With the earlier episodes of Inside the Arena focusing on classes and weapons, it's time to delve deeper into Planetside Arena and the game's map called Echoes of Amerish, as well as Bastions, the huge drop ships that act like lobbies.
We must admit that throwing in Bastion Carriers is a pretty clever way to implement a lobby, as Planetside Arena players start in space and later descend into the atmosphere, after which they're free to drop-pod across the map. Nothing groundbreaking, of course, but we can't deny it does wonders for immersion.
Now Echoes of Amerish may be a condensed version of Planetside 2's Amerish, but we're still talking about 8 square kilometres. This is about the same as PUBG's Erangel, for instance, even though these measurements might not correlate exactly.
While making Amerish lite, Daybreak eroded a lot of the original map and added a bunch of roads and jump pads, so as to allow Planetside Arena players absolute freedom of movement, which wasn't always the case with Amerish.
Echoes of Amerish comes with a few eye-candy changes not present in the original, such as varied and more detailed biomes and a new skymap, which we can't seem to get enough of. Seriously Daybreak, we hope this is one of the changes that will find its way back to Planetside 2 as well, because it's absolutely gorgeous.
Planetside Arena's DirectX 11 update meant that texture fidelity went up and many of the props could be redesigned, which Daybreak did while keeping an eye on hardware demands. The company apparently spaced POIs and used props sparingly so as to ensure that graphics requirements remain modest.
The company did mention that the DirectX 11 update will affect Planetside 2 as well, so it's safe to assume we'll be seeing those lovely skies on Indar and Esamir soon. Hossin? What skies dude?
DayBreak Games
Daybreak's initial plan was to have Planetside Arena out already but they ultimately decided to push the launch to 26 March 2019. The game's closed beta kicks off tomorrow, 30 January 2019.
Planetside: Arena, a Planetside 2 battle royale by Daybreak Games
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