Planetside 2's continents are eight kilometres square

Upcoming shooter MMO sequel Planetside 2 boasts some huge environments.

Creative director Matt Higby told PC Gamer that the continents on Auraxis, the setting for Planetside 2, are eight by eight kilometres in size.

“We have enormous, enormous gameplay space,” he said.

“One of our largest development efforts on this project has been hand crafting every single area of those eight-by-eight kilometre continents.”

Although it's not clear how many continents Auraxis boasts, the figures suggest each is approximately the same size as Far Cry 2's entire map, and significantly larger than both Oblivion and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas's whole game worlds.

To give an idea of the scale, Higby showed off a courtyard, one of many in the game's scattered facilities, and said it was the same size as "a Modern Warfare level".

Such large environments means rooms for a lot of players.

“You’re going to be fighting in battles sometimes when it’s 200 people fighting against 30 people because there’s only 30 people defending that base and then suddenly 200 people log in from the other group and go do it," Higby explained.

“If you use the right tactics and you do things the right way you can still have fun and enjoy yourself as a group of 20 people defending against an onslaught, but that’s something we have to take into account when we do our level design, so we’ve been spending a lot of time whiteboxing bases, figuring out what we want specific areas to look like.”

Planetside 2 has not yet been dated.

Thanks, Shack.