Matt Higby talks Continental Lattice

We’re implementing it first and foremost to fill out our continental warfare gameplay. It’s going to be about being able to conquest across that map and reach the other warp gate. That will allow you to get access between continents.

If you can imagine our three continents that we have right now in a triangle configuration and then Hossin in the middle; each of our current continents will have one home warp gate, that’s basically the home warp gate for that empire. So they now have a home continent.

The other two warp gates on the opposite sides of the continents would each connect to Hossin and each one of them would connect to a different Battle Island. You would use the Battle Island to go from Esamir to Amerish, or you could go through Hossin—because Hossin will have three warp gates; one will go to Esamir and one will go to Amerish.


http://i.imgur.com/mdo4cuL.jpg


From Higby’s description it’s easy to consider the huge scope that inter-continental warfare will have across the constantly expanding surface of Auraxis. Battle Islands will certainly not be peripheral, instanced entities that are simply there to house outfit skirmishes. In fact they will be highly important in forming the newly expanded dynamics of territorial control.
These [Battle Islands] are being designed first and foremost to facilitate continental conquest in the main MMO game of PlanetSide 2. They’re also being designed to allow for a very good competitive gameplay experience and support things like instancing and48-on-48 battles.
48 vs. 48 is a lot of players for an FPS game but that’s not enough players to fill up one of our existing continents so the Battle Islands work really well for allowing us to have a focused, competitive gameplay mode. But when we use them in the MMO game they’re going to support a couple of hundred players, so they’re not just going to be a small instance that’s only used by competitive players. Everyone who plays PlanetSide 2 is going to be able to use them and practice on them, get familiar with them. Then when we do competitive gameplay modes they’ll be a stage of that as well, but that’s not their raison d’être.