Planetside 2 PS4 beta planned for 2014

It's been so long since Sony made mention of the rather excellent MMO first-person shooter Planetside 2 coming to PS4 that we almost forgot it was making the leap from PC to console.

The beta for the shooter is on the way, and it should be landing this year, if creative director Matt Higby is to be believed. He said as much in a recent interview, in the process adding: "As much as it sounds like we're blowing smoke, we're working hard to release a game that feels like a full-on console experience and not just like a port. So it's taken us quite a long time to re-jigger our user interface and our controls. There's a lot that needs to get done."

Reworking the game away from the mouse and keyboard and shifting it over to the DualShock has also been taking them some time: "That's been a really large design process, and we've done a lot of iteration on it to try and make it right. But our goal is at the end of the day to have our launch on the PS4 feel like a great PS4 native console game. Not just a PC port. So it's taking a while."

Visually the PS4 version compares "very favourable" to the PC version, and will run on console with the equivalent of PC ultra settings. The aim is 1080p and 60fps, although framerates might have to scaled down: "that's where we're optimising right now, to get our CPU running faster so the game is running at a more consistent frame-rate on the PS4."

"We're trying to get a solid frame-rate," he added. "So if we go to 30 it'll be because we want to maintain a completely solid 30fps. But that's the optimisation we're working on right now. And we're still grinding on it. Generally speaking the client is running at well over 60fps. In a really big fight it bets bogged down. That's the bottleneck we're chasing down."

Planetside 2 is a first-person shooter that puts hundreds of players together in huge battles on persistent continents. We can't wait to see how it turns out when it makes the leap to console.