SOE feel that there were just too many players for the space available in Planetside 2. As such they’re working on adding a whole new continent to their MMOFPS. Auraxis’ fourth continent, Hossin, will join Amerish, Esamir, and Indar.
While the continent isn’t due for official release until September, Hossin is being loaded into the Public Test server later this week.
Creative director Matt Higby made the announcement on Twitter:
For those of you not lucky enough to check out Hossin at SOE Live this week, Hossin will be released on Public Test this week as well!
— Matthew Higby (@mhigby) July 30, 2013
We don’t know a great deal about Hossin other than it will be a swamp environment. Presumably that means it will encourage the use of transport vehicles to get infantry around, with the difficult to traverse swamps acting as a way to funnel troops into hotspots.
Other continents planned for release, though likely not for a while are the desert tundras of Oshur and the volcanic plains of Searhas.
While new continents are lovely there is the risk that having too much space will spread out the players too much and make any sort of grand scale combat (the thing Planetside 2 is excellent at) unlikely. Of course, SOE will be aware of this issue and hopefully wouldn’t be releasing the content unless there were enough players to make use of it. Similarly, their planned player-generated missions should help focus players on single areas, keeping the combat violence high,