PlanetSide Arena Announced, Has 500-Player Battle Royale Mode

The next entry in the large-scale multiplayer FPS series PlanetSide was revealed, and developer Daybreak Games appears to be taking cues from one of its other games while incorporating franchise staples. It's dubbed PlanetSide Arena, and it'll launch next month on PC with battle royale modes though it's slated to have different modes added as post-release updates.

Daybreak (formerly Sony Online Entertainment) has been running PlanetSide 2 on PC and PlayStation 4, but Arena takes the series in a new direction. There will be solo and team-based battle royale with up to 100 players in a single match, and a unique mode called Massive Clash which puts two teams of up to 250 players each (500 total) in the last-person-standing style mode. The game remains class-based as well and will launch with three choices--Medic, Engineer, and Assault--each with their own specific abilities. Daybreak made it clear that each class is viable for solo play since health, weapons, and jetpacks won't differ between them.

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Capture The Flag, Team Deathmatch, Search And Destroy, and Conquest are some of the modes that are going to be added in the future; Daybreak stated that it doesn't want PlanetSide Arena to strictly be battle royale. It'll launch with one map, and is said to support the scale the game is aiming for, which will be up to 1,000 players per match. There will also be seasonal battle passes which give you additional cosmetics and blueprints, which are weapons you can purchase at terminals in a match with currency that's strictly earned during the match itself.

It's not much of a surprise to see Daybreak bring battle royale to PlanetSide considering the studio's work on H1Z1: Battle Royale. PlanetSide Arena launches on January 29, 2019 for PC exclusively; it's available to pre-order now and grants access to the upcoming closed beta. The standard edition goes for $20 and includes the Season 1 battle pass and an Assault class armor set, and there's a deluxe edition for $40 that comes with the aforementioned items, armor for the other classes, and a hoverbike. Plans for console versions have not been revealed.