ForgeLight, the engine powering SOE’s MMOFPS Planetside 2 will, according to senior art director Tramell Isaac, be at the core of every “internal product that we make from here on out”.
Talking to Shack News at GDC, Isaac went on to talk of the engine’s strengths, “We can put 2000 people on a server, and we can have all those guys running at 60fps. We can have upwards of 200 on screen at one time. You can’t do that with any other MMO, period. You just can’t do that. Then on top of that, you can do it with visual fidelity that’s comparable with any other first person shooter out there.”
This decision may not bring cheers from all quarters, particularly considering some of the problems players have found in getting the game to run on their machines. Isaac did say that we shouldn’t consider Planetside 2 as a benchmark for the engine, insisting that the engine “can be dialed down back to wherever we want to put it”.
What games SOE are developing using the ForgeLight engine, well that’s not something they’re talking about. A new Everquest maybe?