Continental drift: Planetside 2 to leave non-64-bit operating systems behind; “32 bit is dead in gaming”

Planetside 2 will become an exclusively 64-bit game.

Sony Online Entertainment have made the decision to plough ahead with 64-bit only development for Planetside 2 – leaving behind the 6% of players still running the MMOFPS on 32-bit operating systems.

The announcement came via the usual channels – SOE head John Smedley’s Twitter stream. In reference to Titanfall’s 64-bit minimum requirements, Smedley wrote: “32 bit is dead in gaming”.

“Good riddance,” he said. “All our stuff is 64 bit from here on out. We will be moving Planetside 2 to 64 bit completely.”

Smedley pointed out that 64-bit will allow players access to “a lot more memory”, yielding better performance “in theory”.

“Don’t want to promise anything till we have tested it,” he wrote, “but our #1 crash is Out of Memory. This will fix that nicely.”

Smedley wouldn’t elaborate on how the upgrade would affect Planetside’s ongoing development process or its features outside of performance (“Can’t tell you what I don’t know yet. We’re still working on it.”). He did mention, however, that the switch wouldn’t dramatically affect the size of Planetside’s client.

Don’t expect the change to be implemented in the imminent future: SOE had only “just decided” on a course of action before Smedley went public with it. But the shift is in line with a slew of soon-to-be-released AAA games, including Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs and EA’s upcoming Frostbite engine efforts.

I chatted to Daedalic recently about the minimum requirements for their games – which are still notably low. It seems players of some niche fields, including the adventure genre, are less likely to have access to contemporary hardware than others. That said, even strategy specialists Stardock are making a concerted 64-bit push these days. How does that sit with you lot?