expect to see the base building limited to the PC version of Planetside 2 before it even remotely is considered for release on PS4.