ZAM interviews Tramell Ray Isaac and Leonard Gullo as PlanetSide 2 reveals the second continent of Auraxis and much more.

In other words, hiking across short distances to capture small points isn’t going to be as prevalent on Esamir; vehicles will take on much more importance in basic travel and the smaller number of points will likely create more intense flashpoints. Also, those regions will be much larger, up to 19 hexes in size compared to the average five to seven on Indar. Therefore, running over wide open tundra toward a point that your friendly neighborhood infiltrator is sitting on would be a very bad idea.

The breathtaking day/night cycle of Indar will become something quite different on Esamir. As Isaac explained, there won’t be a true darkest night and brightest day contrast on the new continent, “On Esamir you won’t get night time at all, it’s going to get close to dusk and then stay like that because it’s more of a northern portion of Auraxis.” 

Those who enjoy the challenges that the cycle poses on Indar – I know I love my IRNV scope for that reason – can rest assured that there will be those factors on Esamir. As Isaac explained “You’ll have blowing snow, really thick fog, at high noon it’s really bright, really washed out so you get a kind of snow blindness so you’re fighting the environment in a different way.”

It was also confirmed that there would be varying traction values applied to different areas, meaning that attempting to cross a frozen river in a sunderer could prove hazardous. This is to give the players a choice: risk crossing the treacherous terrain or use the man-made bridge which could also be a dangerous bottleneck where an ambush awaits.

It was obvious as the interview continued that there is a lot of ambition in regard to PS2 that goes well beyond the plans for launch. I asked if there were plans to make the environment have even more effect on vehicles, such as blizzards making air vehicles more difficult to control and so on. Isaac answered that while that would not be arriving soon, that sort of dynamic experience was something being looked at for the future “We are actually talking about destructible stuff as well…colliding different objects with the terrain as we go along, a year or two years of developing PlanetSide 2 we’re going to start adding destructible objects on the terrain, weather systems and possibly have weather actually affect the way navigation works, or the way your vehicle handles in the air.”