Construction comes to Planetside 2

You can now build bases in Planetside 2, and that sounds like a fine thing to be doing on a Saturday afternoon. It's all thanks to a new mineral, Unobtai...sorry, 'Cortium', which allows players to cobble together a load of new vehicles, tools and other objects, super quickly. "But how does it work?" you totally just asked me, through your computer. Thankfully, the official Planetside 2 website has the answer.

"Players can summon an Advanced Nanite Transport (ANT) at any vehicle terminal. ANTs are 4-man transports that have mining lasers for harvesting Cortium nodes, which are scattered around the map. The ANT can be deployed at any time, which will reveal access to a building terminal from which you can equip and then place fortifications (at a cost to Cortium)."

Sounds simple enough. The site has further instructions for rotating and placing objects, but note also that you can build Cortium silos to store all that lovely mineral your trusty ANTs have been gobbling up. HIVEs, meanwhile, will generate Victory Points over time. And, judging by the name, I reckon you'll want to grab as many of those as you can. Look, here's YouTuber 'Wrel' explaining construction in more detail (ta, RPS):

It all sounds a bit RTSy, doesn't it? Meaning it might be time to amend Planetside's generic acronym. What was formerly an MMOFPS is now an MMORTSFPS. Just rolls off the tongue, doesn't it?

Tom Sykes

Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.