Planetside Arena enters Early Access in September with 300-player battles

Planetside Arena, the next class-based multiplayer shooter from Daybreak Games, was originally planned for January of this year. Its first delay pushed it back to March, and then—perhaps blindsided by the surprise announcement and massive success of class-based battle royale Apex Legends in February—the release slipped again to summer.

Here we are in summer, and we've got a new date for Planetside Arena's launch into Steam Early Access: September 19, just a few weeks away.

This initial launch of Planetside Arena will feature a teams mode, with three players per team, and a squads mode, with 12 players on a squad, duking it out in 300-player battle royale matches. Future plans include new features like a solos mode, aircraft, additional classes, and a mode featuring 300-player squads... which would imply (at least) a 600-player match. That's a lot of players.

There's a short teaser trailer above, showing scores of players battling it out while what looks like a Bastion fleet carrier gets lit up by some sort of giant space death ray. There are also a couple dozen other, smaller ships zooming through the air, along with tanks rolling on the surface.

Planetside Arena's standard edition is priced at $20, and a legendary edition (with additional skins and crates, is priced at $50. You can view Planetside Arena's roadmap here, which shows a full launch planned for Q2 of 2020.

Christopher Livingston
Senior Editor

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.