E-Sports Gets Another Boost With Planetside 2 in South Korea

Steve Anderson : End Game
Steve Anderson
The Video Store Guy
| The video game industry has gone from a mole hill to a mountain in no time flat, Chris DiMarco is your Sherpa as you endeavor to scale Mount “Everquest”

E-Sports Gets Another Boost With Planetside 2 in South Korea

The field of e-sports is one to watch, that's for sure, and it just got a little extra boost--at least, in South Korea--as the country will see the debut of Planetside 2 in a cooperative effort between Sony Online Entertainment and Daum to give the e-sports field in South Korea something new to compete with.

While an exact date of launch for Planetside 2 is as yet unknown, one thing that was clear--according to Sony Online Entertainment's Louis Figueroa, who serves as the company's senior vice president of business development--South Korea's impressive gaming culture and sheer number of users involved made it a great place to roll out a game like Planetside 2. Backed up by Daum's track record, Figueroa elaborated, the launch in South Korea would likely prove to be a successful one. Though it won't be a full debut, in the strictest sense--Planetside 2 is actually available in North America for PC--but Sony Online Entertainment is planning to put the title into the PlayStation 4's lineup in 2014.

Described as a "massively multiplayer online competitive shooter," Planetside 2 pits groups of users against each other in a bid to control a far-off planet known as Auraxis, packed with valuable relics, including several exciting slices of alien technology. But Sony Online Entertainment's newest addition to the platform makes it particularly well suited for e-sports: Battle Islands. The addition of Battle Islands allows for easy compartmentalization and the building of what amount to arenas.

Though Planetside 2 isn't a part of any formal e-sports arrangement just yet, it does have the necessary mechanics to make it a part of an e-sports league's lineup, especially with the addition of the Battle Islands concept. This is part and parcel of what e-sports really needs to get fully off the ground and achieve some of those impressive totals that we heard about not too long ago: a regularly shifting series of games so that no one game becomes prominent, and that there's always a little something different for everybody. That's likely to really help the concept of e-sports, and likely to make it the kind of thing we'll all be watching in the near term future. It has the first-person action that many enjoy and even seems to incorporate a bit of strategy, which provides both short and long term satisfaction.

While Planetside 2 by itself likely won't be enough to make e-sports the next big thing, it will certainly help, and give us just a little more action to enjoy when we're not actually playing ourselves.
Enhanced by Zemanta


Featured Events