By Meelad Sadat

It can take about 90 seconds to recognize the foundation for a good FPS. It’s that first feel for the control, the mechanics and targeting. A glance at the scenery. That first firefight.

PlanetSide 2 makes a killer first impression. Beyond that, there are a lot of compelling promises from Sony Online Entertainment for the game. It starts with a scarily good one – perennial war. If it takes off, it’ll be more than a persistent MMO FPS. It’ll be a virtual world war without end, fought with repercussions whether you participate or not. Logging off doesn’t necessarily end the game. Your side may be gaining, losing, needing help, and you can track it all. There’s a website and mobile apps to follow in-game events and communicate with players in real time. What if your side needs help badly This game might drag you out of bed some night in the near future.

For fans of the original, it’s taken a long nine years for the sequel. It probably seems like an even longer three years for some of them since Sony Online president John Smedley set the stage for the follow up on Twitter. In 2009, the man known fondly as “Smed” to his loyal gaming community posted in perfect internet speak, “Planetside next. you will like.”

Judging by their showing at E3, where Sony Online unveiled hands-on for the game industry masses, they like. By the time we visited their booth, the PlanetSide 2 kiosk was already adorned with an armful of best of show nominations. It walked away with an impressive list.

We talked with Matt Higby, the game’s creative director, about what’s on the horizon over the next few months as the game moves into beta and towards launch. Not surprisingly, community outreach and social programs loom big.

Where is PlanetSide 2 at in development, and when is it coming out?

PlanetSide 2 is right in the meat of its development cycle right now. We’re going to be starting beta in the next couple weeks and we’ll be launching in the next few months. We’re really waiting until we have a completely solid game before we put it out there, but we’re looking forward to getting our community in and starting to get some feedback from them.

What have you done in terms of PR and marketing beats so far?

E3 is definitely the start of our big marketing push but we’ve been doing a lot of other stuff behind the scenes. We’ve been doing lots of social outreach. This game has been great for us going on Twitter and getting players who are already interested in PlanetSide to start being mavens for PlanetSide 2. We’ve been working closely with the existing PlanetSide community to get them to start building that grassroots buzz. We’ve been doing a lot of different trade shows.

We started last year at Gamescom, that was the first major trade show that we did. All we had there was a show trailer, but we talked to a lot of different journalists out there. And we’ve been moving forward with inviting journalists like PC Gamer in, Game Informer in to get hands on with the game. We’ve already garnered a couple of different covers from PC Gamer. We’ve been doing a lot of pre-buzz, but starting with E3 this year is really where we’re kicking our marketing efforts into high gear.

What’s coming up for marketing?

Starting after E3 we have a major release of a new trailer. We’re also doing stuff at Gamescom coming up, probably going to China Joy to start building buzz out there. And of course right now we’ve already been nominated for a ton of best of show awards at E3, and we’re hoping to win a few of those. People are really starting to be aware of this game and how incredibly different, ground breaking and game changing it actually is.

It’s been so long since the first PlanetSide. What makes it linger in the minds of fans?

I think PlanetSide is already fairly strong with the people who knew the game just because it was such an unprecedented gaming experience and still something that’s never really been replicated by anybody else. We definitely wanted to latch on to that and make sure people understood that what we were doing wasn’t fundamentally changing PlanetSide and only bringing it to the next level. And really what we’re doing is bringing it to where we wanted this experience to be. This is a game that’s been running forever. People have these really fond memories and epic moments within PlanetSide.

It’s not as if the category’s already cluttered, but there are a good crop of free-to-play shooters out now and on the horizon. What do you think is going to set you apart?

There’s nothing that comes close to PlanetSide in terms of overall production value. We have triple-A production value in an enormous game. This is a larger game than what you would buy in a box. We have battles that are huge [compared] to what you’d see in Battlefield 3 or Modern Warfare. This really is an unprecedented multiplayer online gaming experience.

Are you doing anything unique with monetization in the game?

We’re doing a really wide approach to monetization. We’re going to see what sticks. We’ve put in a lot of different micro transaction items, but all of the items that actually affect game play can be earned entirely within game play as well. So we don’t have any sort of pay to win situation, which is damaging for a lot of people as to what free-to-play means.

With micro-transactions you can basically get extra convenience. I can get items quicker maybe. That’s a great approach as long as what you’re doing is making sure the items are just game play style differences. In PlanetSide 2, I can buy one weapon versus another and it’s not stronger, they’re just different situationally. Of course we also have micro transactions for purely cosmetic items, for boosts that give you extra experience.

We’re going to have a membership also. We’re working out the different pieces that go into our membership right now, but a lot of it is things that give you maybe quicker respawn times, or the ability to summon vehicles faster than other people, but nothing that actually affects moment-to-moment play. It’s not even a velvet rope. You’re going to have access to everything in the game. What you’re going to have access to [with membership] is maybe a grab bag of different items every month, that sort of thing.

Tell me a little about how you’ve been engaging the game’s existing community.

PlanetSide already started with a really passionate and enduring fan base. We kind of had a head start in that area with already having grassroots buzz as soon as we announced the game. We’re really trying to make sure we stoke the fire of those guys by actually directly talking to them. We’re going to the places where our fans are already communicating with us. We’re going to fan sites. We’re going on Twitter. We’re engaging them on Facebook. And we’ve been doing a lot of listening. When we went to GDC we showed the game live for the first time. There were some things that existing PlanetSide players didn’t like about it, and we revisited them and we figured out ways to solve those problems but still do the things that were important to us.

Can you talk about any tactics you’ll be using to use your existing fan base to recruit players once the game is in beta or about to launch?

One of the really cool things that we’re doing from a community standpoint is what we call the first platoon program. We’re taking community leaders that have their own guilds, that have their own clans. These are all FPS gamers that are really influential in the genre, including things like YouTube casters. Those sorts of folks that have really wide reach among actual gamers. We’re bringing those guys in first to be able to give us direct feedback on forums that we’ll be monitoring really closely and talking directly to those guys. We think that’s going to pay a lot of dividends as they get their communities involved in our game and pull in their own groups of players from Counterstrike and from Team Fortress, all of these different FPS games that exist out there that have really tightknit communities. We’re trying to gather as much attention as we can from the leaders of those communities right from the start.

Which YouTube hosts are you working with?

Right now we’ve been working with TotalBiscuit, who’s a really huge game caster. He’s here at E3 doing live TwitchTV broadcasts of our booth and of the people playing here. We’ve worked closely with him to get some of our initial game footage out there. We’re going to be working with other big guys in the future. I’m not sure if I can announce all of them yet because we haven’t got all the contracts signed, but we’re really looking to get the best of the best of YouTube content creators and get them to be involved to do something for us. We have three different unique factions in the game, so I want to get one YouTube caster to represent one of the factions and be casting their live game play from their faction’s perspective. We can do a weekly get together where they shit talk each other and slam on the other factions right there on their own channels. I think that would be a fun way to closely knit the community and [introduce] what the different factions are, what their personalities are, and really take advantage of these strong, close gaming communities that exist on YouTube.

Tell me about the mobile app you’re developing that accompanies the game.

Another awesome thing we’re doing with PlanetSide 2 is that we’ve externalized a lot of stuff. People don’t have time to play the game 24 hours a day. We’ve built a web site that allows them to connect to their friends, to their outfit, to look at the status of the world they’re playing on. We’ve also built an iOS app and an Android app that’s going to allow people to not only real-time see the capture status within their world but also to communicate using voice over IP directly into the game. So if you want to talk to your outfit when you’re not online you can just open up your iPhone app, talk to your outfit, let them know you’re going to be home in 20 minutes, let them know to attack a certain base because you just saw on the map that it was under attack. Really, really cool connectedness to give people the 360-degree [experience], “I’m out of the game right now and I want to go back in,” or, “I want to go to the web site to look at stats and see how I’ve progressed.”

Are you planning anything from a PR or marketing perspective that plays on these big, empire-size factions in the game?

We have three unique factions. One big piece of our ongoing marketing effort is to going to be basically allowing people to understand who these factions are and gain an allegiance with that faction. We have a Facebook app that’s up right now that allows you to take over different states and different countries in the world based on your faction. You can recruit people to your faction. You can see the map completely change from one faction to another if you recruit enough people [for instance] in your home town. We’re really incorporating the faction styles into our ongoing efforts.

Any last thoughts?

I want to let everyone that you should go PlanetSide2.com to sign up for beta. We’re going to be starting that really, really soon. Make sure to check out us on Twitter. I’m on Twitter @MHigby. The product is there @PlanetSide2. We’re always on Twitter sending out behind the scenes screen shots. We’ll take an asset that’s halfway done being made and send it out to see what people think about it. It’s really awesome being able to have that direct connection with our fan base.

Thanks, Matt.