Planetside 2 engine to power all future SoE MMOs

Sony Online Entertainment is so pleased with the engine built for Planetside 2 - ForegeLight - that it's going to put it to work in future projects, too.

"Every internal product that we make from here on out will use ForgeLight," Planetside 2 art director Tramell Isaac said, speaking with Shack News at GDC 2013.

"We can put 2,000 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."

Tramell expects the use for ForgeLight to make it easy for SoE to "pump out" future MMOs, despite that fact that it has a very demanding set of requirements for those who want to run Planetside 2 at max settings.

"The engine can be dialed down back to wherever we want to put it. Every other game that's made doesn't need the visual fidelity that PlanetSide 2 does. That's the choice of the development team," he said.

Forgelight is constantly evolving, too; see how the addition of PhysX changes things, for example.